I'm no longer sure that I would make an excellent juror. Not because I'm not good at synthesizing facts and conclusions myself, but because I couldn't deal with it if one of the people in the room was all clinging to some dumb theory and I couldn't just burst out with "Why so stupid?" And because I'm a liberal so I think people would be smart if they Got It, I'm not satisfied till my head hits the wall again and again...fuck a duck.And this is twitter...nobody really loses if I don't make my point...rape culture, maybe, in the abstract, but...

Yay good health news.

Nice goosebumps, thanks Zenkitty!

I couldn't deal with it if one of the people in the room was all clinging to some dumb theory and I couldn't just burst out with "Why so stupid?"

We had one on the jury, but she backed down under the pressure of the rest of us repeating "the judge said" a few billion times.

I love people's ghost stories so much. I have none of my own.

Good health news is good.

I would hope that I would deal with an unthreatening spectre with the same aplomb.

I couldn't deal with it if one of the people in the room was all clinging to some dumb theory and I couldn't just burst out with "Why so stupid?"

Oh, yes, this. I always think, if I just explain it clearly enough this dodohead will surely have a lightbulb moment and understand, but no. That never happens. The more sense you make, the tighter they hug their dumb theory.

I love people's ghost stories so much. I have none of my own.

I have a few.

Excellent news about T's dad! And Callaluna's mom, too!

What Zen said!

My dExH and I had some sort of trouble maker in our house in Stockton. At first it was scary and annoying. After a while, I just had to laugh and the antics went from torn up clothes and papers, open and dumped drawers to sunglasses set up in comical 'I'm watching you' poses and 'it's about to fall but you came just in time' stacks of things.

The best experience of a 'specter' was when I went to scatter my Great Aunt's ashes in Carmel. Long, long, sad, exhausting story shorter, I stumbled on to a place to do the casting and sat on the edge of a cliff shaking. I was so strung out with grief and anxiety.

Suddenly, I heard a voice behind me and turned to find an older man in an old fashioned suit...totally out of place on a cliff side hiking trail. He said in a lovely French accent, "Ah, I see you have found the beauty." Somehow, I felt perfectly relieved. I glanced at the horizon and said,"Yes it..." when I turned back a second later, he was gone. No one for a hundred yards in either direction on the trail.

Later, I remembered that Mary had a French suitor for decades. Maybe she sent him to tell me everything was okay.

If Mary had come herself, I might very well have pitched myself off the cliff. But, this man did not frighten me at all.

Nice! I like stories about friendly ghosts. And poltergeists - I've noticed from stories about them, they seem to escalate depending on the response to them. The sunglasses bit is funny. Melisa had one that followed her from one house to another. She called him George. Things would go missing and we'd look and look, and she'd finally ask George to bring it back, and it would turn up in plain sight somewhere. The weirdest one was when a set of keys got lost. She asked for them back and there was an audible jingle in midair, and then a clank, turn around and there they are, on the coffee table. I don't know what happened to George; when things got really emotionally tense in the house, he seemed to go away and didn't come back.

I have a few.

I would love to hear more. I would LOVE a George; I am terrible about putting things back where they belong. This way, I could blame it on the ghost, and he'd find stuff for me. Nice.

It's not a spectre story, because it happened in broad daylight at the Staten Island end of the Staten Island Ferry.

I was on a business trip to Philadelphia. and one weekend I decided to take the train to New York to see Manhattan and do the tourist things. I rode the Ferry out to Staten Island and got off to wander around and stare at the Manhattan skyline and the ships. I was the only one around. On the other side of the parking lot, I saw an elderly Chinese man. He was dressed in an old-fashioned way, real old-fashioned. Long bright tunic, loose bright trousers, slippers, and the type of cap with a knob on the top you see in the old art. There was also an embroidered jacket with the typical embroidery and cut. He walked along slowly, bending down occasionally to pick something up and tuck it in his yellow shoulder bag. He saw me, stopped, and stared back at me. I thought I should feel bad about staring at him, but I figured as long as he was staring at me so blatantly I could stare back. We were probably 75 feet apart. I can't emphasize how much he looked like he'd just stepped out of a scroll painting.

As I heard multiple people say that day, "This is New York, I don't know how they do things in other places." Perhaps it wasn't odd for elderly Mandarins to wander around parking lots. But he finally turned and walked slowly away in the direction he'd come from.