The latest Linsday Lohan vehicle, Just My Luck, features L-Lo as a smart, sassy New Yorker. Her character has great luck, and through some sort of supernatural kiss, she receives the bad luck of the movie’s heartthrob.

The movie asks some important questions like does Karma transfer through salvia and will Lindsay Lohan ever star in a winning romantic comedy? If A.O. Scott has anything to say on the matter, the answers are no and no.

Regardless, luck occupies a strange place in my psyche. I don’t really believe in fate or mystics, but I do believe in luck. Yesterday I took the G train twice, and I never had to wait for more than a couple minutes. What luck!

Despite my recent success with NYC’s least reliable train, I generally don’t consider myself a lucky person. And I wonder why: I have a job with health care, a nice apartment and good friends. Once I found $20 on the street. Eighteen months after that find, I lost $20 in the changing room at Century 21, but with inflation, I’m doing all right.

My feelings about my luck are much like my feelings about compliments and criticism. I’ll believe any insult about me (I do say like a lot), but I can’t internalize compliments the same way. Whatever good luck I have, I disregard, but I take bad luck personally. I’ve started wearing a bicycle helmet because I don’t believe that with my bike riding skills I have the luck to avoid an accident.

On some level, I know luck doesn’t really exist. I didn’t catch the G yesterday because of something I did in a previous life; I just got there at the right time. But perhaps it’s easier to believe in luck to explain things like a job promotion or being fined for a subway infraction. Either way, if Lindsay Lohan’s life and oeuvre have taught us anything, it’s that luck is not an absolute thing.