As I said last night after drinking some champagne, giving Benson a peck, and blowing a party horn--"Happy 2005 and good riddance to a crappy-ass 2004!" As is often the case with my pronouncements, there's a good deal of exaggeration in there. A lot of great things happened in 2004--several of my friends got married, I felt myself climbing out of an intellectual rut, and who can forget the new washer and dryer we bought??? But the bad things that happened were just so bad--the re-election of a man who has done so much harm to things I care about despite my efforts, a bad reaction to some anti-arthritis medicine I was taking (though fortunately it didn't cause my heart to explode), and, on a more global scale, the catastrophic tsunamis.

So I enter 2005 with hope that this year will be better than last. To help ensure that, I didn't do laundry today.

As an engineer, logic usually rules the day for me--so most superstitions just seem silly. There was one Friday the 13th when an E.T. poster that was hanging on the wall fell on its own. At the time, I was quite spooked out (then again, my Gremlin doll nearly led to a nervous breakdown once, too, so being spooked out wasn't that unusual for me). Looking back, it's clear that the poster falling on the day was simply a coincidence. If the poster fell the next day, I certainly wouldn't remember it nearly 20 years later.

But even though logic rules, there's a part of me that says "what if there is something to this?" I thought about washing some towels today, but then I stopped. I remember Mrs. Sampson in the 8th grade telling us about how you weren't supposed to do laundry on New Year's Day, or it would bring bad luck. She hadn't done it for years, and then one year she decided it was silly and did laundry. That year, her father died. (Doing a little google research, it turns out the superstition is that doing laundry will actually cause someone to die, not just bring bad luck.)

I didn't end up washing the towels today. I don't honestly believe that doing it would cause bad luck. But why take the chance? If something (God forbid) terrible were to happen, would I really want the burden of thinking I had somehow caused it? Isn't not doing the laundry a small price to pay for peace of mind? I reckon this is how most superstitions stay around even in an "enlightened" time.

I unfortunately did not get around to eating black-eyed peas today. That was another tradition I found out about from Mrs. Sampson; this seems to be more of a "positive" superstition, in that it will bring you good luck. I'd like to say that I purposely resisted eating black-eyed peas just to show how enlightened I truly am. In fact, I just didn't have any around. And now there's a bit of a nagging feeling that I'm going to miss out on something good this year because of it.

At least if 364 and 29 minutes from this moment I'm saying "Happy 2006 and good riddance to a crappy-ass 2005" we'll know why.