the immediate outside isn't so bad either - i walk out my door onto a bright, colorful doormat on a walkway i share with the neighbors. i can see the laundry room, grill area and the pool from my front door. i have an assigned carport with some storage space where my car gets parked everyday behind locked gates (even if i have to back in super close to the wall because the car on the other side of me takes his half of the carport out of the middle). it's not until those gates open that i realize, once again, that i live in the ghetto.
for example:
anytime i tell anyone around here who knows the area which street i live on, the response is the same ... "oooh ... ok".
a couple weeks ago a new friend sent me a text asking if i wanted to check out an apartment near hers just about a mile away. apparently someone else just moved into her complex because they'd been threatened in their old apartment (which happened to also be on my street).
each night between 8 and 9 pm, i can look out my bedroom window (which overlooks the carports and a large empty parking lot behind that) and see a big blue suburban parked there - black garbage bags filled with who-knows-what and tied down to the top of the car. that suburban stays there until about 7 am when it pulls away and drives off to who-knows-where.
most sunday afternoons a guy on a bike with a trailer follows a car into the parking lot and digs through the dumpsters for cans and bottles that us non-recyclers leave in our garbage bags. (i've learned pretty quickly to put any discarded mail in bags separate from the recyclables i'm choosing to throw away)
the thing is, living in the ghetto (or at least as ghetto as i'd ever like to find myself in) doesn't scare me. i don't feel unsafe even though i know there's definitely "unsafe" out there. it's starting to feel like another home (my actual home will pretty much always be wherever my family is). which is a good thing because my one-year lease says i'll be here for another 9 months at least.
