Places to live, and weekend wrap-up
Back to work today. While I was glad to be able to go to Augusta and spend time with my mom, I’m happy to be back home.
I am, however, looking forward to the day when “home” means a house that we actually own, instead of an apartment that we rent. If you know me you know that for the longest time I was not at all worked up about the idea of home-ownership. In fact, I wanted nothing at all to do with it. I watched as people I knew bought houses just because it seemed like “the thing to do” and I just shook my head. Maybe it has to do with growing up with Realtor parents (well, from the late 80s on, anyway) but I think too many people get all excited about the idea of owning a home and don’t really stop and think about it. But, 3-5 years ago lenders were making loans to people who had no business qualifying and people were buying even though they weren’t really “settled.” That’s one of the biggest reasons I didn’t want to buy – I didn’t know whether I’d be staying in one city for any length of time! I didn’t want to tie myself down (mental pictures). Plus I wouldn’t be able to afford paying for all the stuff you have to pay for yourself when there’s no apartment maintenance man to call.
Now granted, sometimes the maintenance man is drunk, belligerent, and potentially violent, as happened at one apartment in Athens – the one where sewage was coming up in our sink. Sometimes the maintenance man is a nice guy but he just doesn’t have the skills to fix a particular problem. Sometimes the landlord is crazy. I am aware of all this.
But for me it was not worth it to just run off and buy a house. I always figured when the time was right, I’d know. Gotta trust my intuition. And now? I know! The time is right. I’ve enjoyed living in our loft in Decatur but it’s time to get out of there. The neighbors with their bizarre noises coming from the apartment above us; the weird smells in the hall; the people stomping through the hall at all hours; the yappy damn dogs; the Phantom Pooper; the dripping AC unit; starting off this morning with a clogged toilet and freaking out over getting germs on my hands when I couldn’t un-invert the plunger without touching it; all of this stuff, I’m over it.
And yes I know many or all of these things can happen when you own your home, depending on where you live. But that’s not my point. As I told Rusty this morning, it would be nice to live somewhere where everything works right.
Two exceptions: the ex and I never had problems (that I remember, anyway!) in our last apartment in Athens, where we lived for two years; and I loved my apartment in Texas. I was the first person who had ever lived there. It was one of the only things I liked about living in Texas!
I miss that green sofa. It was too heavy, though; I got rid of it because I was sick of nearly breaking my back every time I tried to move it anywhere. But now I kind of regret that.
Actually, how did I forget? My first apartment in Atlanta was great, too! I really enjoyed that apartment, but it wasn’t practical for me to stay after the second year – and it was probably good that I moved when I did, because it had been taken over by a new management company and was going downhill.
Maybe I just feel more annoyed now because I’m so ready to move. I don’t know. Things at our place just seem sub-par to me lately.
Anyway – after the first of the year, we will revisit the mortgage lender – assuming she still has her job, which I really hope she does, because we like her – do the pre-approval thing (we already got a pre-qualification letter back in September) and start actually going in houses with our Realtor and getting ready to make an offer. Our lease is up at the end of March so we’ll be out of the apartment by then at the latest, and hopefully a few weeks prior.
But enough about that. I want to document this process and my feelings on the matter, but when I blog too much about apartments and houses and stuff, I start to annoy myself. Yes, I know, old-school blogging FTW; but I start to get annoyed because I feel like I sound like those people who love to pontificate about real estate and how they’re going to get a deal and flip a house and blah blah blah, and think they’re big experts, but really they don’t know anything and they just sound like idiots.
So moving on.
This weekend my mom and I went to the cemetery to visit my dad’s grave. I hadn’t been since the funeral. My mom wanted to go because she wanted to see the headstone the VA put up, but she hadn’t been yet – I think she was waiting to go with me for moral support. We didn’t stay long. I think being there was a little much for my mom. I didn’t think I would get emotional but I did tear up a little – but I wonder if that was mainly out of sympathy for my mom? I don’t know. Anyway, we just stood there under an umbrella (it was raining lightly) for a few minutes, staring at the grave. We agreed that the headstone looked good; it’s very small, just a basic stone at ground level with his name, date of birth, date of death, and military rank. It’s smaller than most of the other headstones near it. My mom said, “Well, Dick, we’re just stopping by to say hello” and she got a little choked up. We stood there for a few more minutes, then she said “Well we don’t have to stay anymore” and then we left.
