I don’t consider myself very superstitious but I’m careful both to keep bad luck far away and my superstitions under control (tough balance sometimes). For example, I wouldn’t go under a ladder so as not to get a pot of paint on my head, but sometimes when I suspect that the pot of paint is really just another word for “bad luck”, I force myself to go under it and feel good for a  few minutes that I fought this primitive instinct. Nowadays I’m experiencing a totally new kind of superstition. I started reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex  in the train and didn’t notice that my suitcase was stolen. The other thing I find disturbing in that book is that it makes me aware of the different social traps surrounding me as a woman and I’m not sure that’s the best way to deal with them today. Of course it is thanks to intelligent and forceful women like Simone de Beauvoir that we are lucky to live in a much better world today. Maybe I feel that reading about the women’s position will bring me bad luck, that is, make a victim out of me. Somehow I really avoid opening that book now.