Remember Pat Haden? If you were a fan of the Los Angeles Rams in the 1970s, you probably do.

He came out of USC and finagled his way into the starting quarterback’s job as a rookie in 1976, and pretty much held it until he suffered a broken thumb halfway through the 1979 season. When the Rams went to the Super Bowl he sat out. Vince Ferragamo played and threw that crushing interception at the end.

Anyway, back to Pat Haden. One of the smartest athletes I’ve ever been around. OK,  it isn’t a really high bar to be a “smart athlete” … but he was clearly over it.

And he said something 30 years ago, something he probably got from an econ class at USC, that isn’t exactly revolutionary, but I hadn’t heard it before, and I’ve never forgotten it.

“Lifestyles are not negotiable downward.”

That is, none of us ever are prepared to live in conditions inferior to those we were just in.

And we now are experiencing that, first hand, as we return to the Wan Chai neighborhood to live.

We are back in the same apartment we lived in for, what, three-plus weeks back in October. It is owned by a guy who worked at the International Herald Tribune, here, before he took a job in Jakarta. He hasn’t sold it yet, and we generate some rental income for him.

Anyway, it’s a fine place. Fine … if you’re a guy living alone … fine, if you just came out of a week inside a hotel room … fine, if you’ve been looking at a batch of really really awful Hong Kong apartments and this looks like nirvana compared to those odiferous, cramped, broken, jury-rigged messes.

Not so fine if, after your last stay here, you spent two weeks in a nice, bright serviced apartment in Tin Hau (a step up, in neighborhoods) and really not so fine if you just spent a month in Mid-Levels, on the 23rd floor of a building in a quiet (comparitively; it’s Hong Kong) neighborhood with a stunning view of the channel.

Wan Chai is as “real” as Hong Kong Island gets. Almost utterly Chinese, blue-collar, hard-working. Not very refined. Well, almost a little crude, especially if you’ve been hanging with the Soccer Mom crowd (Chinese or Anglo) in Mid-Levels.

But it’s not really the neighborhood that is the issue.

It’s the apartment. And its 300-something (maybe 400) square feet of living space.

It is small. And it seems really small after having been in a place with a bedroom and two (count ’em, two) real rooms that are NOT bedrooms. AND has a standalone kitchen.

This place? You swing open the front door, and there is the den/kitchen/living room/dining room. In one spot. Kitchen-like stuff against one wall, the TV.entertainment unit on one wall, the couch against the other and the sliding door that leads to the seriously dirty, trash-strewn patio on the other.

The one bedroom is quite tight. Maybe one foot of width to navigate next to the bed, which is jammed against two walls. And you have to stand ON the bed to get your clothes down from the one pole you can hang clothes on.

When I am in that room, it reminds me of a jail cell. I think I mentioned this before.  It has the same sliding doors (just without the bars) … and is the same small rectangle … as the accommodations in the Gray Bar Hotel.

The bed is too small for two, unless you’re used to sharing a single bed. Which isn’t that much of an issue because Leah works the graveyard shift, 1 a.m. till 8 a.m. four days a week.

What becomes an issue is … the glass in the bedroom sliding doors lets in any light from the den/living room/kitchen/dining room. And the flickering images on the TV make for this weird, almost eerie jump in light in the bedroom.  Depending on what’s being shown. Like, jolt of light … then dark … another jolt of light, but it lasts five seconds, then it darkens. It’s amazing how erratic the light out of a television is — until you try to make a room dark and leave the TV on. You can feel the jump in candle power even with your eyes closed, and it messes with your sleep. It really does.

The bathroom is about the size of a port-a-potty. Turn too quickly and you’re going to hit something you don’t want to hit. But the shower is handy, once you squeeze into it.

There is no storage. Very little. Unless you just want to abandon your stuff to the dirt and dirty air outside, on the patio.

But … there is a reason we’re here. We’re looking at a short-term situation, and finding someplace for a reasonable rental rate that is furnished, for what might be no more than seven weeks … well, that’s why we’re here.

What we will soon figure out is if this place is just below the line of “SoCal natives livability” in terms of space, mostly.  No view, grimy, noisy, ultra-crowded neighborhood … I think we can handle that. (Up side: Every service you can imagine is within 100 yards of where we live, and the subway is about 100 feet away)

No, the issue is whether the arrangement here is just too tight for two people working on massively different schedules, and whether the difficulty just sleeping … will drive one or both of us crazy.

I suppose we shall find out. Maybe we can adjust. Or maybe we can forget where we were and recall a time when we thought this was just fine?

Now we’re back to that “lifestyles negotiable” thing.