Thursday, October 30, 2003

World Blows Up Around You

My life could be a lot worse. I could live in a war zone. I could be in the military. I could be experiencing another bout of depression. I could be sick. The rest of my family could be dying. My house could be burning down.

That doesn't stop me from complaining about all the shit that's going down right now.

At the crux of my complaints is that there is a growing puddle of sewage in my basement and the landlord wants to raise the rent by $130 after our lease is up in a month.

Considering the egregious lack of proper maintenance of the property, my housemates and I are crying foul. We don't think a house with sewage in the basement, quickly encroaching on expensive and heavy electronics among other things, is worth the $130 extra in rent. His letter claims expenses have increased, thus the need for higher rent. Bullshit. He doesn't pay any of the utilities for this house, and I am pretty confident property taxes haven't gone up. His previous "maintenance" has been sending a non-English-speaking guy out to "fix" the leaking shower, which was not, in fact, fixed; replacing the broken ceiling fan in Chris's bedroom with an inexpensive light fixture; and giving us a smelly, tiny, 30-year-old fridge to replace the one that died and ruined all of our frozen food. The fuses have blown from that fridge. He's been a useless prick of a landlord, not to mention sexist, only dealing with my male housemate directly, despite two females (myself included) being on the lease.

I love this house. The location is primo--close to everything I love, even though it's ghetto as hell and surrounded by noise, I'd prefer it to frat row--the space is magnificent, the parking is free, the rent was exceedingly reasonable. It's not perfect, but it is nice. Except for those pesky little things mentioned above, which are intolerable. The sewage is the anvil that broke the camel's back.

So we're planning to move.

Maybe if the sewage gets taken care of quickly and we can make an agreement that maintenance conditions improve dramatically, the $130 will be worth it and we'll stay. I'm thinking not, though.

Obviously, this leads to a whole new set of complications. Where to move, when, how to deal with Josie who's leaving at the end of January, not to mention her cat... Moving sucks, it does. But so does a clusterfuck of disgusting house problems.

What else is going on? I don't know. I have a cold and I'm on store brand sudafed, which always makes me spacy as fuck. I slept at Kevin's so I could, you know, shower and use the bathroom--being on the rag sort of necessitates these things--and I grabbed food and coffee at Ballard Market on my way to the bus to work. The coffee spilled all over the place and got cold from sitting around forever. The bus stopped at every stop. The cup I brought for Chris was unpleasant, and of the three sugar packets I brought him, one wasn't sealed properly and spilled all over my grocery bag.

I'm here at work until 4:30, too brain dead to do anything really productive and hogging the only functioning workstation. The printers are being wonky and people keep having retarded and overlong issues that make me want to fall on a sword.

Everyone else has midterms this week and is freaking out over that. The University Neighborhood Service Center, my closest passport application site, is closed until further notice due to flooding, so I need to haul ass to Ballard during appropriate hours. Tomorrow is Halloween and my costume will be Dirty Insomniac. It won't require me to dress up at all and will probably scare patrons and small children alike.

And I need to find a new place to live and move over Thanksgiving weekend, it looks like.

Fuck.

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