The things you can learn from Law and Order

There are rats outside my apartment. I think they live in the abandoned parking lot next door, but they come around to the front of my building every night. Sometimes when I'm in bed I can hear them squealing and screaming--it's really one of the most disturbing sounds I've ever heard. Two nights ago I went outside around midnight and there were three rats on the sidewalk in front of the stairs poking around the garbage. They didn't run as I approached them and to be honest, for a minute there I thought they might jump on me. I thought about something I saw on law and order special victims unit a few weeks--Ice-T was searching a bodega for a missing Asian child prostitute and said that there are eight rats for every person in New York City. It freaked me out that somewhere close there were five more rats with my name on them. I started getting really paranoid that they were all sitting in the shadows, waiting for me to come down the stairs so they could eat me, so I turned around and went back inside and decided I really didn't want those petridge farm cookies anyway.