Chilling & Consideration

¿Hola, como estas? I’m currently chilling in Madrid for a week. I thought some time off work would do me some good and reinvigorate me to concentrate on things I like. At present I’m sitting in that very Spanish institution, Starbucks, looking over all the people scurrying around below in a place called Sol.

Anyway, enough of that, what I really wanted to write about was the film ‘Yes Man’. Before I’d watched the film I referred to it with a Jamaican accent and thought it wasn’t worth watching at all. In fact, after I checked it out I thought it was quite a liberating film and also made me think of what on earth would happen if I applied that kind of logic to my everyday life. Half way through the film I started to think that I don’t get many choices where it involves a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ answer. I was being stupid however, of course there are, but what I seemed to do is just proceed with out actually thinking about them. Like, I always avoid the sandwiches at work or when I go for a walk at lunch it is always the same route, even if someone says ‘shall we try this way’. I tend to say ‘nah, let’s go this way’. How rubbish is that, but I don’t really think about it. Or when I see three drains adjacent to one another, I always avoid them. I’ve done this for so long that I can’t remember why and it has become part of my default setting, along the lines of: 3 x drains + 1 x Mr P. Shadow = bad luck.

But why do I avoid the three drains? I’ve forgotten, other than somewhere down the line someone once said that if you walk over three drains you will suffer misfortune. Thing is I can’t really remember the actual tale or who told me it. Yet, when I see three drains I tend to do this really odd skip, pivot and bounce to avoid them. It’s quite a street dance performance but I step around them with serious intent. I know this is genuine characteristics of someone with obsessive compulsive disorder but in an odd way I kind of like avoiding those drains. Obviously I want to avoid the bad luck which will strike down on me should I one day step all over them, but also, I want to continue this lore that I know thousands of others abide by. And how do I know this? Well because every time I’m up town I see people doing their own little hop, skip and jump to avoid those three drains. It’s like we are all strangers but are all part of this subculture where somewhere down the line someone told us the story of how treading on three drains brings untold misery and so we avoid them at all cost. They even do it in Madrid. Perhaps there’s a wikipedia page about it all but I can’t really be bothered to check but at least I’ve now considered something that I just do generally without thinking, thing is, I’m quite happy to just continue doing it so really I haven’t changed anything at all. Ah well.