Friday the 13th – perfect day for dental work
My dentist asked me to pick a date for repairs on a fractured tooth. I mulled it over and said, “How does Friday the 13th work for you?”
Jerry Seinfeld once remarked that one of his chief pet peeves is the term “pet peeve.” I know the feeling: I’m so unsuperstitious I’ve become positively superstitious about it. Show me a ladder and I’ll duck under it in a heartbeat; point out a black cat and I’ll cross the street, risking bodily harm, to cross its path. I’ve embraced The Dark Side.
Apophenia, the interpretation of meaningless phenomena in meaningful ways, seems hard-wired into the human brain. On Oct. 10, 2010 – 10/10/10 – more than 39,000 couples in the United States were wed, nearly 10 times the nuptial number of the comparable day the previous year. Elvis impersonators hit the jackpot on 11/11/11, when the Viva Las Vegas wedding chapel recorded 200 bookings, four times the norm.
I’m no psychologist, but I’ve seen enough of human behavior to take an educated guess about who’s pushing the easy-to-remember anniversary numbers. It’s the grooms.
Some superstitions that seem numeric are actually sonic. Superstitious people in Japan, China, Korea and Vietnam shun the number four, a homophone for the word for death. This influences the assigning of numbers to cell phones, floors in buildings (skipping four, as we in the West skip 13) and names to streets. If this strikes you as foolish, imagine our Western numbering system containing an exact sonic match for “bloodbath.” How’d you like to live on Bloodbath Boulevard?
What prompts some superstition isn’t numbers or sounds but wishful thinking, like expecting an inanimate object – say, a writing pen – to remember any fact of significance. Some folks believe that when taking a test, it’s a savvy move to use the pen you used when studying for the test, since the pen is likely to remember the correct answers. These folks’ pens are mightier than their gourds.
If I’m wrong about this, if our superstitions correspond to the way things work, if the number 13 is jinxed, we’re all in deep doo-doo. It means the cosmos is supervised by a malicious prankster, that the slightest slip-up can trigger tragic consequences, as when the groom who drops the wedding band at the ceremony dooms the marriage. Who knows what other innocent acts ignite icky outcomes? We can imagine the cosmic prankster laying a curse on dentists who whistle “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” while performing root canals, the most original sin of the modern era.
If you’re superstitious and want to break the habit, go break a mirror. Thumb your nose at the cosmic prankster and track the consequences. Keep a journal – in the case of the mirror, every day for seven years. That’s right: 2,556.75 straight days of journal entries. A more passive strategy: make a dental appointment for Friday the 13th. Dental work: drilling and chiseling on sensitive nerve endings in your mouth. Hey, it’s Friday the 13th; what could possibly go wrong?
But to the true believer on this inauspicious Friday, October 13, 2023: Relax. Embrace your superstition. Take a deep breath. And never mind that it rhymes with death.