On Personal Statistics - A Review
In the realm of all things “math,” I’ve always been one who leans closer to stats than something like differential calculus. Statistics just generally makes more sense to me. Which makes sense, it’s basically just word problems or detective novels turned flash fiction.
Simultaneously, I just like data. Which still just makes sense. Someone who is obsessive needs to be able to reasonably predict what he can obsess over.
So, as we live in a world in which things are making sense, it should be no surprise that I like chunking some of my personal life into statistics. While I won’t go over the details, it should be clear that I don’t have like a spreadsheet that keeps track of how many times I’ve washed my hair in a given week, but I just like to break things into their values every once in a while.
Due to an innate fascination with life statistics, I eventually came to be interested in the prospect of having a printout handed to you when you die.
Something that has a log of everything you’ve ever done, the amount of time/number of times you’ve done it and maybe even your specific ranking in comparison with the rest of the world.
For example, maybe when I die, I’ll find out I spent the most time out of anyone sleeping in hotel bathtubs. What? If you put a bunch of blankets and pillows in there it’s actually kind of comfy.
Or maybe I’d find out that I secretly held the world record for something that I never realized, or that I was actually the literal worst at a skill or a game or anything, really.
I know for a fact that this entire fantasy stems from playing too many video games. A lot of which feature pages similar to the one I’m describing.
This “itch” for real life statistics was scratched the other day while going over what my “stat” spread would be in Dungeon and Dragons.
Nerdy, I know. But. I kind of love it.
In D&D your characters abilities and skills are determined by the following stats:
Strength (how strong you are), Dexterity (how you handle things that require… finesse, like nocking a bow, or doing parkour, or being sneaky), Constitution (your general physical hardiness), Intellect (your ability to remember and recall information, memorization, and logic/reasoning), Wisdom (common sense, perception, intuition), and finally Charisma (which is basically just how well you can persuade people or be a leader). The attributes are scaled between 1-20, with 10 being average and 20 being god-like. You cannot naturally have above an 18 in D&D, and even if you could, you’d be hard pressed to find a real life example of an 18, in my opinion.
So, I was interested to take a stab and guess what my personal stats would be. I decided pretty early that I am at the very least average across the board. Which is a nice ego-boost if you’re ever looking for one. I also think it's important to note that these stats don’t encompass enough to really be passable as a reasonable check for quality assurance. Meaning, just because I have the capacity to score well, doesn’t mean I think I’m above average at every facet of being a human being.
But back to bragging about how great I am.
I struggled to identify what my best stat would be. During the two occasions I went into great detail about the ins and outs of this conversation, both people stated that Charisma would be my highest stat, and that seems weird.
But I suppose I speak words good.
Strength and dexterity are definitely my lowest two scores. I’m assuredly average when it comes to strength, and when it comes to finesse, well, I’ve spilt too many drinks at the dinner table to assume I have any.
As for constitution, I’m allergic to just about everything, but tend not to care. I don’t know if that makes me hardy but unwise, or frail but able to put mind over matter. Either way, it really puts my wisdom into question.
And then there’s intelligence. I don’t feel comfortable scaling that one on my own. But I do have a head for random facts.
At this point I don’t really know the purpose of going on about this. I had an idea, but since I started writing this I’ve led kids on a field trip, accidentally taught a kid math strategies, underwent a crash course in a grading system, made two sandwiches, and of course… sat in the nurse’s office.
Welp.
This is how you end a blog nowadays!
Thanks for reading! Have a great week!
