Please won't you *not* be my neighbor

Since the first of May, nothing has been the same in the apartment. I find that I miss my next-door meatball to whom I never spoke, and I definitely miss the two girls who used to be here. The beautiful Italian was also nice to have around. Their departure at the beginning of the month wouldn’t have been so tragic if they had been replaced by equivalently interesting or nice people. Instead, we now have one absurdly tall, skeletal Swede whose eyes protrude alarmingly out from his head and who slinks around much too noiselessly; we have a tall German man, also frighteningly skinny, who dresses only in black cotton, with the exception of his steel-toed combat boots; we have an American girl from Los Angeles who came to stay here for vacation--though she doesn’t know anyone and doesn’t speak Spanish and doesn’t take classes—and who disinfects her hands 3 or 4 times in the course of a conversation of the same length in minutes. We also have a Colombian couple in their fifties. The husband apparently has some vision problems as he leaves the bathroom covered with pieces of his shaved off beard and dribbles of urine on the toilet. I find this most unpleasant, though he and his wife are otherwise friendly people.

However, the last new tenant is my least favorite of all. He looks quite a lot like Lieutenant Dan from Forest Gump, though in that dirty, angry hippy phase post leg-loss. I forgot his real name because in my head he is Lieutenant Dan (actually, more like “lootinint day-yan”). He is from Nebraska and eats nothing but white bread, pork products and beer (his refrigerator shelf is right above mine). Lt. Dan’s diet is reflected in the most unfortunate way in his skin, which is excessively greasy, large-pored, and ruddy. He has hair growing chia-pet like from everywhere and he smells so sweaty that you can detect his odor walking a half a block behind him. All of this would be….less awful if he had a better personality. Lieutenant Dan introduced himself in the following way “Hi I’m Lieutenant Dan, from Nebraska, though I did my graduate work at Harvard.” What?! I found that to be both tacky and a pathetic attempt at arrogance. It was at that very moment that I began to see all of the pores on his face and the hairs on his neck. I might not have noticed them if he hadn’t been so arrogant. No, I would definitely have noticed them, but maybe they would have bothered me less. Anyway, I also dislike the way I run into him every evening when I’m coming home from class—he has a sneaky, cackling way of laughing, an insulting habit of not looking at my eyes when he speaks to me, and he follows me up the four flights of stairs even though I know he usually takes the elevator. Today, to avoid him, I dilly dallied at the university with some students, then walked half the way home. I arrived 40 minutes later than usual, only to find him smoking on a bench in front of our building. He threw his half smoked cigarette on the ground and followed me in the building.

I dislike him and his serpentine ways…