The Eerie Reoccurrence of the Number 143

Have you ever seen the Jim Carrey movie “Number 23”? If you haven’t, don’t bother. It’s a tedious journey into a dark, bleak place that nobody with any common sense would choose to travel, let alone watch for any length of time (including the hour and thirty-five minute running time of this film). Nevertheless, the premise of the film is rather interesting. A man finds a strange connection between the number 23 and his entire life. He can add, subtract, multiply and divide the number into a plethora of combinations until he finds his birth date, the day he met his wife, the day they married, the number of letters in his name, the address of the house he first lived in, the phone number for the local Chinese Restaurant, etc. Every time he thought of something, he was somehow able to connect it to the number 23. Preposterous, yes?

Well, maybe not. It seems I have my own number that keeps popping up in my life on a rather frequent, if not freakish, basis. But my number is 143, which as many people might know is a code for the phrase “I Love You.” Why? Because there’s one letter in “I,” four letters in “love” and three letters in “you.” A girlfriend of mine in high school taught me this phrase and used it on a rather frequent basis on all our note-passing correspondence during class. Then she eventually dumped me right before prom to go out with some mindless football player, which may account for my turbulent freshman year in college as I tried to move past such a painful and public humiliation. (But that, as they say, is a completely different story.)

The point is, I have always had the number 143 in my life since then, and have often used it myself whenever I needed to express my affection in code. (Though, with this blog posting, I have obviously made this code irrelevant.) Nevertheless, lately I have noticed the number on a much more frequent basis. In the last few months, it seems like every time I glance at a clock, the time is 1:43. Or if I happen to put a DVD on pause to go get a drink, the time it stops on is 1:43. Recently, I even went on a trip and the room I was placed in was 143. (I kid you not.) Or I buy a product at the supermarket, and the price is $1.43. Or even stranger, several of my recent Cat Clip videos have timed out at exactly one minute and 43 seconds long. Without my trying or having any kind of timeframe in mind, the final edited version clocks in at 1 minute and forty three seconds.

Weird, yes? But still this could all be a coincidence, right? Well, then I decided (like Jim Carrey’s character in “Number 23”) to investigate a little further. I tried to apply the number 143 to my birth date, which is November 8th. Right away, you will notice that if you add all the numbers up individually (1+4+3), you get 8. And if you multiply 4 times 3 and then subtract 1, you get 11. November is the eleventh month of the year. Now I realize this is sort of pushing the issue, trying to see all the relationships between the number and my life. But what if it did mean something? What if it was some kind of message? Or a communication from someone from the great beyond?

I don’t really follow Numerology, or Astrology, or even basic Biology, so I don’t know if this number is significant in any way. But I thought I’d broach the topic to see if anyone else has a reoccurring number in their lives that defies explanation. If so, please elaborate in the comments section below. If not, just chalk this up to another weird blog posting that you can’t identify with. There must be millions of those, right? Or at least 143 of them. (Cue loud dramatic music here.)