On the lack of privacy (or "JABS goes off on a bit of a rant")

Last night, I was up until almost three because I had to "attend" one of my classes from 12:15 to 2:15 AM Greenwich Mean Time. Because I need a very minimum of seven hours of sleep per night, I got up late this morning (and still didn't get my sleep minimum). When I came out of the bathroom after my shower, I heard female voices coming from downstairs in my apartment.

If this had happened to me in my house in Wyoming, I would have been utterly confused and rather frightened, because there would never be any reason for someone to all of a sudden be inside my locked house without my permission.

Here, however, this seems to be a weekly occurrence (and some weeks it happens more often than once). There are lots of people with access to our apartment – the building staff, the cleaning ladies, and the maintenance men, at the least. And there seems to be an infinite number of reasons for them to come into our apartment.
First, there is the burned-out-lightbulb-and-leaky-toilet revolving door through which a constant stream of maintenance men and plumbers continue coming. You see, there's something wrong with the wiring in our apartment, so every week or two several bulbs in one of our living room chandeliers go out. And upstairs, we seem to have a permanent water drip coming from the pipes behind the toilet. Since no one has succeeded in fixing either of these problems (particularly the water leak, whose apparent simplicity must be deceiving since the guy hasn't been able to fix it after at least half a dozen tries and several months). Whenever we have one of these problems, we tell the office staff, and they tell us something like, "The plumber will be in tomorrow to fix it." What they mean is something like, "The plumber will probably stop by sometime in the next week, will discover that he needs some additional equipment or supply, will tell you that he'll be back the very next day, and then will come back sometime in the week after that. So be ready every minute of every day for the next week for someone to come into your apartment and get your bathroom really dirty." Something similar happens when it comes to our need for lightbulb changes.

Then there are the cleaning ladies, whose schedule is always changing and almost never posted, so I don't know when they're going to walk in. (The fact that they sometimes seem to leave the apartment dirtier than it started out is a completely separate issue.) And there seem to be all kinds of other reasons why people are coming in here – to measure the windows, to count the pillows, to close all our blinds and curtains while we're on a five-week vacation, thus killing some of our house plants…

My privacy is also invaded from the outside. Right before we left for our Nebraska getaway, work was beginning on the outside of our side of the building. I was hoping they would be finished with the work when we got back, but it looks like they haven't even started repainting, which means that men are constantly walking back and forth one foot outside my living room window. It also means that, one of these days, I will see a man's head pop up outside my office window or bedroom window on the second floor of the apartment.

(On an aside, I'm totally flabbergasted by the University's apparent obsession with redoing the outsides of buildings. Yes, university staff, thank you very much for replacing that unsightly concrete that made up my windowsills. I guess I thought concrete was a perfectly appropriate material for an outside windowsill, but you have convinced me that the much more aesthetically pleasing tile was totally worth getting the entire inside of my apartment covered with a thick layer of white dust. But do you think maybe you could consider replacing some of the deteriorating elements on the inside of my apartment, such as the leaky toilet and, well, just about everything in the kitchen?)

Yucky tile! Yucky backboard!

All of these people who come into my apartment have access to a key, and they rarely ever knock. It's true that I'm partly using this as an opportunity to complain and rant. But the point I want to make is that, for better or worse, this stupid little apartment is the only place on the entire planet that I can call my home right now. When I never know who's going to be walking in on me or looking in through the windows at me, this is yet another boundary between me and my (ever weakening) goal of making this place as much of a home as I can while I'm here.