Does anyone else feel like they spent, or are spending, their entire twenties apartment-hunting?
Tomorrow morning, at like 2 AM or some seriously messed-up hour of the morning, we are leaving for Chicago to try and find a place to live. All day Friday and Saturday we will be canvassing our chosen neighborhood, trudging from apartment to apartment until we find that perfect and elusive combination of two bedrooms, one parking spot, one garbage disposal, and 24-hour maintenance which will not UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES be delivered under the direction of a "Home Repairs for Dummies" public library loaner. Because, seriously, I'm about 100% over the poor-landlord-who-can't-afford-a-plumber-but-CAN-afford-a-$600,000-house routine.
I guess apartment-hunting is one of the more benign elements involved in the moving process. You get to look at pretty apartments, some of them shiny and gleaming and full of promise. You imagine them as they would look when decorated with the framed artwork you wish you had, instead of the $15 tapestries and movie posters you actually have. You picture how cute your couch and loveseat will look in the empty sun-kissed living room, conveniently ignoring the fact that said furniture will have to be negotiated up four narrow flights of stairs before you realize that they don't fit through the sun-kissed doorway.
We decided to stay in the Chicago area for five days (go Jewish holidays! happy Tuesday off!) just in case the process of finding a dream home takes longer than expected. I think this is wise. I have a habit of throwing down a deposit on an apartment based on a glowing first impression, usually as a result of a ten-minute showing during which I inexplicably latch on to one or two pointless features as "must-haves" -- i.e. "We must have this adorable built-in china hutch [for the china we do not, nor will we ever, own]." It is this very habit that landed us in our current apartment, a place we snatched up within an hour of first setting foot on the premises. I fell in love with something about it -- perhaps the subtle hint of impending doom in the air -- and signed the lease without bothering to ask important questions such as "Is the bathroom likely to crumble into hundreds of rotting pieces?" or "Is the landlord a big freak?"
May my current apartment-hunting process find me learning to exercise patience and level headedness. And also, freak detection.
Yesterday the husband and I took a bus to New York City, for the express purpose of seeing my high school best friend perform in an off-broadway play. My notes from the occasion are as follows:1. New York is STRESSFUL. Just coming into the city on the bus, looking out the window and seeing all the masses of people and cars and stuff, is enough to make me yearn for, like, one-room schoolhouses and Amish people. There were lots of crazies on the street, way more than in Boston. I saw one who looked like Steve Buscemi with a limp and no teeth.2. Ok, so the play? Was not good. I'm talking really, really not good. It's not that it was poorly performed or anything -it was just a Bad Play. It had almost everything you could want in a Bad Play: a woman who stripped down to her underwear at a dinner party upon learning of her husband's affair; a boy who was molested by a friend AS WELL AS another boy who was molested by a priest; and a woman who was raped by a stranger in an alley and who was later forced by her husband to shout "I'm a snake! I'm a snake" until she admitted that she, like the snake in the Garden of Eden, tempted men to do evil things. My good friend A., a girlfriend from college who now lives in Brooklyn and who met up with us for the play, particularly enjoyed this plot point, seeing as how she runs a Rape Crisis center. It was two and a half hours of good, comfortable fun all around.3. Things with my friend, the one who was in the play, were kind of awkward and strained when he came to hang out with us after the show. When I was a teenager, this guy was my whole heart. He was the only real "best friend" I've ever had - except for my husband, of course, but that's a whole different kind of best friend (aka the kind you get to have sex with). In high school, I was an awkward nerd and he was a closeted freak and we just had the most fabulous time together. One time we drove around to all the gas stations in our town, pretended we couldn't speak English, and tried to use charades to ask the cashiers for things like batteries and ice. Another time, we used a camcorder to make a short film about a group of friends who were haunted by a black cat-shaped candle named Alfonso. We even recorded a theme song on cassette, called "Alfonso is Immortal." Not even kidding. And this was all BEFORE we started smoking boatloads of pot in his parents' basement.Prior to last night, it had been two years since we saw each other. I don't know much about his life now, and he doesn't know much about mine -- and we REALLY don't have much in common anymore, except for a shared history and the desire to avoid the same hometown. Even knowing all that going in, I felt a little sad at the lack of connection between us yesterday. It was all small-talk and catching up. I guess that's what happens as we get older and grow apart. But still - the awkward nerd in me misses that closeted freak I used to swap flannels with.
