Recently, our apartment has become a hotbed of strange (mostly unpleasant) smells.  It's as though the universe was holding a raffle for "Whose Living Situation Do I Make Hellish?" and 1506 was the lucky, lucky winner.  [Coincidentally, my roommate just hurtled into the living room carrying a stack of wrinkled computer paper.  It was under her bed.  It got saturated.  All of it.  AND there is mold growing on it.  Now it is in the living room and I am going to wave it in the faces of the maintenance people who come tomorrow.  Coincidence 2: a recently repaired wall is crumbling again].  Anyway, it's been one smell after another.  We've finally resigned ourselves to this way of life and have invested heavily in scented candles.

Once we finally got rid of the soggy carpet smell, which disappeared when we finally made the connection between the shower and the puddle in the hall, we had new neighbors move in.  They smoke heavily.  They also talk loudly in husky, smokers' voices, and bang things around in their kitchen, but that's neither here nor there.  Because the apartment building is older, it has lots of these cast iron grates that must go into some now defunct air circulation system.  They're really big grates and are sort of scary looking, like some kind of grate monster might come slithering out when no one is looking; they're also dirty, but again, neither here nor there.  

What is here AND there is that all the apartments are connected by this complex system, which means that smells and sounds travel.  Our smoking neighbors share the wonderful smell of their smoldering sticks of nicotine with us!  It's usually like clockwork; right around 7pm it starts to smell like an old saloon.  And for some reason, by the time it reaches us, the smell is no longer like FRESH cigarettes, it's like old ones that have been letting their scent waft around and get stale.  Anyway, what's probably going on is that our neighbors come home from work, light up like chimneys and clatter around in their kitchen.  The first time I caught wind of it I semi-panicked.  I was half convinced that maybe our apartment existed in its own little realm where it was about to experience its own apocalypse - first there was flood, now there was fire.  It was, in fact, only people sharing their smoking habit.  This is frustrating because it means that our NON-smoking apartment sometimes smells like it's totally pro-smoking.  Candles are useful.

This, however, ceased to be as much of a concern after something started to smell like it was…decomposing in our kitchen.  And we couldn't find it.  It smelled like the way potatoes smell when they start to rot which, for any of you who are familiar with the smell, is ghastly.  It smells like death.  But there were no potatoes anywhere.  We emptied the trash.  Took out the recycling.  Poured dish soap and 409 (because 409 is pretty much balls to the wall awesome) down the disposal.  The smell was still there.  My roommate and I got her boyfriend to empty out the space underneath the sink just in case, you know, something had crawled back there and died.  It was dusty, but nothing was there.  I was literally SNIFFING my way around the kitchen, sometimes on my hands and knees.  My other roommate grabbed the spray bottle of bleach at one point and went nuts spraying everything in sight.  We had to rewash some dishes because of her zealousness.

We still don't know what it is.  Candles are useful.

I'm really concerned about this mold, though.  And I'm a hypochondriac, so I'm starting to feel like I might be wheezy.  I'm probably not, but I'm sitting in my chair, mentally scrutinizing my lungs, and pausing at every tickle I find.  Maybe they'll have to give us a new apartment!  Where do we go to complain?  Because complaining to THEM is apparently not doing anything.

This is me, concerned.  I am simultaneously thinking about my lung health, trying to detect any untoward smells in the apartment, and also hoping that the smell of my coffee will block out any of those untoward smells.

I didn't get a cell phone until long after most of my peers had already gone through two, and when I did get one, mine still had a tiny screen and was black and white.  It also wasn't a flip phone, and at that point, the flip phones were the cool ones.  It also wasn't technically a 'real' cell phone.  It was a tracfone from a drug store and I was only allowed to use it for emergencies, like calling my mom to tell her that I was going to be getting home from school late.  …I was a senior in high school…it was 2005.

(This is the kind of tracfone they make NOW.  I would have been awesome if I'd gotten that kind in 2005...)

