Get off my property!

I really need to get out of the house. I'm turning into MOL (that's mean old lady next door for those of you who don't know the back story). God help me.

To be fair, it was Saturday, I'm on sabbatical, Steve's in Australia, and the only human being I'd spent one-on-one time with all week was a 77-year-old man on Tuesday who talked about himself nonstop without asking me any questions. So I was cranky and lonely. Just like... nope, won't say it. She's evil.

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It was my naptime, but I saw that "The Blue Lagoon" was on cable. And I watched it all the way through. For whatever reason, I thought it would be as engrossing and swoon-worthy as it was when I'd watch it as a kid on HBO with the sound turned down low so my parents wouldn't wake up and catch me watching an R-rated movie. I found that watching it through the eyes of a grownup is nearly impossible. Suspension of disbelief while watching "Gilligan's Island" is easier.

I mean, come on! The kids found the indigenous, human-sacrificing drum people, but the drum people never found their elaborate, beachfront fortress? The boy kept getting mad at the girl and trying to leave in a homemade sailboat that inevitably collapsed when they had the well-preserved dinghy all along? Don't even get me started on the pristine, well-pressed white cotton clothes the girl and the baby dressed up in. Steve's professionally laundered button ups he bought a year ago are dingier than those apparently saved in a trunk for a decade.

It occurred to me then that the only reason we watched it over and over as kids was because of Christopher Atkins's nekkid swimming scene; which, of course was edited out for cable.

Irritated with myself for wasting two hours of my life that could have been spent napping, I switched off the TV. I was trying to go to sleep and heard loud talking outside. I looked out the window and saw MOL in her yard talking to a man in our yard.

I marched outside and said, "Can I help you?" The man said, "I was just talking to your neighbor." "Do you mind doing it in her yard?," I demanded. Then I recognized him as the son of the elderly man on the corner, the same man who chainsawed trees for me after the hurricane 11 years ago. They were talking about the certified letter everybody in the neighborhood has gotten from the city telling us we now have to pay them to maintain that 15-foot drop to Wake Forest Road in our backyards.

MOL skittered away and the man, whose name I now know is Mike, started talking to me. For an hour and 15 minutes. I was hot and dehydrated, but feeling like a very, very bad person for being rude. To him, not MOL. I apologized over and over.

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Today I had bellinis and delicious brunch with my friend Laura. I really needed to go out and play with a kid my own age. Now I feel much better. And more likely to be kind to my fellow human beings. Well, most of them.