New Years Superstitions, karma, & the crabby lady with no chin who always gives me the evil eye

The corner store opened late today (new years day), and I was the first customer. This pleased Terri, the Armenian lady who runs it and has become a sort of surrogate mother to me. I am one of her favorite people, so my being the first person in the door was a very good omen. However, I was there to buy Theraflu since I've been sick as a dog for the past 4 days, and having your first customer be sick is not such a good omen. So she made me wait until someone else came in and bought something, which was okay since it's beautiful sunny and warm outside and I've barely been out of the house since Friday.

A few minutes later, the crabby-lady-with-no-chin-who-always-gives-me-the-evil-eye came in and bought a 2 litre bottle of Pepsi, and then it was cool to sell me the Theraflu.

What I liked about this exchange was the implication that our lives affect one another in myriad ways. The bigger the city, the greater the sense of disconnection, isolation and insignificance, so an exchange like this that emphasizes the connections between us all becomes a wonderful way for me to start the new year. From Terri's viewpoint, it's superstition that she's adhering to. For me, it's something vaguely eastern about the connections between everything. And for the first time ever (as far as I am aware), the crabby-lady-with-no-chin-who-always-gives-me-the-evil-eye had a beneficial effect, 'cause her appearance allowed me to buy the Theraflu and come back to my apartment where I will probably spend the rest of the day alternating between reading Brad Warner's "Sit Down and Shut Up: punk rock commentaries on Buddha, Truth, Sex, Death & Dogen's Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye" and Ross McDonald's "The Way Some People Die", both of which, so far, are awesome books.