I don’t want to sound superstitious (that’s a lie, I am
totally superstitious and everyone knows it , I’m actually only saying that
because I’m superstitious and I don’t want to attract even more bad juju),
but—has anyone noticed that there seems to be a Gremlin of Mischief and Petty
Destructions afoot in the universe right now?
This gremlin’s dealings would include (but would certainly not be
limited to):
–The lights went out at the Super Bowl (although,
truthfully, I would be more inclined to put the blame squarely on Beyonce’s
sparkly shoulders for that one)
–The backup drive for one of my computers started clicking,
then threw off an error message that the “drive is corrupt, please back up the
drive and reformat.” Um….does it know
that I actually can’t access the drive anymore, so it will be impossible to
back it up? That is insane. My information is now gone.
— In a completely unrelated incident (because the hard
drive was in a totally different room, not attached to this computer at the
time), my otherwise completely reliable computer froze up to the point where it
could not even be manually turned off, in the style of HAL
— The dryer broke.
Well, “broke” is probably too strong a word, but how dry can clothes get
when there is NO HEAT AT ALL COMING OUT OF THE DRYER?
— The wood-burning stove’s seal fell off, filling the house
with smoke. Did you know that kind of
thing can make you light-headed?
— Lest you think the problem is just at our house and the
Super Bowl, my friend went on vacation last week, and during that vacation, the
bellboy at their hotel dropped her computer on concrete,
then she returned to find that her email had been hacked (I knew this because I
got a weird email from her this morning saying she was “travelling in Cypress
and lost everything, could I help?”
You may think these incidents are unrelated, and they
probably are, but it seems to me that things types of “annoying/ inconvenient”
items tend to occur in clusters, and then I start to wonder about the larger
significance of it all. In case you’re a longtime Funny Strange
reader, you’ll recall that we had this experience about six years ago, where
our dishwasher and a bunch of other things started malfunctioning all at the
same time. When it happened that time,
I got frustrated and tried to fix things as soon as they broke, which did not
work AT ALL. Now, when this kind of
thing starts to happen, I almost just want to hole up in one area, not moving
too much, not trying to get too much done, because I know the odds are against
it.
Is that weird? I’m
actually asking. Does this kind of
thing ever happen to you, and if so, do you say things like “It’s a sign,” or “What
can I do to appease this bad energy cluster,” or are you not a total hippie,
and you just chalk it up to a “run of bad luck?” Should I stop worrying about this?
Or, if you are even more of a hippie than me, I would
appreciate it if you have some kind of spell or sage/ smudging ritual that can
break the cycle of weirdness.