So, today I'll work on this month's On Display collaboration. The topic for May is "What is most disappointing about where you live?"
It's intended to be a political question. Indeed, when first proposed to the mailing list, it was phrased, "...and that was the most disappointed I've ever been with my country." There were protests, mine among them. Mark Twain once said, "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt." Sound advice. I don't know enough about politics or government to discuss it intelligently, and so I'd rather just remain silent on the topic.
So I'm going to talk about apartments and houses. Though the word "disappointing" isn't really quite right. Disappointment seems to me to convey the thought that something better was expected. The homes that have failed me, failed me almost immediately.
My first apartment was undoubtedly the worst. What can I say? I was young and stupid. The first and worst flood happened less than a month after I moved in. This wasn't rainwater that seeped under the door - this was bad plumbing. The pipes for the toilets would cease working and water (thank all the gods, never sewage) would back up and pour by the gallon out of the bowls. After we'd been there a few months, it got to be a regular routine for us to shut off the water valves to the toilets before we went to bed. I've lost touch with one roommate, but K.T. and I both to this day get nervous at the sound of bubbling water.
The management, knowing we were college students who would be gone in a year, didn't care. We flooded - if I'm remembering correctly - eight times. The management sent someone out with a wet-vac exactly twice. Nothing was fixed. We had terrible roach problems. The ceiling in the main bathroom actually caved in before they were willing to fix the water damage. The heater broke, and it took them a week to fix it. In the meantime, whenever we were home, we'd sit in the kitchen with the oven on. (We didn't pay the gas bill, thank heavens.)
Everyone should have a hell-hole of an apartment just once, to make them appreciate the better ones. That was mine. I suppose it could have been worse, but they'd have had to work at it. I don't know that I was ever disappointed with it, though. The first time we had a problem, I hoped it was an anomoly. The second time might have been a disappointment. By the third or fourth, though, I merely felt the heavy weight of resignation on my shoulders.
My second apartment, I liked. It was decorated in hideously ugly colors, but I didn't have any problems with the apartment itself.
My third apartment, the one I lived in for three and a half years after I came back to Williamsburg, had its problems. Less than two weeks after I moved in, I had a termite swarm in the kitchen. We had the Neighbors From Hell for one year, who brought with them loud, awful music, constant shouting out the windows, and a cockroach infestation. Toward the end of our time there, the air conditioner kept leaking water all over the floor. The termites never did go away - we had one major swarm and two minor ones every March. It was entirely too small a place for us.
But it was never the hell that the first apartment had been.
Now, we have our house. Those of you who have been with this journal since the beginning, or who read all the archives, know that the building of it was rife with disappointment. Nothing was completed on time. We had to almost physically threaten the builder to move in when we were supposed to. We still have one door that doesn't go anywhere, bare lightbulbs in the computer room, a sheet of plexiglass over one window in the dining room that was put up as a safety consideration, and no actual grass growing in our yard.
There have been a number of disappointments with the house - things that broke or didn't operate the way we expected them to. But I must say, the joys of being a homeowner have, in fact, outweighed the disappointments.
Word of the Day: mettlesome - full of vigor and stamina; spirited
"And I've have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those-" Oh, wait, that's meddlesome.
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