Right as the metro was reaching my station, I fell asleep. In a wagon I thought was empty, a stranger asked me to leave, otherwise I’d go all the way to the next station.

It must have someone who I’ve traveled with on the way back many times and I’d never noticed, but it’s cool to remember.

Probably being on stage with Green Day. That was pretty crazy. I’d thought about it for years prior to that point and when Billie Joe pointed at me and said “do you know the lyrics? You swear to god?” instinct kinda just took over. I was floating for days afterward

Somewhere around 2010 I was playing Modern Warfare 2 with my homie and we ended up in a match against a clan. They were talking a lot about Limp Bizkit. We asked how this one guy knew so much about them, and he said “cause I’m the singer haha.”

Dude shared the website to his clan which had his gamertag and sure as hell I was playing CoD with Fred Durst. He was really chill.

So this one is a doozy, and I still have trouble believing this happened to me.

My ex was cheating on me. I confirmed it by checking her phones location (yeah I know, shitty thing to do but there were LOADS of red flags and we were each other’s first everything). I decided I was going to confront her at her fuck buddies house. I drove an hour to get there. I was about to turn into the subdivision, and for some reason just had a feeling that I should stop. Once I did, I realized it was stupid to do this. I knew she was cheating, so what sense was there to confront her?

So I turned around and started to head back home when I realized that there was a huge jacked up truck RIGHT on my ass. It was the guy she was cheating on me with. Turns out, it was a college professor for a class we were both in (this was a long time ago).

So I’m driving along, and this guy starts to try to run me off the road, so I start speeding up. He’s trying to get alongside me to ram me. I’m freaking the FUCK out. I’m doing probably 110 mph down a winding back road that I had never been on. No GPS and barely any cell service. I remember calling my mom, and telling her I was going to die. I’ll never forget that. She tells me to hang up and call the cops. I call 911 and give them the rundown, or at least I try to, but I lose signal. It’s at that moment when I see this dude pull a pistol and aim it at my car from his window. He starts firing at me. I miraculously get cell signal again and call the cops. I tell them the road and mile marker that I’m on, and they tell me they’ll have 2 cops posted up ahead and to stop there.

I stop by the cops and they RIP me out of the car and throw me on the ground and handcuff me. Screaming at me asking where the gun is. I tell them that I didn’t have the gun, it was the guy that just flew by them doing 120mph.

It was at that moment that they tell me to stay on the ground and THEY BOTH GET IN THEIR CARS TO CHASE HIM. I’M STILL FUCKING HANDCUFFED, and now, all alone.

They come back and said that they couldn’t catch up to him, but he had told them he had me on camera breaking into his house (how did they speak to him if they didn’t catch up to him ???). I tell them to take me to jail then and have him prove it with the video. They ask me what I was doing in this small town, and I tell them the truth.

They ask to call my soon to be ex so they could speak to her. I gave them her number and they called her and put her on speaker. THIS GIRL TELLS THEM SHES NEVER EVEN MET ME! We’d been together for 4 years!

They tell me to just leave, and that I wasn’t welcome back into the town.

6 months later my dad gets a job in that town and we moved there. Luckily I moved out right after.

Arriving home with my newborn son. It was the first moment when it really sank in that I’m a parent and we have to take care of this tiny little thing.
It wasn’t a warm feeling but more of a fuuuuuck! What do we do? What do we do?! feeling. The enormity of the responsibility just overwhelmed me.
I somehow got through it and the post-natal care lady that visited a few hours later really helped with grounding the situation.

Anyway, it’s not a crazy situation for most of you. But for me it really felt like a “I can’t believe this is happening!” situation.

2004, the kill bill movies had been out over the summer. In the movies is the crazy 88s. A group of ninjas who try to kill the main character. They have all sorts of weapons in the movie, the key one here is the katana. A long slender slightly curved blade.

It’s now october, and I’m at a bar for a halloween party. The DJ gets on the mic and says in 30 minutes, the crazy 88s will be making an appearance.

I was either outside, or somehow missed hearing that announcement.

My friends find me on the couch, and say “they’re here!!!”. I have no idea what they mean. They point at some ninjas on stage, and I say “hey, they look like those ninjas in that movie”.

At some point I go to the bathroom. I’m at the urinal. And this guy dressed in all black comes in. Stands at the urinal 2 away, leaving 1 free urinal between us. Guy code.

Thats when I notice something long and hard in his hand paralel with my face. I casually look to the side, to see what he is sticking near my face. I’m like “…what the fuck?”

He says, without even looking at me “Even ninjas have to pee, but when ninjas pee, we hold TWO swords in our grips. Both for the same reason. To not get pee on the other.”

To this day I still laugh that my face was about 7 inches away from the katanas they used in the movie…but only because he was peeing and using that space as a buffer zone.

