Things I Find Unsettling

1) Finding homeless people sleeping in the ATM lobby of my bank every time I go there.
2) The sheer number of black women I see in New York pushing around white babies in strollers and creaky old white ladies on walkers.
3) The shrine for unborn "children" I walk by every day on the way to the train.
4) The frequency with which I hear someone trying the knob on the door to my apartment when I'm home, day or night.
5) Seeing a big, colorful ad for an HIV drug on the subway station wall, amidst all the big, colorful ads for movies, teevee shows, and FreshDirect.
6) The amount of hair I pull out of the shower drain on a regular basis, and not knowing whether it's mine or my roommate's.
7) Having our trashcans set on fire.
8) My landlord's crazy -- I hope -- theory that the garbage men set the trashcans on fire because they were mad about bad recyclable-sorting.
9) The way my boss makes me repeat every thing I say to him even when I know perfectly well he heard me the first time.
10) The way goldfish will follow you with their eyes when you pick them up out of the water, even when you turn them upside down.
11) The fact that Spanish is the primary language spoken on the payphone outside my apartment even though I do not live in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood.
12) The way my cell phone displays my voice-mail PIN in gigantic, full-color, back-lit digital glory when I check messages in public.
13) The fact that everyone I've ever heard making smalltalk on a cell phone sounds like an asshole, leaving me to conclude that when I'm making small talk on my cell phone, I must sound like an asshole, too.
14) Practically everything I ever hear on the news anymore.