Life alone is very different for me. Being that I am a social creature, coming home to nobody, and not knowing any of my neighbors, has started to take its toll on me. Mostly, I have become increasingly stir crazy as the days go on.
Most of my days involve watching DVDs to the point that I have watched practically every movie that I own. Worst of all is that I have watched every movie that I practically own in Spanish. This being because my brother lent me his DVD player which has automatic setting for each disc to play in Spanish. I, once being able to speak Spanish to some level, can understand most of the movies, but sometimes I get very lost in the dialogue and then lose all sight of the plot in total. This has given every DVD a whole new storyline where I have no clue what will happen next, which then frustrates me even more, so I turn off the movie half way through. On a side note, I have discovered how to change the settings on my DVD player so that I can watch in English, but sometimes I am too lazy to change it and just watch in a foreign language anyway.
All of my friends claim that living by your lonesome is the best because you can just hang around the house naked. I, never being naked outside of the confines of my bedroom before, decided to take it for a spin. After securing each window and shutting the blinds tight, I took off my clothes and tried to go about normal life. Normal life never really happened, and I ended up standing naked in my kitchen for fifteen minutes, waiting for the awesomeness to set in. After standing awkwardly nude in the kitchen, with my hands by my side, standing as tall as I could, I decided that nakedness isn’t all that fun. Then it hit me. “I should eat something naked. Yeah!” I reached into my cupboard and pulled out one of the numerous Fiber One products that I must have on hand at all times and started to peel away the wrapper. Unfortunately, eating naked made me feel increasingly more pathetic and after one bite, I slid the Fiber One bar back into its package for some other time.
I’ve only somewhat met my neighbors, which means I have seen them around once or twice and never really said much to them. My immediate neighbor’s name is Vern, and he likes to smoke at six in the morning. I wouldn’t mind so much if I didn’t have all the windows in my house open and then having to wake up in a cloud of smoke, but he seems rather pleasant and fat. Next to him is another neighbor who likes to smoke early in the morning, but he likes to throw his cigarette butts off of the ledge and into the courtyard. I would mind more if I used the courtyard, but it smells of dog poop because dog owners have become increasingly apathetic to where their dogs do their business.
My downstairs neighbor is a hoarder, which I discovered when I accidently dropped my phone off of my balcony and onto his patio. I considered just walking behind the building and grabbing my phone quickly, but didn’t want to cause a ruckus with a new neighbor. So I went down, knocked on his door (which he locks heavily at all times), and explained my plight to him. He has no name, but is Asian and has a beard like Brigham Young himself. After I asked him to get my phone, he closed his door, locked all of the locks on it, and then went and got the phone for me. This was the only time that he opened the door wide enough for me to see anything inside, and it was dark and packed with boxes that probably contained dead bodies or something.
Besides my neighbors, the only other inhabitants of Rancho Santa Margarita that I interact with are the numerous spiders that live here. I, moving in with heavy arachnophobia, have become almost completely unphased when I look out my window and see a five-inch long spider spin a five foot across web. Each day, I see more spiders than I saw in the movie “Arachnophobia” or “Eight-Legged Freaks” and each day I care less that they are here, that is if they keep their distance. One spider lives in the eucalyptus tree of my backyard and moves closer to my apartment with each day. The spider crossed the line when he decided to spin its web over the patio chair on my balcony, which I promptly stood up into. After screaming bloody murder and having all of the neighbors from the next courtyard look out their windows, I decided to sweep up all of the webs he had spun and then smashed the spider several times until I knew that he would be dead for a good long time. Although, I hear that if you kill one spider, five more will come in its place.
Because I have just barely moved into my apartment, I still lack a few essentials. So I decided to walk across the street to the Target and get what I had forgotten: cotton swabs, non-stick spray, more bottled water, and anything else that could be useful for my apartment. But due to my short-term attention span, the moment I walked into Target, I forgot everything that I needed. I walked around the aisles trying to recall what I needed, and ended up in the Paula Dean Cookery section. There I became increasingly upset at my previous roommates for destroying all of the pots and pans that I owned, so then I was mad at Paula Dean for having so many great pots and pans. I left her aisle with a vendetta against my favorite southern woman, besides my southern friend, Bonnie Ross.
I came across some bottled water and threw it into my cart and ended up going towards the checkout, where I found a rogue box of cotton swabs. After paying for my merchandise, I walked outside and remembered that I had forgotten the non-stick spray. “Damn it Francis! I forgot PAM!” This, while therapeutic for me, probably caused confusion for all the other patrons of Target. Where was this Francis that this man was yelling at? Is she with Pam? Of course, right when I cursed to Francis, a flood of mothers with their children decided to walk by.
Determined not to walk back into the store to get non-stick spray, I just started walking off towards my apartment with my pack of water on my shoulder. Crossing the widest street in RSM with a heavy package of waters on your shoulder is not recommended, especially if you are self conscious of people gawking at you whilst you shuffle across the street awkwardly, trying to make it before the light turns green, but traipsing across the widest street in RSM is especially frowned upon (but I did anyway).
After making my way back to my apartment, I decided to collapse on my futon and put in my favorite movie. But because I was too lazy to find the remote, I had to watch “Señor Zorro Fantástico” instead.
