What's burning?

(PICTURE: My stalker photo. This is a shot of my neighbor about to burn incense.)

The closest I ever came to be a hippie in high school was when I bought a bag of incense at the Union Flea Market. I distinctly remember going to the flea market with my mother and feeling compelled to buy a cheap bag of incense. Maybe I was going through a body odor phase and was trying to cover it up. Or perhaps I was trying to relate to some of my friends who were trading Phish bootleg albums. Or just maybe I was slowly starting to condition myself for my time in Vietnam.

Since moving into my present apartment with Huyen, there's been a very common occurrence at our place . When the weather has been nice, I open our window (don't worry there's bars on the window so no ninjas can come in). However, the window usually doesn't stay open long because our neighbors constantly burn incense about three feet away from us. The elderly people who live in the house next to us must have a lot of deceased relatives because they pray for a solid three hours a day. Accompanying their prayers is a heck of a lot of incense. Because of our proximity to the burning embers, our apartment constantly smells like a pagoda. I guess in the grand scheme of things, there's worse things an apartment can smell like but the odor is so powerful I've got to constantly close our windows; with the nice breeze out these days, that doesn't make me happy.