Today is a bad day and I know why. I have cursed myself by not forwarding all the good luck e-mails sent to me by friends, which promise good juju if I forward them. Because I never forward them. Never.

In the last few days, I have been sent:

– 8 angels, which I was supposed to send to 8 people
– A chance for God to open doors for me, which I was supposed to send to 10 people
– A prayer for good finances, which I was supposed to send to a multitude of people
– Tips on eating fruit, which I was supposed to send to 10 people to help save their lives
– 4 random questions about myself, which I was supposed to forward to help me learn more about my friends

The e-mail about the angels included this guilt trip: “If you don’t send this to anyone, it means you are in a hurry and that you’ve forgotten your friends.”

Yes, I am in a hurry. But I don’t want to forget my friends. So here you go, friends:

Life is short. God will open doors for you and bless you financially if you eat fruit on an empty stomach. My four favorite smells are chocolate, chocolate, chocolate and chocolate.

There, I feel better. Bad juju, be gone!!

It’s hurricane season in the Gulf and that means one thing: Time to stock up on Holy Bread.

What? You’ve never heard of Holy Bread? It’s Italian bread from a St. Joseph’s altar that’s been blessed by a priest.

To prevent flooding, you just toss a little chunk of Holy Bread out the back door and pray to St. Joseph (Jesus’ earthly dad) for protection.

I usually have a loaf or two in my freezer for just such an occasion. You can’t buy Holy Bread at the grocery store, by the way. You have to have a Sicilian connection. Mine is my mother.

The day before Hurricane Ike struck last year, Boy helped me spread Holy Bread crumbs everywhere. “St. Joseph, protect the fig tree,” Boy prayed. “St. Joseph, protect the dog house.”

It felt like a sacred ritual as Boy and I solemnly tromped through the yard, blessing everything in sight.

It’s so difficult knowing how to pray when a monster storm the size the Gulf is barreling down on you.

“Make it go away,” you pray, even though at Category 2 and up, that seems physically impossible.

An Atlantic storm, Ana, just disappeared off the radar today, never to return. If only Ike would have made such a quiet exit.

No, when they’re that gigantic, they are going to hit someone. So you pray it won’t be you.

Sorry, Mexico, but you’re our first target when a hurricane comes skating across Cuba. If it veers north, then we hope for Corpus. No offense, ya’ll.

If it’s bound and determined to hit us, we pray we won’t be on the “dirty side.” If we must be hit, make it a clean hit, we pray.

Saturday we visited Galveston for the first time since Ike. If you take the 61st Street exit, you won’t even realize what happened last year. But if you go down Broadway, you’ll see that all the live oaks are dead and lots of the Victorians have turned into boarded-up colonies of mold.

The place is coming back. It was jammed with Houston cars this weekend, bumper to bumper on the Seawall. Yes there are beaches. Yes there is sand. Yes, Galveston lives.

Please God, no more for a while. Please give her a pass this hurricane season. Galveston, if I could, I’d rain down Holy Bread on you.

If you ask Sicilians “How are you?” they don’t answer “Fine, and how are you?” They say “cosi cosi,” which means so-so. Or “I’ve seen better times.” They think it’s bad luck to wish someone good luck.

So it is that I am genetically predisposed to negative thinking. It’s deep in my gene pool. And with negative thinking comes two corollary afflictions — worry and anxiety. I suffer from “worst case scenario” thinking. This would be very helpful if I worked for the Department of Homeland Security. It is not helpful whatsoever in motherhood.

I have tried many techniques to avoid negative thinking and was very heartened this week to read an article in Time Magazine saying that a lot of those techniques just don’t work. I could have told them that. For instance, the technique of trying to replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts only makes people feel worse, the magazine reported. Well, duh. We don’t believe the positive thoughts. We know better. And it totally invalidates our feelings to say, “Turn that frown upside down, Missy.”

The magazine went on to report that meditation seems to work with negative thinking. Again, had they bothered to interview me, I could tell them why. I am an expert in this subject. You see, I come from a long, long line of negative thinkers. I believe that while the ancient Greeks had an Olympics to display their athletic prowess, the ancient Sicilians had an Olympics of Worry. My relatives, I surmise, must have been gold medalists in this field. Because their worry genes are so strong, they dominate me and my family to this day. By the way, this gene presents itself best on the Y chromosome.

To continue, the reason meditation works with negative thinking is that negative thinking/worry/anxiety stems from projecting your mind into the future and deciding that whatever happens next is going to be so horrible that you just can’t handle it. So meditation works because it brings you into the present moment, a time in which everything seems pretty much okay. Meditation reminds you to take a deep breath and be still.

“Be still and know that I am God.” Isn’t that much better than “Turn that frown upside down?”

I love America’s Funniest Home Videos, but not for the same reasons my kids do. They like to watch big people fall down go boom. I like to see the inside of real people’s houses all across the country. I’m watching the edges of the screen, noticing the huge pile of magazines in the corner, the dirty glasses on the coffee table, the rips in the carpet. We are a nation of slobs, and that makes me feel a whole lot better about myself.

In an earlier blog post about casting the evil eye, I mentioned the line of strong Sicilian women from whom I descend. Above all else, these women judged each other by the cleanliness of their houses. And I’m afraid they would judge me quite poorly. Maybe on the level of trailer trash. I don’t know how to say that in Italian.

My great grandmother, whom everyone called Nonnie, would sweep the dirt in front of her house. She raised my mother, who never did any dirt sweeping as far as I know, but always goes into a cleaning frenzy before having anyone over for a visit. Now so do I, except I have dug myself into a much deeper hole, so my cleaning fits are even more frenetic. Also, lots of stuff gets stuffed into places where it doesn’t belong, so I get accused for everything that goes missing.

Why do I worry so much about how my house looks? It’s like my dirty little secret. I have the outward appearance of a professional career woman, but deep down I’m just a really crappy housewife.

I want to write more about this, but the family will be over in a few hours. I need to go sweep the dirt.