but…uh…

If you’ve ever found yourself bored with the bulletproof accuracy and scientific rigor of horoscopes, I suggest you give biorhythms a shot.

Biorhythms. I haven’t thought about these things once since learning to plot and compare them at some point in middle school. They’re one of those peculiar things buried deep enough in the grey matter to avoid recall, but always at the ready to be recognized when least expected. Like yesterday, when searching for Konfabulator widgets and finding one designed to track the emotional, physical, and mental cycles that were started on the day of my birth.

Interest piqued, some reading and Googling refreshed my memory. A biorhythm is based on the idea that your body undergoes a natural, predictable cycle that can foretell the highs and lows among 3 different axis. The complication is that each factor is a sine wave running at it’s own speed. 23 days for the physical, 28 for the emotional and 33 for the intellectual. The times when your cycles are all high, you’re firing on all cylinders and life is good. When low, the doldrums are at hand. In between you get all sorts of complicated variations based on the addition of sine waves that only repeat as a group every 58 years or so.

The site I went to for my free biorhythm reading also offers the option to check your biorhythmic compatibility with a number of celebrities as well as with non-celebrities, if you happen to know their birthday. While I’m sure that Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Garner will be sad to know that I think our 94% matches are pure bunk, the idea behind this feature got me thinking about the idea of compatibility and what that really means. At this site, they compare how often the 2 biorhythms line up in each of the 3 categories. Since the overall length of each person’s cycle is the same, there is no variation over time when comparing one factor. For example, if your physical lines are completely out of alignment, they will match only the very small percentage of time when passing each other on the way from top to bottom and never come into alignment. This would be considered a bad match. The idea here is that the more often your rhythms are aligned, the more often you will be experiencing highs and lows of yourself and the relationship at the same time and will thus be more compatible.

At first blush this seems to make perfect sense. It would seem to be bad news if every time one person was feeling frisky the other had a headache or something like that. However, further examination of the composite curves leads me to another conclusion.

When the 2 cycles are most matched, this leads to wild combined swings in the composite curve. The highs are really high and the lows are really low. That may make for some excitement but what does it mean at the low points? If both people are feeling angry or distant, what keeps it all together? Where is the steady, guiding hand?

When the cycles are offset, the combined waves dampen each other and minimize the wild swings from high to low. When one person is perhaps least able to find emotional fortitude, the other has an excess in that area to draw from and cross that distance. Sort of the metaphysical equivalent of the cheesy Jesus "Footprints" poem. In this scenario, only one person is going crazy at a time and there is always someone manning the wheel. Each person takes turns keeping it all together.

I don’t know. While I have about as much faith in biorhythms predicting a successful relationship as numerology, it does make one examine which sorts of things should be valued in a partner.

Then again, maybe I’m just rationalizing.

I know I’ve been really bad about posting lately, OK - always, but I do have a few really nice posts waiting to be completed in the drafts section of blogger. That should count for something.

In the meantime, I did come across a really nifty plugin for iTunes that will post what I’m currently listening to. It even puts up the album art and nifty links so you can purchase the song yourself.

Perhaps this will cause me to cast a more critical eye on my playlist so as to not be embarrassed by the information revealed here. I’m sure Abby hopes so.