Bad Superstitions

I never thought of myself as superstitious.

Friday the 13^th?

Throw salt over your shoulder?

Black cats?

Nah, I don’t believe any of those. They’re silly.

But I’ve recently come to realize that my thinking is rife with superstitions – buried so deep, I didn’t even know I had them.

As this article points out, some superstitions can be positive, can even have a kind of placebo effect.

But mine tend to be negative.

For instance,

Under the theory that it’s the unexpected that will get you, I believe that if you think of all the bad things that can happen, then they won’t happen. My whole family operates under this belief. Does it keep bad things from happening? No. But it does make you miserable and afraid and exhausted. It’s the very definition of “hypervigiliance,” a symptom of anxiety that Pamela Cytrynbaum wrote about so devastatingly at Psychology Today.

If you are waiting for news that might be bad, don’t make plans for the future beyond that because you are tempting fate and it will slap you down. The problem with this one, besides that it is illogical, is that there is always potentially bad news around the corner, so you never make plans.

Related: Never be hopeful, don’t dare to talk about how things might go right, because, again, you are tempting fate. This is the “don’t jinx yourself” and “knock on wood” superstition.

Even writing this, saying that I see that these beliefs aren’t logical, is making me uneasy, to tell you the truth.

But’s it's crazy-making, this focus on the negative.

Are you really supposed to live your life on tenterhooks?

I don’t believe it. (Well, I’m working on that.)

How about you and your superstitions? Are they good or bad?

Get a Whiff of That

My first apartment after college was a dump.

My mom and I were in the hall with the landlord. There was an unpleasant tang in the air.

“Someone must be keeping a dog,” said the landlord.

“That’s not dog pee,” my mom and I both said, in unison. “That’s cat pee.”

The landlord looked at us like we had three heads. But cat pee smells different from dog pee and from human pee (which only smells when it’s stale, like in subway corners), just like chicken shit smells different than cow shit.

Doesn’t everybody know that?

My grandmother told me something that haunts me to this day: “You can’t smell yourself.” That’s why you can have B.O. or bad breath and not realize it.

She was right. We only register the smell of something for a short time, when we first encounter it. That’s called olfactory fatigue.

I once met a man who had lost his sense of smell permanently. He had, he explained, been having a bad LSD trip when he opened the door of a moving car and stepped out. (This was one of my more memorable first dates.) Anyhow, he said not having a sense of smell affects you more than you might think. You can’t taste food. You worry that you might not smell something important – like a gas leak.

Our sense of smell is pretty interesting. According to this article, it is the oldest sense, even single-cell animals have it, and studies have shown that, yes, we can really smell fear.

Also, the sense of smell is very direct. When you smell, actual particles of what you are smelling are in your nose, coming into direct contact with neurons, the only brain cells that are exposed like that.

Like the cat pee that day. 

In Defense of Being Judgy

Ever comment on someone doing something absurd and have the person you’re with sniff that they don’t believe in saying anything bad about anybody?

Bah.

As Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of Teddy Roosevelt, said, “If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.”

We are an exquisitely social species. When we coordinated a hunt to bring down some huge animal with sticks and rocks, when, as mothers with helpless infants, we worked out a group babysitting/gathering schedule, we honed our social abilities, including being astute judges of each other. Gossiping may have been the reason why we developed language.

Primatologists devote their lives to mapping the complex web of social interactions our closest relatives weave, but chimpanzees and bonobos can’t hold a candle to what we can do. We can live in huge groups – in cities, in countries – without (usually) killing each other. We develop complex systems of trade and trust.

We can do all this because we watch each other, judge each other, talk about each other.

Gossip has a bad reputation because it can be used maliciously to keep people in line, to punish and compete. Exhibit A: teenaged girls.

That isn’t what I’m talking about.

I have always talked to my kids, from a young age, about the people around them, including adults. (“You’re right; your teacher IS being a jerk.”) First, to pretend otherwise would be really crazy-making for the child. Second, being a good judge of character (i.e., recognizing when someone is being an ass) is a useful skill. Young humans have to learn to deal with such asses and the first, and most important, step in that process is recognizing what you’re dealing with.

Don’t talk about people?

How else are we going to figure them out?