Abstract Acacias

1. Do you follow any cultural superstitions (e.g., avoiding the number thirteen, picking up pennies)?
I don't walk under ladders, I don't say "Macbeth" when I'm in a theater.... Not, mind, for any determined belief that these will bring bad luck, but more just on the offchance, and partially because it's habit. And I don't look at a program for a performance that I'm in before the performance, because we were told that that was bad luck too, but I've never found anyone outside of my high school who observes that particular superstition. When I was little, I was very careful not to step on cracks or lines (unless I was angry at my mother, ahem), but I've stopped that by now. I also always close my eyes when I'm going under a tunnel (err, unless I'm the one driving...), but that's actually not based on superstition, it's based on a childhood game that I played with myself, of trying to see whether I could tell when we had reached the end of the tunnel by the change in light through my eyelids.

2. Do you have any personal superstitions (e.g. wearing a certain item of clothing to bring you luck)?
Not precisely, but sometimes I'll wear my Corpus shirt when I'm taking an exam. (It's gotten a bit ratty, though.) Or I'll carefully select a certain piece of clothing in the hopes that it will bring luck, even though I've never considered it to be a lucky piece of clothing before.

3. Did your parents have any superstitions? What were they? Do you believe in them?
I don't think they have. And my mom couldn't really think of any when I just asked her.

4. Make up a new superstition and share it with us (who knows, maybe it will catch on!).
Did you know that if a Christmas ornament breaks, you'll have twelve days of bad luck? (But if you break a Hanukkah candle while you're trying to put it into your Hanukkiah, you'll only have eight days of bad luck.)

5. Did you notice the date today? Does it affect you at all (e.g. make you nervous, make you happy)?
I might have noticed it eventually anyway, but I recently got a Bab5 e-mail from eviladmin which mentioned the date. And made me sad that I'm not up in the Bay Area to be at Bab5 tonight. I generally enjoy Friday the 13th, much in the same way that I enjoy a blue moon.

This morning, as I passed by the playground on my way to campus, I heard a little child calling out a taunt; and my insides just curled up with this sick anguish and pain for the unknown recipient of that jibe. You'd think that after so many years I could look back on elementary school with a laugh, and that does seem usually to work, but evidently when faced with actual as opposed to abstract memories there's nothing doing. *sigh* I guess I'll just have to accept that I'm fucked up.