Well Played, Clerks

You might, perhaps, have noticed that I have a tendency to the hyperchondriacal. It's a rare list of symptoms that I can read without being absolutely sure that I have the disease in question. There was a time in my younger days when I was pretty certain I had ghonnorhea, despite the inconvenient fact that I hadn't, as yet, engaged in the sort of activities you need to engage in to get ghonnorhea (to wit: Sex). I've been certain I had gangrene on at least three occasions. And I have a nice litany of self-diagnosed psychological problems.

My hypochondria (both by its nature and through its existence) leads me to believe that I'm somewhat paranoid. I received further evidence of this paranoia when I first moved into my apartment. I live in a very old, very sturdy building. It was finished in 1907, and the walls and floors are thick enough that you can barely hear noise through them at all. I live on the third floor of the buiding, which is eight stories in total.

As I lay on my unfamiliar bed on the first night in my new apartment, I began mentally cataloging its various positives and negative. On the plus side, near the subway. On the minus, a somewhat janky stove. On the plus side, nice neighborhood. On the minus, no furniture yet. Eventually I came to the subject of airplanes. I decided that a huge plus for my current residence is that it is probably airplane-jet-engine proof. Even should a jet engine fall out of a plane with a trajectory that puts it on a direct course for my bed, chances are that, between the five stories above me and the building's solid construction, its momentum would be stopped before it crushed me in my sleep. I'd be much more nervous if I were on the sixth or seventh or, God forbid, the eighth floor, but here on the third floor I can sleep the sleep of the just. There won't be any scary seven-foot-tall rabbits in my future.