Erica, it is time to admit it: There is no Jinx!

On Superbowl Sunday, I was amused as my friend Erica fretted and worried over the last 15 minutes of the game. It seems that when Pittsburgh was winning, she got on facebook and posted a note about how happy her husband was going to be. The Cardinals then proceeded to engineer a comeback, almost winning the game. She was convinced at the time that she had "jinxed" the Steelers. (I wish she had!)

I have a similar history with the fabled "jinx." When I was 5 years old, the Bengals were playing in Superbowl 16 and were winning at halftime. And being 5, the game was exciting enough until halftime, when I fell asleep. I awoke in the fourth quarter with only a minute to go in the game to discover that the Bengals were about to lose. My dad convinced me that I had jinxed the Bengals because I fell asleep. This led to me spending the better part of the next 20 years convinced that the Bengals needed me to watch the game if they were going to have any shot at winning. (That theory has been debunked pretty thoroughly over the last decade!)

So convinced is Erica that the jinx exists that she routinely makes comments that people she knows "jinxed" themselves in one way or another. So I decided to put Erica's jinx to the test.

Last week, I told Erica that I was feeling great. She said that I shouldn't have said that because I jinxed myself and now I would be sick within a week. So I decided to make a friendly wager with Erica. If I got sick in any way within the week, I would admit to the power of the jinx and be a lifelong convert to jinxism. However, if I did not get sick, she has to admit publicly that the jinx is "a bunch of hooey."

Well, it has been 8 days since I declared I was feeling great and I have not even gotten a hint of a sniffle.

(On a side note, Erica also said that every time I taunted the jinx, the clock was reset. Apparently in the system that controls jinxes, the best way to not suffer the consequences of the jinx is to continually jinx yourself, thereby extending the amount of time that it will take for the jinx to set in... It is a very delicate set of rules!)

So, now that I have survived my week of jinxes, I hereby call out Erica Martino. It is time for you to admit that the jinx is a bunch of hooey. (And then hope that you don't end up jinxing yourself in the process.)