Its head popped out with the squeeze of her hand.

“See? It really relieves stress,” she said as I squinted at the small rubber chicken with the distended eyeballs in her hand.

A delightfully unique woman in my office showed me her interesting little collection of office mates. A stuffed frog hangs on the wall with a zipper implanted in his back. A real frog….that was at one time alive…. Now it’s stuffed. And made into a purse. I was so surprised by it I barely noticed the other little animal figurines she began showing me at the same time.

“And this is from the same girl who gave me the frog….” she said with a disturbing amount of pride for a panda figurine.

“Who gave you the rubber chickens?” I asked, noting the two, small, deadish-looking plastic birds on her shelf next to the frog.

“Savemart,” she said seriously “When it used to get really stressful here, I would come in here and sit down and squeeze those. You should try it. They really work.” I smiled wondering for a moment how many little rubber chickens have been sacrificed in the quest for stress-relief. Perhaps more than the frogs that have been recycled into handy coin purses?

I suppose I should no longer be amused by such little things in a place that has winter streets in the dead of summer, George Clooney playing basketball outside every day, a woman with blue bangs who can't seem to get over the fact I'm not actually her friend Alice from Alabama, a lawyer whose famous socialite family doesn't know that he married his boyfriend for fear of scandal, people walking around in every nature of fashion for the variety of casting calls that request the "sexy blonde in high heels and a mini skirt" the "thug in a sleeveless shirt and leather jacket" the "indiscernable but quite colorful character bound to make us laugh" etc., butI am. And I'm grateful to be amused on days when I learn that a man I once taught ballet to has just recently been convicted of sexual abuse/molestation of a child under the age of 14. She was, in fact, actually 14, (not under that age) but that's beside the point.

More on that later.........