People, the phone did not arrive.When Monday came and went without the promised cell phone delivery via FedEx, I called Cell Phone Provider to say "what the fuck?" What followed was yet ANOTHER 45-minute phone call during which I was passed from alleged manager to alleged manager. The call finally ended when "Lee in the Spokane call center" assured me that he would be contacting a senior manager at "headquarters" in Colorado, and someone would be calling me back that evening to inform me why my phone was yet to be shipped. I hung up, dubious. Needless to say, I never received that call.At this point, it became a matter of principle. I could not stop payment on the order, because I had paid for the phone with my debit card (bad idea, yes, i know, don't email me). So I called Cell Phone Provider yet again the next day, this time to cancel the order. I provided my name and order reference number to the woman who answered the call, who informed me that no, the phone had not yet been shipped. I responded with a resounding "yeah, thanks for the news flash." She transferred me to Manager #4,605. I explained to Manager #4,605 that I wanted to cancel my order because his company was a den of evil. And also because he personally, and all of his colleagues, sucked. He put me on hold. He came back ten minutes later to tell me that he could not cancel my order because IT HAD ALREADY BEEN SHIPPED, PICKED UP BY FEDEX, AND WAS SCHEDULED FOR DELIVERY.I was like, are you kidding me? I've been calling for two weeks and have been told each time (including five minutes ago) that my phone wasn't shipped -- and then the instant that I tell you that I want to cancel my order, it is miraculously on its way? Give me a break. Manager #4,605 was told where he could shove it, the receptionists at my place of employment (to which I had originally scheduled my phone to be shipped) have been instructed to refuse any and all FedEX packages that come in my name until further notice, and I walked my little self over to a different Cell Phone Provider's storefront on my lunch hour and bought one of their phones in about fifteen minutes' time. Don't even ASK me why I didn't just do that in the first place.Work is so busy and stressful right now, I am consumed by constant thoughts of my impending Big Move and how we are going to make it work, the new glasses I ordered two weeks ago are still not ready and my eyes are throbbing, my insurance will not cover the cost of a medical test that I want to have done, some jerk on a cell phone tried to kill me with his car on the drive home from work today, and I have been engaged in this epic and ultimately ridiculous customer service battle over a $39.99 piece of electronics. I know it's no hurricane. I know that I am fine. But can I tell you how much I want to spend the next week lying under the covers, listening to Coldplay's "Fix You" on repeat and eating nothing but ice cream?
