Eleven

My Dad bought me my first watch when I was about seven or eight years old. It was a simple, black LCD watch which showed the hours and minutes, and if you held down one button it showed the date, and a different button switched the display to the current minute and second.

Shortly after I first buckled that watch to my wrist I fell in love with the number eleven. There was something magical about it. It was the only number that would ever fill every slot on the display with the same repeating digit. (It was a 24 hour watch, so technically it also did that at 22:22, however I was seven years old and this time existed only in theory).

Every day at 11:11 I would spend a whole minute feeling happy. I would tab between the hour : minute display and the minute : second display to make sure I caught the moment when the time was 11:11:11, and this was like some sort of numerical climax to me. I would then go back to playing with Lego or writing crappy stories or whatever things I do did with my time.

I quickly decided 11 was going to be my favourite number. This, I believed, made me pretty fucking unique compared to my peers. Most of them had 7 as their lucky number. They barely understood the concept of a two digit lucky number, one of them even said to me once "Your lucky number is '1', twice?'" What philistines. No wonder none of them have online journals. If they did I'm sure they would all read exactly the same.

I remember, the year of the first watch, how I yearned for November to come. Once it had, I counted down the days to November 11 and on that day I gleefully tabbed between the hour : minute, minute : second and day/month screens on my watch. For a wondrous second the time was nothing but rows of repeating "1"s. I didn't know much at the time, but it felt like the greatest thing mankind had achieved was creating the digital watch.

That November I was too young to have been taught about war and Remembrance Day, so a fuckton of 1s was all that mattered. A few years later when I did find out that November 11 was already a special day for non repeating number reasons I was immediately unimpressed and jealous.

Later in life bad things started happening to me on the eleventh of the month. In 2002 I broke my leg on July 11, caused a car accident on December 11. I injured my wrist on September 11 2008, and I'm pretty sure I caught a cold or something heinous on some other 11th somewhere in between. I decided 11 was my lucky number no more.

Now, even more years since then I have completely lost interest in the significance of eleven. So, when today's date was a long string of repeating "1"s I did not care at all. I especially did not have a 500 word long opinion about it. I don't have anything to say to elegantly finish this entry.