First Three Rules Of Apartment-Searching: Location, Location, Reliable Plumbing

There are many reasons that it's important to me to live in Boulder proper this year. I could easily cite the skyrocketing gas prices, or the importance of making the most of my last year in college, or the simple convenience of living close to campus. But really, all of those points are minor compared to what else is at stake here: no less than my ability to empathize with my fellow man, which is slowly-but-sure-as-shit eroding every single time I make the commute.

There is this one particular stretch of highway on my drive home that is just a meatgrinder for my sense of human fellowship. Basically, it's the point where one highway merges into another. So the left lane of the first highway merges into the new highway, and the right lane ends. Knowing this, most drivers kindly position themselves in the left lane as they approach the merge, leaving the right lane mostly open. This is obviously the perfect situation to see some grade-A dickbaggery. Like, if you were setting a trap for a vampire, you'd definitely get a nubile, nightgown-wearing virgin, and you'd put her in an old Victorian house, in a bed that's way too big for her, with lots of pillows, and with one of those curtains around it. Maybe you'd make sure the moon is full, because you don't really know anything about vampires but they probably dig that shit. And just as surely, if you were interested in seeing a straight-up parade of asshole cars, you would crowd up the left lane that they've been comfortably speeding in, and leave the right lane open, and put up a sign saying it's going to end in 1000 feet, then just sit back and watch the goddamn show. Because inevitably they'll get tired of crawling along in the left lane, and out of some dickheaded sense of entitlement they'll jump into the right lane and zoom by everyone in front of them, eventually picking out the pussiest person in the pack and cutting them off just as the lane ends. It is infuriating. I would sooner die than let my car be the one that one of these person-shaped shitstains cuts in front of. I have literally come inches from crashing just to keep this from happening. And in the event that such a wreck ever occurs, I make no promises about my subsequent behavior.

It's not like I see this every once in a while. Every single time I drive there, it happens. So when I went to that stretch of highway on Google Maps, I was not surprised to see that it happened to the gMaps Beetle, too. Now, I'm willing to grant that the gMaps Beetle is probably slow and it might be tempting to pass it. But the picture still speaks to me.


I know that everyone sees this type of thing every day, and we all have a few "It was so awesome! This guy was weaving through traffic, and I was all 'I hope he gets pulled over', then later on I saw him PULLED OVER ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD! I was so happy!" stories. And while I do enjoy such mild schadenfreude, my thoughts in these instances tend to transcend a simple hope for a slap on the wrist and dive straight into crazyland. I sit there and actually, really, not-just-saying-this wish for these people to have awful, awful things happen in their lives. I don't just want them to get pulled over up ahead; I want some Biblical, contrapasso-style shit to happen to them. Like maybe all the time they shave off their commutes by being inconsiderate shitheads allows them to get home just in time to find their spouses in bed with their best friends, or, if they're really egregious offenders, just as the robbers are leaving, and they get stabbed for their bad timing. That would be poetic. Or they could just get colon cancer - I'm not that picky. But harboring these thoughts can't be healthy.

Obviously I need to stop commuting so much, so I went into this apartment showing on Tuesday with an open mind. The location was close to campus, which would limit my driving and allow me to rehabilitate my tattered soul, so I was willing to overlook many potential flaws.

I showed up at the apartment and met the guy who was doing the showing, a kind-of-awkward, bohemian-looking guy about my age named Garrett. I would have been surprised that a shy hipster would be walking me through the apartment, if not for the fact that he had called a little earlier to confirm the appointment, and the conversation started like this:

Me: Hello?

Garrett: ... Um, hello...

Me: Hi. What's going on?

Garrett: Um... Not much. This is Garrett (blah blah blah)

I think the phone call was Garrett's way of giving me fair warning that this was going to be an awkward showing, and I appreciated the heads-up.

My apartment-searching experience is pretty limited, but I'm guessing that any time you're looking through an apartment that someone else is currently living in, it's bound to be a little weird, and this was no exception. The guy who answered the door cut a depressing figure: mid-40s, wearing a wifebeater, with hunched shoulders and a mopey, hangdog face. It might have been presumptuous to deem his life depressing this quickly, but when you are over the age of 40 and you let strangers see you in a food-stained wifebeater, you're kind of asking for it. I know I'm not an important guy, but come on - throw on a bowling shirt or a KISS '95 Reunion Tour T-shirt or something. Anyway, I'm going to call him Gus because I was too busy judging him by his cover to remember his name.
 

