Overly Verbal

Apparently, regardless of how busy I am, my blog remains. And since I’m largely happy, and we all know that my blog is really boring when I’m happy, my blog remains boring. I do have a couple of things to write about, though, and so I shall.

First off, the putting of the majority of my personal belongings into storage went brilliantly. It took less than a day, partially because the truck rental company gave me a 16 foot truck even though I had reserved a 10 foot truck, and partially because I was “aggressively vertical” about the space in which my belongings are currently stored. Sure, there was a point in time when I was inside the storage space behind my dresser, and had to perform a fairly acrobatic movement so that I did not have to live in the storage space for the next several weeks – climbing over the dresser was pretty easy, but climbing back over it in order to remove it from storage without harming it or myself may prove to be less so. Only time will tell.

Secondly, it may have become apparent that the reason I am moving is largely because the place in which I now live is crumbling to pieces around me. A couple of weeks ago I had no hot water when I woke up. That was a little alarming, but I had hot water when I returned from work, so I, as they say, shook it off. And Sunday I had no water at all for at least a couple of hours, and that was also alarming, but I manned up and simply neglected to do my laundry, not wanting to test the availability of water in the laundry room by putting four quarters into a machine.

And today, I went to get some leftovers out of the refrigerator and was dismayed to find that many of the liquids and some of the solids in my refrigerator were frozen. It will likely come as no great surprise that I had not recently changed the settings on my refrigerator so that it would be so cold inside as to freeze the water therein. Having only about eight days left to live here, I simply called my new property management company and left a message to the effect of “I am not inclined to spend any time watching someone install a new refrigerator, and I believe it would be foolish to attempt to repair the (at least 20 years old) refrigerator (and would be happy to provide photos of the rust on the outside, should that be necessary), but I just wanted to let you know that it’s malfunctioning.” I am simply going to categorize the refrigerator as an over-achiever, remove everything from the refrigerator sometime on Saturday, and be done with it, because to do anything else would likely send me over the edge.

In other news, all that is left in my apartment is my bed, my computer, my TV, some furniture I intend to divest myself of one way or another, a shit-ton of paper and junk I need to organize, and my clothes and shoes.* Here’s something – I have way, way too many clothes and shoes. With only one pair of feet, I’m not sure why I need 28 pairs of shoes, but whenever I look at them and think, “Okay, some of all y’all need to go to a different home,” I want to keep them all. I did manage to identify a number of articles of clothing that I can donate to someone who needs them more than I do, but I think any rational person would suggest that I have a problem, and one that needs addressing. I am easily one of the least girly girls I know, but the shoe thing . . .

You know what? Never mind. If that’s the biggest problem I have, too many pairs of shoes? I’m sitting pretty, so I’ll just shut up now.

_____
* And Molly. Did I forget to mention that recently Molly woke me up at 3:30 because she was playing with a live mouse? If that sounds familiar, it’s because she killed a mouse in August: when last I saw the latest mouse it was alive, but I don’t think it’s particularly inclined to come back. (I believe she ran it through the wringer, but you just never know with the rodents that choose to enter your kitchen.)

If I’m counting correctly (which I may not be, because being furious definitely prevents my spelling correctly, and may very well prevent my counting accurately), I only have to spend 45 more days living in the ghetto. And that last day won’t be so much living here as it will be loading a truck with my things so that I can no longer live here, so I’m going to call it 44 days. And 44 days is roughly 1,050 hours, and all I have to do now is figure out how much patience I have remaining and see whether I can’t stretch it out so that it lasts 1,050 hours.

Yesterday I received a very odd message from the owner of the property I live in now, indicating that I had not paid my rent for November, and explaining that my failure to pay the rent in a timely fashion was the reason the property I live in now cannot be maintained to my satisfaction. And I was rather rudely accused of having ignored repeated contact from the newly engaged property management company requesting that I paid my rent. Thing is, I had not only paid my rent for November, I had paid it early, and received a letter from the property management company thanking me for my timely payment. Not only that, but I hadn’t received a single communication from this company after that letter was received.

