Sorry Jesus...

I was watching something online (not porn) when a pop-up window suddenly, well, popped-up. Now, usually I'd be irritated and say a cuss word or two (or three) and close that nasty pop-up. But this time, as the last syllable of the first (of three) cuss words was leaving the tip of my tongue, the ad suddenly registered in my head... it was a pop-up window telling me that I needed to seek Jesus right then. Oh crap, did I just commit blasphemy? How could I be rude to Jesus?

How does the first line of the prayer for contrition go?

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Now, I'm not really a religious person, but I do keep in mind some things that may be construed as sort of superstitious. I know these may be illogical and sometimes silly, but I've been brainwashed by a lot of people (starting with my mother, of course) to at least take precautions due to these. Just last weekend, I cautioned a friend about buying rice in the evening because I remembered this odd superstition that you were not supposed to do that. That also goes for buying nails, knives, wooden stakes and other pointy objects.

One of my favorites, which I still practice to this day, is to warn the imaginary elves, gnomes and other earth spirits to step aside because I'm gonna pee. Folklore tells us that if you do not give fair warning and accidentally pee on these guys, they're not going to take it lightly and will curse you ill. One variation goes on to say that they're gonna make your little one-eyed buddy fall off. This is primarily why I've always remembered it, I guess.

There are a lot of others, half of which I've already forgotten or dismissed as just plain stupid. One of them is that you can't clip your nails at night. This I don't get, but I assume that this was formulated during the time before electricity and Thomas Edison. Back then, of course, it was pretty idiotic to do that anyway because you were likely to cut off more than your nails in pitch dark.

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One thing I'm worried about is my bed. When I was a kid, I used to watch the Twilight Zone and there was this episode about having monsters under the bed. I was scared shitless after that and couldn't help looking under the bed every so often to check if there were any under mine.

My dad kinda figured this little fear of mine and had a remedy, he put a machete under my bed, which was supposedly an old trick to fend off the spirits from visiting you in your sleep. This disturbed me a whole lot, though. It seemed to my mind that my dad was coaxing the monsters to kill me, even providing the weapon. Thanks, dad.

Present day, though, I do put a machete under the bed whenever I can as I've come to undo my fear of monsters and developed a greater fear of being broken into and killed in my bed. However, I've recently discarded my creaky cheap bed frame and decided to plop the mattress directly on the floor instead, leaving me no place to hide the knife under. So now I've decided that I've got to get myself a new bed frame, though whether I'm gonna build one myself or buy one off the store is still up in the air.