Up until I got that little tracfone, I always had to bum cell phones off of my peers the way chain smokers have to beg for other people's cigarettes.  Sometimes, I was too embarrassed to ask.  Because at that point, I was still operating with a heightened sense of what people might be thinking about me.  I really wanted them not to think I was weird, and constantly borrowing their phones was not going to put me where I wanted to be.  I always thought I could detect a slight hesitation or a gleam in their eyes that balanced between amused and judgmental.  So in those situations, I would go up to the office and use the school's phone.  The office was small and the phone was in an area with a lot of foot traffic.  That meant that I had to sort of squish up next to shelves that the phone was on, and hunch over.  I also didn't want everyone who was going in and out of the office to know that I was calling my mother to let her know my after school plans, so I wound-up talking as fast as I could in hushed tones.  I also tried to develop a way of saying as little as possible in a vague way so that my mom might understand my intent, but so that no one else would be able to figure out what I was talking about.

"Hello?"

"Hi!"  I wouldn't say "Mom."  Instead, I would opt to be overly cheery and familiar and hope that she recognized my voice.

"Hi, Peeper."

"I have to work on a group project for Southern Hemispheres for a couple of hours.  We have to do research on the blood diamonds in the Congo."  I made sure that I wasn't asking permission.  That way, anyone going by could feasibly think that I was grown up enough to be doing what I wanted and was just telling the person on the other end of the phone what my plans were.

"Oh, ok.  Is Kaye staying?"  Kaye was a friend of mine who lived in my neighborhood and went to high school with me.  We carpooled.  She drove sometimes, I drove sometimes.

"Yes."  I was always glad when that worked out, because otherwise my mom would get after me about having to drive out to pick me up.  And when she was coming to get me, I always got anxious because if I was late, she'd get upset.

"Okay.  I'll see you when you get home.  I love you."  I dreaded those three words.  Because it was my mom I couldn't ignore them without hurting her feelings.  But saying them back would be a dead giveaway.

"Iloveyoutoo.  BYE!"  I would mumble back before giving a loud and explosive goodbye that I hoped would overshadow the "I love you."

"Bye, sweetie."

Then we'd hang up and I'd breathe a sigh of relief at having conducted the whole conversation while staying relatively incognito.  In retrospect, of course, I probably looked incredibly odd, speaking quietly and facing the wall.

When I got my tracfone, everything changed.  Then I no longer had to suffer the indignity of borrowing other people's phones or using the office line.  I could just go stand out of the way, next to a bush somewhere, and make my call.  Of course, I was HORRIBLE at remembering to bring the phone with me.  More often than not I'd be late to pick Kaye up and I'd rocket out of the house, leaving the phone, still charging, plugged into the wall.  Then, unfailingly, my mom would try to call me, realize I didn't have the phone, and get peeved.

She made me put a sticky note on the back door.

"PHONE??" It said.

I still occasionally forgot it.

Eventually, I got better.  Finally, all childish naivete regarding phone ownership was stamped out and I started feeling like I'd gone out without pants when I forgot my phone.  Then something bad happened: I figured out that I didn't actually like the fact that people could theoretically get a hold of me whenever they wanted, regardless of what I wanted.  I started to go full-circle.  Conscientiously.

Now I am probably one of the most annoying people to get in touch with ever.  I purposefully leave my phone in places where I won't hear it.  I also purposefully ignore phone calls if I don't feel like I'm in the mood to chat on the phone, which, recently, is just about always.  Unfortunately, when I ignore a call, I am overcome by guilt, and I go about my business thinking about how I ignored a phone call and how that probably makes me a bad person.  That's why I took to leaving my phone in places where I won't hear it.

However, that presents another problem.  When I return to my phone after having intentionally abandoned it, I'm usually scared to check it for fear of seeing 10 missed calls and 3 or 4 angry messages from people who are like, "WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU PICK UP YOUR PHONE YOU HAVE A PROBLEM."  Because I already know that I have a problem and their anger is not helping anything.  And I don't like it when people get angry at me.  I usually get a little frantic.

Sometimes I just turn it off for hours at a time.  That way, I can feign absentmindedness and tell people that it died.

