So you're all that and a bag of chips.

I sometimes wonder who put the bag of chips on the end of the "you're all that." I mean, are there some people who go to deli's way too much and always get a bag of chips? Or it is some kind of homage to the Extra Value Meal or the Deal or whatever it is the fast food place calls their burger-drink-fries combo? And if we really want to get somebody mad, should we call them Super-sized?

Trends, you know, are hard to spot as they are happening. It's really only after a little while, when you step back, that everything becomes clear.

Take that whole tattoo thing back in the early 90s. Everyone got a tattoo. A butterfly, a Chinese character (even though you didn't know Chinese at all and might have asked the guy to put a big middle finger in Chinese on the small of your back because you thought it meant "love") or a teddy bear. Or maybe your favorite cartoon character. That Pearl Jam stick figure was big for a while. Of course, about five years later, people realized that tattoos stay forever. That's when the antidote became big. Laserizing those tattoos off. For those who might be thinking about this, I've heard the antidote hurts more than getting the actual tattoo.

I never got a tattoo. Or got pierced. And I don't wear jewelry. I'm not a Mac Daddy. I don't have really big jeans with enough room to hold my semi-automatic machine gun and a pound of pot. Actually, my favorite pair of jeans I can't buy replacements for anymore. They were the house brand of Wards--which doesn't even exist now.

That's why I was a little astonished when I met 163.

163 is about five-five, a little over 100 lbs (never said how much exactly, I'm guessing), short reddish hair and a nice figure. I was looking through the used stacks at Bow Wow Records, my favorite place to upsize my CD collection. She was looking at a beat up copy of the Rolling Stones' Exile On Main Street. Soon, I was mostly just looking at her.

"Good album," I said, smiling.

"It's a CD, old fart," she said. Did I mention she's barely older than 21? "Nobody has albums anymore." She said this even though Bow Wow actually has a large selection of vinyl LPs and EPs lining one side of the store.

So I agreed and went into my big spiel about how I still call CDs albums, and how it's really about the grouping of songs and not the media it resides on that defines what the grouping actually is. Then I told her my name, and she told me hers.

"163," she said. "Huh?" I asked back. "163. I legally changed my name to a number." "Cool," I said, but thought that it was a little strange. I'd never heard of people voluntarily changing their names to numbers.

We bought a few CDs (she got the Stones, I bought some CDs from bands that made her make a face and say, "You're one a those emo guys, huh?") and headed over to the coffee house formerly known as Double Rainbow.

She told me about the Number Girls. This group of girls who have started to call themselves by a number--and how many of them, like 163 herself, have legally changed their names to that number. I guess it's easy to change your name--probably about as easy to get a tattoo.

"There are about 350 of us that I know of," 163 said, also saying that many of the number girls she knows about she only knows over the Internet. This is where the idea came from, apparently. All those people who thought they had the perfect screen name and then found they had to put a string of numbers after or before it because a million other people already thought of the same perfect screen name. And cell phones. She said that a lot of people only know others by their cell phone number. "It's about the oppression of individuality," she told me. "We're all faceless and nameless already, might as well make it official."

I did my little schmooze line about how she's not faceless to me, actually rather attractive. She waved it off, laughing. "So if we did it, what number would I be?" These young girls can be tough cookies sometimes.

We exchanged personal information and other personal things, promised to see or talk to each other again and walked our separate ways. We had different places to go.

I haven't met any other number girls, but I'm sure they're out there. No one does this kind of thing in a vacuum. So when they start to pop up in conversation or drinking from a keg in the back room, don't get startled. It's just a phase, a trend, a not-quite-yet-really-cool thing to do. And when they get tired of it, I'm sure it'll be easier to get rid of than that tattoo of a skull and snake on your lower abdomen.

Matt Worley doesn't have a cell phone. 163 didn't believe that one either.