Her name is V--- and she's a sweet old lady, but the thing is, she's a little weird.

A few months back, she told me that radiation from her TV and the cable satilite dishes was making her sick. ( She could actually hear the radiation hitting her body at night, she said.) As well, the management of her building was conducting lethal experiments on the building's tenants and that she had a list of all the people who died in said experiments. (She said they picked old people because no one would notice when they died.)

Now V. says someone's broken into her apartment to sabotage a lamp. She has three separate locks on her door and she's asked me to pray for her, so she's safe.

I knew something was screwy when V. first started going on about radiation, but I was able to keep a straight face long enough to go to Father Lindsay and ask what was going on. He said it could be paranoid schizophrenia. In fact, I've never laughed at this woman, because she must be scared to death and I spent 1 and a half years with people likely as screwed up as she was, and many of those people were my friends.

I tried to treat these people with decency and respect, because of all the times I got yelled at, many times just for how I was feeling.

I want to be a friend to this woman, but I don't know how to approach this problem, though Father Lindsay said to break off the friendship if my mental or physical well-being were threatened.

That hasn't happened yet, but I'd like to do more for this woman than offer up a few prayers. Whatever she's going through, it must not be a fun way to live, to put it mildly.