Also this weekend, I convinced my mom to start a blog. If she ever posts anything, I’ll link to it. It all started because there was a cover story in the Metro Spirit about the Surrey Tavern, which opened in 1978. Well it just so happens, it’s in the same location as a couple other bars where my mom worked in the late 70s. She said she’d never been to the Surrey Tavern, but she worked at Augustino’s and the Man of War, one of which was in the same location and the other was next door (and at one point they took down a wall and the two were combined). The article mentioned both those places briefly but seemed to get the chronology wrong; I showed it to my mom and she verified that it wasn’t right. The person who wrote the story is probably my age and just going off of conflicting things different people told her; but my mom has pictures from when she worked there, labeled with the dates on the back (yet another reason why it’s so important to label pictures!!), so she can say for sure. She worked at the Man of War when she was pregnant with me. I told her she should write in to the Metro Spirit with her corrections, and she said she would. Then we got to talking and I told her I thought she should start a blog and write about all the interesting/weird/funny things that happened while she was a bartender in the 70s and 80s. She could even scan some of the pictures and write about them. She got excited about that, so we went and got her set up with a blog on wordpress.com. Hopefully the motivation will stick and she’ll actually post something!
Guess I better stop for now. I’ve been writing this post off and on all day, since I’ve been so busy. Later I might write more about Augusta’s thrilling 70s nightlife! ;)
One of those obnoxious obligatory posts
One day, I’ll get back to blogging on a more regular basis. In the meantime, check out the blogroll. I just can’t keep up with blogging, blog-reading, and all the rest of it lately, with everything that’s going on. (I’ve been Twittering because 140-character increments is about all I can handle right now.) But I’m sure I’ll be back in the swing of things come October.
As Jenny said the other day, “It seems like there’s been a lot of bullshit in your life recently.” And there has been. But it could definitely be worse. I’m not going to sit here and be one of those whiny woe-is-me people. Some things are annoying, but I’m keeping at the forefront of my mind the important stuff – I’ve got the GDBF, I’ve got my health (such as it is), we’re in a new/old apartment in Decatur, we have a plan for the coming year that involves getting out of debt and buying a house, we’re going on a road trip in a few weeks, and I have nothing but optimism for the coming year.
Still… I am annoyed about more than a few things…
Don’t make me use this.
Having a positive attitude does not mean tolerating bullshit. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Temporarily severing some grid connections this weekend
This weekend, I’m going on a retreat with Georgians for Choice. We’ll be staying in somebody’s cabin near Ellijay, and there won’t be internet access or a cell phone signal. Am I allowed to use the phrase “off the grid” to describe what my weekend will look like? (Probably not, because there’s a landline and electricity at the cabin.) I’m not sure what we’re going to do at the retreat other than eat and sit around; but that’s okay, because eating and sitting around sounds like a damn fine weekend to me.
On one hand, I’m looking forward to the retreat, but on the other hand, I’ll be missing Rusty and looking forward to getting back to Atlanta (civilization) on Sunday afternoon.
Oh, for those of you who don’t pay attention to my Twitter updates, our AC is fixed now. Last night we slept at our apartment for the first time in 11 days. There are other updates regarding this situation, but I’ll post them later.
And now that we can actually stay at our apartment again, I will post about the pole saga soon, too. Executive summary: Platinum Stages is a shady company that has fucking awful customer service. Don’t buy anything from them.
Summary, in pictures
Sad:
Sad:
Happy: (also my current desktop wallpaper at work)
Extenuating circumstances, continued
We still don’t have AC. For those of you playing along at home, we’re going into day 6 of not being able to spend more than a few minutes inside our apartment.