Friday, 4:00 PM: The weekend is off to a good start, as the husband picks me up from work and we drive off into the green mountains of Vermont. We stop for MacDonalds. This is a road-trip weakness. Fries cooked in beef fat are tasty, if ethically wrong. We arrive at our inn in a downpour and are too wet and tired to venture back out in search of the romantic "real dinner" I had envisioned for us. Instead, we have cheese cubes and beer from the inn's bar.Saturday AM: We eat a huge fatty breakfast at our inn, and then are instantly freakishly hungry again. We embark on a driving tour of backroads central Vermont. We stop at a waterfall and sample maple syrup at a roadside stand. We stop in the adorable town of Middlebury and sample treats at a farmers market. We stop at a working maple sugar farm and smokehouse and sample an obscene amount of cheese, maple products, honey, and summer sausage. We purchase some kind of maple-flavored meat snack and pass it back and forth, gnawing on it in turns. We are foul, foul people.Saturday PM: We go to Burlington for our "scenic boat tour" of Lake Champlain. We buy tickets for the 5:30 cruise and then walk around town to kill time until our departure. We envision a cozy couple of hours spent alternately gazing into lovely blue water and gazing at each other in matrimonial bliss. However when we arrive at 5:15 to board the boat, we find ourselves in the middle of somebody's corporate event. Hoards of portly folks in embroidered sweaters are greeting one another while waiting in the rain to board a gigantic ferry-like boat. Oh, did I not mention the rain? There is lots of rain. It is gray and stormy and depressing. My tolerance for annoying people is consequently lower than usual. We bail on the scenic boat tour, chalking up the money spent on tickets as a donation to the state of Vermont in exchange for all the free cheese. We drive to a bar in Waterbury and wallow over sandwiches and beer. Then we drive back to our inn in the rain, drink four more beers, and go to sleep.Sunday: We wake up, eat another huge breakfast, and then go back to bed and watch a documentary about lions on the Discovery Channel, as we are too depressed by the near-constant rainfall to leave the inn. When we finally do leave, we drive to Tunbridge for the "Tunbridge World's Fair." Yes, they seriously call it that. It has miraculously stopped raining. The fair is the epitome of awesome. We see the Holstein heifers judging ceremony, a horse-riding competition, a pig race, and part of the demolition derby. We see the largest pumpkin (somewhere in the vicinity of 750 lbs) and a display of "strangest and weirdest vegetables." We eat soft-serve ice cream and deep-fried onion rings. Although my heart cries out for it, I do not buy fried dough or an Italian sausage for the road, because that would just be crossing the line from Foul to So Very Wrong.Sunday PM: We leave Vermont. Now we are home, and I think it's time for dinner.
Last Sunday I ordered a new cell phone online. The husband and I are in general pretty opposed to the whole Cell Phone Culture that has taken over the world -- like, hang up, freak, you're at CHURCH -- but we are going to be traveling around quite a bit over the next couple of months, what with the big impending move and all, and we wanted to sign up for one of those prepaid cell phone plans so we could be reached or could reach others in an emergency. So. I ordered the phone online and received a lovely message from Cell Phone Provider assuring me that my phone was being sent "overnight" and that I would receive it in 1-2 business days.This all sounded fine and dandy to me. However, 1-2 business days came and passed with no phone in sight. When Wednesday rolled around, I decided to give Cell Phone Provider a call to see what had happened to my promised Nokia "Shorty." I dialed the toll-free service number listed on the provider website and immediately cringed at the sound of one of those godawful automized Fake Service People - you know, the chirpy prerecorded female voices who pronounce themselves "Sheila" or "Wendy" and offer you options that you have to repeat back to them, which you do in a hushed monotone voice ("Yes" "English" "Yes" "Speak to an operator" "SPEAK to an OPERATOR!!") all the while thinking about how stupid you sound talking to this fake robot person as if she were real and could hear you.Anyway. I successfully negotiated my way through a complex set of interactions with the automated Fake Service Person, only to be transferred to a Real Actual Person named Charlotte. Charlotte greeted me with a chipper "Howdy." When I explained my problem to her, that I had ordered a phone a few days ago and was wondering why it hadn't been delivered, she referred to the particular model of phone that I had ordered as a "real cutie, huh?" and told me that she needed to put me on hold in order to discuss my situation with "the big boss-man." After a brief ten minutes of on-hold time, during which I was entertained by porn-disguised-as-music, Charlotte returned to tell me that my phone had been shipped and that it would arrive later that day. Dubious, I asked her why the order tracking devise on the Cell Phone Provider website still listed my order status as "in process." Her response was to giggle and ask me if I wanted to purchase any minutes or accessories.Needless to say, my phone did not arrive later that day, or today for that matter. This afternoon, I tried again. This time, I had the pleasure of being served by Miguel. Miguel sounded about 14 years old. When I