Manipulating the Odds

by Steve Lazarowitz

I must confess, I've had a few bad years in a row and it's beginning to get to me. It seems no matter which direction my life heads, it's always uphill and against the wind.

Take, for example, last New Year's Day. The first day of the year. Coincidentally, my birthday. I woke up at roughly 7:00 AM to the smell of smoke and the sound of firemen in the hallway of the apartment building in which I live. Bleary eyed, I realized I couldn't breathe well and it was time to evacuate.

I woke Kara and we proceeded to dress rather quickly and head to the nearby diner, one of the few things open at that hour on New Year's Day. We ate and then had some time to kill before the apartment aired enough to breathe, so I did the only thing I could think of doing. I went to the computer store I manage and opened it up. Even made a couple of sales. Not much is more fun than going to work on your birthday and first day off in a month after the Christmas season, but there you have it. This is how my year began.

I wish I could say it has gone uphill from there, but I can not. Terrorist attacks notwithstanding, this has been a fairly bad year for me, which got me to thinking.

I'm not a Christian and yet, I follow the Christian calendar. The entire way I think about time is based on the life of a man that may or may not have been born 2000 years ago. This is, as far as I can tell, just about the most arbitrary way of keeping time one could pick. It also shows just how religion affects every aspect of our lives, whether we want it to or not.

Why not mark time by other important events? How did they mark time before Jesus was born? They couldn't use BC. It didn't exist yet. Many societies had lunar calendars, such as the ancient Mayans. It was a perfectly working calendar. Why change it? Of course, the Mayans vanished before they got the chance to change it, but that's not my point.

What event could have so changed the world before the birth of Christ? Perhaps the invention of fire or the wheel. A year since the wheel was invented, or year One IYW (in the year of the wheel). Something to think about. New Year's Day is arbitrary. Almost as arbitrary as Tuesday. And what calendar you follow, might well depend on where you're born and which faith you might have been born to.

So, for this coming year, I had a couple of ideas that I would like to try that might give me a better shot at having a good year.

Around the beginning of September, I'm going to become a religious Jew. The Jewish New Year, or Rosh Hashanah, usually falls in mid-September to early October. My year can begin early. If I don't like the year, somewhere around mid-October, I'll become a pagan. Samhain, or the Pagan New Year, falls on October 31st. I now have several weeks to see if I like my New Year, or it's back to the Drawing Board.

As an interesting side note, Pagans living in the southern hemisphere celebrate Samhain on May first, as paganism relies on seasons to mark the passage of time. If I really run into a bind, I could always head down to Australia next spring and begin my year again.

If the northern hemisphere version of Samhain doesn't work out for me, I can always hold out until the Christian New Year, convert again, and give January 1st a try. It can't be much worse than last year and perhaps it will be better. I am, after all, due for a better year... but if I don't get one, I'm not going to panic.

The Chinese New Year won't be all that far away.

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