I should come up with some kind of solution for this, but sometimes all I really want to do is "accidentally" drop my phone off of our balcony...

I think I might have a problem.

For the past two months I have been adhering to a strict workout regimen.  For the first time in my life (not counting my two year stint on the fencing team in high school - yes, I was just that cool) I am actually managing to work out Almost Every Single Day for at least an hour (1 HOUR!).  This is terribly exciting for me and I often spend embarrassing amounts of time standing in front of my mirror (which is leaning against the wall of my room in its packaging because we forgot hooks when I moved in and I'm worried about finger prints now) and examining myself for physical change.  It's even more exciting because I'm actually finding changes.  Like my calves.  Sometimes I stand on my tiptoes and turn around to look at them and there is definite muscle definition now.

However, what happens when you exercise a lot is that your appetite tends to spike to offset the increase in activity.  I knew this.  But I didn't know that my appetite would turn me into a ravenous freak who has to eat every 30 minutes or else will suffer some kind of gastric distress and completely lose it.  Thing is, I think I'm OVER compensating at this point for the exercise that I'm doing.  I'm probably eating the equivalent of 5 meals a day.  Today, for instance, for a snack, I polished off probably a quarter of a pound of leftover pasta - maybe a third of a pound - with vegetables in it.  That was my SNACK.  There is no way I'm exercising enough to make that even out.  I am even eating right now.  I am sitting in the dark, hunched over my computer, eating, like some creepy, nightmarish internet lurker.

That's me in the dark with my cereal box.  As a side note, I'm sitting in the chair that I am responsible for leaving a butt-dent in.  Clearly, I am not doing anything to remedy the problem.  I have no idea how to get myself to stop eating, either!  It's like my digestive tract has hijacked the ENTIRE rest of me and is keeping my brain hostage while it drives me to consume everything in sight.  Sometimes, sometimes eating just makes me hungrier.  Basically, I have forced myself into a cycle that I'm just going to have to stay in for the rest of my life.  I just have to keep doing p90x.  Forever.

Except now I'm legitimately concerned because the roommate whose dvds they are is going home for a month and taking them with her.  So now I'm confronted by the possibility that I may not be able to do my workouts, while at the same time continuing to eat at a monstrous level.  I positively suck at math, but even I understand that that is an equation for this:

I'm planning on acquiring p90x by any means necessary...


UPDATE 1:00AM: I have come up with a tentative list of things to write about.

I woke up this morning feeling confident about writing some kind of coherent, organized blog post that might both cleverly reflect on the world a little as well as shed a little more light onto who I am.  I also decided that instead of posting a million times when I keep thinking of something "interesting" to add, I could just go and EDIT the already existent post.  It's kind of pathetic that it's taken me…7 years to make that connection.

Then, I rolled over onto my side, had stabbing pains on the lower left side of my abdomen, and immediately thought that I probably had a burst appendix and was going to die.  My first thought was, "I JUST STARTED A NEW JOB I CAN'T DIE OR HAVE TO GO TO THE HOSPITAL OR I WON'T HAVE A JOB ANYMORE."  Then, I rolled over onto my other side and the pain sort of went away, so I'm thinking I'm probably okay.  After that happened, I was pleased to see that I'd beaten my alarm by twenty seconds, so I lay on my inflatable mattress (which is what I sleep on because I don't have a bed yet, and I might actually not ever have a bed here) and waited.  Somehow, despite expecting my alarm to go off, when it finally did twenty seconds later, I wanted to stab things.  But, I didn't.  I turned it off and shuffled into the bathroom with my face wash and toothbrush.  Barefoot.

I should have put my flip-flops on, though.  I'm in a constant battle with our bathroom.  You see, our apartment has TWO bathrooms, but thanks to maintenance's ineptitude, we are only allowed to shower in ONE of those bathrooms: mine.  It's hard enough to keep things neat and clean when three people are sharing a bathroom, but turn that three into a five and walking into the bathroom is like walking into a third world country and realizing that you are there and that you also don't have a way back to civilization.

