Privacy: Reserved for the Elite

Living in an apartment, we share a backyard (of sorts, mostly gravel) with our neighbors. There is a unit across the “yard” from ours that has a tiny patio surrounded by a low fence.

Sarah likes to sit outside to talk on the phone, probably because she doesn’t want anyone to overhear her talk shit about people behind their backs.* She tends to open the gate to our neighbor’s patio and stretch out on one of the chairs while on the phone.

One day, our neighbor caught Sarah on her patio chair.

“The girl in the back is such a bitch!” Sarah complained to me later.

“Why, what happened?”

“She came home and saw me on the phone on her porch, and she told me to get off! She was like, ‘I am a really private person, and I don’t want you sitting on my patio anymore’ or something.”

“I’m sure she didn’t say it like that,” I said lightly. “The patio is so small that the chairs are right next to her front windows, so I could see why she doesn’t want strangers sitting there….”

“Whatever. I was on the phone with Sara, who heard the whole thing, and she thinks that girl is a total bitch too.”

“Okay.” Sometimes you just have to acknowledge Sarah’s ranting and let it go.

Later, Sara (who is in D.C. for the summer) and I were catching up on the phone when she told me that she heard what had happened with Sarah and the neighbor girl.

“Oh, I only heard Sarah’s side, so I don’t really know the details.”

“Well, Sarah shouldn’t have been opening the closed gate to sit on her patio anyway!” Sara scoffed.

Huh. I had no idea that Sara was such an expert on respecting others’ privacy/property.

* I’d give her the benefit of the doubt and suggest she likes to be outside, but she hates nature so it’s unlikely. Her second major is Conservation, and she’s in that awareness group for the environment, and yet Sarah refuses to do anything requiring extensive time outside.

If I Were Them, I’d Run in the Other Direction

Since both Sara and Sarah are from out of state, they have to pay a much higher tuition than us in-state kids do. The amount they pay is almost equal to a private school tuition, which sucks. Sarah’s parents decided to remedy the situation by picking up their family and moving over here in order to be closer to her and to get in-state residency. Which makes perfect sense, if you’d rather pay twice as much for a smaller house (thank you, housing bubble) in order to save a couple thousand on tuition for such a short amount of time… which leads me to believe that the latter reason is less important than the former.

Either way, Sarah is upset that her family wants to move their lives to be closer to her.

She doesn’t care that her younger sister is being plucked out of her high school circle and having to find a new place to fit in.

She doesn’t care that her parents have to find new jobs.

She doesn’t care that her father is making four drives between several states in order to move all their things over.

She’s pissed off that she won’t get to go back home during breaks, and that she is no longer going to live in a huge house with sprawling land. The poor girl has to put up with a smaller bedroom and a smaller backyard.

It has been a month since she found out about the move, and Sarah has not stopped complaining about how much she is suffering from having to move… when she is not actually helping her family to pack or drive over or any of it. Well, thank goodness she has something legitimate to whine about this time.