Love In The Asylum

[Error: unknown template qotd]The aprtment building my mom and I live in is set up in blocks of four connected apartments each, with the parking lot in the front and a quite lovely space in the back that's grass and trees and really tiny patio gardens, very convenient for the people like us that have pets. Not that pets are allowed in the buildings, but as long as you're resonsible and keep things clean and discreet, it gets overlooked; we have a cat and a rabbit, a few other people have cats, and at least one person I know of has a dog. Anyway, our apartment is on the bottom left of our block, and it's me, my mom, her boyfriend George, and at the moment my cousin Rick, since he just got out on bail. 

George lives in the apartment across from us, the bottom right - this is not my mom's boyfriend George, but another George altogether, and also his wife. I've not met his wife, but across-the-way George is an absolutely lovely person. He's a priest in some kind of odd branch Catholic sect, and runs a chapel out of his extra bedroom; when I was home during Easter, he had a full Easter Mass, wore his priestly robes and everything, for about 5 people. Mostly he's just really nice - I was able to get online during spring break because he let me mooch off his wireless, and even went so far as to give me the code when he encrypted it, for which my mom gave him cookies.

I don't think anyone lives in the apartment right above us, and I'm certainly grateful for that, because the last guy to live there was such a jerk! Nice enough when you talked to him face to face, but he threw impossibly loud parties almost every night, even in the middle of the week, with people stomping around and blasting rap music until 4 in the morning. I used to get into music wars with him; he'd start playing his awful hip-hop junk loud, and I'd counter by cranking up the volume on my JRock and my bagpipe music. The whole thing was just obnoxious, and while it wasn't that big of a deal for me because I stay up late anyway, my mom had a lot of early jobs in the summer, and when you have to be out the door at 6 in the morning, being kept up til 4 is not at all fun. Luckily, he moved up and now the apartment is empty.

Last is the apartment upstairs across from us, and that one is another George. Yeah, yeah, I know, I live in the Block of George. I've never met this guy, or even seen him, so any info I have on him is just what I picked up from gossiping with my mom. Assuming he's the same guy who lived there last time she started talking about our neighbors, George is Spanish, non-English speaking, possibly an illegal immigrant (of which we have so many), and some kind of artist, I think a painter. He has an ex-wife, or maybe just a baby-mama, who visits once in a while to leave the kids with him, but I've not seen them either. Granted, I've only been home for a month altogether since this guy moved in, and probably less than half that time was spent at the apartment, so the fact that I haven't seen much of this guy doesn't say all that much. But now I'm picturing myself in a bad children's detective story, where I decide he's up to something nefarious and start stalking on him, and spying through his windows, and maybe even sneaking into his apartment to find incriminating evidence of whatever I decide he must have done. That would be a more interesting way to spend my summer at least.