I usually break down and clean like the world is going to end if I don't clean the bathroom Right That Second.  We have these super awesome yellow rubber gloves that we keep under the sink.  Until I moved here, I'd never had yellow gloves to wear while I was cleaning, and when I found them next to the can of Scrubbing Bubbles it was like I'd discovered Superman's spare costume in my apartment.  I was excited.  Now, whenever I clean, I pull on those super awesome yellow rubber gloves and feel like I am unstoppable and also like no dirt anywhere can get to me.  It makes cleaning so much more rewarding.

Anyway, there comes a point with respect to our bathroom when it's just about impossible to rationalize walking into the room sans footwear.  This is gross.  I start panicking when I see the dirt and grime accumulate.  Like when there are little tumbleweeds of hair curling across the floor.  I freak out.  So that's when I pull on the magical gloves, and grab just about every cleaning solution in sight:

Scrubbing bubbles

409 (which isn't a bathroom cleanser but which is super powerful so I use it anyway)

Some sort of bleach solution designated for tile that is in a spray bottle

Windex

When I finish, I'm usually staggering around from light-headedness.  Anyway, it's totally time to clean the bathroom again.

I'm especially paranoid about everything when I know that people might be coming over.  Like, friends.  When I know friends are potentially going to see the place I inhabit, it's like I'm back in elementary school and it's the first day and I know my clothes don't fit right and everyone is probably going to judge me for it.  I get really self-conscious.  I start thinking that they're going to outwardly be all, "Oh, this is such a nice place!" but inwardly are going to be cringing and going, "Oh my god, I never knew she was so dirty, what is wrong with her?!  Did I remember to bring my hand sanitizer?"  And it really doesn't help that we have MFing holes in our walls that are covered with chunks of ripped-up cardboard, and carpet in the hallway that is a) filthy, b) missing its padding, and c) unattached to the other carpet/floor and is rolling up on the edges (as a side note, my dad feels that there may be asbestos rattling around in tile form under the carpet).  So our apartment is going to look like a wreck even IF it also happens to be spotless.  I work very hard to get every surface and patch of tile or linoleum scrubbed, so that if curious (concerned) guests start inspecting things surreptitiously, they can be comforted by the fact that even though things LOOK bad, they are actually clean.  ...Thank goodness for the gloves.

UPDATE: John and I got into an email...disagreement today and I sent him this to show him that I meant business with my threats:

Then he sent me this next picture and I thought he was trying to appease me, but it turns out that he'd actually taken it earlier and had only just remembered - perhaps reminded by my blue shirt.  Or my general weirdness as demonstrated in my picture.  Because he also thinks my school is weird.  Partially because the dining halls are forced to put signs on the toasters telling people NOT to stick entire rolls in them because the rolls WILL CATCH ON FIRE.  The only reason we had the signs was because so many people were catching rolls on fire.  Which is sad.

The picture is of the Blue Bus that runs between Bryn Mawr and Haverford.  As you can see, John took it at the stoplight through the windshield of his car for me. He took it earlier in the day, and even though he didn't take it right in the midst of our...disagreement as a way to appease my indignation, the fact that he was thinking of me enough ithis morning to prompt him to take a picture fixed things anyway.

And now I feel sick.  I'm so glad I'm still approximately 8 years old with absolutely no self-control.

I also think I should quit writing posts for today because it's going to get irritating, long-winded, and sort of backwards if I keep going the way I'm going.

So. Look for me tomorrow!

I bought all this great food and yet, I am eating:

(I took this picture of my half-eaten Twizzlers)

It's pathetic.  My parents should never have sent me out to fend for myself.  It was clearly a very poor decision.

Somewhat frustrated because I still have a distaste for the lack of definition that seems to be surrounding John and me like some sort of cloud of befuddlement.  I feel befuddled.  Usually labels suffice only to piss me off and make me feel pressure that I don't want to feel, so I'm slightly confused as to why I suddenly seem to be taking issue, but there it is.  He and I have been emailing, since that is what we are forced to do since I do not have texting (more on that in future post, maybe) and staying in-touch has to happen somehow.  We've been having a relatively normal conversation.  

