I don’t get my apartment complex. Actually, it’s less of a complex and more of a collective. Four 2-bedroom apartments in a row facing another row of four apartments with a courtyard in the middle.
I’m on one end and there’s the unmarried 40-something couple next to me, a single 30-something girl next to her, a scary dude who never talks and works on various Mercedes in the alley all day, the shut-in older mom across from me, the trumpet-playing playwright next to her, the shut-ins grossly overweight daughters next to him, and then some college kids or something next to the daughters.
Fairly eclectic, but it is SoCal after all.
The part I don’t get is that no one seems to do any actual work around here. Or, to put it another way, I seem to be the only one with an actual day job….and how can this be? Every time I end up staying home for one reason or another, all of these people are also here. Do we all just happen to coincidentally be on the same schedule? I doubt it. My rent is not what would typically be called cheap, and many of these people arrived years after I did, so there’s can’t be either. How are they affording to stay home all the time? What are they doing that I obviously should be so that I can stay home all the time, too?
Also, I had my first near-confirmation in 7 years that the shut-in across the courtyard may have actually left the 20 foot radius outside her front door that I had previously only ever seen her in. This morning she walked by my window with her daughter from the direction of the alley and unlocked her front door. Which, to me, says that she must have been coming from somewhere. 7 years and this is the closest I’ve ever come to evidence that she’s left our courtyard, or for that matter, gone anywhere other than the little 4’x15′ plot of land in front of her apartment.
She actually locked her door! You don’t lock your door unless you’re going somewhere! She may have been up to and including an entire mile away! I wonder what she thought of all the new-fangled “automobiles” as they kids call them these days?
Of course, it’s within the realm of possibility that she was just standing a few feet away from her yard, just out of eyesight, having locked her door just for practice…but I’ll take what I can get.