Clearly, there was a breakdown in communication somewhere, if my point of contact at the property management company not only believes that I didn’t pay my rent, but also believes he repeatedly contacted me and asked me to pay my rent, when I believe he didn’t.

So here’s how I would have handled the situation, if I was a property owner, and my contact at the property management company that I had engaged told me he had not received any rent for the month of November. First, I would have called my tenant and said, “I just talked to the guy at the company, and he says he didn’t receive the rent. I’m quite sure that because you are a sensible person you would not deliberately withhold rent, knowing that my financial situation is precarious, so let’s figure out what happened, eh?” That sort of communication, as opposed to hostility and accusations, tends to lead toward a more satisfactory outcome for everyone.

Then, I would have learned that the property management company has at least one employee who believes my tenant paid the rent, but another employee who believes the tenant had not. This to me would indicate that the company has some record-keeping difficulties (that lead to financial difficulties on my part), and I would have disengaged the company, because their services did not please me.

Then I would have apologized to my tenant for having had to make her prove that she had paid her rent. (But I wouldn’t have had to apologize to her for having assumed she was wrong, because I wouldn’t have. See how much easier it is to handle things my way?)

Then again, I approach the world differently than other people do. I’m all rational-like, except for the part where I assume people have the best intentions until they prove otherwise. And I naturally assume that in any given conflict between an individual and a giant conglomerate whose job it is to collect money, the individual is probably the one I can trust more.

So it’s Veteran’s Day, and as usual I’ll be remembering people I know and have known who served and are serving our country. But this year I’m also reflecting on the fact that any given soldier cannot be held responsible for the actions of our entire military, and no matter what you think about how our country conducts itself, each soldier deserves to be treated with the respect that his or her position holds. The flip side of that, of course, is that the individual actions of any given soldier reflect not only on our military, but on other soldiers as well - our soldiers therefore have the responsibility and duty to conduct themselves, both in uniform and out, with at least a modicum of decency. While it can be a great disappointment when one does not, I will not let the words, actions, and behavior of one person diminish the good that other people he is aligned with have done and are doing.

And that is all.

So say I’ve had an experience that was unpleasant. And say I write you an e-mail telling you about it, in case you’d care to do something about it. There are a couple of ways to respond to that e-mail, both of which I have experienced in the last several days.

a) Simply ignore my e-mail, and when I phone you to see whether you received it and inquire as to whether further action might need to be taken, be an ass.

b) Write me an e-mail back, detailing a more unpleasant experience that recently happened to someone else, including the words “beaten”, “robbed”, and “bleeding”.

Just for the record, neither of those responses actually make me feel better. In order to make me feel better, it is necessary to be funny about my unpleasant experience (e.g., a third possible response: “Sorry about trying to break in like that. I just wanted to see you.”).

Humor is a defense mechanism with which I am perhaps too familiar, but I still like it. In fact, I like it more than I like denial as a defense mechanism, insofar as laughing can be cathartic.

I am quite literally on the verge of putting everything except Molly, Mouse, some clothes, and my laptop (and some cat treats) into storage, and insisting that I be put up on someone’s couch until such time as I can find a place to live that is not a hazard to both my health and well-being. I’m probably not going to actually do that – I like my privacy, and Mouse is in one of his peeing on things phases, which makes him less than a desirable roommate. (He’s something like 82 in human years – give him a break.)

All I can say for sure is that I am taking all of next week off of work, so that I can try to figure out how to fix this situation before it gets worse.

Wish me luck.

Or send money.

Or beer. Beer would be fine.

I don’t know much, but I can tell you this: when you wake up to the sounds of someone trying to get into your house through your bathroom window just before 3:45 a.m., the number of police officers you have to let in and out, coupled with the number of lights you have to turn on, added to your need to stop and spell-check the e-mail you write to your landlord about it (because you know that your facility with language is diminished when you are tired), makes it very difficult indeed to easily fall back to sleep when you’re finished.

