Where is the Love?

I haven’t had the best of luck with neighbors in my long and varied history of apartment living.

The worst was probably the folks I shared a building with on 1st Street in St. Pete. That apartment was the size of my current office cubicle and was one room within a converted house. The neighbors were scary.

I frequently had folks knocking on my door offering to sell me illegal substances. Someone wandered in off the street and camped out in the hallway for several weeks, unbeknownst to me, until the reeking odor of urine from the mop bucket in the broom closet over-powered me one afternoon and I had to call the manager.

The guy downstairs from me borrowed my skillet and then became insanely angry with me when I asked for it back several months later. At which point it was virtually ruined. Etc. etc. It was a long and nervousy year.

The second worst was the Cobb County apartment where the upstairs neighbors frequently staged horrific battles of epic proportion that inevitably ended with someone screaming bloody murder to the point where we were convinced she was being killed to death. Yes, that’s what I said, killed to death. We must have called the cops at least 5 times during that year.

The last aparment there was a herd of elephants above us who quite literally knocked plaster out of our ceiling several times a month.

So far, our newest neighbors are the least offensive but they’ve proven to be pretty amusing. A young Indian couple and their young daughter, they’ve also got somebody’s older parents living with them.

Apparently the parents only speak Hindi because whenever the young couple fights they do it in English out on the patio, in what we assume is an attempt to keep Mom and Dad in the dark about the nature of their debate.

Here are two gems we’ve overheard during these battles:

Wife (spoken like a female Apu): This is ridiculous! You have to quit! If not for yourself then do it for your daughter!

We have no idea what he needs to quit but our best guess is that it is some kind of chemical addiction. Maybe as simple as smoking or drinking, maybe worse. We speculate a lot.

But my personal favorite:

Wife (again, you have to hear Apu when you read this): You know, lately, when I look at you, I don’t get the love.

Gym Report

Lately, when I look at the gym, I don’t get the love either. I hate my gym and I’m bored as hell with everything I’m doing (except the cardio, which I pretty much still like). I’m exploring options to improve matters in such a way that I can get my head and body back in the game. I’m still going and still doing, but I’m just not feelin’ it like I did when we started. We’ve tried mixing up the routine and that helped for a little while but the fact is, we’re still doing the same damn exercises just in a different order. I need a bigger change.

So I’m either going to find a new gym (which is going to be really hard around here), hire a trainer for a few weeks (which is also going to be hard because I refuse to hire one of these lazy-ass slackers at LAFitness), or sign up for some group exercise classes at a pay-per-session facility a few times a week. I’m still exploring options. I’ll gladly entertain any suggestions.

Pants

Pants are weird. Shopping for pants is frequently frustrating for many people. Sizes vary so wildly from store to store and brand to brand that you have to know your “range” of sizes rather than your specific measurements in order to find anything that fits without trying on every pair of slacks in the store.

When I got to college I discovered that if I wanted to shop for, and wear boutique fashions from stores like the Gap, I would have to start shopping in the Men’s section. The largest woman’s size pant carried at most Gap stores is a 14 and there is usually one on the rack in the worst possible color. For men, the largest typical size is a 44. A 44 in men’s pants translates roughly to a 22 in Women’s. A 22. So that’s 4 full sizes larger than anything on the women’s racks.

However, pants for men and women are obviously made differently. Men, for instance, do not have wide hips and big butts as a rule. My tendency to wear my pants resting on top of my hip bones actually works in my favor most of the time where men’s pants are concerned. Now that my hips and butt are slimming down however, I find that the pants that fit me above the hips tend to balloon out through the hip, leg and crotch. At least most of them do.

By “most of them” I mean this: The pants I wore yesterday were balloonish. The ones I’m wearing today are the exact same “alleged size” of a different brand and they fit me fine. The pair of slacks I bought Sunday at the mall are slightly too big and they’re two sizes smaller than the last pair of ladies slacks I bought from this same chain.

It’s killing me.

What do you hate to shop for?