When I was in high school, finals time meant one thing for sure - it was time to adopt random and meaningless good luck charms. Be they Captain Kirk action figures, tiny stuff monkeys, elaborate hats, or plastic figurines of french comic book characters, these small things served to shield me and my fellow students against the threat that was finals. Since coming to college, I have stopped acting in this way. Perhaps it is because I am older and wiser but am I happier? No. No I am not.

So, at 2:00 AM on the day before my Social Psychology Exam, I decided to adopt an exciting and new good luck charm - a carrot necklace. I constructed it out of a piece of string I had lying around and about a third of a carrot. The basic form of my necklace was a series of carrot slices with small holes cut in them, with the string through the middle. Most of the carrot was too small for this purpose, so I ate it. Cutting holes in the carrot turned out harder than I would've thought - my knife wasn't too well suited to cutting all the way through, so I'd cut a square out of one side, then a square out of the other side, and then make random cuts until enough carrot was cleared away for me to the string through. The carrot I managed to remove was eaten. What I ended up with was seven carrot circles with a string around it. I decided not to peel the carrot, figuring it was luckier that way. Having created my necklace, I put it in my freezer for tommorow, so as to keep all the luck from leaking out. Finally, I left myself a note so I wouldn't forget my new necklace.

Despite this precaution, I was this close to leaving my necklace behind. Luckily I remembered as I was just about to leave my domicile and was able to retrieve it before I left for my exam. With the carrots around my neck, I set out into the world. Now approached the moment of truth: Would these orange root vegetables bring me luck?

No. If anything, I think the carrots probably brought me bad luck. First, when I was biking to class, my bike chain fell out of my pocket and I had to bike back to get it. Next, when I got to the exam (slightly late I will add) I was unable to find a pencil sharpener and when I ultimately found a replacement pencil, it was ill sharpened and threatened to break the entire test. The test wasn't too bad but it wasn't anything particularly lucky either. This probably has more to do with my lack of sleep (Hours of sleep on Monday, December 17th: 4, from 8 AM to 12 PM) than my jewelery but the carrot was supposed to protect me from consequences of my actions! And it didn't! Can you believe that?

Despite being entirely disillusioned with the magical powers of vegetables, I continued to wear my necklace for the rest of the day. The necklace itself was slightly cool and vaguely moist. Sometimes I would reach up and play with the carrots like they were prayer beads. Other times I would hold them up to my nose and smell them. They smelled like carrots. I managed to resist the urge to nibble on them, mostly because they looked kinda grody. When I started wearing them, I was worried about what I'd say when somebody asked about them but as the day went on I started being peeved that apparently nobody noticed. Or if they did notice, they didn't think them particularly interesting. All of my dinner acquaintance noticed but they don't count.

A short aside about the definition of a day: I've always felt that your day stretches from the moment you wake up to the moment to go to sleep. According my definition, I wore my carrot for a day, despite the fact that I was out and about from Midnight to 8:00 AM as well as from 11 to 2 AM on Monday and not wearing it. I wore it from noon to 9 PM and slept before and after that period. But some other people feel overwise. They'll be all like "Day's start at midnight" and "you only wore your necklace for a short period of the day, you big cheater." This is because they're pawns of the Man. That's right - the Man. But in anticipation of these haters, I resolved to wear it some more, just to shut them up.

So I set out on Wednesday*, carrots around my neck. I resolved to take a lot more pictures this time. By now, the carrots were even more grody than before - they'd shrunk a bunch and were kind of soft and malleable. Again, no one commented on them all day long expect for people that I was already acquainted with. Disapointing. To see the many places that I wore my carrots, see the many images I took. After I had gone to the many places, it came time to bring this task to a regrettable end. I needed to return the camera I had borrowed, the sun had set beneath the horizon, and my carrots were starting to look gross.

After spending all this time with these carrots, I couldn't just throw them away. Instead, I did the respectful thing: I crushed them under my foot. Stomped them to tiny pieces with my big stompy feet and left the remainout exposed by the elements to rot, decay, and die. A tragic end to a brave necklace.

The End

*If you're wondering what happened to Tuesday, see the first image.