I was at a summer camp as a kid. I went into the bathrooms, which were only a notch better than latrines. There was a crack in one wall and as I’m peeing, snakes start pouring out of the crack and from gaps along the ceiling. This is like Indiana Jones movie level of Lots Of Snakes. I run out, still peeing a bit with my pants halfway down.

I was terrified, but also in the back of my head knew there weren’t any venomous snakes in the area and this would make for a good story someday. A counselor found me, believed me (thank goodness), and helped me get to clean pants before too many other campers saw me so the story at the time stayed about the snakes and not me pissing my pants.

I was living above the 15th floor of a building in one of the poorer parts of NYC. I heard my bunny thump and run to the bathroom, and was really confused as he never acted that way.

A few minutes later I see smoke pouring around the door frame and tons of fire trucks outside (I found out later it was a 5 alarm fire). Was sure I was gonna die, so I texted my ex (we were still close) that I loved her and then sat around calmly waiting for death. Eventually FDNY grabbed me out of my unit, and ran me downstairs. Two people across the hallway and someone in the unit above them died.

Small event that may only have been exciting to me.

I’m casually into amateur astronomy and stargazing. I like to count satellites if I’m outside on summer evenings, maybe haul the telescope out if some night is particularly clear. But I really don’t get out very often. Emphasis on “casual.”

We moved to our current house some years ago and were just enjoying the nice, big backyard for one of the first times, sitting in some folding chairs fully reclined to look straight up at the sky. Whenever we do that, which is maybe once every several years, even then it’s always too cold, too hot, too many mosquitos, etc., so this was rare and nice.

Right above our heads, right where we were both looking, an Iridium flare swept across us. I’d heard of those satellites reflecting “flares” being particularly spectacular, and I’d thought about trying to get in the path of a predicted one someday, but I don’t think I really thought I’d ever really make the effort or have any luck if I did. Not expecting it and seeing it happen, I couldn’t decide if I was dreaming. I hopped on heavens-above.com right afterwards and, although I didn’t see that flare predicted, it confirmed an Iridium pass had coincided with the sighting, so I’m convinced.

So, something spectacular and somewhat scarce that many people wouldn’t notice and many would either find boring or think was a UFO was something we got lucky to accidentally see together right in our backyard.

On my 8th birthday my dad took a couple friends and I out to dinner and we stopped to buy a video game. My friends and I were arguing about what to get and my dad came by a couple times to get us to hurry up. Finally he said we had to make a decision and ushered us up to the cashier.

As soon as the cashier started to talk a truck off the highway that was above the store crashed through the side wall of the shop with enough speed to hit through every aisle and collapse all the shelving to the back as well as ripping down the ceiling. The guy was covered in blood and slumped over the wheel. No one was hurt in the store luckily, but we all would have been killed if we argued any longer in that aisle. My dad just got us into the car and we drove home. Afterward my dad would just downplay it whenever I would bring it up.

When I stared into my husband’s eyes as he calculated the consequences of beating me in front of our 2yo.

Followed closely by being ordered by a judge to allow him at the birth of my second child that he had claimed wasn’t his fifteen minutes previously.

I could list a few.

• Christmas when I was about 10 I found out my dad wasn’t really my dad. Thanks nana. The man who raised is my dad to me still.
• Leading on from the last one. Later in life my biological father got in touch and giving it all the life complicated spiel. I was indifferent but figured sure I’ll meet. Turns out he was back with my mum and now I’m back at home and he ain’t ever act like a dad, and now he doesn’t see if other daughters since he got back with my mum. Dudes a joke.
• as you might have noticed I’ve had a tumultuous childhood. Mum spent my formative years flipping between my non-bio dad and the man who I have a half brother with, who I ain’t seen in 30 years. So I spent the time sat in the back of a car whilst she called men to her friend or went in pubs to pour pints on their head.
• one time we came home and saw burglars robbing our flat. Probably something to do with my half brothers dad.
• one time as a young adult, the man that raised me was out getting drunk in his mates house. My mum made me break the door down and she went in all guns blazing grabbing a golf club and going ham.
• Fell in a canal at night off my box on Xanax and thought I might die. Threw out my stashed and literally nearly died from withdrawals.
• surprising not been assaulted many times cause I used to be a righteous mouthy cunt when drunk, i don’t drink at all as I saw how it broke my dad, well my mum did but alcohol didn’t help.
• watched as my mum and dad had a loveless marriage and at the start he used to hit her, then later she bullied his ass for decades. Like take his wages and refuse him money for cigs.
• on way to school vacation and got told my dad was going prison for driving drunk whilst banned.
• saw my tea dumped on her head.
• it’s all coming back now. One time my dad tried to drive the car into our house but it got stuck in the bushes.

That’s just a few, but yeah it’s no wonder I’m fucked, not an excuse as I’ve made progress and got a good job now. Not sure I’m happy but I’ve just shut off the stuff I grew up around as what else can I don

I lived in a house with housemates. This house was managed by a company.

