I just uploaded yesterday's entry and found that I had an e-mail from mr brown in my mailbox. Nothing wrong with that, except that he pointed me to the text of what is ostensibly an e-mail hoax.

I think I should clarify that for someone who's a real sceptic of organized religion, I'm a wimp when it comes to superstitions and omens. Things that go bump in the night, things in movies that go bump in the night that make me think twice about actual things that bump in the night, episodes of The X-Files, coincidence andhappenstance, visions and prophecy about Armageddon and the end of days --- I'm a sucker for the lot. That's the reason I don't watch horror movies --- the first half hour of Scream was enough to bother me the other night --- and I'm even wary of cheese like Prophecy because though the movie sucks, the made-up mythology behind it is enough to keep me awake at nights.

And now we have this e-mail. I would ordinarily dismiss it, but I suspect that there is some truth to the fact that a couple has stood up in churches to relay certain prophecies because my parents told me about them a few months ago. In fact, the couple in question has been attending my family's church all this time and their names weren't unfamiliar when my parents brought them up. My mom said that they talked about some Armageddon-ish prophecy and marked October as the time. My parents were openly scoffing at the idea; they're both solid Christians, but they're also wary of modern-day 'miracles' and prophets. We all smiled politely and the subject went away.

And now it's back. Part of me wants to be like mr brown and scoff at the idea, particularly since the church involved has denied everything. Another part of me is wincing at the coincidence, at the fact that it's already October and Bad Things Are Happening Around The World. The rational, modern half of my brain shouldn't believe, but what if, what if, nags the other half, and that's the half that keeps me busy cogitating over nothing.

I mean, I had no such worries when it came to the turn of the millennium (or what everyone was calling the turn of the millennium). For one thing, if I were an all-powerful deity, Jan 1 2000 was just too obvious a date to pull anything, and I knew from talking to computer friends that Y2K wasn't all it was hyped up to be. Also, there was the tricky little detail of the turn of the millenium coming on Jan 1 2001 that few people seemed to notice or, at least, publicly admit. I think it's because they were too busy charging other people big bucks for making their computer systems Y2K-reliant or whatever the term was.

It was either to dismiss millennium fever. It's not so easy to dismiss this because what happened on September 11 was big, huge, beyond anything a layperson would have predicted before that day. Maybe now all bets are off. Maybe this is it --- not the It the Bible or any other Big Book was talking about, but some kind of It anyway. I figure it's long overdue, the way humans have been treating the earth and each other. But I don't particularly want the world to end. I think there's a lot more good that well-meaning people can still do in the aftermath of all that's transpired lately, even though now it might be the irrational optimist in me that's taken over the floor.

Feh. I have to go offline now. Ruminations will continue, no doubt. I was just thinking yesterday that it's creepy how real-world events have hauntingly paralleled the course of study that my IR professor spelled out for us in the syllabus; last night's topic, for instance, was the proximate causes of war and what causes escalation to lead to armed conflict rather than retreat to a peaceful settlement --- and when I woke up yesterday, the world was suddenly at war when things seemed to have slowed down when I went to bed the night before.

Parallels, coincidences, everywhere --- if you want to see them.