And most importantly, my mad family, they called me Lucky

Cuthbie's Girl said to me the other day that its never your lucky day until it is, and she's right. Its a much more complicated idea than I realized when she said it. I've been thinking about it ever since. You never know your luck, but more importantly, you never know your luck until its all in. And I hope that's not for a while. I'm obsessed with the idea of luck at the moment. Not good luck or bad luck, but Luck in itself, which I suppose is simply things happening in a stricter pattern, or perhaps, a more extreme pattern, than an entirely random universe ought to allow.

A friend of mind says I have more luck than anyone he's ever met, he just wishes more of it was good luck. I wouldn't mind believing in a little good luck just now. I'm not very good at blind, or at least visually challenged, optimism, because I find it really difficult to believe something without a reason. Let me be clear; this is not because I keep to strict or high standards of empiricism. It doesn't have to be a good reason and it doesn't even have to be better than all the other reasons, there just has to be something. Bill Bailey calls this, or something like it, 'relaxed empiricism'. Necessarily, I am also deeply anti-pessimism. If we're against believing things without reasons then it is illogical to be pessimistic. The trouble is, that's only theoretical, its ideological. In fact, its always easier to be pessimistic than optimistic. (Now might be the time to mention that my Da, who apparently has a black sense of humour, named me after the pessimist from a dialogue between an optimist and a pessimist, in sharp contrast to one of my favourite musicians who is called Felix and for whom this blog entry is named.) I think that culturally we have a bent towards pessimism. I think it comes from a slip in the thinking around the law of contradictions, which goes something like this: if there are always as many opinions as there are people and the law of contradiction says they can't all be right, then we can only assume that opinions that are personal are wrong. And then there's a little logical slide in the process and we think that personal opinions, as in, what we want to believe, is less likely to be true than what we don't. Hence the utter smugness of the cynical and the tendency to confuse cynicism and rightness.

Or maybe pessimism is just a survival instinct.

Not a lot of mileage from an evolutionary (or indeed, life-expectancy) point of view in being 'cautiously optimistic' that your natural predators won't prey on you.

Anyway, the point is, BlueJ got what is probably the most beautiful apartment in Dublin, but only after missing out on some truly horrid apartments. At the time, she wanted them and it seemed like bad luck. You never know your luck, not even after its happened to you sometimes.