Then he wrote back:

I said:

Him:

I had an easy answer for that:

I tacked this last little paragraph on to diffuse what could potentially be an uncomfortable situation.  I don't even know if it would have been, but I don't even like to risk the possibility, so I preempt by lightening the mood.  It was very convenient that I had an adventure to Trader Joe's this afternoon so that I had ready fodder for mood lightening.

Trader Joe's is not somewhere anyone should visit on a Sunday afternoon.  It is full of grumpy, confused people who don't know what they want and move very slowly.  There was a serious backup in the produce section as I was waiting patiently to grab a bag of spinach salad.  It was unpleasant.  Then I almost ran over a child who darted into my path at the last moment.  But I still got good things and am excited to eat them:

Brie

Hummus

AWESOME bread

Salad with dressing and walnuts and cranberries and blue cheese

Carrots

Lots Of Other Things Like Cereal (which I mention because cereal is my favorite thing to eat ever)

However, I feel like I'm in a stupor now.

...Maybe he actually has a fear of commitment that I didn't know about.  Why else would he have told me a couple of months ago that we would, at some point, turn into boyfriend/girlfriend, but now be playing some kind of weird evasive game about the whole thing?

I'm not going to think about it.

FOOD.


UPDATE: Also, I don't understand why my font (and SPACING) keeps changing part of the way through each post...  I'm going to have to figure it out.  Apologies.

So, occasionally I'll get really excited and feel like I'm going to take over the world and be on top and accomplish all my dreams and just generally win.  This usually lasts for a week or so at a time, during which I'm happy and motivated and, in my case, furiously writing because that's what I want to do with my life.  Then the unrealistic nature of these dreams starts to sink in and depression starts to creep up on me, like fog.  I'll drag myself out to the living room of our apartment and plunk down in a chair (that I'm fairly certain is developing a butt imprint from me), and stare hopelessly out onto the balcony.  I don't actually go out onto the balcony because that would require strength and motivation that has been completely sapped by my remembered disappointment at not actually being ABLE to be a famous writer.  So I just look out and try to imagine what the temperature is like and think about how if I'd accomplished my dreams I'd probably be outside frolicking and I wouldn't have to imagine the temperature at all.

My main problem is originality.  I'm an original person and I do lots of creative things that other people don't do.  Or, I do creative things that other people do, but I do them differently.  For instance, I have only ever made cards.  I think I have paid for maybe 3 cards in my entire 22 years.  Family, friends, everyone only ever receives a handmade card, and I work really hard to make each one unique and tailored to the individual who will be receiving it.  And I write relatively interesting things, according to the poor saps I've cornered and bombarded with requests a million times who have finally broken down and read my stories (the question then becomes, 'Can I actually believe them, or are they just trying to get me to shut up?).  And my friend Mike and I have about a bazillion ideas every single time we manage to sit down and have a conversation.  But I'm constantly plagued by feelings of deep inadequacy, like no one would ever be interested in anything that I did because there is probably someone who has already done it or has done it so much better than I did that anyone who saw mine would laugh and ask, "Is this a joke?"  Then I would crawl into my butt-dented chair and think that maybe it was a joke and I just hadn't figured it out yet.

Today is one of those days.  One of the ones where I sit in my chair all day and my roommates go in and out, probably wondering to themselves why I seem not to have moved out of my chair AT ALL and whether they ought to be concerned.  For whatever reason, I always only seem to move when no one is around to witness it.  I'll get up and go to the kitchen, or be overcome by the knowledge that the bathroom is not even a fraction as clean as I'd like it to be and rush off to scrub it, or I'll think of something in my room that I want...but I only do these things when NO ONE IS AROUND.  It isn't intentional, it just happens.  But when I think about it, I get sort of paranoid because I don't like being judged.  Yesterday, I heard someone trying to get in our front door and I literally launched myself out of my chair and went to stand by the kitchen sink to, you know, look busy.  It's kind of sad.

