.ride to the highest point and leap across the filthy water.

Here's a sampling of the horrifying things have happened to me in the last three days:

1. Last Saturday several children were standing outside my work and slamming their backs into the window. Which is, as you imagine, really fucking annoying (I work next to the overpriced shitshow know as Serendipity). I finally get up to kindly ask the children to stop it. Opening the door, I see no parents but approach the back of the one nearest to me. "Sweetie, could you please stop that, the noise is really scary from inside," I say to the girl. She slowly turns to me Exorcist/Children of the Corn style and looking back at me is a girl, maybe three or four with the most terrifying face paint I've ever seen in my life. Like, remember that scene in Red Dragon when you finally see his full tattoo and realize he's nuts - yeah, that was on this little girl's face. I froze and nervously repeated myself as she slowly cocked her head to side with a blank expression. We stood there staring at each other, me with a big fake smile, nodding for a while before I slowly back up and went back to work. In a few moments she continues pounding on the glass and I thought, hey, I could get used to that sound.
2. As a business next to Serendipity we often get people just wandering in, wasting time because they've decided to patron a restaurant that has three hour waits for frozen hot chocolate (yeah, I know). It was no different this day as a middle-aged woman and her mother walked in and looked around. I knew they weren't interested in anything but kindly asked them if they needed help, the whole spiel. They walk to my desk which is front of our back porch, that people are allowed onto. The mother (maybe 80/85) walks up right to my desk, I tell her she can go back there if she'd like and she just smiles at me and then proceeds to speak in Russian to me for about 30 seconds straight. Which may not seem like much, but it's like 30 seconds of gibberish to me. Life doesn't have subtitles; I can't understand foreign languages. I've tried. I gaze down at people's waists sometimes when they speak to me in another language, no words come up and they just look at you like you're mental. Her daughter then comes up to me and says, "Oh, she's just said you're pretty." It does not take someone 30 seconds to compliment someone else. I'm flattered if it's true but the paranoid girl who thinks life is more like The Truman Show rather than a mumblecore movie automatically assumes that she put a Gypsy curse on me. (It has nothing to do with my semi-low self confidence, I looked really cute that day - and maybe just a little Russian).
3. This happened today. I'm still calming down from it so just bare with me. On the way to the bank today, I was walking near the Queensborough Bridge area of 2nd/1st Avenues. It's a bit of a clusterfuck of traffic so not many people go that way but I thought, hey, let's try a different route. It wasn't raining, but I had a hat on with my lovely red trench coat just in case it started sprinkling again. A woman, perfectly normal 40 something slim black woman, walked up to me and approached me like she was about to ask direction. Understandable; it's a weird area. I take out my headphones and she jovially says to me, "You look just like Sarah Palin on Dancing with the Stars - especially in the face." She laughs and wishes me a great day, like she just imparted me with the secret of life and it's dancing around in circles with midgets dressed at monkeys. Now, I'm assuming she meant Bristol Palin, Sarah Palin's 19-year old daughter (I've put a link to her Wiki page but seriously if you need to look her up and understand why I'm so different from her, you have issues - the rock isn't that heavy, come out from underneath it). After this interaction I immediately called my mother, traumatized and, I shit you not, almost on the verge of tears. I've never been so insulted in my life. My mother's response was the lines of, "Aw, sweetie. I'm sorry. That's my little liberal baby."

And that's my life. I'm a bit shaky. I think I need a gin and tonic to calm my nerves.