Water motif.

(August 16, 2007)

I used to live here.

Remember my Sunnyside apartment -- my old friend? Let's take a moment to reminisce about the first apartment I occupied without a roommate.

Notable features:

1. surrounded by undergrads on all sides
2. the "Penetration Station" sign
3. slumlord Kathy
4. negligent pet owner neighbors upstairs (threw pet shit out window onto shared sidewalk)
5. abusive misogynist neighbors next door (occasional yelling, hitting sounds)
6. keg pinata with bullet holes
7. conveniently located near Stabby Avenue
8. proximity to crack-smoking physicists
9. temperamental heat, water, and electricity
10. weird caterpillar infestation
11. peeling lead-based paint
12. mold

I didn't have a lot of company, which is a shame because I never got to share the experience of my aquatic kitchen. I lost count of how many times the shit-throwers upstairs let their toilet run for hours, leaving me to come home at the end of the day to find my kitchen flooded. The only bright side to that situation was that I'd have to call Kenny, the maintenence guy (he was a West Virginia version of Groundskeeper Willie -- all red hair and anger), who would have to key into the shit-throwers' apartment and stop their toilet from running. Then he'd come downstairs to my apartment and help me mop, and/or replace parts of my ceiling. We grew close.

Given all of the other unfortunate disadvantages of my Sunnyside apartment, I naively assumed the water motif was just a Sunnyside thing. But, now I'm starting to think it's me. Tonight my roommates and I discovered our washer drains into the sink next to it. We realized this because the washcloth in the sink nestled over the drain, which caused a massive flood in the basement. I'm ok with that, though, because I haven't seen any caterpillars yet.

Dudes sometimes like rhyming.

(October 14, 2006)

The more astute Dudes also like puns. Case in point: the "Penetration Station: Freshmen Welcum" sign the upstairs Dudes had on the porch for a while.

Sunnyside is all very Foucault. I can never walk around without feeling like a bunch of younger people are staring at me. And not because I'm narcissistic. They really are.
Case in point: leaving this afternoon for beagle-sitting, some Dudes playing beer pong on the porch before noon delivered the following rhyming assessment: "Look at the shitter on that critter."

That was too much, really. Isn't it standard Dude practice to wait until a bitch has passed before cuing other Dudes to look? Most sexual harassment that occurs in real time is delivered in the form of inarticulate shouting from the window of a moving car.

The strange part about this incident, though, is that no one playing beer pong on the porch actually lived there. And they were all gross. So, either they're some resident Dude's friends, or they just look for empty porches to gross around on.

I think the more pressing question, though, is when we can expect to see the demise of the catcall. And I'm not asking because I'm liberated, it's just ineffective -- maybe because women never really learn anything new.

I already know I have a nice "shitter". Readers, please note: calling attention to the obvious will never make a stranger want to sleep with you. I'll admit I was a little surprised to be called a "critter", but I guess that's all part of the colloquial charm of the Regional Pride Dude.

Friday the 13th

(October 13, 2006)

This morning when I woke up, I could see my breath. In my apartment. I turned my heat on. I hope we don't have another one of those mid-October incidents where it gets all cold and then the frost knocks a bunch of trees down over power lines and then we lose power for a few days and I end up trudging across town with a bunch of frozen meat because it's too depressing to have to throw it all away.*


* Censored excerpt from sincere mass email from Meg, 27 Oct. 2005:

Oh hi,

So things got weird in Morgantown on Monday and it snowed like a mother. And all the trees were like, "Whoa, we still have all our leaves and our sap in liquid form therefore making us really, really heavy and totally not ready for snow." So needless to say a bunch of trees fell down on power lines and people lost electricity. Which leads me to a story about how I'm psychic and me and Sarah carried 15 pounds of frozen meat across town.

... So many a people lost electricity when we had that storm, including little Nader. So obviously we went to her home, drank the rest of her orange juice and vodka in a Poverty Screwdriver, packed up her valuables and Anne Franked it to my home. At the beginning of our trek, we lightheartedly referred to it as the Chickenwalk, but it slowly morphed into a ChickenTrudge because we stopped talking to each other in favor of thinking about how much weight we were carrying and how far we were from my house. I started seeing mirages of white Ford Festivas slowing down to pick us up. Then we got to my house and ate Funfetti cake.

"We found poop in there!"

(May 17, 2006)

Getting new neighbors. Actually, I've already gotten two of them in the house across from me. Drew said when he went out to walk his dog he heard one's mother saying, "We found poop in there!"

Ah, Sunnyside. But that was days ago. I met them last night, and also the people that live on the third floor. No one has rented the second floor yet, and I'm hoping it stays that way. Maybe I'll put some poop in there to try to deter prospective renters so no one will live directly above me.

As most good friendships begin, I met my neighbors, Lauryn and Kimmy, outside at 3 a.m. while they were grilling t-bones and drinking beer. I wasn't sleeping anyway.

Then, the third floor guys from my building came home and, long story short, started running around in circles on the roof in their boxer shorts while some girl (a girlfriend?) half hung out of the window swinging a baseball bat before storming out in a drunken rage.

I've broadened my theory of alcohol as a paradoxical balancing agent, as apparently it doesn't just apply to me. Granted, it's hard to stand still while drunk, but somehow I can run across an icy Michigan parking lot in heels, and Donny and Justin can run around a wet, slanted roof without falling and getting concussions. It's one of life's greatest mysteries, really -- Stonehenge, Nostradamus, shroud of Turin, the correlation between alcohol and athleticism.