Sunday, 15 July 2007
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More information than anyone will ever want to know
A) A corner fifth-floor apartment with lots of windows, but very small, cramped rooms. It's in a fairly affluent neighborhood, but I'd have to walk by a huge vacant lot and over a bridge over a long-deserted railroad to get home every night, which would make me nervous. I know I make a full-time job out of being irrationally paranoid, but I will never shake the feeling that rapists, serial killers, and other Very Bad, Creepy People love hanging out in vacant lots and on deserted bridges. On the other hand, one more (long) block and it's beautiful mansions. One more (long) block after that, and it's a pretty bustling area with a lot of banks, bakeries, a couple of pharmacies, etc. About an eight-minute walk to the nearest subway station, but it's a low-traffic one without an express train.
And this should be irrelevant, but the broker is kind of defensive whenever I ask her a question, which makes me rather not want to pay her well over a thousand dollars in broker's fees.
B) A generously-sized, beautifully laid-out second-floor studio in a good neighborhood. It's in much better condition, with good floors and a recently renovated kitchenette. Only a three-minute walk to the nearest subway, and there's an express train. Broker is not pushy at all, which I like, and the fee is only one month of rent. The rent itself is about ten dollars cheaper, and they include cooking gas, which would save me about $20 a month. I like the space much better than the first one. However, it is much darker than the first one, because there's only one real window--and this window, though large, is heavily gated and lets in little light. And THAT is because it overlooks the long, flat garage roof, which has a nice, sturdy stairway down to street level, so I might as well put a welcome mat outside the window for rapists and serial killers. (Sure, there's this excuse for a fence, but it's pathetically made out of thin strips of plywood, half of which are already kicked in. *I* could kick down the remaining boards in minutes, and I haven't kick-boxed in years. (Note: the fence partly belongs to the orthodontist's office and partly to the vacant apartment building next door, so it's not really the super's fault. The portion of the fence that belongs to him is a very impressive and imposing one of tall iron bars, but you know how a chain is only as strong as the weakest link?)
Seeing fresh graffiti on the orthodontist's office was not reassuring. The aforementioned vacant apartment building is in terrible shape (pile and piles of litter all over, broken windows, crumbling facade, etc.). Aesthetics aside, that's a safety issue, too. If that building were inhabited, it might deter at least SOME criminals from strolling up the roof and knocking on my window.
But even with all that, I still want the second apartment more. It's in a slightly busier area, and well, if I have to face a serial killer, I'd rather face it inside an apartment building where I can run and scream for help, as opposed to outside, by a vacant lot, with no one around for a block.
Now, imagine having to hear all of that incessantly and unrelentingly, and listening to me change my mind after every other sentence, and you will understand how delightful my company has been this weekend.
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Comments (2)
On a somewhat related note, some of these apartment complexes can be quite charming. My college apartment was located in a particularly seedy part of town, and although there were a few times that I feared for my life, I believe that the entertaining cast of characters I came across everyday more than made up for that. For example, there was this old guy who always asked me for some "sticky" every time I went to go check my mail! Straight up, if someone was showing me the neighborhood and I came across that guy I'd sign my name on the dotted line in a flash.
Well, see, you have that beautiful openness to human nature and all its varieties, whereas I am a narrow-minded coward that walks with keys clenched between her fingers as soon as the sun goes down, and who would invest in a cannon to aim outside the window if I moved into Apt#2.
You know, I was looking at an apartment complex in Queens, and the apartments were decent, the price not too outrageous. The problem was, however, that every single building in the complex looked eerily identical. I would seriously have ended up going to the wrong apartment building every night. If each one had its own colorful character outsisde the mailbox, well, that could have helped distinguish them...