I am now really worried because on top of everything else, the AC has been running this entire time in the hopes that it’ll actually get fixed and then cool down the place before we get home one afternoon. Who am I kidding? So today when we pop in to get clothes (including a laundry basket and detergent, because I must do some fucking laundry, I’m nearly out of everything) I’m going to turn off the AC, because I don’t know how stupidly high our electric bill is already going to be, but I’m not going to let it get even worse.
In addition to grabbing an overflowing laundry basket this afternoon, I’ll try to snag some other stuff like nail scissors… all the mail that’s piled up… a book or two… the cable that connects my iPod to my computer…
I hate money, I hate jackassess, and I hate this apartment at this point.
Oh, and on another note, here’s a preliminary list of stuff we’re going to sell soon. I would love to take photos and post them online, and write complete descriptions with the item in question actually in front of me, but again, that would require being able to spend more than a few minutes in the apartment. So anyway, we’ll be selling:
- A fancy dark wood dining room table. If you ever went to Rusty’s old apartment in Decatur, you saw it.
- A 27-inch TV. I bought it in 2003 when I moved to Dallas – almost exactly 4 years ago!
- A fairly low-end but perfectly functional DVD player. Mitsubishi I think.
- A blue denim love seat that folds out into a bed. I bought it at Pier 1 in 2004.
- Maybe the blue denim chair that matches the love seat. I haven’t decided about that yet, though.
- A coffee table and two end tables that kind of make a “set.”
- A Mac Mini and monitor.
- A garden-variety microwave.
Email if interested, but I don’t know prices or anything else yet.
And, preemptively: nobody post any comments about I should do this or did I try that or why don’t I do that other thing. No, no, no. We’re doing what we’re doing, and that’s what we’re doing. And that’s the end of it!
Extenuating circumstances
Sorry for the lack of blogging. At least my daily Twitter updates provide some semblance of a record of what’s going on. Anyway, the short version is, we’ve been staying in hotels and with friends since Sunday, because our AC is busted again and as you can see from the thermostat, it’s ridiculously hot in there. I took a photo of the thermostat yesterday afternoon when we were there to pick up a change of clothes, and it was even higher – closer to 100.
So, net access has been spotty, work’s been busy, and there’s other stuff happening that I don’t think I’ll blog about just yet. And in the midst of all this, I haven’t yet posted about the crappy situation with the stripper pole! Eventually I will… but, you know, I would like to post something positive, too!
That’s the Beltline, under there
There’s kind of a lot of kudzu behind our apartment building:
Ah, Georgia. Even in the middle of the city, the kudzu will not be thwarted.
Friday night – the sex club, and the person on the roof
The two major events of last night involved me scraping up my leg while pole dancing at a sex club, and the police coming out to our apartment building at 2:00 a.m. These two things are not related.
We decided to go to a sex club to (here comes the big surprise) watch people fuck. I didn’t exactly have high expectations, as I had been to a sex club about 6 years ago and was underwhelmed to say the least. But, I thought, that was one night at one place; why not give it another shot? It might be fun and hot; and if not, well, at least we went, and we could laugh about it.
I did get my hopes up a little after talking to a friend who had been to a club called Trapeze about 3 years ago, and reported that it didn’t suck. And, according to their 1999-esque web site, they had a pole. (Side note: I do not recall the name or location of the club I went to ~6 years ago. It was somewhere in/around Atlanta, but that’s all I remember. It might not even exist anymore.)
So we went out there, and plopped down the $115 to get in ($50 membership + $65 door fee – they don’t waive the door fee on the night you buy your membership). They had a full buffet, and I’d heard that the food was really good, so the first thing we did was go get some food. And indeed, the food was awesome. Honestly, it was the highlight of the night. (Close second was a furtive blowjob we witnessed near the dance floor, but really, the mashed potatoes and broccoli still win in my mind.)
