I'm what you call a fairly big believer in there being no afterlife, no big Kahuna in the sky directing traffic, no natural order of things spinning and intermingling to the tune of forces at large -- basically a generic quiet atheist who has no problem with religion if it's not being used to harm or restrict the happiness of others and typically describes themselves to others as "not religious". My friends state that I'm really agnostic as I'm a bit too open-minded to stand hard on any point dealing with so many unknowable variables, but I tend to think of myself as standing upon a personal belief from what I know and have experienced thus far, being logically ready to accept any new structure should any new knowledge come my to change this -- somewhat like dinosaurs. 

BUT!

Hmmmm....

...

What?! Sorry! Just thinking of Kate Beckinsale for a second there and how in person she...well, never mind about that. 

Anyhoo...But I have a strange fondness and reverence for religious trappings and all things supernatural and at times I can be quite superstitious. My personal life experiences has led me to believe that something odd is occurring around me and I'm at a loss to completely explain it. Comically I often wonder if I'm some sort of self-punishing God who constantly wills people and objects to constantly get in my way. Other times I have to wonder if people at times enter what I call a "zombie state" in which they are easily influenced by the thoughts of others. The latter seems a tad more "realistic" in that way that I don't really think of my insane musings as anything quite close to the reality of most situations, but that perhaps things such as ghosts and spiritual encounters have more to due with how certain parts of the Earth are more conducive to holding electrical residue that the brain generates. These recorded impulses then are occasionally picked up by the messy electrical brains of people, perhaps a certain frequency is needed, and thus strange occurrences...um, occur. I'm sure scientists will suss it out someday but that's just my knee-jerk thought on the matter. 

BUT!

Hmmmmm...latex. 

Sorry I'm um, being distracted by Dita invites. 

This leads me to my current story of an actual odd happening that totally happened and I'm not kidding. It's not really very interesting though so don't get your hopes up. I'm just bored and typing so you might want to go watch a movie or play some games instead. But if you've read my meanderings up to this point....here we go!

Many a year ago when I worked at Borders Books -- who I figure I can talk about since they're now out of business and my "you no talk" contract is thereby null and void -- I would often come in early when I had an opening shift. As most retail business will do unless they have a strong confident leader who knows what he is doing, they start unnecessarily cutting corners which involves removing positions and lowering payroll. Of course when they do this they also raise their productivity expectations as well as your areas of responsibilities meaning of course that everybody kinda, sorta has to work overtime or off the clock...a lot. 

At this particular point they had eliminated the office manager position which meant whomever the opening manager was had to do all the office work as well. Normally this wasn't really too much stuff, just balancing the money from the night before, printing out the daily schedule, getting the drawers ready for the day, all while hoping there isn't anything dramatic occurring such as a minor flood in the cafe, no employees showing up for work,  or some such thing. This particular morning however the payroll needed to be done and since a lot of people need it to be done correctly or they don't get paid, it's really a lot of work and it's fairly stressful. Having woken up early, I decided to truck on in and get an early start on the annoying work at hand as technically none of this office work was actually anything that my management responsibilities were judged by. Gotta get all that impossible stuff done in "magic" time y'know. 

Whilst I was plugging away the outside phone rang. Normally I wouldn't have answered it because it's way too early for anybody to be calling whether they worked for my store or not. But for some reason I did perhaps fearing it was our overreactive security folks getting all in a tizzy over my early arrival. It turned out to be a customer with a simple request of looking for a book. Why at 5 a.m. she felt anybody would be there and that this was a normal thing for a human to do is beyond me, but I was making good headway despite being by myself in the store (itself technically a sorta kinda no no the company long ago stopped caring about) so instead of blowing her off I set out to find her book. 

It turns out her request was for an erotic fiction book, a collection of tales dealing with sexy things happening in water environments entitled 'Wet - Tales of the Erotic'. I was a bit annoyed because young teenage girls beat that section up so bad on a constant basis that it was almost impossible to keep alphabetized. But again, I was ahead of the game so I gave it my best shot and proceeded to check through every damn book in the section looking for this silly thing. While I was eyeing all the fuzzy bits of semi-obscured nudity, a book suddenly fell off the shelf about 20 feet away from me out of the Social Sciences section. I ignored it at first, and I continued trudging my way through the erotic messiness at hand. Having no luck and realizing my phone customer wouldn't wait forever, my curiosity finally got the best of me and I walked over to see what book had fallen down. 

The below spoiler is what I saw!

[spoiler] [/spoiler]

That's right...not the actual book (as it appeared not to exist in our store) but the sequel to the book she was looking for!!! :o

Thus endeth my tale. 

Hmmmmm...tail. Oh Kate. You're incorrigible.