Scene: my bus stop, at a crowded intersection with many cars.

Enter: an old white lady (75ish), who is CRAZY, runs across the street and bangs with her fist on the window of a car being driven by a young African-American man who is waiting for a green light, listening to music at a reasonable volume – a little bass carries, but compared to the music from the lounges down the street, it’s nothing.

CRAZY LADY: *tirade of profanity and window-banging*

DUDE IN CAR: *blinks*

BUS STATION PEOPLE: *blink*

[Crazy lady knocks harder, points with free hand]

CRAZY LADY: If it weren’t for us, you wouldn’t even BE here!*

DUDE IN CAR: *BLINK*

BUS STATION PEOPLE: …OMG WHAT?

CRAZY LADY: NOW GO TO CANADA!

[exit crazy lady]

[light turns green]

[dude drives carefully through the intersection as though nothing has happened]

* Yeah, she did.

Man shot for making noise in a movie theatre.

As someone who goes to movies sometimes, and who would go more often except that people are disgusting and annoying, I want to say two things.

1. The guy got two warnings, which is more than I would give if someone was being annoying and I had a gun.

2. This is why I don’t own a gun.

(Also, it was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which makes me laugh. Stop talking! Brad Pitt’s insights are important, and EVERYONE SHOULD LISTEN QUIETLY.)

Earlier this week we had to go to The Mall to pick up a holiday gift item. While we were there, we passed Hot Topic, and there was no way I wasn’t going in there.

You guys, it was awfultastic. I lasted about forty-five seconds, and that was all I needed to see.

The good news is: if you didn’t think Christmas was good the first time, it’s never too late for a do-over as long as it’s Twilight stuff!

For The Special Girl in Your Viewfinder: a tee that tells her why you care enough to rent that cherry picker all the time.

For The Man You’ll Regret Marrying by the Time You’re Twenty: a pair of rings that reminds you of your place any time you feel like having an opinion.

For Your Child Who’s Probably Going to Resent You Anyway: might as well!

Yes, these are actual items. I don’t know what to tell you.

In better news, what I actually got for Christmas:

* A pair of loafers. They’re orthopedic. (What? Your arches aren’t gonna support themselves! See you when I’m eighty, suckers!)

My family is super pragmatic and tends to give totally unsurprising and useful gifts. My sister got a wind-up radio/flashing help signal for her trunk. It’s awesome.

There’s finally a news release about the high-speed chase from my drive back from the train station.

The guy was peeing on the street, and when a cop asked him to quit it and/or made a move to arrest him for street-peeing, he leapt into his car and sped off, hit another car and spun out (and nearly hit us), and got shot at a few times before the nine police cars were able to catch him. Unsurprisingly, they discovered said dude was wasted.

Clearly there’s more here than just being drunk (my vote is smuggling, Mom’s vote is Mafia), but it’s always a shame when people get so drunk that they forget every episode of Law and Order they’ve ever seen. Everyone knows that if you’re ahead of the forty-minute mark, you can sometimes bullshit your way out of charges, but anyone who runs is automatically guilty.

While trying to escape (from the crash we were almsot in), the dude tried to run over a cop, so now he’s going down for some serious jail time. How wasted are you when you try to run over a cop?

Eventful ride home!

1. Train lost power because of a lose power wire. Sat in snow-crusted train, in the dark, as they worked to “fix the wire.” Then they taped it closed and e kept going.

Fun fact: All the power to the train is controlled by a single wire. Ride safe, Amtrak!

2. Train was dragging live wires all along the sparking rails for X miles before they tripped the safety alarm at a station in Delaware and stopped to fix those wires, too.

3. On the ride back from the station, we got caught up in a high speed cop chase! We were at a stop lightand heard the squeal of tires – a car was doing 360s towards us. It hit the median and slowed down enough that the car barely tapped us, as a cop car with lights on cut across two lanes to block the car.

We tried to get ahead of what we thought was the end of a chase, only to see a moment later that the car was passing us, the trunk ripped off the back and dragging as he sped past as going about 80, 90? The cop couldn’t keep up, and neither could the other four cop cars that sped up behind us. A few streets later we saw the collection of blue-light cop cars (nine) that had finally pulled the car over. The news has yet to mention this, which sort of surprises me.

I have been eating cookies since the moment of arrival, though, which does wonders for the nerves.