Keep your friends close...OK, that's close enough!

I love my neighborhood. It's quiet, sparsely populated, and most of my neighbors are retirement age.

However all things must change and they're building a couple of new homes on the road. A few of my friends are looking for houses. Two of my friends are very serious about the homes up the road.

I like hosting parties, having people over for BBQs, mainly because unless someone completely blitzed needs to sleep it off in the guest room everyone eventually goes home. I can see this proximity being too much and potentially fucking up the friendship. After all we've already had an argument about a shitty tar paper lean to that he would build (that I semi-jokingly said would lower property values in the neighborhood).

Focus: Have you had situation of friends/family living too close for comfort? Did you buy the house behind your parents place because you thought it would be great to still get home cooked meals from mom? Did you let a buddy move in only to find that they belonged on the show hoarders? Share your experiences.

 

Re: Keep your friends close... ok that's close enough

Good topic idea. My mom is a bleeding heart of sorts, and my brother often ran with a crowd of Kerouac-ian drifters. One time, a friend that "just needed a place to stay for a couple days" ended up there for about three months. That's probably tame compared to some of the stories out there.

 

The first apartment my sister had on her own was about a block or two away from my parents' house. She moved out because she felt like my parents were crowding her too much by asking where she was going and making sure she didn't fail out of college or lose her scholarship.

She ended up coming over a couple times a week to eat dinner, and drop off her laundry, and borrow money. Somehow, despite the fact that she was still here all the time, she lost her (full-ride) scholarship and had to drop out to go to community college.

 

Speaking of full-rides, I ended up getting a full ride to Rutgers (honor college too), which meant I could have stayed at home if I so desired, since I live in central Jersey. Of course I ended up going to an expensive private university, and about 90% of the people I knew from high school ended up at Rutgers. It was partly due to the fact that my current university is one of the best in the world for my field (international relations), but I'd be lying if I said the fact that it was so close didn't put me off. Plus I really relished the idea of never seeing some of my fellow students again.

My twin brother, on the other hand, hasn't dealt all too well with the distance - one "suicidal ideation" and medical leave of absence later, he's back in Pittsburgh, studying the exact same subject I am (and I suspect for exactly that reason - because I am). Sigh.

Edit: Maybe not directly on focus but I think it's close enough.

 

Let me give you some background:

Last spring, I decided I wanted my own kick-ass place in Philly's Olde City. I found this amazing aparment in a four story walk-up. The group of buildings was about 200 years old and the entrance to all the apartments was through this amazing little courtyard, hidden behind a large gate. I loved this place - it was above Market Street so there wasn't the douche-baggy Olde City drinking crowd wandering around, and you could sit in the courtyard at night and listen to the horse drawn carriages go clomping by. It was great.

I was traveling at the time, so I was only home on weekends. I came back on Thursday night and found my neighbor standing on the landing in front of my door, pounding away. Apparently, he had come home earlier and had no water pressure, but just placed a call to the super. It wasnt until about four hours later that he heard the faint sound of water coming from my place. That's right: a pipe had broken for god knows what reason and had been spraying water into my apartment for at least five hours. When I opened the door, it was a scene of utter chaos: the cieling had collapsed, there was water pouring of light fixtures on the wall. The bookshelf looked like a mini waterfall.

Obviously, that left me in a shitty spot. So after two months in a hotel, I sucked it up and leased a new place that one of my friends lived at. Huge mistake.

Huge.

You think you like somebody. You go drinking together. Hell, you hang out a lot. Maybe you sleep off the drunk on their floor? Well, none of that compares to what it is like to live right by them. Apparently, common courtesy goes out the window when you are neighbors, and they feel like they can pop over whenever the hell they want. That's horrible when you work from home.

And you know the worst part? You can never lie to them. You dont want to go out with them because you have other plans? Well, now you have to fess up and listen to the bitching. You know why? Your parking spots are next to each other. So when you say "I think Im just going to stay in tonight" when you really mean "Why the fuck would I spend more time with you? I am going to go out with my REAL friends," they know. And they know every time you bring someone home, or have a party, or get stoned.

It's like living in a fucking college dorm.

 

I lucked out with my roommate freshman year. She became one of my best friends at school, and we choose to room together our Sophomore year too. When it came time to move off campus, we didn't even have to think about looking for an apartment together. You would think that if we shared a tiny room together for two years that sharing a whole apartment would be fine.

