Highlights from the Recent Past

When the going gets tough, the procrastinators finally stop blogging.

So I've been in my new apartment for six weeks now, and I'm wholly convinced I should've been comped the first month's rent to make up for all the time I had to spend cleaning (i.e. not being settled into) the place. I even had to repack, reclean, and then unpack (again) the kitchen and bathroom, on account of work my landlord needed to do to those rooms AFTER I had "finished" them.

There have been other delays, too. Primarily: I've been so frustrated with the whole ordeal of even needing to move, that I feel moved to inaction.

And by that mean: every time I looked at the boxes around me, I was struck with such a sense of futility, that some days I couldn't bring myself to touch them.

I'll probably just pack them all up again in 11 months, right? I mean, what's the point in doing this over and over again, particularly in a city that treats tenants like three-week-old meat? Making changes here, as I've come to realize, doesn't really change a thing.

Not to mention, it's hard to want to clean that mysterious stain in your hallway closet when your mantra is anything but self-affirming.

"I don't care. It isn't worth it. There is no point."

So you do what you can in-between bouts of depression, only to realize four weeks in (after you've finally cleared most of the boxes from your dining room, where they'd previously been stored) that the folks who live upstairs are actually noisier than your previous neighbors.

It was so bad, in fact, that just sitting in my dining room / office was an act of self-inflicted aggression. To do anything other than leave my apartment was torture. The music was so loud, in fact, that I could make out the lyrics to songs. I could even sing along if I wanted to.

I allowed this to continue for a few days before one afternoon — heart pounding — I made the bold move up the stairs and knocked on my neighbor's door.

Their music was so loud, however, that after 2-3 minutes of intermittent knocking, I was able to confirm that they simply couldn't hear me over the the sound of Narles Barkley's "Crazy."

So I wrote them a nice letter — and I do mean nice — and tucked it under their door.

And wouldn't you know it, but one of them stopped by all apologetic — admitted they had speakers feeding directly into the floor, without a rug to muffle the sound — and within a day or two, the situation was mostly resolved (I can still hear their television at times, but I can deal with that better than I can the constant sound of a stereo).

In which case, I'm starting to (finally) feel better about the place. But that doesn't mean that old sense of futility doesn't creep up every time I go to hang a picture, or measure the windows for curtains.

I'm at a point where, quite simply, I care less and less. Whereas once upon a time I made an effort to make every place feel like "home," there's an unquestionable air of homelessness that increases with every subsequent move.