I hear them talking and one of the women says REALLY snidely, “Oh my GOD, someone keeps their water bottles on their front porch? How TACKY!”, then they all start filing down the stairs. When they see me, they all say excuse me cordially and one woman was extra sweet — Texas style. Meaning, covered in bullshit, bless her heart.

I smiled back and said jovially, “Oh, it’s no problem. I’m just the woman with the tacky water bottles on her porch.”

They looked uncomfortable and kept walking. But at the bottom of the stairs, I heard one of the women exclaim, “I am SO embarrassed.”

Good, lady. If you’re going to talk shit, keep your voice down or be prepared to be called on it. They’re 5 gallon bottles of delivered spring water, where do you suggest I keep them? Those capris you’re sporting are tacky, but you don’t hear me complaining.

I feel a little bad for firing back and embarrassing her in front of her friends — I could have let it go. But… I didn’t.

No high road for me today I guess. Given the expression on their faces, the low road is more scenic.

For those who don’t know, I’m moving out of my apartment in a week and a half.  I am really going to miss Casa Cocktail and all the good things about it, but lately the crap has started to outweigh the good things.  To start, Slick (a.k.a. Guitar Hero) picked up the electric guitar and bass as a hobby, which he played  every day at 4pm for 2-3 hours.  Is it not bad enough that his girlfriend made sex sounds like a caffeinated baboon, he had to fancy himself The Edge at least 5 days a week?  But… a blessing!  He moved out in April and took Ape Escape with him.

But then, GFI moved out.  I don’t know who the hell she thinks she is just moving out and having a life and stuff. I mean, god, lady. Don’t you know everything revolves around my happiness?  Obviously I’m kidding, but I miss her as a neighbor.  She never made a peep, we were BNF: Best Neighbors Forever.  I could text if she needed help when I heard she might’ve dropped something, she could text me to ask if I had margarita mix, we could sit on the patio and gossip about the neighborhood and I never, ever had to hear her pee.

When GFI moved out, we really pushed to get a woman to move in upstairs because we thought it would be better. It’s mostly women on this side of the building and, historically, single professional women tend to be quieter and more considerate than say… a guitar-playing baboon fucker.

And lo, we got a woman — a nurse, no less!  GFI met her and she seemed nice enough.  If only she’d known at the time that this woman — nay, this late-20′s girl — has feet made of cement and a double-wide disposition.  She walks so heavily, I half expect to hear “FEE FI FO FUM!”.

She also vacuums at 10pm or later indiscriminately.   Once at midnight in the bedroom on a weeknight!  She finds it impossible to enter or exit her apartment without sounding like a stampede of yaks and… this is the one that really gets me: she is incapable of going to the loo without stomping over to the bathroom, doing her business, then dropping the lid of the toilet and flushing every. single. time.  Now, this is something most people do, right? You go, you do, you flush, but for some reason, she even flushes loudly.  I never really noticed when GFI flushed, but I can actually hear this girl pee. And then she slams the lid and flushes… even in the middle of the night.

My name for her is Godzilla.  Also sometimes The Beast, Moose and “Oh my god, I hate you so much right now, wtf!”.  I tried to make nice in the beginning. I welcomed her with wine and smiles, both the property manager and I alerted her to the fact that this is a very old, very quiet building of single professionals and sound travels, so things like heavy walking and loud TVs/radios should be kept to a minimum. I also let her know I work at home and I gave her my phone number so she could text me if she needed anything or if I got to loud (and of course, it was just a ruse to get her phone number for the same purpose).

She doesn’t care. She told me we had to “learn to live together”.  I’m not your roommate, woman.  I pay my own rent and never had issues with upstairs noise until you got here. Check yourself.

And she lives a ‘younger’ lifestyle than I do, clearly.  Which is her prerogative, but one day, she turned up her radio SO loud it sounded like Fergie was playing live in my kitchen.  And all her little friends were clomping around on the terrace in their kitten heels, so I popped my head outside and there she was, hanging over the railing with a can of Miller Lite (sorry, I’m a beer snob), knocking some back before she and her friends hit “the club”.  Meanwhile, I was looking forward to a hot bath and the Ghost Whisperer, you know?  Different strokes.  I don’t begrudge her the fun, I just asked if she could turn it down a little because it echoes through the tile in the kitchen.  She turned it off and then sent me angry texts about how she feels like she’s “walking on pins and needles” and “I might as well turn it off — I can’t hear it outside”  Uh, it’s not my problem there’s a freeway, an ocean, some train tracks, a trolley and an airport outside that whisk away the sound.  Get a radio for the terrace, Mensa.