It was probably just a drunk guy who got locked out of his apartment and was trying to get back in, but who was so drunk that he mistook my bathroom window for his own. Happens to the best of us, I’m sure. No one could get into my house through a window if they wanted to, without breaking one, at least, and I don’t think anyone really wants to get in here anyway.

So the guy leading the meditation this Sunday* talked for a while about the “impermanence of sound”, and so now I’m thinking about that, and about the fact that if I had been sleeping more deeply, I might not have heard any sounds at all, and instead slept right through the time when someone was attempting to get in through my bathroom window. I can’t decide right now whether that’s a good thing or a bad one. (Maybe the important lesson is that things can be good, bad, or neither good nor bad. Perhaps this whole episode is neutral.)

The other thing that I can tell you for sure is that there is no one online to chat with at 4:30 a.m. I mean, there are, likely, but not people I know and want to chat with. Even the people on the West Coast are asleep.

There are all sorts of other things I could tell you now, not having written here since Tuesday, but further blog entries may just have to wait until I have found a new place to live. I had intended to make some progress on that front this weekend, but instead spent my weekend doing other, more pleasurable things, things which I shall not recount here except to say that I had McDonald’s for breakfast on Sunday, and having breakfast at McDonald’s always makes me glad, particularly if I have a companion (even a begrudging one).

_____
*Yes, I went again. It’s like a thing I do now. Get over it.

So I forgot to mention something earlier - all day today I’ve had “Don’t Dream It’s Over” stuck in my head. I like that song quite a bit, but the reason it is stuck in my head is because my air conditioning has been leaking into my hallway for several days now. Each day it gets worse, and some day it will be fixed, but in the meantime, there are worse songs to have stuck in your head.

It’s sort of funny how many broken things there are in the video, eh?

September is National Preparedness Month, and I am losing.

I am not prepared at all. No kit, no plan, no stores of cash or water, couldn’t find my passport if you wanted to trade me a thousand dollars for it. I have no stockpiles of boxed wine – that’s easily rectified, but the fuzzbusters don’t like wine. Given the frequency with which they shut off the water to my home (to make “reparations” to the system), I’m not guaranteed water on a regular day, let alone one on which we have a hurricane or a terrorist attack.

If there’s a “culture of emergency preparedness in the United States”, as the Department of Homeland Security assures us there is, I guess I’m part of the counter-culture.

Let’s start with the kit. My day-to-day bag includes a pretty extensive pharmacy – the other day someone was suffering from allergies, and I just so happened to have Zyrtec in my bag. Hydrocortisone cream? Check. Flashlights? I own three, plus a battery tester, and enough batteries to kill a horse. But a whistle? I need to buy a whistle, I guess, although I’m pretty sure that I have a whistle that my grandmother got in a box of Cracker Jacks. It’s all retro and stuff – I bet it even works, but I couldn’t find it if you wanted to trade me a thousand dollars for it.* And a fire extinguisher? That’s been on my list of things to purchase since, oh, about September 11, 2001. I understand they have them at stores, but I really don’t know where I would put one. And pet food? I just counted, and we only have 25 cans of cat food, and 5 cans of tuna. (You would think with the OCD I’d be slightly better at the hoarding.) I do have a hot glue gun, though, and that’s gotta come in handy. And as far as the paper and pencil, I’m all over it – I actually believe I have enough extra mechanical pencil lead to last me the rest of my natural life.

Other parts of preparedness, if I understand this whole thing correctly, include having an alternate route home if public transportation fails you, or bridges are closed or whatnot. So I have a backup plan if the Metro is inexplicably stopped. I actually know how to get all the way to my house using only buses, completely avoiding going underground.

If the buses are stopped? I take a cab.

