I find it bizarre that friends (are they actually friends?) are compelled to send off notes that are fundamentally somewhat inane and then tell you that you will have terrible things happen to you if you don't copy, paste and forward it on to an additional ten people, whom you obviously don't like, either.
So, I don't.
Then I wait for something horrible to happen to me. Since it hasn't, so far, I imagine I have once again, escaped the wrath of the "why didn't you send this on" Gods. But I do think my days of this are probably numbered, and might have, sometime in the not to distant future, torture a few of those I know, with a forwarded call to action email. Just to be on the safe side.
And it is the concept of "just to be on the safe side" that confounds me. We knock wood, we throw salt over our shoulder, we avoid walking under ladders, and will do other rituals to ward off a bad thing happening.
Some of us have a talisman.
Don't you love that word? Awkward to gracefully put into a sentence, i.e. "She carried her love letters, written to her, so long long ago, like a talisman… Since it is defined as an object, a charm or some such thing, to bring comfort and solace, we tend to be much more sympathetic to that activity.
My comfort comes from my credit cards. Wonder if that counts as a talisman?