I even bought her a little giftie (of slippers — hint hint!) with a note that said I hoped we didn’t start out on the wrong foot and that she’s truly welcome in the building and I hope she enjoys it here.  If she could just try to walk a little lighter, I said, I would appreciate it.   It worked for like, a week. Now she’s back to Riverdancing around the house.

Bottom line?  She’s just a clod.  No grace.  NONE. I don’t expect her to go to Barbizon, for chrissake, but didn’t anyone teach her how to walk like a lady?  She’s a tall girl, but I’m 5’10 and not exactly the slimmest of slims and I’m capable of walking without shaking the damn tschotschkes, why can’t she?  Put a book on your head!  She came home last night at almost 3am, banging and crashing about, peeing and slamming and flushing and finally, I reached over and banged on the wall.  LOUD. I’m done being nice about it.

I gave my notice to move a couple weeks ago. It makes me sad to give up this beautiful view.  And I really do love this apartment, but it pains me to live here sometimes, too.  It’s a vintage building and the apartments have good energy… or used to.  But the landlord doesn’t care about the building as much as I do and I’m tired of caring about the building more than he does.  In fact, I dream of winning the lottery and restoring the building to it’s original glory, then rennovating it to make it eco-friendly.  But that won’t happen and I’m sick of my sink smelling like rotten eggs and the plumbing backing up. I’m tired of the foundation crumbling and the lack of A/C.   There’s not quite enough space now that I’ve got Lulu and while they are going to do some improvements to the building (all new triple-paned windows and a fresh air circulation system — like central air without the conditioning part), I don’t want to wait around for that.  Besides, since the landlord is such a cheapskate (and he’s not paying for these improvements, the Port of San Diego is), he’ll most likely raise the rent once it’s done.  The view is beautiful, but if I’m going to pay more rent, I want a washer/dryer more.

I decided to move to an area of town that doesn’t have a view, but is centrally located — about 10 minutes from everything.  It’s not the most beautiful area of town ever, but the property itself is like an oasis and it’s a big complex with proper maintenance staff and amenities like a pool, fitness center and the like. I’ve got a washer/dryer in my apartment.  It’s bigger than this place and it’s got a new kitchen and a big soaking tub.  It’s very much like my apartment in Dallas, which was comforting somehow.

Like I said, I will miss this place… quite a bit. It’s been one of my favorite places I’ve ever lived and I have great memories from here. But it’s not the same building it once was… the good juju I felt when I moved in is replaced by cursing and wall-banging and other rude neighbors.

It’s time to move on.

Similarly, Twitter.  At first (and sometimes still) I didn’t ‘get it’.  As an old school blogger, I found the idea of microblogging kind of weird.  I didn’t want to know what everyone was doing right that minute.  But then I gave it a chance and actually quite enjoy it… because I use it the way I want to use it and not how Mr. Know-It-All Blogger says I should.  Sure, it’s almost killed my desire to blog in a sense because I can spit out whatever I’m thinking right when I’m thinking it rather than try to craft a blog post around one clever thought and, like anything else, Twitter and it’s users do things that bug me, but I take it with a grain of salt. Nothing is perfect and I have to assume that somewhere someone finds my tweet-style excrutiating.  Different strokes.

I’ve run into a rash of articles lately that all have a running theme of unholy hatred for Twitter (and/or Facebook).  I don’t mind tips and tricks kinds of articles or the occasional cheeky humor-based commentary (especially #2), but these official-looking “articles” (*cough*blogentries*cough*) that do nothing but complain about how people “aren’t being true to the conversation” or that they “don’t want to know what you had for lunch” really grate.

Guess what? Sometimes I don’t want to know that you went to the laundromat or that you think chickpeas are gross or “OMG Baltar is totally the 5th cylon!”   If that’s the case, I just won’t follow you or I’ll ignore the tweet.  I’m not going to write a highfalutin article chock full of piss n’ apathy, telling you how you should be doing it.  You know the ones with titles like:   “You must do how I do it or you suck.” or “Don’t use Twitter this way because I’m totally an elitist prick and I will think less of you.”   Or… you know, whatever they’re called… they just irk me.  Can I do anything about it other than gripe to you fine people?  No. But I certainly feel better about it.

And, I suppose this is what those folks are doing, too, but I’m not applying any level of expertise to my rant. I’m not pretending to be some kind of guru on social networking and how it ‘should be done’.  I’m just so sick of hearing about how Twitter is “lame” or Facebook is “stupid”. I think it insults the people who enjoy it and belittles the efforts of those who are trying to embrace technology in a way that’s comfortable for them.