If there are no cabs? When I was in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, and Mouse was in Brooklyn, I didn’t have a real solid idea of how to walk to Brooklyn from Manhattan. But I had to do it, because Mouse needed me – if he had opposable thumbs, things would have been different, but he doesn’t. There were some helpful policemen along the way, and I also knew that Brooklyn was on the other side of the, um, “Brooklyn Bridge”, from Manhattan. (Also, on the other side of the, um, “Manhattan Bridge”.) I’m pretty sure there’s no bridge in or around DC called the “Ghetto Bridge”, or the “I Can’t Actually Afford the Taxes One Has to Pay in Order to Live in the District, Because I Work for a Non-Profit Bridge”. So I’m screwed, because my backup plan if I can’t get a cab is to call people I know who live on the side of the river that I live on and weep until they agree to come fetch me. And that likely won’t fly, not only because the number of people I know who live this side of the river is swiftly dwindling, but also because I imagine they’re going to prevent people entering the District if there’s a hurricane or something, even if all those people want to do is drive me home.

The other day, though, I rented a car, because I needed to go to Ikea and no one wanted to go with me. (Kooky, the whole lot of you.) And when I rented this car, I picked up a map from the counter, because I didn’t actually know where I was going. And so I have a map in my bag, which is like being prepared, but not really, because the map doesn’t have the names of any of the bridges on it. And while it is true that during the time I have spent typing this entry I could have handily learned the name and location of each and every bridge in the greater metropolitan DC area, I sort of secretly like being oblivious, and then finding the wherewithal to make do when the times call for it.

But there are things we should do, and can do, really easily. For example, when’s the last time you checked the accuracy of the beneficiaries on your life insurance policy? Or paid the premium on your home warranty? When does your renter’s insurance renew? Is that gonna unexpectedly cost you something like $200, because you set it to automatically charge your debit card and then swiftly forgot about it, couldn’t find your renter’s insurance policy even if someone wanted to trade you a thousand dollars for it, even though you know it should be in a waterproof and portable container? Do you own as many cat carriers as you have cats, even though you have had two cats for upwards of eight months? Do you own a field book for creatures you might find living in your bathroom, or behind your dishwasher, some of which might be a viable foodsource for you or the aforementioned cats? When’s the last time you actually backed up your blog?

Get with it, people – it’s National Preparedness Month!

_____
* That’s the newest phrase I’m overusing, by the way. Where’s any given item, at work, at home? I couldn’t find it if you wanted to trade me a thousand dollars for it. (And the origin of that phrase? I couldn’t tell you if you wanted to trade me a thousand dollars for it.)

Can someone tell me what the hell this thing is, and why it’s in my bathroom? I know it’s not a particularly good picture, but I didn’t want to get too close to it - I was afraid it might hurt me. It’s still in my bathroom,* so if you were inclined to come to my house and try to find it and kill it, that would be keen.

It’s not even a bug – it’s like an alien life force or something. It casts a freakin’ shadow, for goodness’s sake:

Could you all start reminding me that I need to get a real, actual, honest-to-god boyfriend soon, so I don’t always have to kill my own bugs and pick up my own dead mice? TYIA . . . (Also, if people are going to be filming nature documentaries inside my home, shouldn’t I get a cut?)

In other news, there is no other news, except to say that a) even though I called a moratorium on helping people move a long time ago I spent a large part of my day engaged in a full-blown chemical assault on a certain someone’s bathroom. Because I am apparently completely incapable of saying, “No, I will not help you clean your apartment. There are professionals for that, and you should hire some.” Instead, I just keep ending up cleaning people’s bathrooms. It is not cool to live in the same apartment for a year without ever (not even once) cleaning your bathroom, because you know that I will clean it for you when you move. Not cool at all.

And also b) I really do appreciate the dinners people buy me after I have cleaned their bathroom for them, and so I will likely keep doing it, if only because I do enjoy saying, “Thank you for dinner – it was lovely.”

Finally, has anyone ever used BookMooch? Because the aforementioned moving person gave me a bookshelf, I’ve been seriously looking at my books again – yes, I cataloged them at LibraryThing, so I know they’re there, but actually removing them all from their shelves and having to put them back on different shelves has made me realize that I own far too many hardcover books, the majority of which I purchased only because I could not wait to read them beyond the very minute they were published. If I just switched those hardcover books for paperbacks, my book collection would be lighter, and that would be good. So BookMooch might be a good idea, or it might suck, but I would really like it if someone could just tell me, so that I don’t have to do everything myself.

