Am I just being paranoid?

It’s 3:00 a.m. on a Saturday night, as I wobble home to Timothy Dwight College at the height of booty-call hour, I cannot help but feel an overwhelming sense of doom choking me, clouding over me like my Grandma’s cataracts over her retina. I hear my stilettos go “klink klink klink” over the cold blue slate stones. The air is still, cool and calm until a Kia Sephia riding on 20-inch dubs zooms past blasting “Dame Mas Gasolina.” — their carburetor leaves the stench of Townie behind them.

By now, it’s 3:30 a.m., and I’m thinking it’s time to cue the John Walsh voiceover from “Unsolved Mysteries:”

“A typical night in New Haven. A young Yale student is walking home from a night of partying blah blah blah. She was a nice young lady (throw in some pictures of me when I was younger possibly eating cake and ice cream and holding a balloon looking innocent on my fourth b-day), a good person (a tearful plea from a broken mother in broken English holding my framed graduation pic) and a good student (cut to a dining hall worker). ‘She always got a second plate when going back for more buffet — so sweet, so sanitary.'”

The music quickly turns, possibly from themes from “The Little Mermaid” to scary death music from Mozart’s Requiem : “and then she disappeared. The End. Call 1-800-Unsolved-Mysteries…” blah, the end, cut to “That’s So Raven.”

Suddenly, I see a myriad of flashing red and orange lights and hear a melee of earth-shattering sirens Rrrrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhhhh — what the hell is going on?

Oh, it’s not Image Nightclub on wheels; it’s a fire truck and ambulance. After four years at Yale, I’m so conditioned to hearing emergency medical vehicles that I can’t believe it even registered as significant, but my nerves are so shot at this point Jesus and the 12 disciples could roll up around the corner, and I’d still break out the mace.

Somebody got hurt — but not me. That’s hot.

It’s 3:43 a.m. and I’m finally safe and sound back in TD.

I wonder: Why can’t walking the streets of New Haven be like a Valtrex commercial? The sunshine scintillating over a beautiful woman’s scantily clad herpetic body as she runs, smiling, hand in hand with her hot boyfriend by the glistening, crime free sea. OK, OK, those commercials are admittedly ridiculous — but at least nobody got mugged, they just got herpes.

Elle Cornwell can’t decide whether she’d rather be on “Unsolved Mysteries” or “That’s So Raven.”