We all have things we like or we don’t like about blogging, social networks, web applications, etc. They’re called opinions and they’re totally valid.   But unless you’re paying for it, either don’t use it or sack up and quit talking down to us like we care what you think.

I’m so sick of all the previews.  Commercials show the whole damn show, practically. The preview they show before the show starts (for FIVE MINUTES) reveals everything we’re about to see. The preview before each commercial break shows us 30 seconds of what we’re about to see when they’re done recapping for another 30 seconds after the commercial.  Then they maybe show me 3 seconds of real show they already showed me in the preview and then preview what’s about to happen next. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Now it’s happening in the ‘info’ on cable, too. I was sorting out my shows and was checking to see if something was a repeat. I hit ‘info’ on a particular episode and it told me the entire episode in detail, down to the ‘shocking surprise’. Thanks, now I don’t have to watch the show.  Assholes.

I don’t even bother going to the movies anymore. Why pay $10 for something I can see for free in the commercial?  Then the moment a movie actually hits theaters, the morning that it opens, before anyone has a chance to even see it, they show even more of it in the previews.  You just saved me $10 and my firstborn child for a box of Red Vines.  Thanks, Hollywood!

I tallied up the amount of series I have listed in my ‘scheduled series’ profile and it’s something like fifty. Fifty shows.  Granted, not all at once, most shows are cyclical and seasonal and only are about 8-12 episodes. Its not like I watch fifty shows at once. But seriously… fifty shows?  As Oprah would say, what am I hungry for?   Why does anyone have that much scheduled television?  Because there’s no show in my show!  I’m entertainmentally deficient! Showtime and HBO series (and sometimes Bravo) provide actual nutrients, but everything else is just empty calories.  Television is the 64 oz. Big Gulp of media.

And on top of that, now that so many people have DVR, shows automatically run 2-3 minutes beyond their scheduled end-point so that you purposefully lose the end of the show. I think they do it to discourage recording the show since television is losing advertising dollars due to the almighty fast-forward button.  Fortunately, AT&T U-verse has a “record until 5 minutes past” feature, which is handy, but I still think it’s shifty.

Gee, perhaps all this griping will get me to whittle the series list down to a manageable 35 or so.  Probably not.  But it does make me realize I really do have time to go to the gym… *sigh*

Color-blind?  Ok, I’ll have to suck it up there – my dad was colorblind (or so I suspect of Mr. Olive Pants-Brown Shoes-Purple Shirt) – but only about 5% of men and less than 1 percent of women are likely to be color-blind so when I hear a reference to something as yellow when it’s orange or vice versa, it’s like nails on a chalkboard to me.  Hopefully, this doesn’t incite the wrath of the color-impaired.

I realize it’s the persnickety designer in me, the part that actually cares about the nuances of ecru vs. tan vs. cream vs. eggshell.  And I realize sometimes people can’t help it and color may be considered somewhat subjective, but I certainly am not going to go outside and declare the sky aubergine simply because that’s how I perceive it (that’s ‘eggplant’ or a deep purple/black with what some might call a slightly red undertone, in case you were wondering).  And no, I don’t think the sky is eggplant.

Teal is another one. Teal and turquoise.  Teal is more green. Turquoise is more blue. And aqua… well, that’s a tough one. Aqua is like turquoise and teal had a very light-colored lovechild.  Don’t tell cerulean.

Pink and coral?   Coral is not orange. Coral is not pink. It’s a combo of the two, hence… coral.  C’mon now.  Ok,  I’ll concede the pink/coral thing could be subjective, I suppose. Some people might see more pink. Some might see more orange.  But basics like yellow and orange? Orange is orange. Yellow is yellow. If it’s more orange than yellow, but it’s still yellow, it’s “orange-ish yellow” or vice versa… yellow-orange.  We have hyphens for a reason. Crayola loves a hyphen. Embrace the hyphen!

Or purple and brown is another. For some reason, I often get references to the color of our business site as being purple.  I see it more in the brown or gray family, leaning toward taupe. “Puce” if you want to get really uptight about it.  But I suspect even seasoned artistes don’t walk around saying ‘puce’ unless they wish to incur a snobbery-induced asskicking.

Why do these minor color infractions bother me so? It’s not the end of the world. It’s just colors. Maybe because color makes up such a prominent part of my life and who I am.  My curtains aren’t blue, they’re pale aqua. My carpet isn’t yellow, it’s Corn Chip. (No, really… that’s the color: Corn Chip. It’s on the label.) My couch is sage, my bedspread is deep rust.  But my living room rug?  That’s orange. If I wanted to get all snooty, I could say it’s “tangerine” or something, but no… it’s straight-up orange at a glance.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with colors being blue or red or green or yellow. The basics have gotten us this far, but descriptions and variations are what make color so exciting for me.