And I am tired. Not profoundly tired, but tired enough for it to be noticeable, and while I would like to get into bed with my laptop and watch a movie, I can’t do it instantly, because the UPS man did not show up today with the new adapter for my modem/router thing. So I am bound by wires, and that wouldn’t bug me so much if I wasn’t so tired, but I am. And while it is true that Netflix only sends me DVDs that I actually want to see, I am not in the mood for either Copacabana or Dexter at the moment, so it looks like I’ll just have to read a book. I’m really rather excited about the book I’m reading now, actually, but I’m not going to tell you about it until I’m through, because you never know when a book’s gonna turn on you, do you? Or when the creatures living in your bathroom are going to rise up - if I never write here again, at least you’ll have photographic evidence of the monster that killed me.

On that note . . .
_____
* I think. I’m not man enough to go in there and find out.

This morning when I woke up there was a mouse in my bedroom. I think it was dead, and whoever killed it left its tiny broken body on the rug immediately in front of the cat litter box. I didn’t get a real good look at it, only glanced at it sideways, long enough to be about 75% sure that it was actually a dead mouse and not a cat toy. Then I went to make coffee while I considered the next steps. Sure, I could pick up the dead mouse and dispose of it, but I hadn’t looked closely enough at it to be certain that it was dead - if there’s something more distasteful than picking up a mouse your cat has killed it’s picking up a mouse your cat has not fully killed.

When Mouse and I lived in Harlem, we had these roommates. While they left much to be desired in the way of cleanliness, English language skills, and not being sort of frightening, they were always willing to pick up the mice that Mouse maimed, of which there were many. Sometimes they flushed the mice down the toilet, other times they threw the mice out the window into the courtyard below, but there were so many roommates that I almost never had to pick up my own dead or dying mice.

So just in the middle of my second cup of coffee, right about when I decided that the only rational thing to do was call each of the men who live near me in sequence until one of them valiantly offered to remove the mouse carcass from my home, Goethe called me. “I think there’s a dead mouse in my bedroom,” I said, and he rather reluctantly offered to come pick it up for me. He assured me that it was dead, picked it up with only some paper towels as a barrier, and only made a little fun of me because I had to call a boy to handle my domestic problems. In any event, now there is not a dead mouse in my bedroom, and about that I am glad.

I think it was Molly who killed it, because the other morning she was just sitting on the kitchen floor, fixated on the spot between the dishwasher and the wall. I thought maybe there was a spider back there, but it seems pretty obvious now that it was a mouse. (Also, times that Mouse has killed mice, he’s made much more of a show of it. I’m pretty sure he would have woken me up, meowing at the top of his lungs about his conquest. Subtlety is not one of his strong suits.)

And since I think it was Molly, I told her to brush her teeth:

(And from now on, we can all refer to Molly as “Killer”, which is a much better nickname than others she has earned, like “Droolie” and “Peanut Brain”.)

And now if you’ll pardon me, I have to figure out how the mouse got in, and how to prevent his friends and family from following him, because I really don’t think I can take much more of this. (And no, I did not take a picture of the dead mouse to post here, because I couldn’t bring myself to look at it, let alone focus on it long enough to take a picture. Although whichever cat was involved and the mouse were simply fulfilling their biological destinies, an endeavor in which there is much dignity, I think it’s simply more respectful to not post pictures of this mouse whose young life was brought to an early halt through no fault of his own.)

So I finally broke down and bought a new camera. It took me a while, because I had to make sure this new camera was sleek and stylish enough to suit me - I’m a little broken up about having to break up with my old camera, which, while beautiful, was just not doing the job anymore.* So I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that future pictures of the shopping carts in my neighborhood will be much more focused. It hasn’t been my photography skills that have failed you - it was the equipment I was using. To wit:

Old camera:

New camera:

And I couldn’t resist these, because if there is something more lovely than the noses of my cats in extreme close-up, you’re going to have to tell me what it is.

In other news, oh what a pleasant weekend I have had. I’ve got a new 7-11 story to tell you later, I met a new person and before I even knew it he’d taught me a new word,** and I had a glorious nap - this whole new camera thing is just icing. I’d like to say that you can expect an actually interesting entry soon, but I wouldn’t like to lie. (It’s really taking all the energy I’ve got not to wake the cats up and make them make adorable noises so I can capture that digitally and share it with you.)

_____
* I think the one thing we can all agree has been missing from this blog is video of the cats, but you may now rest assured that videos (with sound!) are forthcoming.

** Micaceous - might come in handy for Scrabble, don’t you think?

How is it possible that someone who often fishes had never heard the expression “fish or cut bait” until I, who never fish, don’t even care to eat fish were I to catch any (except maybe tuna), used the expression in passing? I’m like an expression idiot-savant or something.

Remember a while back when I said there was an epic entry on the way concerning my dissatisfaction with the medical establishment at large? That entry grows larger by the minute, on account of I keep getting paperwork in the mail about my recent medical insurance claims, but why can’t I find time to actually write it?

(Here’s the short version: my ophthalmologist owes me $65; I owe my dermatologist $106.55, but she thinks I owe her $136.55; my medical insurance owes me some as yet to be determined part of the $30 that I paid to my dentist for a procedure that was not dentally necessary, but was instead medically necessary. It’s practically a wash, but only if I fill out eleventy-hundred forms and then sit patiently waiting for the machine to spit checks at me. It’s not about the money at this point – now I’m just engaging with the establishment on principle. I keep wondering how people who don’t read English manage their health insurance forms, when I can scarcely figure them out and I consider myself among the most intelligent and capable people currently in existence.) (Oh yeah – and I think I’m cancelling my dentist appointment for next week, because of all the things I can imagine to spend $374 on, a crown is not even on the list.)

How many times am I going to have to call the police to report people selling foodstuffs in my parking lot without a proper solicitor’s license? Earlier this week, when the ice cream truck that bears no company name or phone number happened to be in my parking lot selling ice cream (among other things?) at precisely the same time I happened to be in the parking lot with my ever-so-patient sometimes companion,* I remarked upon the lack of recourse one would have if one were to purchase ice cream from said truck and feed it to a small child who then fell ill. Across the street were some police officers, so my ever-so-patient sometimes companion waited while I discussed the matter with the police officers. Turns out that they think that most of the people driving unmarked white panel trucks or vans and selling things to eat in my parking lot likely don’t have proper solicitor’s licenses, and that if I were to send the police an e-mail containing the license plate numbers of these vendors, they would investigate the matter. I guess that answers the question, then: I don’t have to call the police – I can just submit reports online.

Why is Molly coughing? Does she have consumption? (We’ll find out tomorrow, when we go to the vet. Speaking of which, the other day I bought the little guys some new cat treats, and the package reads, “For your pet’s health, see your veterinarian regularly.” So I also wonder, can I just look at pictures of him online, or do we have to visit face-to-face? And where does my vet hang out after work anyway?)

How long will it be until I no longer have that Chumbawumba song stuck in my head?

Am I really going to actually go to Baltimore tomorrow to see Mike Doughty for free at this fancy Artscape thing, or is it going to be too hot? (Speaking of which, did I really go see The Alarm, The Fixx, and The English Beat last week, like actually attend a concert, and then not tell you anything about it, even though I rather drunkenly persisted in writing several incredibly amusing and insightful observations in my notebook, partially just so I could quietly mock the apparent music reporter who was writing the setlist in his notebook, but mostly so I would remember things for the eventual blog entry? I did.)

I think that about taps out my capacity for wonder at the moment. So be it.
_____
* Read “newest ex-boyfriend”. It’s not like it’s a long story, it’s just sort of boring.