Saturday, May 01, 2004 ha....
For the past month or so I've been looking for housing in the Boston area, and I've learned harsh lessons about internet ads and so forth. Looking for a place in a reasonable location with roommates I feel like I could get along with has kind of become my interest and hobby.
Picking one option out of several different options has never been my strong suit. My secret talent is to con myself into believing that I can stand or even like a person, place, or concept that it is not reasonable to put up with (note: this is not a secret passive-aggressive message to anyone I know who happens to read this).
This works for about a year and half at the outside limit. That's why I had to take periodic breaks from my college career at the school in the middle of nowhere in the form of ill-advised trips to go and be a bum (or, you know, blackouts).
So last night I went and looked a room in a house in a neighborhood I'd been avoiding because it's off of one of the shittier train lines, because really, apartment leases are shorter than a year and a half, and every place in my price range in better locations had a tragic flaw taht even I couldn't overlook. For example: the place where the rent was cheap because the room was actually the living room closet (No, seriously. Also, they left me a message saying they'd found someone else: I didn't make the cut to live in the closet.) and the place where the rent was cheap because my roommates would have been creepy, creepy creeps into this weird middle-aged white guy version of "Native American spirituality," which involved cluttering the place with gourds and dream catchers and maize and every part of the buffalo, and playing tapes of tinkling native flutes. They were also into "massage" which, you know, I'd get for free if I lived there.
At the latest place, I met all the roommates, noted that the rooms available were indeed be intended to be used as bedrooms, and hung out for a while. I just got a message from them that they'd talked it over and would like me to move in.
However:
I found another room with really cheap rent that I can sublet for the summer: so cheap that I could pay for both rent and utilities for the entire summer on what I would pay for a single month for the house from the other night. The trouble is, this cheap place is in Baltimore. When your old college roommate asks you to sublet...
The voice of reason tells me that while these potential new housemates might be very nice people, I know I can happily live with J&J, and with the money I could save, I'd be able to get a better place still if I decided to come back to New England in the Fall, if Baltimore didn't, you know charm me. The only thing is that going to Baltimore feels like a cheating. I've been faithfully sticking to my semi-arbitrary set of plans to move up here and get my affairs in order, and it's been good. It is infinitely preferrable being tired at the end of the day to not knowing what to do with endless and pathetic free time.
In my head, the idea of living in Boston (or you know, the area) and the idea of making a life for myself are linked, even though I know it's not necessarily so.
All I know is, I have to finish flipping these coins pretty soon.
posted by Frenz | 5/01/2004 06:47:00 PM
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