It's Thursday, and I'm feeling better...

Those of you who follow along here might have noticed that I didn't post anything yesterday.

Well, it was a busy day for me, and so I might not have posted anyway. But the more immediate reason that I didn't write anything yesterday was that I felt like crap.

No. Really.

There's been something in the air this fall that has been driving my allergies crazy, and yesterday my sinuses finally stood up and said, "Screw it," and proceeded to make the front of my face feel like someone had hauled off and hit me in the middle of the face with a baseball bat. Feeling like that is not conducive to stringing two thoughts together, which is something that's sort of necessary to writing a blog post that is at least minimally coherent.

So, instead of doing the things I should have been doing last night (reading, doing some writing, posting here), I went to bed directly after dinner. Which meant that I was in bed by 5 p.m.

That is something I never do. Never.

I'm a night person. I'm generally happiest and do my best thinking and writing between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. I never, ever go to bed before 11 p.m. or midnight. On a normal night, if I were to go to sleep before 10 or 11 p.m., I'd be awake at about 3:30 a.m. and not be able to go back to sleep. I often stay up until 1 or 2 a.m. even if I know I have to be up at 6 or 7 the next morning.

Not last night. Last night I was in bed by 5, slept for a couple of hours, woke up to try to read a little, gave up on that and tried to watch some TV, gave up on that and was back asleep by between 8:30 and 9 p.m. And pretty much slept through until just before my alarm went off at 5:45 a.m. Something woke me up around 2:30 a.m., but I was back asleep almost immediately.

Not that I think any of you are really interested in any of this. But all of this is to say that I'm really kind of disappointed that I didn't get to post yesterday.

I really wanted to write about the girl in Kentucky who refused to run in a regional track meet she had been training for and which, if she had run, could have qualified her for the state championships, because the organizers gave her a number to wear that she didn't approve of.

If you guessed that they tried to get her to wear "666", you win.

This is not a new phenomenon by any means. When I used to work in retail, every once in awhile a customer would freak out if their total purchase had those numbers in it. I've seen people who had $6.66 or $16.66 or $46.66, or whatever come up on the register either put something back or buy an extra item, just so they wouldn't be paying that total.

This has to do, of course, that some Christians consider the number 666 to be "The Number of the Beast", from a passage in the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, symbolizing the Antichrist or Satan. This is resulted in some people having a phobia regarding that number. This phobia even has a name: Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia.

No, I don't know how to pronounce it, either.

Personally, I don't know why the meet officials didn't just issue her another number. Some reports have said that the officials later claimed that if they had known her objection to the number was religious in nature, they would have given her another number to wear.

On the other hand, I'm not a Biblical literalist, and I don't have any objection to the number 666. So, I also don't really understand the psychology of that. Did the girl really think that if she wore the number, that her god would think she was worshiping the Devil? My conceptions of god have always given him/her credit for a little more intelligence and a little less rigidity than that.

That could just be me, though.