Superstition
Created | Updated Aug 29, 2002
For centuries, possibly even millenia, it has been widely accepted that Friday 13th is an unlucky day, but in my dysfunctional little world, the idea of superstition relating to days appears to go a step further. Is this simply product of my bizarre and overactive imagination, or do certain days have different atmospheres about them? For example, regardless of circumstances, in my meandering and befuddled experiences there are days of the week where good luck gleefully dominates, or on which one is continuously humiliated by a rampant onslaught of prevailing misfortune. I generally attract many a raised eyebrow and bewildered expression when I refer to this phenomenom in conversation as "Wednesdayness" and "Thursdayness".
Wednesdayness? What on God's Earth is that all about?
It all started when I joined Truro School, or perhaps that was simply when I began to notice the mysterious force that is Wednesdayness. To start with, I received my timetable and to my horror realised that all the most cringeworthy lessons I had forced myself to endure in the hope of securing myself a decent education were squatting disdainfully in the same column. The heading of this column, written in crudely uneven typewriter font, was the dastardly word itself. "Wednesday". As I began to experience this most gruesome of days every week between Tuesday and Thursday, it quickly became clear that it was indeed as torturous in practice as it was in theory. On consecutive Wednesdays I missed my school bus, did twice the amount of prep I was supposed to(and the lecturer didn't even mark it), fell down the stairs in front of my favourite person, was dumped, was got drunk by a demonic teenage male, did badly in a mock exam and finally, realised that the dream dressage horse I had recently bought in Holland had in fact been drugged and was completely crazy. Nice. Any Wednesdays which did pass without a minor catastrophe were littered with bizarre and surreal events. For example, on one occasion I was meandering haphazardly around town with a friend on a wander which amounted to us being asked out by a tribe of unidentified teenage boys who were daft to the point of appearing crazily comical. And none of this had anything, whatsoever to do with the original curse of Wednesday, ie the nasty lessons. I was struck by horror when the thought that my exam results were arriving on a Wednesday hit me like a flying train propelled by a hurricane. To my relief, I then discovered that the dastardly date was in fact a Thursday, which leads me on to the fabulous topic of Thursdayness!
Thursdayness? Whatever next?
If God punished Adam and Eve for committing the Original Sin on a Wednesday, the guilt set in on Thursday, when he feared they were so terrified that if he was not careful they would launch themselves into orbit and vacate Planet Earth forever. Similarly, Thursday's timetable dished me up a wholesome and large chunk of most agreeable lessons. Each and every Thursday appears to have a surreal and eccentric quality all of its own. In my confuzzled, blundersome skitter through life, many of the most fantastic people I have stumbled upon have been discovered on Thursdays. It was on a Thursday that I started college, which now appears to me to be the centre of the universe, and it also happened to be a Thursday when I visited Oxford, which is the most fabulous place imaginable and will hopefully provide next year's universe with its centre. Last Thursday, I received my exam results, which to my astonishment were flabbergastingly fantastic. When Wednesday's chemistry teacher sees my A, he can go eat his test tube garnished with the multitude of flippant comments he has made about my work over the years!
Bizarre coincidences
It has to be admitted that sometimes life does not seem in the slightest bit like a chaotic and unrelated sequence of events. It is almost as though there is someone sitting up there with the remote control, getting pleasure from providing us with fortune and freaky situations. For example there are certain people who appear to be like satellites in my life. Although they sometimes disappear, and I think I'll never see them again, they miraculously seem to "turn up" by chance in the oddest of places. Many would dismiss this as pure luck, but it must be considered that there are also many people who fade into obscurity once, never to return. However I know one such "satellite" creature who has disappeared three times, and each of these times reappeared in my life through no fault of his own, or for that matter mine!
Then there was the incident when I dreamed about someone who I had absolutely no cause to think about and had not seen for about a year. The phone woke me up, and of all the people on the planet, he was on the other end of the line!
Then there are the predictions that come eerily true, either from other people, from horoscopes, or even from dreams. Possibly it is simply a case of probability, and there are a great deal of predictions that do not come true but these are simply dismissed as insignificant or forgotten. Or perhaps anything which is thought of as a prediction is crammed forcefully by the mind into the subconscience and affects our behaviour without us knowing, simply because we want X to happen so much and have a strong belief that it will. It is a question that cannot within the mental power of even the cleverest genius be answered, as doing so would involve metaphysically dissecting the world in search of surreal and bewildering forces! Maybe sticking to A level chemistry would be saner!
