Spying on the Neighbors Again

I'm in a new apartment and you know what that means: more neighbors to watch and hypothesize about!

1) There are two handicapped parking places (hmmm...that sounds as though the spaces themselves are handicapped...parking spaces for handicapped people?) in the parking lot outside my apartment. Obviously, these are the two best spots in the parking lot, the ones closest to my building. I'm not exactly complaining about this. Handicapped parking spaces are necessary. But who is using these spaces, you ask? I'll tell you who: A man who seems to weigh about 400 pounds but outwardly shows no sign of a true disability. He has a personal car and a car for his business, and so he gets to use both spaces, apparently just because he is fat. Now I realize that maybe he has some sort of underlying medical condition that leads to his excess weight. I don't know what it would be. A heart condition or a thyroid thing, maybe? But the vast majority of people who blame their obesity on a medical condition don't actually have a medical condition at all, and anyway, wouldn't getting a tiny amount of exercise--say, the amount needed to walk a couple of extra steps from a further parking spot--help? Surely carrying around that much weight is detrimental, no matter what your "condition" is. At any rate, even if he does have some terrible disability that causes him to gain weight and isn't in fact just a lazy person taking advantage of the system, it annoys me that he gets to have BOTH of the best spaces.

2) Last night I finally (finally!) finished unpacking my last box of clothes and I took it down to the dumpster to throw it away. This was around midnight. I do realize that strolling outside at midnight is probably not wise around here, but this complex really does seem safe and I don't want to be paranoid, either. Careful and cautious, but not paranoid. Anyway, when I opened the door to take the box outside I literally ran into a girl who then knocked on my down-the-hall neighbor's door and slipped inside. This was midnight, remember. Then this afternoon around 2:30 I was heading down to the pool to work out when the neighbor's door opened and he stepped out...with a different girl! I don't really think three people could share that apartment, there wouldn't be room. Plus the one girl knocked and didn't have a key so she was probably a visitor. My sister pointed out that the afternoon girl could be his roommate and the other one could be his girlfriend or just visiting the other girl, but I prefer to think that my new neighbor is pimpin' over there and calls up a different girl every few hours.

3) Because this apartment complex charges approximately a million dollars a month for a one bedroom apartment, they can afford some pretty frivolous extras, like hiring lifeguards for the complex pool. There were two lifeguards there today, both very blonde and very German (I can't figure out if they are siblings or a couple). I noticed them at the pool all last week, too, when I was going back and forth to the mail room and the laundry room. Since it seems that the majority of people in this complex work a pretty standard 9-5 schedule, the lifeguards seem to spend most of the day just sitting at a table by the pool eating fruit and talking. But then whenever someone shows up and gets into the water, one of the lifguards has to go sit at the lifeguard stand and watch. When I first got to the pool this afternoon there were three people around my age swimming. The lifeguard was watching. So I lounged and read for a while, and the three people eventually got out of the pool and the lifeguard left his stand and went to lounge, too. After a while I got up to get into the pool to do my workout, and up sprang the lifeguard to sit at his stand again. I find this really awkward, mostly because it makes me feel like, "Oh, maybe I shouldn't swim because if I wasn't in the water right now this guy would be able to just lounge. I feel bad for making him work." I realize it's his job, but I still felt a little guilty every time I got into the water. It was fine in the later afternoon once there were more people swimming, but it was definitely weird when the lifeguarding was just guarding me. It was even weirder because I was just doing a workout routine in the shallow end (jogging, ab work etc.) and I am a fairly adept swimmer so I would have been just fine with the lifeguard lounging on the other side of the pool. That would have been preferable, actually. But I didn't want to be like, "Hey, I'm okay, really," because I'm sure he legally has to take his post whenever someone is in the pool. Eventually I got over it and just did my workout and stopped feeling guilty for making the lifeguards actually work for a while. But now I have all these questions. Do they live here? What happens when the pool closes for the winter? Is having a lifeguard a state law here or just an extra precaution demanded by residents in this complex at some point? I'll definitely be going back to the pool if I have time because it's a very nice pool and the water was a perfectly refreshing temperature (unlike the lukewarm bath at my last complex) but it's weird.

That's it on the neighbor front for now. Hopefully soon I'll have things to write about that are more interesting than my neighbors, anyway. Tomorrow I'm having lunch with a fellow Ph.D. student. She's a year ahead of me in the program (I think) and she got her masters from the same program I just graduated from and knows my advisor there, so I had contaced her back in April when I was trying to make a decision between the two programs that accepted me. She was really helpful then, and she offered to show me around if I opted to come to school up here. She e-mailed me again reminding me of her offer once she heard that I'd accepted a position here. So I e-mailed her today asking if she wanted to meet this week, and she called me back and now she's going to show me around the department and take me to lunch tomorrow! She sounds really nice on the phone. We're at different points in our lives (I'm guessing she's at least six or seven years older than me since she taught for a while between her BA and her MA and she's married and has a kid) but I'm hopeful that she could become a friend here. It's a start, anyway!