For some people, Friday the
13th marks a day of misfortune where we all should live in fear of
being cursed by ill fate. For me, however, Friday the 13th marks
nothing more then another day on the calendar. Pretty much all my life I have
believed superstition to be nothing more than a load of old wives tales. I
presumed that people who genuinely believed in superstition must live very
sheltered lives with nothing better to do then worry about black cats, ladders
and the combination of the word Friday with the number 13.
Upon doing some research, I
discovered that the fear of Friday the 13th is called paraskavedekatriaphobia. Whoever invented this term must have had a cruel sense
of humor as anyone inclined to genuinely fear Friday the 13th is
surely unable to pronounce nor spell this word. However, after the events of today,
I reluctantly admit that I too now suffer from paraskavedekatriaphobia
(a word which I can neither pronounce nor spell).
As
with all good stories, it all started yesterday when I decided to eat a one-pound
burger (unfortunately this was not its price but it’s weight - equivalent of four quarter-pounders). This decision was not a spontaneous one, in
fact it was a meticulously planned event which I had been preparing for all day.
No breakfast, little to no lunch and a preemptive gym session to counteract the
impending calorie attack. However, nothing could have prepared me for what was
to come. The burger itself was the size of a pizza and the height of a coke
can, it was impossible to pick up and had to be sliced like a cake – a very
meaty cake. The menu proudly boasted that the burger contained a 500 gram
patty, six slices of bacon, one entire onion, four tomatoes, four slices of
cheese and four entire pickles – I don’t even like pickles! In any case I
accepted the challenge like a man and then promptly threw up.
I
woke up today with a distinct pain in my left kidney, it was no doubt in
overdrive trying to process the one pound of dead cow inside me. Unfortunately
I had little time to complain as I was due to be in school for a long day of
lesson planning. I spent most of
the day in the staff room sweating pure liquid fat (the kind left in a frying
pan after cooking bacon) and clutching my kidney.
Things
couldn’t get much worse until I felt the iPod my friend had lent me slip out of
my pocked and crack on the floor. The
fall rendered the iPod to nothing more then a $250 paperweight, the
iPaperweight. To make matters even worse, none of the music on the iPod has
been backed-up. In effect, I had both broken $250 dollars of electrical
equipment but and destroyed someone’s entire music collection in one…..and my
kidney still hurt.
So there you
are kids, paraskavedekatriaphobi is perhaps something to be taken more
seriously now.