It probably would've been fine, if she hadn't snapped for whatever reason and changed into this entirely different person who was a psycho. For the first semester, the problems were that she was a disgusting slob and ruined some of my dishes and never took care of anything and didn't hang out with me and our other roommate a single time outside of the apartment. She was also completely possessive of her boyfriend, and hated that we were all on friendly terms. She was clearly convinced that our discussions with him about rap (which she had no interest in or knowledge of) were filled with secret messages to each other about our affair we'd both been carrying on with him at the same time.

Then, second semester, it got really bad. She seemed to have conveniently forgot the whole last semester and was convinced that she was the only one who took care of the apartment and that we were cavemen who couldn't wipe our own asses, let alone the kitchen counters. In March, she and I had a fight that boiled down to me reacting poorly to finding out that she did something really stupid and then lying straight to my face multiple times when I confronted her about it. The result? She didn't talk to either of us for the rest of the year.

For the next couple of months, I did all I could to stay out of the stupid, petty drama, but she kept on finding more and more things to fight about through notes left on our refrigerator. We weren't allowed to touch or use any of her things in the kitchen (even though it was fine for her to ruin my stuff earlier in the year) and when she suspected that we were still using them (we weren't, except for the one time my roommate accidentally used one of her knives. She saw it in a picture she posted on her Twitter and picked a fight over it) she took more drastic measures. Every time she went away, she'd hide all of her silverware. In the fridge, she claimed her own shelf in the space, on the door, and cleaned out the coldcuts drawer to use as her own vegetable drawer (even though we already had two that we'd been sharing). If we dared put something on her shelf because it was too tall for "our" shorter shelves, it got left out on the counter.

Somehow, she became convinced that our sole mission in life was to ruin hers, even though (I swear) we weren't doing a damn thing and were just letting her be crazy in her own little world. She started taking pictures of her room every time she left and then would compare them with the state of the room when she got back to make sure we didn't do anything. And these are just two examples of the crazy shit she was doing. It was awful. We lived in a small apartment, and the tension was the worst.It got to the point that every time I turned onto my block and saw that her light was on my stomach would sink and I'd dread walking through the door. It was only made worse by remembering how great friends we used to be and how much I had really loved her. My one bit of comfort is that I know that all that shit had nothing to do with me. It was whatever the hell was going on in her head and the fact that she was having some sort of genuine breakdown. It sucks that she'll never see it that way though. I'll always be this evil, conniving, retarded bitch in her mind.

Shrug.

 

I moved in with a guy from work.

Guy from work is a degenerate alcoholic who forgets where the bathroom is during his drunken hazes.

I moved out.

 

My friend made the mistake of keeping a family trend going.

He bought the house directly behind his parents house. The house that was in fact his grandparents house. Crazy.

His mother is retired and when he was laid off last year she kept tabs on him like he was staying home sick from grade school. She would drop by at least ten times a day and would hassle friends like me who stopped by during the day.

The fucked up thing is that his mother doesn't even cook.

 

I bought a condo less than 10 minutes away from my parents and the house I grew up in. I didn't necessarily want to be that close to them, but it was the best area for me to live in the city - closest to the beach.

I don't think either of my parents have been to my place in over two years. I go over there whenever I want, which roughly equates to once every week and a half, whenever I feel like it. But they want to respect my privacy and insist on being invited over. Awesome. The girlfriend and I are trying to get them over soon for dinner or something because I completely re-decorated the place since they've last seen it.

One of my best buddies just bought a place about 2 miles away. This wouldn't be a problem except that he can't afford his place, so in an effort to save money he chooses to not have cable. Cue him coming over all the time so he can watch tv. If we're lucky we'll get a courtesy phone call 10 minutes before any significant sporting event or his favorite shows to ask/tell us he's coming over to watch tv. This is so fucking annoying if I'm trying to study, or hang out in my room, or heading out, or over to the girl's place for the night and he catches me before I leave. It's like I'm supposed to feel obligated to sit and hang out with him for some amount of time. My roommate (the three of us are all good friends who've known each other for 12 years) sometimes won't even acknowledge his presence when he does this, so I feel like it's on me to be the nice guy. I told him that this isn't fucking Seinfeld, there's no pop-ins.

 

My little sister and roommate's girlfriend moved a couple of blocks away from us. Both hate weed, so we have to be very stealth about it. The girlfriend sleeps over here half the time as well. He brings her over to pretty much every event or party we go to. Which was fine at first, till I had to start babysitting her drunk ass half the time and my roommate just leaves her when he gets pissed off. It's also awkward as fuck when they get in a fight and she just sticks around.

My sister on the other pops in once in a while, but pretty much always calls first. She's busy with her own life and friends anyway and very independent for someone who just moved out of the house. We get together to make meals and just bs. I love having her around (minus the weed thing).