Writer's Block: Friday the 13th

[anagramofbrat]

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Believe? eh...

Some I still practice out of either long habit or with a sense of irony. I like Friday the 13ths, they're fun and point to the fact that the month began on a sunday, which is just... aesthetically pleasing. On American calendars anyway. As for the rest, I flip tails-up pennies over before I pick them up, say "bless you" when someone sneezes, avoid walking under ladders, make spooky noises when thirteen people sit at a table, try to remember to eat black-eyed peas on New Year's Day, make wishes on stars, birthday candles and coins thrown into fountains, and get mildly nervous if mirrors get broken around me.

Comments

[htl-1126.livejournal.com]

The mirror thing I practice. And an old Polish tradition of not allowing any woman to walk through your threshold on New Year's Day otherwise you get a year's worth of bad luck. If a man walks through then it is a year's worth of good luck excluding current occupants.

[mortisnightmare.livejournal.com]

A few of them I follow on the theory that it can't hurt and why risk it? I mean, if doing/not doing something MIGHT be bad luck, and whatever it is is easy enough to do or avoid, why not? The worst that can happen by following it is you look a little silly and waste a little time. I guess it's like some people go to church because - on the off chance not going to church results in you spending eternity in hell - you might as well do something relatively simple in order to avoid the negative results that you might get.

[mortisnightmare.livejournal.com]

Though, being a Jew, going to church obviously isn't one of the things I do just in case. And I have to say I am so very very grateful that attending synagogue is not something that my denomination of Judaism requires, since the one around here is very Conservative (the denomination, not the political outlook) and insanely boring. Back when I had to attend 13 services before my bat mitzvah, we had this rabbi and he was terrible. You could tell the whole congregation felt that way because right before he was about to give his sermon, the whole congregation would suddenly have to go to the bathroom for about how long it took him to get through that week's sermon.