explained to him that I was calling to inquire about the whereabouts of a brand-new phone I had ordered, he asked me for my cell phone number. There was a beat of silence. "I just told you I don't have the phone yet," I said. Miguel's reply: "What? Oh." Miguel put me on hold for another 15 minutes, only to return to wholeheartedly affirm my stance that no, no I had not yet received my cell phone. I took a deep breath, thanked Miguel for his efforts, and asked to speak to a manager. Twenty minutes of hold-time later, I got one: Shawn.Shawn was very sorry for the inconvenience, as well as for the misinformation I had been given. Shawn did not know why my phone had not been shipped, as my order had been processed days earlier, nor did he understand why Charlotte had informed me that it was on its way - but he would personally see that it was sent out tomorrow. No, sorry, Shawn could not offer me the opportunity to lodge a complaint against Charlotte and her campaign of cell-phone-related lies, as Cell Phone Provider favors "Coaching Opportunities" over complaints (so that Charlotte can build her skills, see) and besides, we don't even know what call center Charlotte works at, now do we? Shawn wanted to make it all up to me by offering me five dollars worth of ring tones, to be used for downloading obnoxious pop songs to be played every time my phone rings. Which might be useful if a) I wanted to be that girl in the staff meeting that everybody hates because "Hollaback Girl" keeps spontaneously erupting from deep within the confines of her bag, and b) I had a cell phone.Which I don't.
When it comes to money and all things financial, I have big issues. Here's the conflict: I desperately want to be one of those people for whom money is nothing more than, as Lelaina Pierce puts it, "green colored paper that floats in and out of your life like snow." I"m not saying I want to be rich -- I'm saying I don't want to care about it. I want to eschew material concerns, to rise above the worldly and the capitalistic, to say (and believe) things like "I may not have money, but I'm rich in love." But, see, I DO care. Deeply. Sometimes to the level of obsession. And it is profoundly not ok.First off, there's the checkbook. How many times per month do you think the average stable individual balances his or her checkbook? Maybe once? Yes, well, I do it pretty much every time I buy a soda. Immediately upon marrying me, my husband was asked to say "I do" not just to agreeing to be my partner for life, but also to saving each and every receipt for each and every debit card purchase for as long as we both shall live so help you God amen. Each week I sit down with a pile of these receipts and pore over every purchase, carefully entering them into the balance log of the checkbook and mentally berating myself for whatever expenditures I deem to have been unnecessary or frivolous - usually some kind of cookie from Trader Joe's. Damn them and their checkout counter brownie-bite samples. I then compare my record-keeping against our monthly bank statement; if the balances don't match up, my whole world view of good and evil is turned on its head until next month's statement arrives, offering me a chance to start anew.Then, there's my obsession with salary: namely, my own versus other people's. I'm a librarian. I'm never going to make money -- I knew that going in to this career. But that knowledge does nothing to stop me from feeling all wronged and long-suffering whenever I hear about someone my age or younger making twice my salary. I am jealous of my friends who make more than me [read: I am jealous of all my friends]. I am embarrassed of my salary and reveal it to almost no one. I feel embittered toward my past, current, and future employers, none of whom have ever or will ever be able to truly compensate me for my unique skill set and can-do attitude.I didn't always have this strange relationship with money. I was raised what I guess you would call "working class," although I never realized it until I went to college and started to see that none of my new friends' families seemed to look like mine. What, you guys didn't grow up in a family of 7 squeezed into a 3-bedroom house? I was high on the fumes from all of my financial aid applications, had never been on an airplane or traveled anywhere outside of the Midwest (except for a couple of school trips to Canada), and had a savings account of a couple hundred dollars from my summer job at Ben Franklin Crafts -- but I had never wanted for a single thing my entire life, and thus had no idea that my family might have been financially strapped. Although it had never been a problem for me before, the day that I realized -- or, probably more accurately, perceived -- that the people around me had more than me, was the day I started to obsess.When I get like this, all freakish over salary and savings with my nose shoved into other people's paychecks, I am full of shame. I often sit myself down for a good talking to; I go to the internet and google-image my way to pictures of Lindsay Lohan and Donald Trump in order to remind myself that people with money are not necessarily who you want to envy or emulate. Which is really emblematic of what makes this whole thing so ridiculous: I am simultaneously covetous of wealth and judgmental of those who have attained it, seeking out some kind of ideal of financial comfort while placing moral value on hard work, simplicity, the idea of an "honest living."Some days, like today, I really miss when getting a $5 allowance was enough. You know?