We sat at a table near the dance floor. There was really bad porn on two TVs, but fortunately the sound was muted. After we finished eating, I sat there waiting for the DJ to play a song that didn’t suck, and for annoying people to get their asses away from the pole so I could go up there and show them what’s up. Finally, I just decided to go up anyway even though I didn’t really like the song and this one couple would not move. So we went up there, Rusty stood on the “sidelines” so to speak, and I wiped the pole down with a napkin. This obviously wasn’t good enough, but I thought it might be better than nothing. Well, I ended up not being able to do a whole hell of a lot, because the pole was really slippery and dangerous. I tried a few spins and such, but for the most part I couldn’t get enough grip to do anything 100%. When I tried the fireball spin (Darcey will know what I’m talking about) I damn near fell off. Discouraged, out of breath, and bruised, I sat back down. Rusty said I did a great job but he could tell the pole was holding me back. Later, I noticed that I’d not only bruised the crap out of my legs, but they’re peppered with scrapes and cuts, too.
After I caught my breath, we decided we might as well go to the back area and try to see if we could watch people fucking. So far the clientele hadn’t exactly blown our skirts up, but we thought we should at least see what’s up.
The club was pretty clearly segregated into a “naked” and “non-naked” area, which annoyed me. And to go back to the part with the beds and stuff, you had to get naked or mostly naked. They had lockers, but they didn’t actually lock. That annoyed me too. Look, I don’t have a problem getting naked, but I don’t know these people; I’m not going to trust a bunch of strangers just because we all happen to be naked. But, still, we put our clothes in a nasty little locker, in a cramped locker room with a leaky shower (and some woman spilled her drink all over the floor right next to us), and wrapped threadbare towels around our waists. I kept my purse with me.
We walked through the double doors to the designated fucking area to find… not much fucking. Really, not any fucking. We walked around the whole place, and there was no fucking to be seen. A few old people had gone into one of the semi-private rooms and were groping each other, but I didn’t want to watch them fuck anyway. Mostly, people were just sitting around naked. WTF. Why do you go all that way and pay all that money just to sit around naked? You can do that at home. (Yes, you can have orgies at home too, but that’s a digression for later.) And most of the people were significantly older than us. I have nothing against people having awesome sex at any age, and indeed I intend to be having awesome sex until I’m seriously geriatric; it’s just that at this point in my life, if I had my druthers, those aren’t the type of people I’d like to watch fuck.
So, we stood in the corner for a minute or two, nonplussed. Some older men leered creepily. Finally we decided to just leave. So we got our clothes back from the nasty little locker and left.
I guess I’m a little disappointed, but not exactly surprised. However, we’ve decided to do a little more “research” and do a podcast about it, hopefully within the next few weeks. Since we have the three-month Trapeze membership (we didn’t have a choice), we decided we’ll go back on a Saturday night, and see if it’s any different. For one thing, single men aren’t allowed on Saturday nights. That might help create a less lecherous dynamic.
We also want to check out Club Venus (why do these places always have web sites that look like a bad mid-90s Geocities home page?) and see what it’s like. That might be the club I went to before, but I can’t remember. I don’t know of any other clubs that are still open (Velvet Heaven and 2Risqué closed; shame about the latter, they had an under-40 rule) and aren’t BDSM-themed or something. If you know of any others, let us know; but our podcast research may remain fairly limited in scope anyway, ’cause this shit costs money.
Later I want to write about why the whole “swinger” concept annoys me; but I’ll do that in a separate post, because this is already really long, and I have to talk about the person on the roof.
So, after coming home, we were lying in bed at around 2:00 a.m. or so. The lamp on the bedside table was on. Naturally, we were lying there naked. I was lying on my side, facing Rusty… we were relaxing and talking, and then all of a sudden he says, “Holy shit, there’s a person outside the window.” (When he was at the “there’s a…” part, I thought he was going to say something like “a ginormous insect on the bed.”)
