Work, work and more work has been keeping away from blogging. It’s good that I have the work to do, for sure, but it doesn’t give me much time to do any fun writing. After a sweltering weekend here in New York, I have a little bit of time to get to some blogging before doing some more work today. So let’s reflect on Friday’s question, which was:

Tell me the one superstition you have heard or practiced the most in your lifetime.

Since it was Friday the 13th last week, everyone seemed to have all these different superstitions on their minds. Black cats crossing your path, walking under ladders, picking up a penny that is only heads up – there’s an awful lot to choose from. I asked a lot of baseball players this question on Twitter since ballplayers are notoriously superstitious about what they do and when they do it. Some won’t step on the white lines of the ball field. Some have to wear a certain t-shirt under their uniforms or a particular piece of jewelry. Some people, not just ballplayers, have a routine of eating or drinking something specific before a big event for good luck (in retrospect, this doesn’t seem to work well for people on death row in movies, who get their last meal choice, but, well, you know what happens). Even Sean seems to chime in with following superstitions, like throwing spilled salt over his shoulder for good luck. I can remember all kinds of things from when I was a child that my grandmother used to tell us to do. Don’t step on the sidewalk cracks. If your nose is itchy you’re either going to kiss a fool or get in a fight. If you’re palm is itchy it means someone is going to give you money. Don’t wear a hat in doors or open an umbrella indoors. The list seems endless. I think we are all guilty of performing some of these little rituals even if we don’t seem to take much stock in them. It becomes almost a silly routine, but yet we do them anyway. Is it because we think, hey it can’t hurt, maybe I will have some good luck out of this? Or is it more because we heard these things so often as children that it is almost like folklore and something may actually happy, good or bad, depending on these legends? It’s hard to say. you could probably take this further and further up the chain with people going to kiss the Blarney Stone in Ireland. You could go even further to the extent that some feel any kind of religious faith is founded in superstition. People regularly trek to places like the Wailing Wall or Fatima or Lourdes with hopes of miracles. Is that really just an extension of a superstition or does that go beyond that into religious faith? That’s probably a discussion for another day, but you could take it to that end. When I reflect on it, there aren’t any superstitions I can say that I actually follow in my daily life, other than the occasional rally cap to try to help out the Mets 🙂 I guess it can’t really hurt to avoid some of these legends and embrace others though, as long as you don’t put too much stock in them.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to answer and a special thanks to Zach Braff, Aaron Boone and David Price for answering me on Twitter. Now let’s move on to today’s question. It’s a question you hear people ask fairly regularly and there can be many answers to it:

Finish this sentence: There’s nothing better than . . .

Here’s your chance to be as serious, sarcastic, funny, or crazy as you want. You can answer this however please, just try to keep it semi-clean if you can :). You hear people say this all the time about food, music, people, family, life, you name it. There are a million ways to answer this. Use the one that comes into your mind first and go with it. Heck, answer it multiple times if you want to. Think about it and let me know. You can answer on here, or on Facebook or on Twitter. I’ll also ask some people on Twitter and see how they respond. I’ll post my answer tomorrow.

That’s it for now. I know I keep promising things about writing on here, I just seem to run out of time every day, so I am going to try to do it tonight. There’s no ballgame to watch and I have most of my work done already, so I should be good to go. We’ll see what else comes along. Enjoy the rest of your day and don’t forget to do something creative today!