After a lot of searching and two weeks of homelessness aka couch surfing, I am going to be signing a lease for a new apartment tonight. The new apartment is small, cute, and ::mine alone::. It is excellent for escaping from in case of fire, but it’s a terrible location for barricading oneself in to escape a zombie horde.

I’m particularly cognizant of this fact because of my coworker Andrew, one of whose conversational habits is to turn discussions of common objects into discussions of using those objects to fend off zombie attack. Thanks to him, I will now feel particularly safe from zombies in gyms, where you can set up a wall of treadmills to fend off the slowly-moving undead.

Zombies are a fascinating earbug–after a couple of mentions of zombies from Andrew over the last week, they suddenly seem to be everywhere. Wednesday’s lunchtime conversation with Brian, today’s A Softer World, even personal ads on the internet–all of them seem to be filled with the idea that we need to be prepared for the undead to rise up and shamble towards us, possibly more than we need to be prepared for fire and earthquakes.

What is this? Does everyone really think about zombies all the time? Is it the Frequency Illusion having its way with me? Are zombies the mental equivalent of glitter, impossible to remove once you’ve been doused with them? Or is the world telling me that the zombie apocalypse is nigh?

[Game: first person to identify the two references in the post title gets gold star stickers.]