After my adventures with bedding, it should come as no surprise that I had difficulty tonight buying drapes. Having measured my windows as roughly 39 inches wide by 73 inches tall, I bought a two-pack of handsome blue window panels, which according to the packaging are “82 x 63 inches.” Because the packaging gave no further details, I assumed that 82 inches was the height, as curtains are well known for their longer heights to shorter widths. Wrong! 82 inches is the total width of both panels and 62 inches is the height, so after I put them up, they weren’t long enough and resembled Gilligan’s pants. Is this yet another thing about consumer goods that’s never implicitly stated but that I’m expected to know, like that the first number in jeans’ sizing is the waist size and the second is the length?
On the new neighborhood front, having walked around more to absorb the local flavor, I’ve determined a good descriptor for the area is “musical.” People blast their jaunty Spanish pop and rap from the windows of their homes and cars. In my building, on the lower floors, someone practices trumpet, and one floor down from my apartment, someone is learning to play piano or teaching lessons. The piano doesn’t bother me because it’s not played after 10 p.m., and in fact has a warm, lonely resonance, filtered through the wood floors and the walls of big rooms. The crescendo, as it were, of my musical musings occurred late tonight, as I returned from a bodega with a Goya pear nectar. Just across the street from my apartment, there stood on the sidewalk a quartet of young fellows in a loose circle and they were beatboxing. They weren’t playing for a crowd, they were just doin’ it like it was 1984. That is totally awesome.