did you feel that?

i hate panic.
studies show that in times of crisis or emergency, panic kills more people than the actual catastrophe.
and i work with panickers.

lucky me.

and, living in an area with more cracks than a crackhouse, well...

cracks. not buttcracks. earthcracks. them edge-em-u-cated folks calls 'em faults. i's calls 'em reason to par-tay.

no, not really.

but at 11:42 today, we had ourselves a little episode. only a 5.8 on the Richter scale.

pftttttt. call me when it reaches 6.

don't get me wrong, i do hate earthquakes, but i cannot STAND it when people panic. because in their panic, they will do something stupid that could kill them...and me, too.

so there you go. just a little shaker that was really hard, at least at my work. we lost a good section of tiles from our ceiling, and to be on the safe side, they sent us home.

and i did.
no damage, except to the cat. he was pissed.

just so you know, the whole earthquake is probably my fault. you see, i had emailed April last week about a chick i know that i've been butting heads with (i know, hard to believe i can't get along with people). i said to April that this look i got was the same as if i had farted in the Vatican.

therefore - the earthquake is my fault.

but - everyone i care about is OK, some more shaken than others, but no damage, surprisingly.
except that the news stations with their continuous coverage are losing their minds.

because nothing really was damaged. no freeways collapsed. nothing to see here, move along.
hey - what if they threw an earthquake & no one came? a TV news nightmare.

and all because i passed gas.


moving on to today's regularly scheduled post.

on the morning news today, there was a story about a man who had invested his life's savings into opening a rather trendy (read: EXPENSIVE) clothing boutique in West Hollywood.

he'd been opened maybe two weeks, and sometime last night, was broken into and robbed.

cleaned out.

every article of clothing - gone. they even took the Swiffer.

come on, guys; you took the Swiffer? what are you gonna do, sell that out of the back of your car with the clothes?

*hmmmph*

but - they left the hangers.

hangers? dudes.
it did, though, remind me of something that happen when i was a kid.

i had watched Dragnet - not sure if was a rerun or not, but Our Man Sgt. Joe Friday was called out to a clothing boutique that had been the victim of a grab and go. the criminals had run in, grabbed hangers of clothing off the shelves and run like hell.

Sgt. Friday was his usual sympathetic self. he told the owner that what she should do is to arrange the hangers with the loops going inside and outside the bar on the roundabout. that way, if she were to be robbed again, the criminals wouldn't get nearly as many of the goods.

my seven year old self thought that was a great idea. so good in fact, that i decided to do that in my own closet.

because, you know, there was a string of home invasion robberies back in the late 60s, early 70s, where the perps were stealing little kids clothing from their closets.

goes along with the vampires that lived under my bed.

needless to say, my crazy auntie Kay completely lost her mind, trying to fix my closet the way it should be, as well as trying to explain to me how i wasn't really a candidate for clothing thieves.

so there you have it. i'm not only responsible for today's earthquake, but for my great aunt's mental illness.

watch it - i might affect you the same way.