I'm not a believer in the 5-second rule myself, but I evidently share with my brother the similarly irrational belief that my breath is antiseptic, because if I drop something on the floor, I immediately pick it up and blow on it. Although in my case, my breath might actually be antiseptic, but only on Saturday nights - fine, selected Thursdays and Fridays, too. (Do you see what I did there?)
It doesn't end there, though. There are several completely irrational things that I at least sort of believe. I'm going to share them with you, but before you judge me, ask yourself how many times you've jinxed someone into owing you a coke you full well know they're never going to deliver. And I'm not even going to ask about all your elementary school cootie shots - we're going to leave those in the past, where they belong.
I don't trust people with mustaches. In my personal experience, everyone with a mustache either looks like a serial killer, a dirty old man, or at the very least someone possessing an unhealthy obsession with the Olsen twins. Now, if you yourself are a mustached gent (or lady) please be aware that I'm not saying that you are any of those things. I'm just saying you look like one of those things.
You know how your car makes all kinds of weird noises at different times in its life? For most of those noises, I have pretty much the same fix... Strange clunking sound that could be anything from stuff rattling around in the trunk to the wheel falling off? Turn up the radio. Odd beeping noise that sounds like probably all the doors are open and/or the car is about to self-destruct? Turn up the radio. Insistent crackling sound accompanied by smoke billowing out from the fuse box? Turn up the radio and roll the window down. But when that noise sounds even the tiniest bit like a buzzing sound? BEE IN THE CAR, hooooly crap, OH MY FUCK, there's a BEE in my CAR! Pull over! Abort! Just jump out, let the car go, it's not worth it, the bee can have it, hellooooo 911, Bee in the fucking CAR!! ... oh hold up, sorry, it was just my phone vibrating. My bad.
Some of you may know that I have been being told for 3 years now that I need to get my wisdom teeth removed. You will likely also know then, that this is never going to happen. Firstly, I've had a cavity filled without Novocaine and IF YOU THINK YOU ARE GETTING YOUR STUPID DRILL ANYWHERE NEAR MY FACE, you vile white-coated fiend, you've got another thing coming! So then my dentist and all of you rational people out there are like, "Well, why don't you just have them put you under, then?" and that brings me to my next irrational belief: if you think that's such a good idea then you do it, and we'll see who's on the front page of failblog tomorrow with Sharpie genitalia all over their face. (Do I mean pictures of genitalia drawn with Sharpie markers, or do I mean actual genitalia belonging to a Sharpie marker? You'll always wonder that now.)
In a similar medical vein (ha) I have a weird relationship with the doctor's office. It's like, first of all, I hate going to the doctor, because I'm a fairly sane human being and the doctor's office sucks once you're too old to get free lollipops there (I think I just now uncovered the secret evil conspiracy between doctors and dentists). The thing is, I also know that if I have an appointment, by the time I get there, absolutely nothing will be wrong with me. I could be vomiting frogs on the way there, but by the time I get in the exam room, I'm miraculously cured. If I decide to tough it out and refuse to make an appointment though, I will just get sicker by the day until I cave, make an appointment, and get miraculously healed as soon as the nurse calls my name. Now my doctor probably thinks I'm a hypochondriac, but the truth is that I really did have bacterial meningitis yesterday. I think I may have had a touch of West Nile, too.
The other thing I've noticed is that night time, in general, is a lot scarier than daytime when it comes to irrational fears. Like if I hear footsteps on my front porch in the daytime, I'm like, "Yay! Mail's here. What wonderful mystery item did I and my antiseptic breath order on amazon last night?!" but if the footsteps are at night there is clearly a serial killer outside my house. So what if it's only 6:30 and my husband is due home any moment? It's dark out, a serial killer is the only plausible explanation. It's fine though, I actually have a foolproof serial-killer survival tactic. It works on werewolves, vampires, and most other imaginary predators of the night, too: I lie on the bed, perfectly still, with all four limbs and all extremities completely on the bed (this is crucial) and pretend to be asleep. The only downside to this tactic is that it unfortunately does not work on bees.
Not every one of my exclusively-nighttime irrational beliefs is a fear, though. Take my alarm clock. (I'm not afraid of it, I just deeply and inexorably loathe it. Big difference.) If I wake up in the middle of the night, I absolutely will not look at my clock to see what time it is. The reason for this is that I wholeheartedly believe that if I don't look at it, I can go back to sleep for like, six more hours, but if I do check the time, it is suddenly going to become twenty minutes before the alarm's going to go off anyway. The worst part is that I will probably still go for the instant gratification of going back to sleep anyway, and be rewarded with a groggy, walking-dead outlook for the rest of the day, when I wake up at exactly the wrong stage of REM sleep or whatever.
