Rochester

if the drug dealers' friends beep the horn one more time to get their attention, i'm going to go all crazy-neighbor and beat them to death. i hate that.

i lived in Rochester, MN, for a summer, and the apartment we lived in was a little odd - everyone sharing space with us happened to be foreign (we said somalia, but that might have been an assumption.. you know.. it was easier than determining their actual decent, so we just went with it. mainly because giving them a label was easier). it made for some strange cultural shocks. for one, i don't particularly find the smell of somolian food appetizing. just a personal preference, one that was beat into my head all summer long. i guess the smell of their food carries farther? maybe it was just that it didn't really smell like "food" to me, and it was constantly around. another thing that irked me was the beeping; the constant nature of which led me to believe that either the cars in somolia didn't have horns, or they didn't have that muscle in the back of their necks (the one that twitches in spasms when it hears the beeps continued).

the smell might be a random association - the whole summer was one of my worsts. it was three years ago (in some ways, i think "three years? it feels like yesterday!", and in others, i think, "wow, only three years? so much has changed.."), and the summer wasn't one of those that will go down in my memory as being one of the best.. not by a long shot. i didn't see my family all summer long, and we were pretty well disconnected from our friends, as well. Sam was working a lot, and when he wasn't working, he was stressed out. at that point in his life, when Sam got stressed out, he took it out on a 1.75 of really cheap vodka. and we argued, a lot - mostly when he was sober, but the silence carried over into his drunk. everyone was sick - just the facts of life in a town where the major pull is the medical center, i guess. but i'd never really seen so many deathly ill people in one place, and it was depressing. i worked (for half the summer) in a party goods store, and we sold balloons. the balloons were more often "get well" bouquets than anything else. it was unnerving. the smell was constant, the whole summer long. it was hell, and that was the aromatherapy, the atmosphere smelled of somolian cooking.

the beeping, however, is more of a major annoyance to me. it sets off that button in my head that makes me want to scream. it tells me that someone is too lazy to walk to a door, and ring a doorbell. the beepers (the lazy people) are usually impatient as well. the frequency of the beeps leads me to believe they expect their expected party to materialize, and the absurdity of that idea hurts my head. the other part of it that annoys me is the sheer stupidity of it all - if everyone who visits anyone in an apartment building is beeping to get the attention of the visitee's, then how the hell will anyone know they're supposed to go to check? for that whole summer, it was as if we were the only ones in the place who didn't have beeping visitors.. pretty much the only thing we knew if someone was beeping, was that it wasn't for us. i hate beeping.