thurdl's take on...

...Triskaidekaphobia

There are a lot of things that people are afraid of. Lots. I, myself, am scared of spiders, and absolutely petrified by snakes. And I mean that by the literal definition of the word, they scare me stiff, I can't move. Don't anyone be using this to their advantage, I'm trusting my blog readers entirely too much revealing this.

These fears seem to get divided into two groups. Well, they get divided into ONE group, but there is a natural negative. These are the irrational fears. Now, there are plenty of natural fears. It's natural to be afraid of something that can kill you. It would be quite natural to be afraid of, say, a Velociraptor if one was coming up the street. You're not going to turn tail and run, just to have all your friends mocking you for pissing your pants at the sight of a creature that could likely devour you. Being afraid of snakes, again, quite rational. Sure, maybe to the degree that I am, perhaps not, but in general, there is a very natural instinct from the time when mankind survived on instinct instead of reason and rationalization that snakes are bad, and they can kill you with a bite. Well, some of them can. But it's a rational thing for people to be afraid of.

Then...then there are the irrational fears. And the one that trumps them all, relivant if I can finish this blog post in the next 28 minutes, is triskaidekaphobia. The irrational fear of the number thirteen.

Now, I've seen a few reasons that 13 might have entered the vernacular of western civilization as a Bad Thing. The most compelling, or at least the least uncompelling, is the observation that the Last Supper of Christian tradition had 13 guests. And, well, things didn't go all that well for the guest of honor, or so the story goes. But it's a number. Like three. Or nineteen. Or six million, seven hundred forty-two thousand, three hundred four and two thirds. But you never hear about Triskaiphobia. Or Nonadekaphobia. Or Six-a-742-uhhhh...well, an irration fear of the number 6,742,304. I'm not about to work out exactly what that would be called.

Listen. I work, as many people do, in an office building. And it has 14 floors. And, amazingly enough, the 13th floor is actually called...floor 13. I've been there many times. To this point, the floor has failed to catch fire, or flood, or spontaneously wink out of existance, or be just a few but constant unexplainable degrees warmer than it is suppose to be. The elevator has neve stuck there, it's not plummeted from that heigth, it's not opened up and turned out to be full of velociraptors. Nothing but nothing bad has happened to be there, other than a computer crashing on me. And if I'm to believe that is a rationalization for the fear of 13, then the numbers 1, 2, 6, 7, and 9 are also horribly unlucky. Yet, so many office buildings, or other high rises, lack a 13th floor. Or lack a floor NUMBERED 13. As people conveniently ignore the fact that there still IS a 13th floor, but just called by another name.

Cause you know what they say about roses by other names...

It's amplified on today, Friday the 13th. Even MORE irrationally feared. No one cares about Tuesday the 13th, or Sunday the 13th. Or, for that matter, Friday the 3rd, or Friday the 17th, or Friday the 38th. Okay, that last one would concern me, but it's just so blatently arbitrary. Should we start skipping days as we do floors? Should students not have to learn what 7+6 yields, in the off chance they are traumatized by the result?

Here's my theory. No one is actually afraid of the number 13. No one refuses to learn about early American history because there were 13 colonies. No on recoils from the American flag because it has 13 stripes. It's all a joke, a laugh, something that people have been told they're supposed to be afraid of, so they play along, and pretend. Show me someone who is actually afraid of the number 13 in any bona fide debilitating way, and I still won't actually believe it.

So...just stop it. It's silly. And while I like silly, it's not the good kind of silly. So. Just stop it.

posted by thurdl @ 11:28:00 PM