My New Apartment

Some notes:

• After 7am the bedroom resembles the sun. People like to make themselves feel good about themselves by pretending that they need to have windows everywhere. "I'm the type of person who never wants to be in a room without a window," they think, smugly. But this big, shadeless window is nothing short of an alarm, set at 7am permanently, with no snooze button (even if there were a snooze button, it would be mad selfish of me to turn the sun off for my snoozing convenience).

• I met my neighbor yesterday. Boris. I estimated his age as somewhere between 90 and 100. We were instant friends.

• Another neighbor is a dentist. This made me extremely uneasy, only because one time about 6 years ago I saw some crappy late-night TV movie about a dentist who goes on a gruesome killing spree, and I've hated dentists ever since. On the plus side it's nice not to have to deal with going to the dentist and paying for an appointment, since he can just do it.

• The 80-year-old South African building manager, who is already becoming a third grandmother in my life, told me about what she called a "very nice young lady" who lives on the floor below me. She even had the balls to stress that this young lass was single. All this means to me is that this is 100% the person I will always end up in the elevator with when I'm in mesh shorts and sneakers on the way to the gym.

The overall package seems acceptable to me. As of now I'm living with dozens of boxes. These boxes are nothing short of being all up in my grill. Right now we're in a bit of a standoff. I look at them, they look daunting to unpack, and I back down. I finally found the toothpaste in one of them last night, thank god, and I discovered some clothing in another, which has allowed me to function in public. So that's good. Now I'm headed to the kitchen to enjoy a breakfast of "bread with condiments", a meal I also enjoyed for dinner last night.