Jeneration X: One Reluctant Adult's Attempt to Unarrest Her Arrested Development; Or, Why It's Never by Lancaster, Jen (e books free to read .txt) 📕

between us but two iron porch rails and a three-foot strip of sidewalk. Such was our proximity that I could identify every legume in their three-bean salad picnic suppers.

Many of our windows lined up with those next door, so the first thing I did upon move-in was to hang completely opaque blinds because I’m a big, fat hypocrite who believes in spying but not being spied upon. [I said it so you don’t have to.] However, we had a particularly large set of transom windows over the stairway in that house and they couldn’t be covered with anything that wasn’t custom-made. We immediately sought out estimates on drapes because my desire to not be seen without pants outweighed my thirst for information.

Due to excessive width and the height, we’d have to pay over a thousand dollars to insure no one saw my underwear as I dashed from the bathroom to the bedroom. I wasn’t about to drop that kind of cash on a rental home, so I spent seventy bucks on a pink terry-cloth robe from L.L. Bean. Monogrammed and everything! Problem solved, problem staying solved… or so I thought.

Here’s the thing… if you can see into my house, I can also see into yours. That’s how regular glass works. Why the sight of me zipping past in a blur of damp hair and shame didn’t spur some flash of realization with the folks next door, I’ll never know. Ergo, I felt… somewhat justified in seeing snatches of their lives, rationalizing if they didn’t want me serving witness, they’d close their blinds. I mean, all I was doing was climbing my stairs—no crime in that, yes?

At first, the window into their home office was a lot like watching the boring bits of Big Brother, only with a lot fewer camera angles and no Power of Veto competitions. Due to our proximity, I could read the titles of the books on the shelves. I could tell whether or not the wife had dabbed on zit cream. Like it or not, their world was my (voyeuristic) oyster.

Gazing into the fishbowl of their lives was kind of what I’d expected back in the day when I ordered the sea monkeys advertised in my Archie comic books, except they didn’t run around in crowns carrying scepters. [Anyone else still pissed off about the whole sea monkey thing? They were supposed to hang out in front of their castle and read and be our friends, but all they did was flit about in a bowl of brackish water.] The best part was that I wasn’t spying so much as simply walking from the bedroom to the bathroom—repeatedly—and I was able to keep my promise to Fletch. Hey, I’m not spying! I just happen to need to brush my teeth thirty times a day!

A while after we moved in, they rearranged the room and suddenly I could see what was on their computer monitor, too. Oh, boy! Now it’s getting good, I thought.

The wife was a big fan of Facebook and Zappos and LOLCats. She spent an awful lot of time uploading photos of her dog who had a shockingly large number of embroidered sweatshirts. Every time we saw Pippen, a highly strung Bouvier des Flanders, in the yard with a fresh haircut and a new shirt, Fletch would whisper, “How badly does she want a baby?”

As for the husband’s viewing pleasure?

That’s where it got troubling, bless his XXX-rated heart.

The (thankfully) odd part is he never seemed to be… um, enjoying [If you know what I mean. And if you don’t know what I mean, please don’t make me explain it.] all the bare-bottomed babes on his screen. His actions were never untoward. Rather, he’d simply click through page after page of GIFs for hours in a highly clinical manner, almost as if he were sorting, rather than ogling. He had all the passion of a gynecologist flipping through a bunch of pap smear results. I felt oddly comforted by this.

Now, you fellows out there, I’m not going to judge you if you like to see a little strange on the computer from time to time. Because, really? That’s why Al Gore invented the Internet in the first place. But I will say this: if you have so much porn on your computer that it takes months and months to organize your stash, you either need to seek help or turn this into a business.

Perhaps you’re not a perv at all; perhaps you’re an entrepreneur.

The worst part of all this for me was that the vista was so clear that I could even determine the era of nudie photos he most favored. He must have come of age during the Olivia Newton-John Let’s-Get-Physical days because he was all about the shots from the eighties. How was I so sure?

The standards of grooming have changed since then.

I haven’t been this bothered by anything since I discovered my sea monkeys were essentially water lice. I felt like the universe was telling me, “Hey, you wanna spy? Oh, I will GIVE you something to spy, missy.”

To put the situation in different terms, you know sometimes when you want a cookie of the oatmeal variety, so you make a batch of them? And you use the recipe from the smiley blue Quaker’s drum and it always makes way more than you meant? Like, you wanted enough cookies for a decent snack, yet you wound up with six dozen, even though you got super sick of touching cookie batter towards the end and made the last few dough balls big as baseballs?

And turns out you baked so damn many oatmeal scotchies that all you’re doing is eating cookies for every meal because they’re right there and you’re kind of hungry and, really, you don’t want them to go to waste because they took some effort to create? So you eat and eat and eat far past the point of actual enjoyment? And then you spend the bulk of your day in