1. 23 March 2007

    You get what you wish for

    So my favorite mysterious phenomenon is when just as you begin to wonder about when something will happen, it happens. Someone has wandered off into another room, and just as you wonder where they’re at, poof, they walk back to wherever you were wondering about them. This has happened like 5 times tonight. It’s great fun, and it just culminated my night (it having now become the next day) with me finishing a paragraph of my reading and thinking something along the lines of: is it seven o’clock? no, couldn’t be 7. man, it must be almost seven…. The next thing to happen was delightful in the most, because I have my powerbook set to speak the time at every hour, and just as my mind settled down and turned to look at the clock, my computer spoke (System voice: Vicki): It’s 7 o’clock.

    A few general observations:

    • This cannot be willingly put to use. With even the slightest thought of trying to force something to happen by emulating the above series of events, you’ve already fucked it up and you’re only deluding yourself now.
    • Often the effects don’t come around until the thing to take place is mentioned aloud. As soon as it’s asked when/whether someone was indeed coming over, they appear in the doorway. You can wonder to yourself however often you want with no result, but once expressed aloud between concerned parties: poof.
    • At soccer practice, running sprints, I have an uncanny anticipation of when the hand will drop to give the start. I can get a pretty good jump on everyone else, so much so that they think I’m cheating (I may be a bit, but my jumps are never flagrantly early: I don’t get much more than a step on the rest, but I do consistently get a good step). It seems to be a related sense, just in clearing my mind and not thinking about anything all the sudden I know just before it happens that the signal is about to be given.
    • This is all very likely just a case of positive reinforcement. Ie: I make stupid predictions like this all the time, but the failed predictions are utterly forgettable, while the uncannily accurate ones give me a warm fuzzy feeling and stick around in my mind. But still, you can’t diss the warm fuzzies. Then again for all I know, I’m a psychic.

    Addendum, 5 days later: Playing pool today one of my balls was sitting right on the edge of the corner pocket waiting to get knocked in. Before the other guy hit his shot I told the ball that it wasn’t going in. It didn’t. I was up next, and only needed to knock in one ball to win. I told the ball in question that it was done for, out loud, in exactly the spirit of this post, without thinking about it or anything. I hit, knocked the blue ball but missed. Both the cue ball and I think it was the 4 bounced off the walls for a while (I always hit way too hard). I’ll try to describe this well: blue was coming back towards the original pocket, but you could tell it was an inch or two off. Happily, white was coming back on a different trajectory, and the two hit maybe 5 inches and 45º out from the pocket, sending blue one on it’s way.

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