Read Online Jeneration X: One Reluctant Adult's Attempt to Unarrest Her Arrested Development; Or, Why It's Never Too Late for Her Dumb Ass to Learn Why Froot Loops Are Not for Dinner by Jen Lancaster - Free Book Online Page A

your new iPhone and Coach bag, and punches you in your bourgeois mouth, ruining a significant investment in dental work.
    That’s
what they take if you’re lucky.
    So you keep your guard up all the time. And you know what?Living like this is exhausting and it’s one of the million reasons we’re decamping for the suburbs in three weeks.
    But we just wouldn’t be
us
if the city of Chicago didn’t send us off with a parting gift. Thanks, Mayor Daley!
    I’m in my office around midnight, finishing up an e-mail before heading to bed. Because the room’s at the very front of the house on the top floor, I have a premiere vantage point for my self-appointed position as the Queen of Neighborhood Patrol. Trust me when I say I’m delighted to turn over my Constant Vigilance™ sash, crown, and scepter to anyone who wants ’em when we leave Logan Square forever.
    I’m just switching off my computer when I hear a few weirdly muffled thumps and a light clattering of metal, followed by a familiar clang.
    The familiar clang is that of my front gate closing.
    I roll my chair over to the window a couple of feet away and notice one person standing outside my gate while another ascends my front steps. In my head I’m all, “Hey, who’s come to visit?” until a split second later my city-brain takes over and I realize that no one should be there, what with this being midnight at a single-family property with a perpetually locked gate.
    I don’t recognize these people. My friends not only have day jobs, but also the courtesy to phone before dropping by, and I quickly deduce the two people looming around the front of my house aren’t here on a social call.
    Also? I’m pretty sure none of my friends take crystal meth.
    Politely as I can, I open my window in order to inform them that I shan’t be receiving any visitors today.
    “HEY, TWEAKERS! THIS IS PRIVATE PROPERTY. GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!”
    To which the dreadlocked white guy [
Oh, honey, Counting Crows called. They want Adam Duritz’s look back.
] replies, “Mind your own fucking business. We’re allowed to be here.”
    From my perch in the window, I assure them they are
not
, in fact, allowed to be here and go off on an entire tangent about the notion of private property. I explain how my concept of ownership is influenced by the capitalist school of thought and how I don’t subscribe to their clearly more Marxist views of said concept, although really, Marx was more about the people owning the
means
of production and not so much about that which is considered “social wealth,” such as Coach bags, iPhones, a mouthful of veneers, and any sort of high-end electronics that might be stuffed in the large, empty sacks they’re carrying.
    To which he responds, “Fuck you.”
    Seriously? A brilliant monologue like that and the snappiest of rejoinders he can muster is instructing me to sex my-self up?
    You, sir, are neither a gentleman nor a scholar.
    I inform them of my plans to call the local constabulary and the woman, who is Stevie Nicks’s younger, druggier doppelganger, again suggests I go spend some quality time with myself in an intimate manner while her partner informs me of his plans to come inside to “fuck you up.”
    Oh.
    Really.
    As I’ve reached the limits of my own negotiating capabilities, I’m left with no choice but to call in the big guns.
    No, not those. [
Until it’s legal to shoot someone for being an asshole, my weapon of choice is a shovel.
] I mean Fletch.
    He’s on the other side of the second floor in the bedroom. He hears me squawking,
“Perimeter breach! Perimeter breach!”
as I thunder down the hallway. He assumes I’m on a bad Ambien trip, perhaps cut with a side of crazy, but I assure him that other than Claritin, I’m entirely sober. I brief him on the sitch and he takes off up the street after them while I call 911. His goal isn’t to confront them as much as maintain visual contact and direct the police to them.
    After