And the tour of the apartment vindicated my snap judgment (It was a studio, so by "the tour" I mean "my first three steps inside"). My task, then, was to try to separate the merits of the apartment from the depressing way that Gus was inhabiting it. This was easier said than done, because this guy was really a bummer. For instance, there was this mildewy smell, and I couldn't decide whether it was the apartment or if profound sadness just smells like mildew (read on for the answer). And he had a gift for answering my apartment-related questions with anecdotes that made me even sadder for him. In response to a question about how much electric ends up costing, I learned the following things:
 

- Electric can be 25-40 dollars a month, depending on the time of year. (Useful)

- He tries to be frugal, and he doesn't run heat during the winter. He just wears hoodies. He also likes to turn the lights off whenever he can because sunlight does the same thing for free. (Semi-useful, or at least relevant, albeit long-winded and obvious)

- Expenses add up, man, and this place is out of his price range these days. (Less-useful, very rueful)

- That's why he's moving out, and he wants to stay in Boulder but he doesn't know where he's going to live. Everything is expensive. He's hoping he can stay with a few people, but he's not sure. (Irrelevant, very sad)

Even in my empathy-damaged state, I really felt for the guy. As he was talking I got this really vivid picture in my head of him sitting on his floor (there was absolutely no furniture) in his underwear watching Olympic speed-walking on his 13-inch TV (also on the floor), eating Spaghetti-Os out of the can. I am 56 percent sure it was a psychic vision, and it was chilling. But his penchant for volunteering depressing information - stuff that other people would keep buried deep down in the recesses of their souls - actually soon came in handy. When Garrett pointed out the bed that was folded up into the wall, Gus told us he never used it, because it was uncomfortable and rickety. I asked him where he slept, then. He said "Just..." and then pointed to a specific part of the floor, and I wept inside for him. Then he told us that he used to have an air mattress, but it was ruined by the flooding. He not only said this like I already knew about the flooding, but also as if apartment flooding is just a fact of life - like the apartment was next to a South American river during monsoon season - of course it's going to flood sometimes. When I pressed him further, he told me that the apartment had been sporadically flooding with toilet water from the unit above him. This was game over for me. I was mentally checked out the second he said "toilet", but the guy had a good head of steam now and just kept complaining. We got to hear all about how the property owner declined to buy him a new mattress, and how next time they wanted to set up a showing they should call him a little later in the day because he's on sleeping pills and he can't get back to sleep if they call too early, and something about his caller ID not working. I'd imagine that Garrett wanted to strangle him; I just wanted to give the poor bastard a hug and get the fuck out of there.

While I waited for Gus to take a breath, I thought better of the hug and inched toward the door, fully prepared to leave Garrett to fend for himself. He tried to rent me a lemon apartment; I had no sympathy for him. But Garrett was having none of it, and he rode my coattails out the door. When we got outside I told him No Thanks, and as I walked past the staircase that led to the unit above, I smelled cigarettes and heard a girl talking way too loudly on her phone. And I couldn't help but smile, content in the knowledge that I would never, ever have to clean up that girl's poopy floodwater. And for just one day, the goddamn drive back didn't bother me at all.

Completely Self-Absorbed, Kind-Of-Serious Post. You Probably Shouldn't Read This.

Do you know what my dad does when he gets bored? He reads the encyclopedia. Just grabs a letter from the bookshelf, pours himself an Arnold Palmer, sits down, crosses his legs, and sets about expanding his intellectual horizons. I, on the other hand, am a sporadic reader. My bookshelf is full of partially-read books, any one of which I will nevertheless claim to have read and loved if it comes up in a conversation. And if I get stuck comparing favorite parts, I'll just list a few things from the 20 pages I actually read, then I'll enthusiastically agree with anything the other person throws out there. I've never been caught doing this, but I cringe just thinking about the day that someone gets wise to my game and starts talking about the riveting chariot race in Catcher in the Rye. I have nightmares about this stuff.