Tomorrow I am going to go visit my library school friend T. Out of my two years in library school, I have maintained a total of two friendships: one for each year. This is due to the following factors: A) Library school is a transient place - people usually go part-time and can often stretch their degree over a course of many years, resulting in an ever-changing student body; B) I am antisocial; and C) Library school people are freaks. My friend T. is now a reference and tech services librarian in Rhode Island. My other library school friend, B., is a children's librarian at a public library in my neighborhood. T. and B. are people who understand me when I want to complain about the sexist and racist implications of Library of Congress Subject Headings. We share horror stories of nightmare patrons, creepy reference requests, overly OCD colleagues. We recall our alma matter with equal parts humor and revulsion.For a time, I had a third library school friend. I met A. in cataloging class. Thrown together by mind-numbing boredom (she caught my notebook when I fell asleep and accidentally pushed it off my desk during class), we became instantly inseparable. We went to happy hour after every class session, had weekly realty tv binges at her downtown apartment, she even came with me to get alterations done on my wedding dress. Then the semester ended. I took the summer off to get married, while she took what would be her last two classes in June and July. At the end of the summer I got an email from A. announcing that she was moving to New Hampshire for an academic library position. That was the last I heard from her. I guess our love just wasn't meant to be.Finding friends while traveling the long bleak road of library school was, for me, a matter of survival. If I did not have someone with whom to share a dramatic and pointed eye roll, how then would I get through three hours of a Children's Library Services class filled with moms who took themselves to be experts on the topic simply because they read an Elmo book to their kids once? If I did not have someone with whom to point and laugh, how then would I fully appreciate the wardrobe and affect of the stone-age faculty? If I did not have someone with whom to feel intellectually superior, how then would I stomach a class in which the culminating final project consisted of a made-up research project, pitched to made-up clients, presented in a mandatory Powerpoint format?My library school friends understand the sense of shame I feel over my masters degree. Don't confuse this with the feelings that I have for my profession -- I love being a librarian and find it worthwhile, challenging, stimulating, and fashion-forward. Library school, however? While my non-librarian friends struggled through business school projects, law school internships, and complicated education school theses, I was turning in 5-page papers on "Children's Biographies About Anne Frank" or "Teen Read Week: A Multicultural Approach." I had no internship to do, no thesis to write. I took a whole class on research about libraries, learning how to conduct user surveys about such topics as whether or not to have snacks at the reference desk. In another class on information retrieval, the official worst class I've ever taken in my life, I had to complete an assignment called "All About You and Me," in which I was asked to use online search engines to find information about myself and about the professor. During the next week's class, the professor made us read aloud from the information we had gleaned about her professional accomplishments, interrupting periodically to inform us when she thought we had missed an important point.My library school friend T. and I shared that information retrieval class together, and one of my favorite memories is that of our solidarity: on the last day of class, when course evaluation forms were handed out, T. and I remained long after all the other students had gone, stringing expletives together to cover both sides of the page, wrists aching from the effort. Assuredly, our forms were immediately disregarded and/or tossed, but it gave us a good library school story to tell for years to come. And that, along with the assurance of future networking potential, is what library school friends are for.