One day, a mate goes with friends outside and I’m left with two other housemates which were in their rooms when I cooked myself something to eat. The bell rang. I went to see who it was and was introduced to someone who asked to visit the house. He said he knew A (one of the two housemates who was at home) and they wanted to visit before joining us. I told him there was no visit but he insisted and I accepted thinking it would last 5 minutes and also thinking about my food in the oven. When I accepted he told me a friend of him would join. And after that the one who drove them here would too. And it was at this moment I knew I fucked up.

They entered and started asking me questions about the room number of A. I told them I don’t know his room number. They tried to make me ask him to come but I declined because we weren’t so close. Two of the three persons stood with me in the kitchen and one other vanished (he tried to find A’s room).

I quickly got they were after him so I texted A that I handled it and asked him to stay in his room. At some point the three guys explained that A scammed them and they lost around 7k euros and they believe A owe them.

And the bell rang again. The three guys imagined it was the police and one of them told the other not to panic because they did “nothing wrong”.

I got to the portal. By the time I got there the police opened it and in no time I had the flash of a light in my eyes. They asked who I was and claimed they were called for a robbery. I was like “wtf there is no robbery” but nevermind I explained three guys managed to get in the house but were here for something else than visiting.

A policewoman went upstairs to A’s room. She asked him to open. He declined but she didn’t gave him the choice so he eventually opened. He was really scared. The polioewoman yelled at him saying he lied about the robbery. He added that one of his mate got aggressed. I was the only one with the three guys and they never hit me so I couldn’t understand why so much lies. The police asked him to go downstairs he said no, very panicked. She asked if he knew the guys, he said no but he obviously did because he was frightened.

I went downstairs with the woman, finding his colleague laughing with the three guys. I was like “wtf is this”. They were very nice with them and at some point they got out.

Turns out a mate was really aggressed. The followed the one who went to a party with his friends at kick him out of the transport, asking him his phone to know who he was related to A. They took information and used that to make me confident enough to let them visit the house.

In the end, A really scammed those guys with crypto. He first denied for a day but ended up telling us.

Either when I lived through a magnitude ~7 earthquake while on the 21st floor of an airbnb in a country I didn’t speak the main language of, or the time a moth flew into my ear and got stuck there alive so deep in my ear that four hours later at the hospital the doctors almost didn’t believe that it happened to me at all. I could hear it flapping and struggling the whole time.

The building I was in stayed structurally sound, and the doctors did eventually believe me and find a way to drown/suffocate the moth (although they couldn’t get the corpse out until I could make an appointment with an ear specialist 3 days later because of a long weekend. So I guess maybe both stories are not so interesting in the end, but they still mark two of the worst moments of my life

One really oddly specific realization I made a few years ago.

First, they were filming The Last Of Us (season 1) in my city for a few days, on the street behind mine - the street was closed off to keep the crowds out and from the crowds making noise, but they couldn’t close my alley that lead into the street (through a parking lot) because it was the only way for cars in some of the buildings to leave. So the alley remained open and the parking lot connecting it to the filming location was open because they were going to have shots take place on it.

So it meant that while crowds were forming around both sides of the block trying to see into this street, I happened to notice that my back alley and the lot connecting it to the filming location were wide open, with only some lighting people and production assistants there. Since they couldn’t not let me be there in my own alley, I asked if I could stand quietly on the sidelines and watch the production because that interests me, and maybe I could get a glimpse of a dreamy Pedro Pascal (they said sure and I stood in the alley and moved when they had to film it).

Now unrelated, but a a year earlier, my spouse and I used a real estate agent to look for condos in the area, but A) didn’t like anything and B) didn’t like how pushy this agent was - she was loud and manipulative and kept trying to convince me that I liked something when I didn’t. We ended up ditching her and doing a private sale to buy the condo. She, in an email, called my husband “a man of no integrity” because she was pissy we didn’t earn her an easy commission I guess.

So the strangest moment of my life was standing in the alley nearly alone, when Ana Torv, Bella Ramsay, and Pedro Pascal start walking towards me and stop 10 feet away in the parking lot. They’re chatting and preparing to shoot a now-cut scene of them emerging from the parking lot onto the destroyed street. I just look like a production assistant because I’m the only onlooker there and am a little starstruck and just watching, when our attempted real estate agent, who has an office on my street and has no idea that filming is happening, or cares, walks through the alley screaming on her phone in the most loud and obnoxious voice. I just remember looking over and thinking “oh god, that stupid awful bitch is disturbing the filming” and when I turned back, Pedro Pascal was looking annoyed at her too because she was the loudest thing on set without knowing she was a disturbance.

Long story short, the strangest sentence I can truthfully construct is “Pedro Pascal and I were both pissed at my former real estate agent at the same time”