"Be careful with him. He's not a good sort."

I have new upstairs neighbors. I feel about this situation much the same way I felt about living in a dorm in college.

So far, we haven’t gotten off to a jolly good start. Why, might you ask? It could possibly be their penchant for moving in sometime around 1 am, and spending the next several hours moving furniture and unpacking. All, of course, while yelling across the apartment to each other in a manner that could charitably be likened to the screaming of a crack-addled, unhinged homeless man.

Or it might be the penchant for blasting music at decibel levels usually reserved for the runways of major airports or the decks of WWII battleships.

Or it could possibly be related to the fact that the son of the family was described to me by my Colombian roommates as “not a good sort.”

Here it’s necessary to digress into a discussion of cultural/linguistic subtext. In most parts of the US, a teenager who “isn’t a good sort” might smoke a lot of pot, get into fights at school, get his stepdad to buy him and his friends a thirty-pack of Coors, and spend his weekends cow-tipping or taking a baseball bat to his neighbors’ mailboxes.

A Colombian telling you that someone “isn’t a good sort” could be translated to (North American, Middle-Class, Suburban) English as, “I saw him desecrating the corpse of a golden lab puppy, in honor of the Duke of Hell Beelzebub, while doing a line of coke off the body of a prostitute he had just knifed. Oh, and he was selling heroin to a group of poor-but-with-so-much-potential inner-city teens.”

Now, my roomies are, admittedly, paranoid worry-warts. However, when it comes to my living arrangements, my ideal roommates would be ex-SEALS, and our perimeter security would make the 38^th Parallel look a sunlit field of daisies full of fluffy bunnies and sugar cookies. Since I, too, am more than a little paranoid, we get along just fine.

I have now been cautioned against leaving my window open or leaving the back door unlocked. It is worth noting that the back door opens only onto a patio, and that my bedroom window is an interior window with no access from the street.

The rationale: Someone could, from the 3^rd floor, climb down to our patio or to my window and use it to gain ingress to our apartment. Sound a little far-fetched? Welcome to Colombia. So right now, I’m considering employing the time-honored method of discouraging burglars: shards of broken glass lining the surface that could be used for hand- or footholds. Personally, I’m not ruling out sprinkling the bedroom floor with caltrops. Punji sticks are, likewise, an option. If I wasn’t on the second-floor, I would be writing this post during a break from digging the tiger-trap.

Send lawyers, guns and money,

J.