I've been going to bed too late lately, and I'm extremely tired because I think I need more sleep than the average person (I have an autoimmune disease, and quite often, people with autoimmune diseases do need more sleep than normal people), so I decided to go to bed early last night for a change. Yeahhh! Wrong. At 1:30 in the morning, I get a knock on my door. I ignore it because I'm asleep and it's the middle of the night and I don't want to ruin the first night in a long time that I have decided to treat myself to a good night's sleep. Then, I hear people in the hallway outside my door having a loud discussion. This is terrible, because the sound in my building travels ridiculously well, and the hallway echoes, which meant that I could hear everything in my apartment. And it did disturb my sleep. So finally, I get up to look outside and think I might ask everyone to be quiet or to take the conversation into someone's apartment and close the door so they don't have to disturb me. When I look outside, I see that it's my boss and my neighbour. My neighbour, the same guy who got mugged a few weeks ago. And he drinks too much. So I start to put two and two together, and figure he's probably drunk and lost his keys or something. And I don't want to get involved because in many countries in Asia, you lose face just by involving yourself in a situation. So I close my door and try to go back to bed. But they continue being as loud as ever, so finally, I get up and go out of my apartment and I go up to them. My neighbour is like, "Duuuuuuuuuude," (he is obviously very drunk) "There's nothing. There's nothing in my apartment." Whereupon, I assume he means that he has been robbed and there is, in fact, nothing in his apartment, so for just a second I am really concerned for him, but then he continues, "I went to the club and I was going to get some ____________, but it was a lie! It was a lie! They didn't have any ______________. So I was on my way home in the taxi and they took it. They took everything. They took... they took like... a hundred dollars! They took a hundred dollars. And they took my cigarettes. And they took my keys. And I can't get in. I sleep here tonight." And he sits down on the floor in the hallway. Which I kind of felt like it was a request for someone to invite him into their apartment for the night. No fucking way! I need my sleep, and when he's drunk, he tries to do inappropriate things like tickle my feet and stuff, and I need my sleep, and I don't fancy the guy, and I don't fancy not getting any sleep because he's in my apartment for the night. So, I just turn around and walk back into mya apartment and hope he doesn't notice me go. I mean, should I feel bad that I don't feel bad for him at all? I mean, last time he got mugged, I felt extremely sorry for him. I went out looking for him with his girlfriend (see my post from October called
"The Mugging"), and when we found him, I brought him back home, and I helped him find a way into his apartment (because he had also lost his keys that time, too), and I stayed with him until he calmed down, and I actually even cook for him, but all he did was insult my cooking because he had seen me put a little salt in it, so he decided that it was too salty, so instead of fucking thanking me, he just insults my cooking. Okay, I had thought, he's drunk and upset, I'll let it slide. But the next day, once he was sober, the one thing he seems to remember is that he thought my cooking was too salty (which it wasn't-- he was just a drunk idiot and likely doesn't know what good food is). And that kind of hurt my feelings because I had taken a good four or five hours out of my evening, which I had intended to be a relaxing evening, to help him out. And that's the kind of thank you I get. But I did still feel bad for him that he had the awful experience of being mugged. I mean, it sounded terrible. But, I figured he had probably learned from that time. I mean, he had been drunk and alone, and it was getting dangerously close to dark. I mean, I definitely learned from his mugging experience. The things I took away from it were in the form of a few rules I made for myself: (1) no public drunkenness, ever, under any circumstances; (2) don't carry anything that will make me look like an appealing target to a mugger (I try not to carry my camera with me too often, I try to bring only what I can fit into my pockets so I won't have to bring a purse, and I carry less than 10,000Tugrug with me at all times); (3) avoid taking the so-called taxis here in Ulaanbaatar; and (4) if I can avoid it, I don't go out after dark. I just assumed that my neighbour had also learned at least a few of these lessons from his first mugging experience, so now that I find that he in fact learned fuck-all, and he thinks it's okay to disturb my sleep because of it, no, I don't have any pity or sympathy. I mean, yes, I know that opportunistic crime is rampant here, but that's just the thing-- it's opportunistic. Just don't give them the fucking opportunity. This guy insists on going out to clubs, getting wasted, and coming home alone in taxis. He's begging to get mugged, and he's gotta know it. So I wasn't sorry for him.
Anyway, about my picture today, I saw this dude with a snorkel fitted onto his SUV. Traffic was monstrous, so he snaked past me a few times, and finally I decided to get my camera out. I mean, it's like, 'Dude, you live on the Steppe. WTF do you need a snorkel on your SUV for?' He must have thought I was crazy for taking his picture because, as you can see, he gave me quite the look when I took a picture of his vehicle.
