The other night I stayed up watching documentaries on Netflix and working.  When I’m up late I know better than to watch paranormal anything (though I make an exception for anything with cryptozoology because I don’t think Big Foot exists in urban Los Angeles and Nessie is obviously not going to attack me).  Not that my documentary choices weren’t a little spooky – The Miracle at Fatima and one about English castles (did you know there’s something called Wood Henge and that castles used to be made wood?).  But they weren’t anything to make my hair stand up on end.

I got settled into bed and then I heard a strange noise in my apartment.

I tried to wave it off, but the problem with independent living is you have to tackle strange noises in your apartment…independently.

After about five minutes of laying in the dark and kind of freaked out, I thought I heard the strange sound again – possibly coming from my kitchen or my dressing room.

I sat up and turned back on my lights and didn’t hear the sound again.

Still, it worried me.  So of course, I did the next logical thing – I grabbed my red katana from Little Tokyo and prepared to make an inspection.

Red katana in tow, I moved toward the kitchen and turned on the light.  Peeking inside, I didn’t see anything suspect.

I moved toward the dressing room, opened the door wide, and turned on the light.  Peeking inside, I didn’t see anything odd there either.  Walking slowly through the room toward the bathroom, I turned on the bathroom light and there was nothing.  The blinds weren’t even moving.

Turning off the bathroom light, I closed the door.  Then looked around my dressing room again and closed that door.

I walked into the kitchen toward the dining area and saw nothing and then looked at my filled dish rack.

Could that be the culprit?  Was my fear seated in a bunch of clean dishes overflowing in a blue two-dollar dish rack from the bargain store?

I began to unload the dish rack – I was up and paranoid after all.  Dishes unloaded, I turned off the kitchen light and went back into living area.

I wasn’t going to pull a Ziva (from NCIS who sleeps with her gun underneath a pillow), but I carefully propped my katana near me.  With a sigh, I closed my eyes and then proceeded to hear noises outside (I live in the city!) and something shifting in my apartment, which might have been my steamer pot attachment that I had a difficult time putting in my cabinet.

I then proceeded to turn my desk light on as a night light and open up my computer to do some work and to troll around the internet.  If anyone was in my apartment, I would SEE and then whack them with an expensive piece of computer equipment (yes, these are the preparations of a paranoid mind.  And yes, I have thought about how I would parry an armed person with my katana to disarm them).

At around 3 am, I saw something pop up on the LA Times twitter regarding Gus Van Sant and Bret Easton Ellis collaborating on a screenplay.  They were going to write a screenplay about the Vanity Fair article on the Golden Suicides.  I emailed my friend Jon about the partnership since I knew he liked their work, and hey, what else was I going to do trolling the internet and paranoid at 3 am?

But in emailing the article, I ended up finding the original The Golden Suicides Vanity Fair article (linked previously), which was ironically about – paranoid people who meet an untimely demise in their own hands (it’s a Van Sant and Ellis project, what do you expect?).

Luckily, I am just an overly imaginative girl with a red katana who eventually fell asleep with her desk lamp on.

-cct