Anyway, I tell you this for several reasons: to inform you that my father is better than I am or can ever hope to be; to alert you that I am sometimes a liar; but most importantly to establish that I have absolutely no follow-through. I don't stick with anything - books, commitments, relationships, jobs - anything. I'm not a finisher. One might say that "not a finisher" is a pussy-ass way of saying "quitter". And I say fair enough, hypothetical bullshit detector person. Fair enough. Whatever you want to call it, it's something I need to work on.

I guess the first step is to pin down some underlying causes. Sometimes, like when I can't finish a book, it just comes down to laziness. But I've realized that most of my problem is that I have absolutely no regard for my future self. I am really a fucking asshole to that guy. According to the old bromide, a stitch in time saves nine. Roughly translated, this means that a little consideration now can keep you from getting knifed in the balls later (figuratively speaking). I regularly fail to do simple little things that would save me testicular trauma (speaking in figures here) down the line. And I don't care who you are: when your nuts have puncture wounds (in the figurative sense), you want to do what it takes to stop the bleeding.

Take college, for instance. Miraculously, I am very close to graduating (with a degree that will limit my options to grad school or learning to give a killer handjob), but it has not been easy. The work itself isn't hard; even though I tend to do things at the last possible moment, it's only rarely made me contemplate quitting, and even then only for a few miserable sleep-deprived minutes. No, the worst part of college for me is this time of year, before school has even started.

It takes like 20 minutes to register for classes online. It is very easy to do. And considering the profound impact that your schedule can have on your quality of life for 4 months, it stands to reason that any semi-competent college student would free up a little time to register as soon as the system opens up. My school's registration opened at the beginning of April, with the earliest slots going to the students with the most credits completed. As a Senior, the system was obviously working in my favor. It's clear where this story is going: until this week, I hadn't registered for any classes, because I am an idiot. It's not like I forgot to do it; registering for classes is like all anyone talks about in late March/early April. For weeks, conversations like this were a regular occurrence around campus:

Guy: Did you register for classes yet?
Girl: No! I can't till the 6th!
Guy: That sucks.
Girl: Yeah, but I've been using the planner thing, so I kind of know what I want to take. I definitely want to take Western Civ. with Donahue because I heard he's super-chill and his class is at 2 on Tuesdays and Thursdays and I'm trying to get all late classes so I can party the night before but if that's full then I'll take blah blah blah blah (10 minutes of rambling about potential schedules and contingencies).
Guy: (bored, regretting that he asked)

I would regularly hear people having these conversations when I was already eligible to register. Sometimes I would hear these conversations in class, with my computer in front of me - registration literally at my fingertips - and I would instead choose to play online Family Feud or to type my full name into Word and attempt to come up with anagrams for it ("Shawn Christopher Davis" = "Christ, a dawn shivers. Hop!") for the entire class period. I didn't even think about what I wanted to take. Little did I consider that I was (figuratively) shanking my future self right in the (figurative) junk. Because here I am five months later looking through a bunch of booby prize classes that are going to make my life miserable starting in about two weeks, wondering what the fuck is wrong with me that I lack even the smallest shred of foresight when that little sliver would have been enough to prevent me from being in such a dumb situation.

The same applies for my living situation. I really have no idea where I'm going to live this semester, and school starts in two weeks.

And I do this every goddamn year, so early August is generally a pretty stressful time for me as I struggle to get my shit together before school starts. So I really, really feel like quitting. I feel the magnetic pull of the vagrant life: I'd roam from town to town, just me and my rucksack, working for food and impregnating the women with the fewest teeth. It would be great. But I guess I've come too far to quit now. There's plenty of time for vagrancy. For now, I need to finish what I started - if not for me then for my parents, not to mention my many, many future children. It's not that I want to be there for my progeny - I just want them to live. And vaccinations to protect against raccoon scratches don't come cheap. A college degree can be my first-ever stitch in time, because with a little work now I can not only save my future kids' lives, but I can more importantly keep one of their toothless, obese mothers from castrating me for being such a lousy bum, thereby saving my balls (LITERALLY!!!).

