OK. I meant to post this yesterday, but I got overwhelmed with “things” and, quite frankly, forgot. What a lousy blogger, when I can’t even say things on the days they are relevant, right? Wrong! Because today, I lived through a day (I’ve got 4 hours left in it, so I shouldn’t make such confident declarations, should I?) which further proved the point I was going to make.

Yesterday, was “Friday the 13th,” for you in the United States who were lucky enough to survive it (as you have your entire lives). Here, in Italy, it was a perfectly normal and uninteresting day. No cause for alarm. No cause for worry. Not a soul was concerned. No one avoided certain experiences or streets or routes which have proven difficult in the past. No one procrastinated proposals of marriage, thinking that the date might influence a negative response. Because, here, in Italy (here in the land of suspicion-raised-to-the-level-of-a-national-passtime) Friday the 13th has no significance whatsoever. Elevators all stop on the 13th floor. And as far as I know, Alitalia planes still have seats in the 13th row. Every day of the month could be Friday the 13th, and Italians would sleep easy.

No. The problem, of course, is Friday the 17th! Venerdì il 17! That’s when you really have to worry. That’s the day you have to stay in bed! At least according to Italians. And I have quickly found three reasons why on an Italian chat site:

1. If you write 17 in Roman numerals, you will write XVII. This, rearranged, is VIXI, which meant to the Romans “I have lived,” or “I lived.” Ho vissuto. Past tense. Been there, done that. In other words, I am now dead. And no one wants to be dead, not really (right?). Still, that doesn’t explain the significance of the Friday. Just the unluckiness of the number 17.

2. Another theory combines the separate significance of the two parts of the day. First, Christ was crucified on a Friday. Second, The Flood (capital T, capital F) began on the 17th day of the month. Put them together and what have you got? Disaster on a personal and universal scale.

3. And yet another hypothesis…Friday the 17th was the day that Filippo Il Bello (Philip the Beautiful) ordered the extermination of the Templar Knights.

I doubt the veracity of all of the above, even though I find them all fascinating and worthy of another novel by Dan Brown. And I refute them all with my own observations: Yesterday was beautiful, flawless, happy and productive. Today was, from beginning to end, shitty, fraught with difficulty, error, misunderstanding and slight depression. So I put forth this proposal: from now on, Saturday the 14th is to be avoided. What say you?

P.S. I ordinarily don’t post on Saturday. But this just wanted to come out. Maybe my luck is changing. In which case, I’ll be amending that last paragraph.

[If you enjoyed this post, you might also like “It’s your lucky day.“]