May 22nd, 2008 @ 10:57 pm
Goodbye, old roommate. Hello new roommate. Oh! Hello, second new roommate.
Jerome got his bed yesterday. He was sleeping on the couch before that. He was sleeping in our apartment because he’ll be staying with us the next three months. Three months! This is Jerome (and this is Jerome en English). He is Quebecois, from Quebec City. An international traveler extraordinaire, he planned a three-month internship as a Mac developer, not to mention found a place to stay (with me), completely through Gmail. That’s impressive.
Jerome, meet Rhiannon. She’s our roommate—as of two weeks ago. Yup. She had to move three times in the past two months to find a place as good as ours. She’s planning on settling down and having some action figures. We met her at Bad Movie Night and kept coming back, long enough to make friends with the girl taking our $5 every week. Now it’s free for us. You can come too, Jerome, and be subjected to the horror that is “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.” It’s ok, though! It didn’t actually win any Razzies, so that means it must be a good movie.
Nice to finally introduce you two. This place isn’t the cleanest in the world, now that our former roommate is gone. She sure liked that cleaning. So there’s some Dr. Pepper boxes that are being saved for no reason. We’ve got extra couches, now (not sure what to do with those). I’ll be the first to admit that there’s too many open projects to count. Expect things to be in unlikely places, like my hats on the couch or network cable strung up in the hallway. It’s a creative disorder, a constantly brewing ferment of materials and activities and ideas all swirling around in too small a space for their own good. Welcome.
January 8th, 2008 @ 2:37 am
There’s a room in my house that smells like abandoned building. I know this, because I’ve been in many, many abandoned buildings. For the past few days San Francisco has had (while not quite “Biblical” as described by some) torrential rains, and the normally warmer drier Mission has seen as much as the rest of town. And I love my apartment; my neighborhood is great despite some evidence to the contrary. It’s just that the place is a bit of an old girl, you know. She does the job… the job of being inhabited… just, sometimes she shows her age is all. One room at the back of the apartment I call the “project room” despite the fact that no “projects” to speak of have been completed there. We just called it that when we moved in. Besides, it’s easier than calling it the “sitting slash storage slash plant slash kiln room.” It’s actually one of our cooler rooms and used to be outdoors in fact, which is why it has two windows looking in on it from other rooms of the house (err apartment—a personal history of single-family home residency is apparent in my mental constructs). It also doesn’t really hold in warmth too well which makes it not-too-handy for sitting in seats as far as “sitting room” goes, but which is pretty handy when Lynae’s kiln hits the 2400 Fahrenheit mark. Except of course when it rains and water starts coming in under the door, which doesn’t fit because it’s swelled up in the rain. And as far as the rain goes it doesn’t stop at the door. The roof hasn’t started leaking… yet; however, one gets an inkling of why I might notice a little aroma of dilapidation. I think you kind of get the picture here: the room is neat for its uniqueness and its feeling of history, but has its disadvantages as concerns actually taking care of the place. Well, I did want to live in an abandoned building once. I guess we ought to be careful what we wish for.
March 22nd, 2007 @ 10:20 pm
There are a lot of apartments in this world. Some of them are livable. Lemme tell you what…
There’s a place in the Marina with bay windows and a couple of big bedrooms. Hardwood floors. Private entry. Nice Chinese landlady. View to the bay (just a little). Extra room, almost as big as the bedrooms. Dining room’s gigantic too.
There’s another place in the Mission, on a corner. Got a lot of character and some nice bedrooms, really sunny. Been painted a dozen or more times and we could do the same. Sliding door between the bedrooms. Lots of stuff in the neighborhood, markets and little stores and maybe a crazy-cool neighbor downstairs.
Both places cost the same. They’re both spacious and close enough to public transit. Awesome party houses, if that turned out to be our thing. There are four roommates and we’re split down the middle. Not two and two, but each one of us liking the both of them. We applied to one. The other gets put in tomorrow. How do you decide these things? A coin toss seems somehow inadequate. They’re both good.
Then again, the Mission one is in what some would call “el Barrio.” Those charming taquerias and markets and community parks might harbor gang-bangers at night. The paint is peeling outside and the common courtyard has stained asphalt and a half-dozen neighbor’s windows. Loud music bumped from the place next-door, and I’d assume more of the same. The guy downstairs could just as easily be crazy-crazy. Valencia, the cool street in the Mission, is way farther than I’d like it. I think it’s also possible there’s ten people living next door.
But in contrast, the Marina spot is as boring as a lobotomy. There are enough cool restaurants to shake a toothpick at. A flavorless, bland and splintered toothpick. Union street is close, at several blocks away, and has lots of charming… upscale shops. Every room is ample (and then some) save for the kitchen—which wraps around both the hot water heater and the recycling and the back door and indeed, despite it’s granite-osity, still manages to seem cramped and uninviting. Did I mention that this place is situated on the main highway? Yeah, that’s our doorstep.
I’m not sure if I told everyone who reads this yet: me and three others are currently seeking an apartment in San Francisco. We’ve been living together in a small room on the fifth floor of a hostel in the Financial District, one that now houses a total of six, and we really want to move out by April 1st.
We’re gonna get a cat.
September 26th, 2006 @ 5:00 pm
I’m in San Francisco right now. I’ve been moving to San Fran since last Sunday the 17th. I’ve walked the entire length and breadth of the city, or at least it feels that way. I’ve applied to more jobs than I care to count. I haven’t been laughed at for it. Yet. And although I don’t technically have a job right now, I really am hoping I do. So I’ve started looking around for a place. I started with the internet, and writing out things like this:
About me:
I like things that I find. This has been most apparent in the past, when I lived at CSU Monterey Bay on the old Fort Ord. My rooms were decorated with army lamps, lost art, and all manner of discarded artifacts. They’re never scrapheaps; they’re galleries, with nice lighting and curtains. I like bringing guests into my spaces and so I take care of them.
For those wanting the jist: I’m clean, I have taste (and a decent hobby), and I’m cool enough I don’t make it a big deal.
To be fair I’ll offer some negs, too: I spend too much time on the computer (in the past, anyways). I sometimes get neurotic when things are out of place. I thought I was messy until I had roommates in college, and then I was the clean one with the cool room. I dislike television. I love meat pastries, so vegetarians/vegans have hereby been warned. And I won’t remember anything you tell me upon just waking up.
-from my Roomster.net profile
I’ve written many emails, received none. Am I being too eager? Too honest? Too smarmy? Quite possibly. But Imma keep looking, if for no other reason than because my hostel is a fourth-floor walkup. So I’m going to an open house right now. See you in an hour.
Wanna comment?
