Some people attract smarty-pants geniuses, or warm fuzzy friendlies, or laid back dudes. I attract the crazies. And I don’t know why. I really don’t. My friends are all wonderful, lovely, smart, caring and affectionate people. And still, I get the crazies.

I won’t go into the whole history because crazy often means wildly inappropriate, but my first memory of attracting a crazy is from when I was 12 or 13. My family was in Washington DC for a week. My dad was attending a conference, and my mom, sister and I were visiting every museum within city limits. We were on the Metro and my mom and sister were talking. I was looking around the train, being curious, when I noticed a strange man looking at me from the opposite end of the car. I looked away, read a poster on the wall, tried not to look again and glanced back. He had moved a seat closer to us. This happened a few times, until he was sitting across from us, and we got off the train. I was the only one who saw him doing this. When we were on the street again I told my mom what happened and we came up with a secret code. When someone made me feel uncomfortable and we were in public, I was to ask my mom for pistachio ice cream. Because I hated pistachio ice cream, she’d know something was wrong.

Well, I really wanted pistachio ice cream last night. But I was at home with my roommate, it was 10pm and my mom was at home in Connecticut, probably asleep. It’s not like she could have done anything if I’d called her and told her I wanted pistachio ice cream. And I wasn’t in any real or immediate danger anyway. There were six Essex County Sheriffs Department officers watching the house and my roommate decided that he wasn’t going to leave me alone in the house, but it was weird and shocking and something out of a movie crazy. And it was because I live in proximity to crazies. Because I can’t get away from them.

It started when I was a kid and every once in a while, just when I start to get comfortable, a crazy pops up in my life and reminds me that I am a magnet. Yeah. Fun times, that.