Lucky, Conclusion (?): The Ancient Wisdom of the Orient

(Listening to: Windows Media Player on random. My "4- and 5-star tracks" playlist is 77 hours long. Yeah.)

So when we last left off, I was pondering the existence of good and bad luck -- wondering whether they actually existed, or if perhaps it was merely a matter of perspective, a question of where and when you stopped looking at the pattern.

Check out today's events. You tell me what you see.

I woke up at around noon. I thought about getting up and doing, ya know, stuff, but I was feeling lazy. (Big surprise there, I'm sure.) Instead, I stayed in my room and read (Al Franken's The Truth (with jokes), which is absolutely fantastic). I tried to write a little. That went nowhere.

A friend of mine arrived at around 2:00. (I'd say his name, but he's actually asked me not to in the past. I have no idea why, and it's entirely possible he doesn't care anymore, but I will honor his wishes as I last remember them. But I have to call him something, so instead of writing his name, I'll call him...Trebor. Yeah, that's sufficiently vague.) Anyway, Trebor demanded -- in that way Trebor has -- that we go to lunch. Since Szechuan Garden is right next door (close enough for me to open the door to check my spelling), we opted to walk there for Chinese.

On my way over there, I noticed a folded sheet of yellow paper under my windshield wiper. I grabbed it, unfolded it, and suffered a very brief myocardial infarction. See, the note was from my aunt. She either knocked on my door and got no answer or simply didn't bother trying -- so she left a note where she knew I'd see it. But she didn't sign it. And my aunt's handwriting looks exactly like my mom's handwriting. (It's like they're related or something.) Since my mom hasn't written anything in over...holy fuck, three years?...every time I see one of these notes from my aunt, it scares the shit out of me for a second, until my rational brain catches up with the hyperactive eight-year-old that runs the irrational side.

The note instructed me to call the agent I'd dealt in the collections department at the credit union I mentioned in the last post. I had to do this by 5:00 p.m. -- this was stressed in the note with three underlines.

Okay, pop quiz: on a scale of 1 to 10, how much panic do you think this caused in me? If you guessed 10, congratulations -- score yourself five bonus points. If you guessed 9 or lower, e-mail me and introduce yourself -- I don't believe we've met.

Now, I can already see some of that "luck" going on -- I'm always late to work (as Trebor and I later discussed at length in the parking lot at around 5:05, as I was trying to leave), so the odds are very good that, had Trebor not arrived and ordered me to march with him to China, I wouldn't have seen the note until the triple-underlined deadline had passed.

So, I put my apocalyptic panic on hold while we had lunch. We each had the same dishes we always get -- creatures of habit, the two of us are.

And then came the fortune cookies.

I love fortune cookies. I especially love sickly ironic ones. So you can imagine the backflip my diseased brain did when I cracked the cookie open and removed a slip of paper that proudly declared The current year will bring you luck and happiness.

Yes. "The current year," said the cookie. On the thirtieth of December. HA HA HA HA. Ha ha ha. Ha. ...Eh.

Wanna know something even funnier? I've actually received that same fortune before. In the same situation -- close to the end of the year, bam, here's your philosophical middle finger, courtesy of the Ancient Wisdom of the Orient. Happy New Year, asshole!

So what are the odds? The same fortune, in the same darkly funny context, twice? The stodgy voice of probability agrees that the odds are, indeed, quite low. The younger, hipper voice of quantum mechanics, meanwhile, argues that the fortunes did not, in fact, even exist until I opened the cookies. The odds are incalcuable.

(A voice rises from the back: "Actually, jackass, considering how much Chinese food you eat, I'd say the odds of you getting the same fortune twice are pretty fucking good! Hahaha!" Thank you, sir. Thank you. Security!)

Anyway.

So, content in the knowledge that the current year -- all of the remaining 33 hours of it -- would bring me good luck, we left the restaurant to find my apartment beseiged by several men and women of Hispanic descent loading our television and stereo equipment into the back of their truck.

Bam! Gotcha there, didn't I?

Now, I'm sure you assumed they were stealing it, but that's just you succumbing to racial stereotypes -- they were actually very nice people, they spoke very good English, and had actual jobs and everything. In this case, they worked for our landlords. And they were taking our things as a landlord lein because -- wait for it -- Tommy (who has yet to ask me to stop mentioning him by name) didn't pay his share of the rent.

Bam!

Not that Tommy blew his money on coke and whores -- he is, in fact, at this moment working offshore to make it all back. And before he left, he worked out a deal with the office whereby he'd pay whatever he could when he got paid, and pay the remainder when he returned. (That's what I was doing when I got pulled over by the Pig of Destiny, remember? Dropping off Tommy's rent payment.) But, as it happens -- as it happens every goddamn time -- the office decided their agreement with Tommy was worth about the same as the paper it was laser-printed on, and staged the Sixth (or Seventh) Siege of Apartment 7F to take some stuff.

Ready for the good luck? They only took Tommy's things, with the exception of my PlayStation2. Trebor's GameCube and Nintendo64 were right there, but they ignored them. We happened to catch them in time to make sure the geniuses also took the cases along with the musical instruments they were taking. I'd left my computer in my room, or they would have taken it, too. And -- this is the important part -- I didn't lock the door when I left, but they locked the door when they did...so it's a great thing we caught them as they were leaving, because for some reason I'd forgotten my keys.

The wheels of probability spin, spin, spin.

After doing some cathartic screaming on my couch (which I'm sure Trebor found amusing), I called about my car. I expected some really apocalyptic bad news -- "We're coming to take your car from you right now, just as soon as we finish murdering your sister, setting fire to all of your friends' houses, cancelling House, and putting the finishing touches on The Passion of the Christ 0: The Extraordinarily Bloody Birth of Jesus!" Something around a 10 on the bad news scale.

Instead, it was something approaching a 3. Or a 2. Nothing severe. Trebor felt this made it qualify as "good news." I disagreed, but that's a whole other thing I'm not getting into. The point is, it probably would have really upset me and put me into panic mode...if I hadn't just come home to find the living room kidnapped and held for ransom. Something that doesn't really effect me personally at all. I took my own awful twist of fate by saying -- seriously -- "That's it?"

Events transpired in such a way that the blow was dulled.

So? Good luck? Bad luck? No luck? What?

Actually, I don't want to know the answer anymore. Fuck it. Fuck probability, and luck, and quantum mechanics.

This entire post -- and the one before it -- have been brought to you by the small animals trying to burrow their way out of my brain.

(Oh, and here's a random broadside: when I told this story to someone else, I structured it just the way I did here, only without the reference to the race of the people taking our stuff. Before I could explain who they were and that they weren't burglars, I was asked, "Were they Mexican?" Since apparently the audience wants to know, I thought I'd go ahead and tell you before you asked.)