I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been cranky since last night. Frankly, I feel that I was provoked–not a lot, perhaps, but in a fairly short period of time.
First there was the pot thing: when I took the dogs outside for the last time last night, I opened our apartment door and was assaulted by air so thick you could walk on it. And it was definitely marijuana. Yes; I spent two years at Bard College. I’m quite sure.
Which reminded me that the night before, I could’ve sworn that I’d caught the smallest whiff of the same smell in our own hallway–inside my freaking apartment–but that it had been so slight that I’d shrugged it off. So we’ve got some hardcore potheads for neighbors now, and the amount of effort that will go in to getting our common spaces back to their usual odorless condition is positively infuriating: not only will I have to figure out which apartment the offenders are in, but I’ll also have to learn key words and phrases such as, for starters, “marijuana,” as well as “reek,” “thoughtless,” and “shove a towel under your door like a decent human being or you’ll be lucky if the landlord is the only person I’ll call.”
But I went outside anyway, only to have some woman’s dog promptly start barking at mine. And the woman was blabbing on her cell phone, and so completely missed the part where little Fifi turned to follow her, stopped, and…well…made a nice big mess directly in the center of the sidewalk.
So, after some muttering and gesticulating, I caught up to them.
“Excuse me, but I believe you–”
“Oh, yes, yes; thank you!” she interrupted, snapping her cell phone shut and wheeling her dog around the way they’d come. The mongrel barked at my dogs again, but small price to pay for a good citizen as a neighbor, right?
Wrong. When I headed back for the building, the mess was still there, and I lost a little more faith in Parisian humanity.
So it was not in the cheeriest frame of mind that I picked up the phone this morning, noting the unfamiliar cell number just a little too late. “Hello, I’m…and…that you…parking space in the sixteenth?”
We’re on a waiting list for a parking lot down the street, which short-circuited my brain for a minute, because this had to be related to that even if there was no way that that made any sense. “Yes, I’m…looking for parking,” I quipped wittily.
There was a good long silence.
So apparently this is some retiree who owns a parking space near the lot we’re on the waiting list for, and somehow found out about us, and wanted to know if we wanted to come take a look at her space. But she’s not in any way connected to the lot, as far as I know, unless she happens to play canasta with the woman who put me on the list in the first place, so what the hell is she doing with my phone number? And naturally she doesn’t have email, so I finally settled for “Send me something in the mail!” once I realized that I wasn’t going to be remotely capable of following all of the pricing information.
I did follow enough to be pretty sure that she’s asking about twice what we’d intended to pay, since the spot is actually a lockable, garage-esque “box.” Although, given the frequency with which Nick’s scooter has been damaged, vandalized, or had bits stolen off of it, that might turn out to be a prudent investment.
Anyway, to shake off the feelings of inadequacy that tend to come with being unable to conduct a freaking phone call without sounding like a stammering moron, I took the dogs for a walk. And they celebrated by eating all kinds of trash and junk that is so going to disagree with them later because the entitled freaks who use (and, in some cases live on) our pretty little walk island are too lazy to turn their heads far enough to see any of the thirty trash cans per square centimeter.
Now, look: I buy the whole community thing. And I get that it entails some compromises, which are generally worth it because relentless individualism is, for social animals, the path of least resistance that leads to despair.
But really: every now and then I can’t help but feel so very…encroached upon.