I dove under the covers; I didn’t even look up to see the person. Rusty yelled, “What the fuck??” and apparently the guy ran off. I was scared and stayed under the covers. Rusty got up and called 911. He told the operator that there had been someone on the roof peeking into the window, and it looked like the guy was fiddling with the window as if he was trying to get in. (He wouldn’t have gotten very far… it’s like a 20-foot drop inside those windows.) So about 10 minutes later, a cop came out, and looked around the building and the roof, but didn’t see anyone. So that was that. We didn’t file a police report or anything. Oh and apparently the cop said something to Rusty about, “Most people have drapes.” (This was over the phone.) Excuse me?? For the most part, I was happy Rusty was dealing with cop and such, but I wish I had been on the phone at that moment. I would have pointedly asked exactly how us having drapes on those 20-foot high windows would have made it okay for someone to be creeping around on the roof at 2:00 a.m. A million other questions about this stupid non-sequitur spring to mind as well. I mean, also, I shouldn’t have been wearing that short skirt. And what was I thinking, walking through that part of town alone?
So anyway. That was our night. My leg is still sore from the shitty pole dancing. I’m pretty much over the “dude on the roof” incident now, and am just pissed more than anything. (Yes, we told our landlord; but you know how things have generally been with her. Strained, to say the least.) We’re thinking it would be nice to have drapes up on those windows, but we’ll definitely have to hire a professional to install them, because there’s no way in hell either of us is getting up there.
Stay tuned for, eventually, a podcast about our experiences with Atlanta sex clubs. And I’ll also write a post about the whole “swinger” thing, and the concept of sex clubs in general.
The politics of cleaning my apartment!
Rusty and I have discussed the possibility of hiring someone to professionally clean our apartment once every two weeks or so. Given our busy schedules, it makes practical sense. And I’ve had the contact information of a cleaner for about two weeks now, on recommendation of a friend – but so far I haven’t actually contacted her.
I feel weird about this. I guess the word to describe what I feel is guilt – but I’m not sure that’s the whole picture.
For one thing, at a very deep level I just balk at the thought of me hiring a cleaner. It seems absurd. That’s something rich people do.
Also, I don’t want to be contributing to, well, exploitation. It goes without saying that I would be respectful toward any cleaner we might hire, and tip well. And yet, again on a very deep level, I feel bad about it, kind of like, how dare I pay someone to do this?
But when I think about it, that second reaction isn’t exactly fair, is it? It’s along the same lines as the reaction many people have to sex workers, for example. Obviously they must be downtrodden hard-luck types who would rather be in a different line of work, but as it is they’re poor exploited victims with no choice, and no voice. And we all know how I feel about generalizations like that.
And it’s really arbitrary, when I think about it even further, because I don’t have a similar reaction to, say, yard workers. Maybe that’s because when I was growing up we hired people to do yard work sometimes? (Even though, for the most part, they were my parents’ friends.)
So, upon (over-)analysis, it seems like the first part of my guilt-like reaction is coming from a place of being low(er) class myself, and the second part might be coming from a place of relative privilege. Maybe. Does that make sense?
Thoughts, anyone?
Smoke, dust, and such
It’s another smoky morning in Atlanta. I can’t believe those wildfires in south Georgia re still going on – and that the smoke makes it all the way up here, ~250 miles away.
This morning our apartment smelled like smoke, because of the window that doesn’t close all the way. And yeah, about that… I emailed the maintenance office about it Saturday, and yesterday the landlord wrote back and said (and I quote), there’s nothing they can do and it’s just “part of the historic value of the building.” :P
Great. Except, our living room area was already coated in dust from a crew working on the outside of the building (landlord says “the recent tumult of the dust intrusion is a rare occurrence”), and I worry about industrious mosquitoes finding their way in during summer, and cold air during winter.
I don’t like to be a chronic complainer, I really don’t. And I understand that with an old, industrial building, it’s pretty hard to find satisfactory solutions when problems like this arise. But it’s frustrating. However, it’s obviously time to take matters into our own hands; tonight, I’ll be breaking out the duct tape! (And the mop, to clean up the layer of dust on the floor.) The apartment should be somewhat clean in time for this weekend’s podcast party.