Oh, class! It's Friday the 13th! Ooh, I'm so scared!

Not! To the contrary, I nurture a lofty disdain for all superstition -- so you know what you can do with your ladders and black cats and shatter-prone mirrors. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, Diary, but we live in an age of enlightenment, don't we? (Of course we do!) Scientists have cloned sheep, mapped the human genome, and put whole computers on the head of a pin! Yet some of us are still spitting on baseball bats for good luck and tossing salt over our shoulder to spite the devil. I'm like, what's up with that? Why, my very brother (long considered the voice of Reason in our sometimes flighty family) has a horseshoe over his front doorway, in tribute to the supposititious association between that equestrian commonplace and the abstract notion of "good luck." (Personally, I find it worrisome to pass beneath such a heavy implement that seems to be balanced so precariously on the thin ledge of a doorway frame; I consider it good luck merely to pass under it without being beaned on the head.)

Come to think of it, though, some superstitions are true.

You'll often see me placing an acorn in my window during a thunderstorm to keep the lightning out (though if you often see me doing this, you must be using binoculars in an apartment across the road at Seminary Towers, in which case, shame on you!) Plus, I'm not going to knowingly place a hat on my bed since that would be just ASKING for bad luck. And I'll naturally keep kitty cat out of baby's room lest the feline suck the breath out of the infant as I'm convinced it would if it had its druthers. (What else? There are a few more legitimate superstitions....) Well, I 'm certainly not going to shout the word "Pig!" when I'm at sea since that's been proven to conduce to shipwreck, and if I ever contract a stye in these scintillating orbs of mine, I'm going to rush outdoors and recite the following words: "Stye, stye, leave my eye, take the next one coming by." I'm told that that incantation has remarkable efficacy (though I question the morality of deliberately passing one's optometric affliction to a stranger).

Unfortunately, I appear to have compromised my Rational bona fides with the extensive list of caveats in the last paragraph, but I still insist that Friday the 13th is rubbish: Why should today be more unlucky than yesterday? And even if it turns out to be so, who's to say that it wasn't because I accidentally left a hat on my bed? See? To the enlightened mind, there is always a logical explanation. (Or at least a reasonably plausible superstition that we can fall back on, not like the random association of a calendar date with misfortune, for heaven's sake.) So I guess you'll just have to pardon me my lofty disdain, huh? I mean, look at me: I'm having a fine day today on Friday the 13th, aren't I? I'm a happy, free spirit, chaps, a pulsating, vigorous -- So don't cry for me Argentina on account of nothing is going wrong, okay? Honestly! I feel great, and no superstition is going to get me down today! (knock on wood, of course)