stories (in descending order of length)

A banner day here in NP. Things are moving and spinning.

I went to the post office this morning to mail my practice test off to the poor man in Chicago with the annoying job of running scantrons thru a machine, and, as has so far been my luck, there was only two other post office patrons, one being helped at the counter and one in line. The post office here is notorious for its long waits (they have 4 slots at their counter, but there's often only one clerk), but, as I said, so far I've been lucky. Right after I got there, about 6 other people also arrived and got in line behind me. The dude at the counter got done and then the lady in front of me went up, so I was first in line and kind of spacing off. Then another person came in to whom I didn't pay much attention until I realized that the person (who was wearing loud, clompy shoes) was making a lot clomps more than was necessary to get to the back of the line, which was right next to the door. So I kind of glanced over and he was on his way up to the front of the line, and wearing an eye-wrenchingly bright orange coat to boot (it's been 90+ degrees here). He came up to the front of the line and just stood what would have been in front of me, if we'd both been acknowledging there was a line, about three feet away. I looked at him, and he just looked back without acknowledging in any way that anything weird was going on, which I wasn't expecting, so I just nervously smiled at him. Then I looked at the other people in line to see if they had a clue and they were all staring at him with this weird expression on their faces too. So I says to myself, I says, well, either he's crazy, he's really stupid, or he's got some kind of emergency and either way I don't need to get in his way. Then the lady at the counter got done and he clomped on up there (he was wearing cowboy boots). I waited very expectantly to see what would happen, whether it was an emergency or if his craziness or stupidity were going to show themselves in some interesting way or other. But instead, the orange-clad guy just said something very banal, like "I need a book of stamps." And the rather meek, cute little old postal worker looks at this guy (and at about this point my imagination started to run wild and I thought maybe he had a gun and was going to shoot all of us b/c he had that bright orange coat on like a hunter might wear), and he said, um, did you just cut in front of all those people in line? And the guy was like, No. And the post office guy was like, um, there's a line there. And the guy was like yeah, but they're over there. (It wasn't such a big room, and it was quite clearly a line, in my opinion.) And the post office guy said, um, you need to wait in line. Mr. Orange was kind of irked, but he was like, fine, whatever, I'll wait in your stupid "line." (that's not exactly what he said but it was the same tone.) And then the post office guy was just too nice and he caved and got him the stamps. And then the lady next to me, I looked at her with this incredulous look on my face, and she kind of laughed and shook her head and said, well, I wasn't in a hurry to get to work this morning anyway. In Brooklyn that guy wouldn't have made it past three people in line w/o having someone yell at him, nor would anyone have made lemonade with those there lemons. People here (aside from some lawyers I've heard about) are amazingly conflict-averse.

Later on, a very vicious-seeming dog decided chasing me on my bike and barking hysterically was a good thing to do. This scared the crap out of me, and I slowed down for some reason, looking for its owner, I guess. No owner appeared and the dog was still going berzerk, so I was like, hell, I'm on a bike, I can outgun this dog anytime, so I sped up a lot. Dog was going so fast it was blurry, not losing any ground at all, and I was coming up on intersections with stop signs. So I slowed down again, trying to keep my leg, the nearest biteable bit, out of range, and looked around incredulously for its owner. Finding none, and losing hope, I just yelled HEY really really loud, hoping that some distracted owner would appear and call the apeshit beast off. That didn't happen, but it did seem to frighten the dog, or at least convince it that I wasn't to be trifled with, for it turned around and trotted off. Or maybe I just got out of its range, I don't know. Next time I'm going to yell a lot sooner. Shortly thereafter, a bug flew into my open mouth and down my throat whilst I was tweedling down the road, happily unchased, on my bike. I think that right after I rode off, the dog died, was reincarnated as a bug and, knowing me so well, decided that zooming down my throat was the best way to get me.

My mother has very kindly offered to treat me to some massages while I prepare for the bar. So today I decided to investigate the massage parlor situation here, which investigation started off with asking our office paralegal, who has lived here for 50 years and knows everything and everybody, and when she doesn't know, she knows who'll know. In this case, she didn't know, hadn't ever gotten one, but, typically, she knew who'd know. So she got the county attorney on the phone, who had a couple of recommendations for me, and, it turns out, also lived in my apartment at one point. This is a pretty common occurrence here, it seems. You'll just be talking to some random person and it'll turn out they've lived in your house. It's almost like we're related. Small towns are funny. I also routinely run into my colleagues and my neighbors at the grocery store.

On a more long-term note, it seems my desperately-unhappy-in-NP colleague will be hitting the road sometime this month or next. So they're sending me a new boss. The new boss has worked here before, actually, last year and the year before. The office today was all drama, all the time.

. . .