On Randomness

“What are you going to do today, Napoleon?”
“Whatever I feel like I want to do. Gosh.”
- Napoleon Dynamite

The word “random” has changed its meaning. It’s still got the “chosen by chance” definition, but that’s now been joined by something along the lines of “weird, arbitrary, unexpected or unknown” - at least among people my age in my country. For example, “Why did Jack call me Sarah when my name’s Melanie? I thought it was a bit random.” Saying this, Melanie wouldn’t be trying to imply that Jack chose the name Sarah at random, but that his behaviour was odd and difficult to explain. And then there’s the noun, as in “Jack brought a couple of randoms to the party.” This one doesn’t even imply that the extra guests were odd - just that the speaker didn’t know them.

So it’s much easier these days to behave randomly. I’m not sure anyone’s behaviour has ever been random in the old sense of the word. One person who claimed randomness was the title character in Luke Rhinehart’s novel The Dice Man, which I’ve just given up on after 150 pages. I enjoyed it until the dice bit started. The dice man would make decisions by writing down six options and then throwing a dice to choose between them. The flaw, of course, is that he’s the one choosing the options, so he never really writes down anything he doesn’t want to do. The author doesn’t seem to be unaware of this problem, but it doesn’t bother him too much either. He allows his narrator to spiel for tens of pages about the possibility of living our lives without personalities, and how attractive this possibility is. Anyone who’s read the book all the way through, feel free to chime in and defend it. I found that the sparkly writing was wasted on the premise.

I’ve been trying to come up with methods that allow you to live more randomly than the dice man. Here’s one: you open the dictionary wherever you like and put your finger on the page without looking at it. You read on from that point on the page until you come to the first verb. This is your order. Some verbs need one or more objects; if so, you do the same trick with nouns until you have enough. Then you carry out the order as well as you can and repeat the process for the rest of your life. There’s a problem with this method too, though: working out what the command means in the context of your situation is often going to take a fair amount of interpretation on your part, and I suppose more interpretation means less randomness. Hang on, let me try it…

Oh dear. I seem to have found a chemistry term. To “desorb” something is to stop it from being adsorbed any longer. And something is adsorbed when it’s being held in the form of a thin film on the surface of something else, like dye on a fibre. This doesn’t look promising. Still, let’s find out what I’m required to desorb… “Prime cost” - the direct cost of a commodity in terms of materials and labour. Hmm. So my command is “desorb prime cost”. I guess I’ve already carried this one out as well as I can, since I can’t think of a way that a prime cost can be adsorbed, even metaphorically. I’ll try one more. “Linish chimichanga”, which apparently is a command to polish a kind of tortilla by holding it against an abrasive moving belt. Well, this one’s at least possible. I just have to cook up my first chimichanga and then find an appropriate belt. The dictionary has spoken.