This morning I had an appointment at the eye doctor's office for a check-up. Here are the things I appreciate about the eye doctor: the eye doctor is quite prompt, and his appointments are quick. The eye doctor does not attempt small-talk; he points me in the direction of a chair to sit in, makes me read letters on a wall, and shoves his fingers into my eyes for a few minutes before declaring me "all set." Here are the things I do not appreciate about the eye doctor: his breath, and that whole "shoving his fingers into my eyes" thing. That shit hurts.I have super-sensitive eyes. I can't open my eyes underwater, or even really in the shower. I have worn glasses since the fourth grade. When I was fifteen, I endured a month-long exploration of the World of Contact Lenses, brought on by my hope that the beauty of my unobstructed eyes would temporarily blind all fifteen-year-old boys into forgetting that yes I was still two feet taller than all of them, and yes I did just get an A+ on my homework again, and yes I did just trip over my own converse sneaker. Sadly, it was not to be. It was SO not to be, in fact, that it ruled my life with pure awfulness for a month. The lenses hurt my eyes so badly, and I was so afraid of dealing with them, that it took me up to an hour to put them in in the morning and another hour to take them out at night. Often I would "mis-fire" and end up with a contact lens floating uselessly against the white of my eye, leaving me and my mother to dig and root around inside my eyelid trying to find and retrieve it. Once we got it so deeply lost that we had to call over my next-door-neighbor, a girl my age who had worn contacts for years and who deftly popped the offending shard off of my eyeball and into her waiting palm. That was the end of my contact lens delusion.Since then, it has been four-eyes for me all the way. I wore an unfortunate pair of bright red Sally Jessy specs through most of high school, and a set of nondescript and overly large frames throughout college. My most recent pair, which I have worn for about four years now, are black and have rhinestones decorating each side. The rhinestones were a surprise, if you can believe it; I picked out what I thought were understated black glasses, looked at myself head-on in the mirror, and, without a sideways glance of any kind, said "I'll take them." When the husband and I went to pick them up a few days later, he pointed to the frames in my hand and said "What are those shiny things?" The rest, my friends, is no-returns-policy history. My glasses have become a part of me. I wear them in photographs, I wore them to my own wedding, the only time I am without them is to sleep. I think I look funny without them. That doesn't mean that I am any less incensed every time I watch a movie or television show in which an Ugly Duckling is transformed into a Red Hot Sex Goddess through implementation of a makeover that consists of A) taking off her glasses and B) nothing else. People with glasses can be Red Hot Sex Goddesses too! We've got four eyes, man. That's wild!
I defy you to find this unappealing.
Do you ever feel like everything is just going to shit?First, there is this hurricane. Thousands of people dead or dying, cities obliterated, disease spreading, and all of this under the watch of a president who was good enough to cut his 5-week vacation short by two whole days in order to lend a hand by touring the devastated Gulf Coast in a helicopter. Our House Speaker skipped the emergency House session on hurricane relief on Friday in order to attend a Republican fund-raiser and car show, then returned to Washington to suggest that rebuilding the city "doesn't make sense" to him. CNN listed among its top breaking news stories "Celebrities affected by Katrina." And I'm no expert on disaster response, but it sure seems like we are able to coordinate and implement war efforts a lot more quickly and efficiently than we are able to rescue and feed our own dying poor. Why is that?Then, there is the Supreme Court. I got out of bed this morning (after being away all day yesterday) to find my husband sitting in front of the television, looking up only to greet me with the words "Rehnquist died." My response: "Fuck." His counter-response: "Nice to meet you, Chief Justice Scalia." My counter-counter-response: "Oh well. I wasn't really attached to my uterus anyway."And then there is the rest of the world. Almost 1,000 Shiite Muslims died in a stampede on a bridge in Iraq on Wednesday. A typhoon just hit China. There is an ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of the Sudan, in which more than 180,000 people (reported numbers vary) have died already and tons more have been displaced. When it ends, if it ends, people (myself included, cause what the hell am I dong about it?) will sit around and say "never again" just like after Bosnia and Rwanda.I know that there are good things happening too. Hey-- gay people can get married in Massachusetts, at least for now! Take that, The Man. Hey-- ordinary people are coming up with thoughtful and inventive responses to tragedies like the hurricane. Take that, vacationing president in a helicopter. But still. Does anyone else have days where they just feel doomed?
