My new studio apartment is tiny. There's room to sleep, but everything else is pretty much left to chance - including food. Unless I sit in the chair, which is sorta the living room area, I can choose to eat my dinner either on the bed, which I guess is the bedroom - or also the family room, and the lounge chair. But eating in the chair runs a choking hazard while leaning in for the salt. And dinner in bed feels too relaxed and subordinate for any typical dinner etiquette - table top dining, with a fat tire to your left and remote toggling Jon Stewart's face to your right. Then there's the kitchen, which is where I kinda feel the dinner happens. But when your standing here, pulling food out of a Jello bowl in the crunched corner of this dollhouse, everything becomes immediate and urgent. Why yes, I would like another glass of milk. What's that, you want my to wash my dinner plate before I'm done eating? You bet I will. Anything to get me out of this corner.
Of course, when it takes only one good stride to step from the bedroom to the kitchen, it makes hippies look not only incredibly simple-minded, but incredibly lazy too. I mean, where else can you watch the noodles boil from the comfort of your own bed? Where a bathroom break merely requires standing up? And where, at any moment, a cool, frothy beer can be found at arms reach? Nothing without sacrifice, of course. Washing your hair requires first bumping your elbows multiple times lathering the shampoo, then bending over so your hair can reach the waist-high fire hydrants rushing out to stab your body. There's no forgetting the 747s either. They're a constant in this ghetto. You either thicken your skin, or get fettered by an irritating rash that will never go away. My injury count consists of two cuts on the leg, one bruise on the shin, three stubbed toes, and one red, swollen burn on my left index finger. This is a total compression of life, in every sense of the word.
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