I want to talk about the coolest feature of my new Burlingame apartment: the windows. Windows, plural. I have one, two, three, four windows—five if you count the peephole—and feel blessed to once again receive that sweet precious sunlight which was so lacking when I lived in San Francisco. (This lack of sunlight was partially due to the fog and partially due to the fact that my apartment was a converted quasi-subterranean garage which looked out upon a concrete driveway—i.e. my yard—and the underside of the upstairs neighbor’s deck.
Unfortunately, there is one major drawback of my window situation. My building is separated by one car length from the apartment building across the alley and so anyone who draws open their blinds has all the privacy of a zoo animal. Problem is, I tend to forget this fact as I go about the less glamorous moments of my daily routine—the scratching, the picking, the playing my belly like a bongo drum. Only several nights ago I was eating Count Chocula from a tupperware container when one of my ghost marshmallows fell into the faded brown living room carpet. I picked it up, blew off the carpet crud, and instinctively moved the marshmallow toward my open mouth to eat. I halted at the second—the blinds were open! I looked out the window only to find that the man one window over was scrubbing dishes and gazing outward, seemingly at nothing in particular. I wondered whether my neighbor was truly staring off into space or if he had, in fact, been looking at me and suddenly averted his eyes when I glanced his way. To be safe, I decided I must operate under the assumption that he’d witnessed everything and now watched from his periphery to see what I would do with the marshmallow. It is not easy to improvise your way out of such a moment. I’m proud of the gambit I devised. I pulled the marshmallow away from my lips and raised it to eye level, squinting intently. I made a hmmmm face while I rotated the marshmallow for inspection from multiple angles. When at last I felt confident he’d seen me, I nodded to myself—so as to indicate my curiosity had been sated—and threw the marshmallow away. I figure that best case scenario, I fooled my neighbour into thinking I had a visual fascination with the marshmallow, not a desire to put it in my mouth. Worst case scenario, he saw me throw the marshmallow away so at least he thinks I have some discretion in the food I eat off the floor. Still, I can’t complain about my living situation. It could be worse. I could still be living in a one-windowed quasi-subterranean garage.
0 Comments
|