Wonderful Rubbish

I cannot seem to find a decent small house in Junction City, Coburg, Santa Clara, or Harrisburg [H-ville] for less than $1100 a month. $1100 a month! When my housemate is a student without a job! That's a small fortune! That's like... half my monthly paycheck as an underpaid and non-tenured teacher. I kid you not. Throw me a freaking bone here, Willamette Valley. I am not going to live in another goddamned apartment now that I have a career. . . am I?

I never want to hear the word 'apartment' again. For full details surrounding the reaons why 'apartment' has become a four-letter word in my life, please see the following colorful character profiles of the enlightening individuals I've lived amongst over the last six years.

1. The Instamatic Chromatic Trombone Man. See previous post for details.

2. The Downstairs Domestic Dispute Family: proving that the best part of waking up is indeed not Folgers' in your cup, but rather, the sound of shattering glass and sobbing downstairs at 8:00 AM on a Sunday. (There's a post in the archives about this lovely couple, which includes Andy and I calling the police and someone being hauled away in a police car in a most dramatic fashion, but I don't want to bother looking up the link.)

3. The Elizabethan Floutist/Space Cadet. This lady lives right next door to me, and although I like her as a human being, she constantly plays some of the most irritating and seasonally-inappropriate music imaginable on a cloyingly cheery instrument that sounds like a cross between a clarinet and a flute. None of the industrial-quality earplugs that I've tried can overwhelm her instrument's high pitch, so gradually, I've become more accustomed to it . . . but occasionally when I'm doing intense law homework and she's tootling away next door, I want to scream a bit and maybe set something on fire. Last year, this lady spent about six months practicing her "Flight of the Bumblebee"-reminiscent part for a symphony that was performing (honest to God) "cacophonous music." The part that she practiced had no rhyme or reason, but repeated itself eerily so that I knew exactly when each assaulting bar of trilling and tweedling would start and end--and I was really relieved when the symphony for this piece was over, because the lady's constant practicing next door gave me perpetual feelings of paranoia while I was in the apartment. It was like living in a Hitchcock movie or something. The Birds.
More recently, now that it's July and all, the floutist lady next door has begun practicing for The Nutcracker Suite. It's pretty surreal when it's 95 degrees in the apartment and I have to listen to 90 minutes' worth of butchered bars from "Flight of the Sugar Plum Fairy." But she's got to make that December performance deadline, I guess...

4. Janie* the Shih-Tzu-toting coke dealer/dance major. She was a nice but slightly manic girl who ran a 24-hour rock shop in the alley in which the front (and only) door of my studio apartment was located. Through my living room/bedroom window, at any given hour of the day, I could see all kinds of dynamic and drunken characters hanging around in front of her apartment, and quite regularly, they woke or kept me up until about 3 AM with their Socratic dialogs. On a positive note, I guess this gave me a sense that I was living in a city much larger and more rugged than Eugene. I could be wrong, but I think it was not entirely unlike living under some bridge in San Fransisco.

5. Miss Hurff. I'll refrain from saying more, except these keywords: epic proportions of Jack Daniels, a mistreated man named Jimmy, a cat named Cheech, and another housemate with some pretty gnarly drug-related connections that I was not immediately aware of. After six months of bizarrity, I moved out. And fled to another state, and avoided phone-calls from aforementioned parties.

6. Peter* and the Wolf. Suzanne (the only awesome housemate I've lived with, aside from Andy,) knows this story well, for she was there with me: Peter*, our upstairs neighbor, was a bird researcher who had recently gone on an avian expedition to Alaska to do some graduate coursework. He returned from the Northern Hinterlands with a wolf-creature--a truly enormous and vaguely predatory-looking dog, which he named Cooper, or as I liked to call him, Pooper. (Pooper had parasites that the vet "had never even seen," which I thought was kind of ominous, but his bird-loving owner joked about his as though it was an entertaining tidbit of trivia. I wonder if little ol' Peter's* bowels are still intact.) Anyway, one day Peter* left Pooper in the apartment alone while he went out on the town. As far as we could gather, the ensuing flooding incident (known as the Great Flood of '03) unfolded like this: Pooper found some delectable dirty dishes in the sink and began to snort his way through them, and as he did so, he bumped his head on the tap, turning on the water. The sink, clogged with dirty dishes and nasty food, could not drain, and soon water began to overflow, flooding the entire upstairs apartment. The door to Peter's* apartment was locked, of course, so all of us living downstairs had no idea what was happening until water began to rain from our plaster ceiling; when we figured out something was going on upstairs, we couldn't do anything to stop it except call the manager. We covered everything in our living room with plastic tarps, placed buckets in strategic locations, and waited for the rain to stop. But it was a bummer because we'd just painted the living room and the ceiling mottled and peeled, and because, like, our living room was raining.

I could tell you about Maeve, the truly evil first roomate I had in the dorm at OSU. But I won't.
I'll just say that the six disastrous encounters above, even excluding Maeve, are enough to justification for anyone to cringe at the thought of living in an apartment setting EVER AGAIN.

A house, yes--that's what I need. For under $1100 a month though, damnit.

(*Names have been changed. God knows why.)