So brown that’s purple or orange that’s yellow?  It’s almost disrespectful to the amazing subtleties of color in everything around us.  It’s color heresy in my book. If you can’t help it, you can’t help it… I feel for you, in fact.

But if you can see all the wonderous colors, why not take a moment to describe them to yourself, to a child, to someone with their eyes closed… or whomever.  Write it down in your journal, whatever blows your dress up.  I find when I stop to admire the little details, I appreciate so much more the tiny differences that make many colors unique in their own right.

The line at this Rite Aid is always slow and for some reason, people always form one big line instead of lining up at each register (there are eight registers), then the next checker that is available takes the next customer.  Well, last night, there was an Asian dude in front of us holding two bottles of wine, a crotchety guy in a yellow shirt holding a box of Tucks or something, this Isaac Hayes (R.I.P.)-type guy (who we saw tip his hat at someone earlier — I love that), and then 3 registers with customers already being helped.

One cashier finished and called out, “I’ll take the next person!” and Crotchety Yellow Shirt and his hemorrhoid pads tried to dash out behind Isaac Hayes Guy, but Isaac Hayes Guy was no fool and he cut Crotchety off, taking his rightful place at the counter.  Crotchety grumbled and griped, but shuffled back into line, ahead of the Asian Wine Drinker.  While this was going on, a strapping middle-aged, tank-top wearing homosexual (not that his sexuality is relevant, but it paints a picture and I happened to be in the gayborhood) with a cart full of ammonia bottles and paper towels pulls up in line behind us.

Asian Wine Drinker keeps looking around the store, turning around and looking past us, past Ammonia Mo, all over the place. But before I could ponder what he was looking for, Isaac Hayes Guy was finishing his transaction.

This is where I kind of lost my cool.

One of my biggest pet peeves in this world is people who “cut”.  I hate when I’m stuck behind someone in traffic with my signal blinking, desperate to find an opening in the next lane so I can dash out and pass the slowpoke in front of me.  That’s bad enough, but what really chafes is the jerk immediately behind you that takes your window of opportunity, leaving you in the dust.  The same principle applies to queuing at the store.

As soon as the cashier called the next person, Ammonia Mo without any regard for common decency, maneuvered his cart out of the line and darted over to the open cashier while the rest of us stood there with untreated butt issues, unopened wine, and melting ice cream.

My mouth fell open. I loudly said to mikey and Asian Wine Guy, “Oh, I’m sorry!  Were you first?  I didn’t notice you…” I continued to bitch loud enough for the guy to hear me.  But he didn’t care. That’s the part that just blows me away.  Yes, it’s rude to cut in line, but at least act like you feel bad about it.  At least Crotchety Yellow Shirt grudgingly went back into line.  I mean, you don’t even care that people in line think you’re a complete and utter douchebag?  He just kept loading his bottles of ammonia up on the counter, looking stoically straight ahead.  He knew he was a jerk, but he. didn’t. care.  I realize that I, like many humans, care too much what people think on occasion, but this is ridiculous.  This is an affront on common courtesy, on societal decency… and frankly, it’s just plain dick.

Once a few years ago, I scolded at a guy in a home improvement store because we’d all been waiting an aeon in a line and a guy walked up to the line just as a new register was being opened.  And then there was the time I shamed Diaper Debbie in front a whole Sprint store.  I am beyond over this kind of rudeness and I’m not afraid to call someone out on their assholery.

I was about to do just that (much to mike’s chagrin, I’m sure), but before I could, Ammonia Mo started loading his stuff back in his cart.  I thought that for once the establishment was going to act on behalf of it’s customers and tell the guy to wait his turn, but no… he’d forgotten his wallet.  Just desserts, I guess.

My parents, even in the short time I had with them, instilled me with manners, respect for others, understanding that the whole world doesn’t revolve around me (despite what I thought when I was 15) and the knowledge that there are just some things that you don’t do.  It’s just a given.  I can’t believe I saw this kind of rudeness twice in one night, in one line within a matter of minutes!  What the hell is wrong with people?

I dragged mikey to the Sprint store yesterday with me in a fit of “I’m Getting a New Phone Before I Throw This Against the Wall” and parked next to us was a fairly nice black town car of some sort.  Mike got out of the driver’s side and as I was about to exit the passenger side, I noticed a woman slowly making her way from the passenger seat of the town car.  She saw me waiting for her, but she took her sweet time.  I realized she had a very wee baby with her, so I took a deep breath and tried to be patient. Finally, she rolls out of the car with her baby and starts to walk away.