China's Underage Gymnasts

I recently started watching Planet Earth, having heard reviews ranging from "It's great" to "After you watch it you'll sprint outside frothing at the mouth and have rabid sex with the dirt". So far, my opinion probably falls somewhere between the two, so I guess you could say that I want to feel up nature. It's definitely an impressive undertaking, man. The creators spared no expense, using state-of-the-art technologies to show us rarely-seen creatures and locales that other state-of-the-art technologies are pushing toward extinction. And David Attenborough's narration could make a backalley stabbing instigated by a "Yo mama" joke seem dignified and poetic.

I always feel weird about watching nature documentaries, though, because it turns out that animals often kill each other, and I never know who to root for. And the documentarians don't make it any easier with this popular formula:

1. Introduce animals as they frolic/eat/chill.
2. Segue to that animal's predator by cuing dramatic music and saying something about how life isn't all just fun and games for the animal.
3. Show the inevitable clash between the animal and its predator.

In cases like these, the primacy effect dictates that I'm going to root for the prey. Plus, I don't particularly like seeing things die. But then it's like, what do I expect the predator to do? They've gotta eat, man. They've gotta feed their families and mistresses, just like the rest of us. And what they do is necessary, even if I don't like it, not unlike bar bouncers or Rush Limbaugh's lawyers. So what the fuck do I do? I'm an American, and I wasn't brought up to watch things without a rooting interest. And fucking David Attenborough never helps me out by playing favorites. If he would just tell me that macaques are homophobic, or that golden eagles beat their wives, I wouldn't have a headache at the end of each confrontation.

Sometimes, though, one animal is so much cooler than the other one that I can wholeheartedly root for an outcome. Who wouldn't want to see a badass endangered snow leopard make an acrobatic kill on seemingly impossible-to-navigate mountain terrain? Unless you are a markhor enthusiast, this one is easy.

But if the snow leopard fails, it doesn't die on the spot - unless something goes super-wrong, it lives to hunt another day. So while I rooted for it, there was no real sense of urgency. It's only when the animal being hunted is undeniably cooler than its predator that shit gets intense. Cue the otters.

Otters are fucking awesome. I've always thought so. When I saw otters come up on the screen, I smiled a stupid smile, because otters are like little furry hits of Ecstasy without the spinal fluid issues and potential for rape. Basically if you don't like otters, I hope you get eaten by a snow leopard. So imagine my distress when Attenborough introduced the crocodile*. My memory isn't the best, but here is a paraphrased version of events:

Me: (smiling about otters)
Attenborough: (Britishly, accompanied by suddenly ominous music) Check out this crocodile. It is big and scary.
Me: Oh no.
Attenborough: Crocodiles eat otters.
Me: No!
Attenborough: A single otter is no match for a crocodile.
Me: (hoarsely, crazily) NO! Goddamn it, no! Run, you fucking otters! Attenborough, do something! Why won't you do something!

In retrospect, I should have seen the foreshadowing when he said "a single otter". But then my mind wouldn't have been so otterly (fucking yeah, I did.) blown when the otters got together and GANGED UP ON A GODDAMN CROCODILE. A bunch of cute little otters teamed up and antagonized a murderous dinosaur thing until it got confused and ran away. Usually when you root for the prospective prey the best you can hope for is that they live. But these otters basically got together and pantsed the school bully. Just when I thought otters couldn't get any cooler, by Darwin's balls they did it. If the otters were fat kids and the crocodile were Ben Stiller, this would be the movie Heavyweights.

I'm not really going anywhere with this, except to say that nature is cool.

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*Some might contend that crocodiles are also cool, but they don't do much for me - certainly not as much as otters. Dictionary.com has my back on this one, as the third definition of "crocodilian" is "hypocritical; insincere". Otters are nothing if not sincere. I think "otterian" should eventually come to mean: 1. sincere; 2. gregarious; 3. lovable 4. better than a crocodile.

UPDATE: Just after writing this post, I realized that the otter video is probably on YouTube. Sure enough, it is. This renders moot my (inaccurate) paraphrasing of Attenborough, but oh well. Here ya go: