rumblings

I woke up to hammering. It took a while to identify the location of the origin of the sound as probably my upstairs neighbors' apartment. I don't think is is a peculiarity of my apartment, although the high ceilings may do something to scatter the noise. Rather, I think it's just a 9 AM on a Sunday after several aborted post midnight attempts at sleep.

The boys had some company over last night. I found a little intoxicated girl in the hallway around 1 AM. I had come out to ask them to kill or at least stop revving the engine on the monster truck idling in the parking lot. We're ground floor facing the parking lot so any gunnings of engines, squealings of tires, and slammings of doors are done in a space about 4 yards from my not highly insulated bedroom wall.

9 AM is certainly a reasonable hour. The sounds of well shod feet hustling across the floor every Sunday morning tells me the younger woman directly above us probably goes to church when she's not hammering a bed apart. She was testy when I went up to ask if the noise was coming from her apartment. I'm not sure she realizes that she's been quite noisy in fact. She's one of those people who leaves their shoes on inside, and she is a "hard sole woman" too. Then there's the dogs, who after an initial quiet period started the occasional fits of barking for little reason.

But then it could have been worse. Although my current but soon to be former upstairs neighbors were not quiet, I could have someone like The Boys up there, and man that would suck.

The landlord is still trying to sell the place. Meanwhile, he tells A_____ he's got a job as a manager in training at a chain restaurant. I guess the finances didn't work out as he'd hoped. I still don't really know what happened with all that. I'm not sure I want to know, just so long as my rent doesn't go up and he's contactable for things like the driveway being an ice rink.

The upstairs neighbors' moving a reminder that it's the season for moving. Regardless of whether my landlord rents the upstairs apartment to more of The Boys type, A_____ and I will probably be moving within the next few months. Partly because when the landlord DOES sell, it seems at least plausible that whoever buys will want to raise our rent, and we can just barely afford this place as it is. It's too bad. I've liked this place. I think of all the rentals where I've lived here in this wretched state, the current one has been the nicest.

Lacking

I was looking over my site meter this morning and seeing that a rather large number of people end up here by typing funny shit into a google image search. Up until now, it took them to a post about Archie McPhee and christmas shopping in 2005. Other than cjblue commenting that she almost bought me some of the very items I had been admiring at Archie McPhee's, there wasn't much remarkable about this post. Oh how disappointed these people must be. I'd like to know what the logic is that governs this selection of search terms.

Last night one of my neighbors kept propping open the outside door. This meant the heat was on full blast, roasting at least A____, me, and two of our other neighbors I ran into while I was closing the door a second time. It did occur to me that they could have been lying, but there are good, non-altruism assuming reasons for that being very unlikely. So some dipshit is propping the door. So what? Aside from being worried that our landlord will raise the rent (an issue for me and A____ who are no longer on a year lease), it means we will run out of oil faster. We've run out between 11 PM and about 1 or 2 AM the last few times. This is no fun because it means (a) NO ONE gets heat. If these idiots think their underheated apartment is cold now, imagine how much colder it will be when the whole building is freezing. (b) the oil line to the furnace will clog because it sucks up sediment from the low end of the oil tank. This happened the last time and the filter had been changed within the past year. Clogged means it won't run or won't run well.

I had occasion to wonder what kind of reasoning leads to the behavior of my neighbor last night. I decided that more than being purely self interested, it is childish. That is, self interest would say "I'm cold and I want to be warmer. I don't care if making myself warmer make others uncomfortable. My warmth is the most important thing." So then this person being warm should be a governing principle in the decision of how to act. While propping the door open on a cold night so the cold night air floods the hallway where the thermostat is will make the furnace run hard and might warm the colder apartments, it will also increase the chances of us running out of oil. No oil means NO heat, not simply insufficient heat. And that outcome would seem to be directly in opposition to the governing principle of maintaining warmth.

Ok so this is not supposed to be like some fucking greek philosopher style argument. My point is just that if you're trying to keep warm, wouldn't you think that you'd avoid doing thing which might make you warmer in the short run or for a limited set of times but which has the risk at ANY point of making you much, much colder?

That's the childish part. I don't mean childish like petulant, I mean childish like someone who hasn't mastered object permanence.

All of this is just a long way of me wondering What the Hell is Wrong with People?

dogs

There are dogs upstairs. Medium sized fluffy dogs with tails that curve all the way over so they are touching the fluffy backs of these dogs. That kind of dogs. They don't bark too much but they make noises. The strange thing about these noises are they are sounds I had forgotten. The sounds were immediately familiar but strangely unplaceable, at least when I first hear them. Like a bit of a song you haven't heard since you were a kid. The soft "ka-thunk" of paws hitting a floor. The "whap-whap-whap" sound of a wagging tail or of a leg belonging to a paw which is busily scratching at the fleas who are permanent tenants of this building. I hear them when it's quiet, often at night, like now. It catches me off guard.

Where the boys are

We have boys. They moved in quickly, as boys often do on account of their usually having little in the way of furniture, dishes, or pots and pans. Why spend money on glasses when you can buy packages of keg cups every month on your mom and dad's Sam's Club card? Why own a baking dish when you can't cook ramen in it? Why own more than the one orange plastic plate you stole from the dining hall last year when a hot pocket's flavor is in some magical way enhanced by its being eaten off a swath of paper towel, a smoothed out grocery bag, or the surface of your hardened mac and cheese specked orange plastic plate?

Thus, because they pretty much aggregated here rather than moved in per se, it's hard to know when the boys officially arrived. I can tell you by when they were here. I believe it was last week, before the storms, that I first heard cars screeching in and out of the parking lot and later (after the storms) tires fiercely spinning on the snow and ice. These are the telltale noises of someone who doesn't understand that not all acceleration need be full to be fully effective. I know they were here last week when the sounds of heavy feet - made heavier by attitude than gravity - shook my apartment, when male hoots and grunts and hollars punctuated loud late night conversations in the hall and on the porch, and when I could hear the giggles and 1:00 AM playful stairwell protests of one or two young women behaving in a way which apparently counts as "coy" and therefore desirable in our post-Larry Flint-iconized culture. This "coy" sounds a lot like what we in my time called "skanky" but I'm more sympathetic to the girls.

Not with boys. I have a BOYS intolerance. I believe there should be a place were I can buy product to get rid of them. A boy spray or powder. Perhaps a boy-bomb (à la flea bomb folks, I'm not talking Ted Kaczynski shit here).

A____ told me this morning "I just worry about you." I said I don't know what that means. It's not specific. He said he worries that sometimes my reactions to things, e.g. the boys on the stairs at 2:00 last night, will make those things worse.

That's not worried about me. That's worried about the ramifications, implications, and overall fall out from my typical reaction to things like BOYS in my personal space, which reaction is admittedly intense at any time of the day and it highly amplified if it starts after I've turned off the lights and settled down to try to go to sleep.

1:00 AM poetry

Someone set the thermostat on my building's oil burner to 80 degrees. My apartment, being directly and immediately over the furnace, is mighty warm.

Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
-Robert Frost

CT, we're expensive

I was up early today to see my fella A_____ off. He's got a talk today, one I should go to but during which I managed to schedule an appointment. I couldn't have timed it worse if I tried. It's not like the talk is new info. As of last night, I'll have heard his talk 4, maybe 5 times. But I still would have gone if I could because as I've said, it's bad not to be seen in grad school and the occasion of this talk is one of those places to be seen. Plus, if I have to attend a talk that is not entirely my cup of tea, I'd rather go to one where I have some good reason for being there other than what more often than not boils down to faculty mollification (i.e. at least pretending to drink the cool-aid).

So I'm up, under-caffeinated, a little cranky about my day's schedule, and reading the news while I wake up. And what do I find? More reason to dislike the state I live in.

Despite a slowdown in the housing market, the median sales price of a single-family house in Connecticut has climbed above $300,000 for the first time.

The Warren Group report shows that sales of single-family houses were down by 9.5 percent in June compared with the same month last year.

The overall point is clear: The median price of a house in the state has outpaced the price of consumer goods and services. In June 1997, for example, the median price of a single-family house was $149,900. If it had risen in step with the consumer price index, that figure would be $195,000 in 2007, not $307,250.

Why? The article goes on to offer some shallow commentary from unbiased sources like a Century 21 agent and unsubstantiated speculation. (Thank you Fox news for lowering the standard everywhere.) Personally, I'd put my money on this:
The reason [for the local spike in home prices] even as sales decline, could come, in part, from a higher portion of sales occurring in Fairfield County, where houses cost more, said Steven P. Lanza, executive editor of The Connecticut Economy [published by a local university].

Fairfield county? The article has a table which lists the median price of a single family home in Fairfield county as $629,500. The county where I once owned a home has a median price of $243,750. Fairfield county is also the richest county in CT, and a nice example of how screwy the distribution of wealth is in this surrogate state o'mine.


The part of today's article which hits the point for me comes from this quote.
"It's still a very expensive housing market in the state, even in the midst of the housing recession we are going through," said Todd Martin, economic adviser for Bridgeport-based People's United Bank. "The state is still not very affordable."