Luck. Some people believe in it, some are decidedly against it. Some view it as simply superstition, others think it's another way of looking at probability. It seems that luck always comes up when we're lacking it the most. Everyone's always searching for luck, wishing each other good luck, saying "Oh, you're so lucky!" when something goes right for someone else. And, when searching for luck, there are always those handy Lucky Charms (they also come in less edible forms).

Theatrical types are the most luck-obsessed batch of people you'll probably ever meet. Among many, many other superstitions, it's bad luck to wish someone good luck, so they say "break a leg" instead. Shakespeare's Macbeth is considered one of the unluckiest plays ever written, so to mention "that play" inside a theater is one of the gravest of sins. Whistling is also considered unlucky, as well as using real money or peacock feathers onstage.

What perplexes me most is the way luck works exactly. I mean, once you've had a streak of bad luck, how do you find good luck again? How do you regain it once it's lost? We'll use my Spring Break for an example. I went on a trip with a group from my school, and everything that could have possibly gone wrong did: we were stranded in Chicago for two days with no luggage, stranded in London's Heathrow airport for fifteen hours straight, a terrible crime was committed in our hotel while we were staying there, and those are just the big things. I doubt a single group of people have ever been quite so unlucky. And wherever we went the bad luck followed--we were standing somewhere to take a picture, and a woman fell down the stairs behind us. A little girl dropped her toy and it broke, a french tourist fainted. It was like a black cloud was hanging over us.

I guess it really depends on what you believe in. Maybe someone had done something really unlucky before we left for the trip. Maybe we were fated to have this horrible experience so that we would learn something about life. Maybe we were being followed by demons. Or maybe bad things just tend to happen in clusters.

Whatever it was, I plan on getting my hands on one of these before I go on another trip. Just in case.