This is why I'm glad I have a job now.  It's going to cut into the amount of time I can actually spend stewing in my chair.

HOORAY.

Well. Here I am again...several months later, as per my usual course of action. And, as is also the norm, everything in my life has completely changed. Again. Well, not completely, John's still around. But, for instance, my job is different now. Because the Fund for the Public Interest was probably the biggest load of horse sh*t ever. Shockingly so. Lies and dissimulation through and through; an apple with a maggot infested core. So I blew that popsicle stand and rejoined the ranks of the unemployed. For all of two weeks that were simultaneously the best two weeks of my life as well as perhaps the most stressful (you know, having to worry about paying bills and for groceries and all of that while not having an actual income...).

I've come so far over the past two months. I am positively convinced that the combined chaos that was my living situation and my work/general life situation has taught me to be more confident in myself and in my abilities, and to cause me to really understand that concentrated effort pays off in real results. I'm really liking the universe right now - it's teaching me the ropes. However, at the same time, I can't help but wonder what exploded somewhere to cause my life to blow-up the way it did. It was sort of like being a mole in the whack-a-mole game. Except in a whack-a-mole game where there is only one mole. And I was the mole. And every time I popped my head up, hoping for relief and greener pastures, an enormous mallet came whistling down to thud on my head. Life went along like that for a good month and a half, from just about the exact moment that I moved into my new apartment.

1) We were risking being tossed out on our heads because one roommate's mother had cosigned for the entire apartment and said roommate was (intelligently so) taking her mother off the lease. This of course meant that anyone in the apartment who couldn't get approved/find a cosigner, would have to leave. If that happened, we'd be left with yawning holes to fill and very high rent.

2) Our apartment kept flooding and maintenance didn't do anything about it.

3) Thanks to said flooding, walls were coming down. I once poked the damp spot on the wall in my closet and my finger went right in. And when it came out, chunks of drywall fell down.

4) Flooding was determined to be due to a rusted shower pan (that probably should have been replaced 20 years ago) and all 5 of us were made to use one bathroom. This of course resulted in extreme crowding and accumulation of dirt.

5) When people finally came to fix things, they put in a new shower, patched up the walls, and painted (no action taken against the ruined and soggy carpet). Then they told us to go back to using the newly replaced shower.

6) The afternoon on which this occurred, I was so excited that I was energetically pacing around the apartment on my phone while regaling John with the happy details of the day. I was on my way into my room to admire my newly repaired and painted closet when, SQUISH, my foot sank into a wet spot on the carpet.

7) Long story short, turns out that they fixed everything but failed to actually REPLACE THE SHOWER PAN THAT WAS THE PROBLEM IN THE FIRST PLACE. So they came back and busted holes in the walls again.

8) We're all back in one bathroom again and eagerly awaiting the completion of repairs.

And all of that has been going on from day one. I've gotten very good at complaining and making phone calls and chasing after people. It's a good skill to have. Additionally, we've had to fight with leasing every month because they keep charging us the wrong amount for rent/utilities/other fees. It's been like having a full-time job that I don't get paid for.

Meanwhile, the Fund for the Public Interest turned out to be little better than slave labor. The only difference between me and the canvassers was that I worked about twice as long and, when all was said and done, got paid less than minimum wage. It was hell. However, dabbling in canvassing taught me valuable interpersonal skills and I no longer have any fear or concern about approaching absolute strangers. Asking people for money pretty much guarantees that you can ask people for just about anything else later on.

I've lost almost all of my cautiousness about life. I'm ready to go and I'm ready to try just about anything and everything. Because, hey, why not? I've worked a shitty job, I've been unemployed, I've risked homelessness.

Now I am the Private Events Manager at City Food Tours Philadelphia. It's awesome. I do things like draft proposals and contracts, budget, and learn about Philadelphia restaurants. Kickass.

I'm also getting very good at going for what I want. I've sort of internalized the idea that life is way too short to spend time sacrificing at your own expense. There's no point. And that's bleeding over into how I handle relationships. Which is also kickass because it's making me exponentially happier.