Chapter 5 & 6: Zombies Can't Solve All Our Problems & Success, the 2nd Time Around!

So, amazingly enough, I finally found a place to live! And it was totally easy this time around. When I first went back to St. Louis, I was waiting to hear back from a guy about a roommate situation in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I didn’t blog about it because I didn’t want to jinx it. However, in the end, he didn’t pick me anyway so it really didn’t matter. I was sure that I was going to get it since, when I first met him, he got totally stoked about the idea of living with a life-size animatronic zombie. He ended up narrowing it done to me and a couple of other people. He then interviewed me again over the phone when I was back in St. Louis. We talked for at least a half an hour in which time we discussed everything from my sleeping habits to my religious beliefs to my taste in music and film. I felt really good about the interview since he and I seemed to be on the same page with everything. So I was pretty let down when I got the email that he went with someone else. I beat myself up about it for a while trying to figure out where in the interview process I went wrong. Was listing Radiohead as one of my favorite bands too mainstream for this po-mo hipster? Did my mentioning that my cat happens to be fairly fat come off as too judgmental? Was I doomed when he said that he couldn’t live with someone who would sit around talking about angels and I didn’t then immediately say, “Yeah! Angels, who needs ‘em?”

Eventually I began to let it go. I focused on what would have been the downsides with living with him: Even though the building itself allowed dogs, he didn’t want to live with one so I would have been without Ralphie, at least, for a few months. One of the major draws of the place for me, other the sweet claw-foot bathtub, was that in the initial meeting he had made it sound as though he would be moving in a few months – thus leaving me the apartment so that I could bring up my little dog, but in the second interview he sounded a bit more settled-in. I wouldn’t be able to ask him for directions ever since when Liz and I went to see the place he gave told me to get off at completely the wrong station which landed us literally in the middle of some cops arresting a man but then it turned out that the “right” directions had us having to walk over 15 blocks when we could have simply taken a different train that would’ve landed us only 4 blocks from the apartment. And I would have to deal with his dumb name, which I won’t say here, but I’ll just say that it was totally dumb.

In the end, it all worked out for the better. As it turned out a friend of mine from college decided to move and so we started looking for a place together. She had recently helped her brother find a new place in the city and had found the whole process to be almost as bad as what I had gone through in my initial search so when I got back into town for us to start actually viewing places, we were both fairly discouraged. After being back in New York for two days, we went to see our first place. We entered into the whole thing with our expectations set very low, but when we walked up to the building, we were totally impressed. And even more impressed when we saw the actual apartment. Two days later, we were signing the contract.

The place is totally great. It’s the 3rd floor of a house that has now been converted into apartments. It’s a 2-bedroom, each with a door opening directly to the hallway (so that if we ever end up hating each other we can manage to pretty much completely avoid one another). It has a good-sized living room and separate kitchen and bathroom, hardwood floors and lots of closets. It also has plenty of windows (a couple with a semi-view of Manhattan and one of the major bridges). It is just steps from the subway and is surrounded by lots of restaurants and shops. For now, I can only have my cat. I say, “for now” because I am being optimistic that I will be able to talk them into letting me bring up Ralphie later since their only concern is for potential noise. (The ad said that small dogs were okay, but that apparently meant under 10 pounds, which my mutant beagle is not.)

So all in all, we totally win. My head has finally stopped spinning from how fast it all worked out so that I am now left only to figure out how to get all my stuff up here from the ol’ STL. And hopefully, next month I will be able to win them over with how attractive my dog is. I mean, could you say “No” to this?:

I do still long for that claw-foot tub though. Oh well – I guess you can’t have it all.