Over the course of my year-and-a-bit of living in this town, I’ve noticed an odd thing. Several street lights will go out as I approach them. I’ll be driving along and suddenly the lights in front of my will flicker and go dim. I never see them coming back on, but I know that the next time I drive past they’ll be bright right up until I get about 15 feet away from them.

The only light that does this absolutely every time I pass it is the light nearest my apartment buildings, but there are other lights that have played this strange game of hide and seek with me. Even the security light on the front of my building condescends to unlight my way from time to time.

Depending on my mood, this strikes me as sinister or silly. Sometimes it seems like the lights are deliberately leaving me vulnerable to the hauntings of the night, and sometimes they seem more like babies playing peek-a-boo, giggling as drive under them.

For a long time I thought I was imagining it. Then I started theorizing about what could make it happen. Do my headlights trick the sensors into thinking it’s day? Not likely, seeing as it’s also happened when I’ve walked under them. Could it be the aliens that are invading my hallway? No, that’s even less likely. Electromagnetic forces? Pixies? Nothing seems to make sense.

Still, I never said anything about it to anyone. After all, there’s always the chance I’m just imagining it. But last week one of my co-workers made reference to the incredible un-lighting street lights. She wouldn’t have thought my eager questioning about her experience was so odd if she’d know that she’d just released me from my code of uncertain silence. She’d just proved that I’m not insane.

Political commercials are stupid at best, but now I’ve seen a real doozy. I just saw a commercial put out by Candidate A smearing Candidate B for running a smear campaign! Ironically, I’ve only seen the smearing commercials of Candidate A in the past couple of weeks, so it would have been less funny coming from Candidate B…

The trustworthy sounding lady narrator sounded so hurt, professionally and personally, when she said that newspapers have accused Candidate B of not playing nice. She pointed out specific words these newspapers had used, words like “unconscionable” and “outrageous.” “We are learning that Candidate B is becoming one of those politicians you can’t trust,” the narrator concluded, laying subtle emphasis on “You Can’t Trust.”

Meanwhile, I laughed out loud from my vantage point in the kitchen.

I went back to pick up my dry-cleaning today. This time as the bell rang to announce my entrance, Mrs. Shop-Keeper came out from the other side of the shop (opposite the machine shop). She put down a stack of reality listings that she’d been looking at and instantly transformed from realtor to dry-cleaning cashier. As far as I can tell, this one store front provides one-stop-shopping for houses, mechanical repairs, tools, tailoring, and dry-cleaning.

A few weeks ago we had new hall lights installed in the apartment hallways. These hallways are about 2 and a half feet wide and 10 feet long, and there used to be a round light fixture hanging in the center of the ceiling and shedding a warm glow that could never quite penetrate the corners near our apartment doors.

Now, at each end of the 10-foot-long hallway there’s a very helpful exit sign marking each stairwell door, and about 80% of the rest of the ceiling is covered with a rectangular bank of solid brightness. In the mornings, as I open my door to leave for work, this fluorescent phalanx assaults my entryway. In the evenings, when all the lights are out and I make my last check of the doors and windows, the front door glows with an unearthly light. I can see the door’s outline shimmering from the farthest reaches of the apartment.

You know how in sci-fi movies you can tell the mother ship is coming to experiment on the hapless humans when that cold light squeezes through shutters and keyholes? That’s the light. And every night my last thought before retiring is that the aliens are coming for me.