My alarm clock is actually not the only non-sentient element of my life that conspires against me, though. Take snow, for example. If a snowstorm is coming when I have to go to work the next day, they will predict 5-10 feet of snow (all those computers, and they still give as wide a range as Charter Communications does when your internet is down) and possibly a tornado, or maybe locusts. And I will be like, "Wow, there is no way they're going to open the library tomorrow! I'm going to the bar!" (because I just love the way the sun reflecting of all that snow affects my hangover). The next day, of course, it will be sunny and unseasonably warm, with not a snowflake in sight, and I will spend the whole work day contemplating whether to trade my soul for a BLT or a McDouble. If, on the other hand, a snowstorm is coming the day before I need to drive or fly somewhere that I actually want to go, they will call for a coating to an inch, and we will get 3 feet of solid ice. This brings me to my irrational belief in this whole thing (because the rest of this paragraph is just solid factual information): I look at the weather forecast every day, even though, regardless of what it says, I am just going to believe that the weather will do the exact opposite of what I want it to do. I've tried tricking it, but it knows better than to buy into "Oh no, but if work is cancelled tomorrow, then no one can download porn in the library, and what a travesty that would be!"
Just when I've gotten to that part of my blog where you're like "Hm, nope, I don't think I can identify with her after all, she's got some pretty weird shit going on in her head" (admit it, it's your favorite part), I'm going to circle around and come back to things that I am not alone in irrationally believing: things that, like the 5-second rule, are met with a worldwide attitude that "I don't know, it could be true, let's not chance it just in case".
Okay, I've probably stepped on tons of cracks, and my mother's back is still fully intact, but the thing is, I stepped on those cracks without noticing, and deliberately stepping on a crack is a whole different animal, right? Like, if I'm mindful of the surface I'm walking on, I will totally avoid the cracks, because what if? Besides, even if that myth isn't true, there is the whole "the floor is lava" thing that could suddenly become real at any minute, if I open a space-time rift by stepping on the line between tiles at Market Basket. (For some reason, I never picture this end-times scenario happening anywhere else).
I don't always have birthday cake, and I don't always have candles, and I don't always make a wish even if I do have candles, but WHEN I DO all of those things, I never, ever tell anyone what my wish was. You know why? Because at my fourth birthday party, amidst more My Little Pony-themed shit than you can even imagine, I blew out my candles and proudly announced that I'd wished for a real pony. I am still waiting. What I should have done is wish-and-tell to be grounded, but at that time I still legitimately believed there was a chance I could grow up to be a princess, so my logical reasoning skills were clearly not fully developed.
I also don't walk under ladders, not because I think it's bad luck in some abstract sense, but because that's just a stupid thing to do generally. In fact, if you walk under a ladder and it or an object falls on you, it's not even bad luck, it's just the price you pay for being a moron. Breaking mirrors, though? Well, I dropped a little mirror I was using for a craft project once and thought nothing of it when it broke, but guess how many years I've been working at the library?
I'm not really sure how I feel about the whole knock on wood thing, so I compromise. If I say something that seems like it could be jinxed just for having said it, I knock on the closest object that is either made of wood, or covered in laminate that has a fake wood grain on it. (In retrospect, yet another way I could have salvaged that pony wish).
There's a lot of irrational stuff out there that I never really bought into, believe it or not. Like I guess there is some kind of thing where if something-or-other happens, you're supposed to throw salt over your shoulder? I don't know what the myth is, but I feel like whatever you're avoiding can't be any worse than stepping on a salt-covered floor with bare feet. And that thing about your ears ringing means someone is talking about you? (Or is it itching?) There is no way that could be true, or every single person from the People of Walmart calendar would be at the doctor's complaining about their ears every day. Also, what about celebrities? Is there a minute ever that someone, somewhere isn't talking about Lady Gaga or breaking up with Taylor Swift? Wouldn't their ears always bother them? Similarly, a shiver means someone's walking on your grave? I shiver all the fucking time, and I am so not going to be buried anywhere, because hello, serial killers and bees can still find you as long as it's dark, and I'm not completely ruling out the zombie thing yet.
