A couple weeks ago, I stumbled home drunk, and of course, promptly got online. The man just happened to be around, because work was snowed in/out.. (sign #1 that you’ve lived almost all your life in a tropical country: You have no idea how to navigate around winter related grammar) After the customary viewing of White Winter Wonderland via Webcam, mocking his hair, him mocking my drunken self, etcetera, etcetera, we got around to serious conversation.

For example. One of the questions I asked him was: What’s the one place you would like to have sex, even though it’s most unlikely to ever happen?

I’ll leave out his answer, but my response to that question is…. in a giant ball pit. You know, those play pens with the plastic balls? Like the ones in the IKEA children’s corner? Well not in IKEA, obviously. But if you had your very own ball pit, just for a night, imagine how much fun that would be.

I’d completely forgotten about this until I noticed it at the bottom of xkcd.com. A little bit of googling, some off hand measurement, painstaking conversion of units and currency, and lots of calculation, eventually led me to the discovery that for the low, low price of S$8064.14, I could fill my room to a height of 0.7m, with plastic balls, in 6 colours, just to do the deed.

That’s an underestimate of course, because I didn’t measure my floor area very accurately. I used a free measuring tape that’s also a pen, which mix got for answering a survey at my sister’s book launch. Plus, I didn’t take into account all the space that’s already taken up by furniture. You’d think this would equate to an overestimate in cost, but the prices I got for the balls themselves are off of ebay, and the shipping was limited to the 48 continental US states. Who knows how much they’d cost in Singapore.

Or what my parents would think when 23 204 balls, each almost 4cm in radius, showed up on our doorstep.

Yes, I am a total nerd. I spent a good portion of my lazy time doing math. Although, on the plus side, it was for the sake of sexual fantasies. Say… does that make me a sexy nerd? I’d love to be a sexy nerd. I think.

Anyway. In case you’re as bored and as dedicated to freakishism as I am, and have a lot of time on your hands, this is a metric cost calculator, here and here you have links to write ups by people who have actually done it, and these two have nothing to do with ball pits, or sex, but they do prove just how cool xkcd and it’s creator are.

I’m almost disgusted by how content and happy I am after doing all this. I am a sad, sad, child.