Using his Spidey Sense, Mike immediately ran over to the town car, bent over and looked underneath.  The look on his face said it all.  Oh yeah.  Diaper..  Used, stinky, poo-laden, stranger-person’s diaper left in the parking lot.  That has long been a “thing” with me… I hate littering of any sort, I hate it. But leaving a napkin on a table is a far cry from leaving feces under your Lincoln. We have laws against leaving your dog crap on the ground, you’d think that it would be understood that people crap is pretty much a no-go.

It was confirmed that yes, there is, indeed, a diaper under the car and I noticed that as the woman was walking away, she glanced back at us a few times. I was certain she knew we were talking about her.  Perhaps it was my, “She did WHAT!?” that tipped her off.

So, anyway, maybe it was my already foul mood, but I’d had enough.  I figured, “Who cares? I’m never going to see this woman again. What’s she going to do?  Shank me?” While she was still a good few hundred feet ahead of us, she entered the Sprint store. How convenient!  With purpose I marched right through the doors, right past the front desk helper girl (mike stopped to give her the dish) and straight up to Debbie Diapers, who was standing with her assumed husband at the counter.  In a voice loud enough for people nearby to hear, but not loud enough that I looked like a crazy person, it went a little like this:

Me: Excuse me, ma’am?

(She turned around, still bouncing the baby, with a tight-lipped “What the hell do you want?” look on her face)

Her: Yes?

Me: Were you planning on leaving that dirty diaper under your car in the parking lot?

(Looking me directly in the eye, the red splotches of embarrassment creeping their way up her cheeks)

Her:  Yup!

Me:  Wow.  Really?  So, you’re just going to leave your kid’s poop in the parking lot to rot?  To harm the environment? For someone else to pick up?

(Her lips are pinched into a Renee Zellweger-esque onion stink-face by this point and her face is pretty flushed)

Her:  Uh huh.  Yeah.

(Mind you, all of this monosyllabism is presented with a very adolescent, “What are you going to do about it?” kind of tone.)

Me: Really? You’re just going to leave it there because you were too lazy to walk it to the trash? You passed three trash cans on the way to this store… you couldn’t have just dropped it in?

(Her face is red hot at this point and I can see her eyes are glassy and her jaw clenching. Finally, she said nothing, but broke my gaze — I WIN!  The best part was that her husband just let her stand there and get her ass reamed by a stranger.  Now that’s commitment!)

Me:  That’s lovely.

Then I turned and walked away from her.

I was so just… offended! Grossed out!  Disgusted by her lack of decency, laziness and outright just… ICK factor.  In fact, Sprint should give her a discount because she redirected the anger I was winding up to pitch at Sprint.

We watched, along with our Sprint agent, to make sure she didn’t get creative with that diaper.  But, much to my delight, when we left, the diaper was gone.  I can only assume I shamed her into picking it up and while I am not the type of person to take pleasure in embarrassing someone, in this case, perhaps it will make her think twice before doing it again.

Hmph! 

The second woman really sent me over the edge.  A well-dressed, extremely put-together woman in her late 20’s, maybe early 30’s in a Lexus, while sitting at a traffic light, just flung open her door and hocked one right on the concrete.  It wasn’t even discreet or ladylike in any fashion.  I thought maybe she’d found something floating in her coffee or something, but even then, crack the door, be discreet, or hell! Spit it back in the cup and get a fresh one when you get to work.  Don’t make me have to watch it!  It made me thankful my mom instilled manners in me at an early age.  Gah.

Speaking of coffee, remember when I talked about Food Processes?  Well, coffee is one of my “processes”.  I’m completely retentive about my coffee and I own that. I go to Einstein’s this morning for my usual cup o’ joe and they were not only out of all the creamers (2%, skim, half-n-half, etc.), but they only had a dribble of my usual coffee left in the urn and it was burned.  So I ask, “Do you have any Vanilla Hazelnut brewing?” The cashier lady, whom I’ve secretly dubbed Horse Tooth, reaches out her hoof to grab my cup and fill it from the semi-brewed pot behind the counter.  I kind of…pull back and say, “Oh, no…that’s ok. I can wait, thank you. (insert sweet smile here) I have kind of a …process.”

I stood around for a while and then Horse Tooth nays, “Excuse me! Lady with ‘the process’!!!!” Nice, huh? I go over there and she snatches my cup and runs to fill it up. I realize she was trying to be nice, but dammit, I said I’d wait!  She comes back with a totally full cup and then not two seconds later, they bring the urn out to the coffee bar so I could have filled it myself. I tried to “build my cup” properly, given the cup she’d filled for me, but it just wasn’t right. I had to dump it and start again.  She’s messed with my process.

You don’t screw with the process.