Superstition

Being that Friday the 13th was this week, I figured nothing more suiting to blog about than superstition. I cannot say that I am the most superstitious person, far from it in comparison to the rest of the world I am sure. Especially with the signs of bad luck like a black cat walking across your path, walking underneath a ladder, opening your umbrella indoors, walking over the zodiac sign in the Memorial Union. Who is earnestly afraid that bad things will happen to them if they were to carry out one or more of those actions? All of those have happened to me, multiple times actually and I have lived to tell about it with no serious or scary stories to share. What I want to know is who made these things up and what about them makes them “bad luck?”

Towards the beginning of the school year, I accidentally dropped a handheld mirror on the tile floor in my dorm room. I picked it up to realize that I only had the plastic covering in my hand. The glass was shattered in a jumbled mess on the ground beneath me. My first thought was “aaah crap. Now I have to buy another one.” Then immediately after, the thought came to mind of how you will supposedly get seven years of back luck once you break a mirror. I shrugged it off and said it was all a scam. Then my button fell off on my jacket. I stood there for a few seconds and just stared at the button twirling on the floor. I was thrown off guard because this was not supposed to happen. I grew somewhat concerned not knowing if something else was going to happen. I tried recalling the other times I had broken a mirror if anything had happened, but I could recall no such moment. Then I wondered if maybe this bad luck because of a broken mirror thing had its own set of rules and it would not kick in until you were eighteen years old. So I kept my eyes open and my senses acute. Nothing else ever happened, but it almost had me.

Although I do not find myself believing that bad things will come from these things happening, I will occasionally find myself doing silly things like: avoiding stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk, making a wish when it is 12:34 (even though one of them is yet to come true), search for four-leaf clovers, wishing on a fallen eyelash, knocking on wood, and sometimes just for fun to recall the memories of childhood I will twist the stem on my apple and recite the alphabet until the stem falls off (you know what happens next). Oh the ridiculous things we do.