Let’s recount my last week, shall we? On Friday I was taking a shower and a pipe burst in my bathroom; I had a head of hair full of shampoo and no water coming from the showerhead (it was coming from the walls however). Yup, sucked to be me. But I’m a trooper, so after speaking with my super and rinsing my hair out in the kitchen sink, I surveyed the damage to my bathroom, shrugged my shoulders and went off to work. After that it was a fairly uneventful day.
Let’s move on to Saturday.
I started the day on Saturday by going out with Christine for manicure/pedicures, and after that we got some coffee and just wandered around. I ended things early before we got into an (inevitable) fight, and went home to find…honestly it can only be described as complete fucking chaos. My bookshelves – the same ones I’ve described in the past as ‘overflowing with books’ and ‘looking like a damn library’ had, of course, collapsed. Books EVERYWHERE. Shelves everywhere. Broken pictures/picture frames…everywhere. All my pretty porcelain thingamabobs – broken fucking everywhere!
Oh, and my cat was scared shitless – I hadn’t been home when it happened and I can only imagine the noise it made. But more importantly…what if she had been hurt?! She’s little and light, and my bookshelves are big and VERY heavy. (Honestly, that’s the point of the story that freaks me out the most.) Anyway, so after gathering up all the shelves, collecting the broken pieces of some of my favorite things (throwing most of them away), and stacking all my books so that they covered the entire floor of my kitchen and living room, I was ready to trudge off to Crate & Barrel.
Only OOPS, the downtown trains weren’t running – so I got to hoof it. Awesome.
Long story short, $500 dollars later I had my ‘easy to put together’ new bookcases being delivered between 6 and 9pm (they showed up at 8), and I got to cancel my dinner plans in order to wait home with my tool kit in hand. (Oh, and if you’re wondering if Fancy Pants decided to come over and keep me company/help, then you’re fucking high. He didn’t understand a) why I had gotten something that wasn’t already put together – one word: cheaper, and b) why I wasn’t paying someone else to put it together for me – five words: I’m not a lazy incompetent. So FP ended up going out with his boys while I stayed home with my screwdriver and built shit.)
I finished at 2am (shut up, I have no sense of humor about this) with one broken toe (fucking shelves slipped), two (okay, probably more than two) very graphic death threats aimed at the jackass who wrote the Crate & Barrel assembly instructions (fucking masochist), and three new interconnecting bookcases (which look fucking beautiful, thank you very much).
I am a rock star.
Sunday was Mother’s Day – I hung with my parents and tried to drink away the pain in my foot.
Monday I was sick – goddammit – and stayed home and slept all day.
But the real topper was yesterday. It started out like any other ‘morning after I was out sick’ day – in other words, I had about a hundred emails waiting for me that were all time-sensitive. As the day progressed, and my headache got worse, I managed to get into a fight with one of my vendors; short version is she said I'd ordered something I hadn’t, I said ‘um, no,’ she said she had email proof of this, I said ‘okay, send it on over,’ she said ‘okay,’ and then never sent it (because it doesn’t fucking exist). She then went to my boss and complained about me; my boss – already having been apprised of the situation by me – told her she was wrong and she knew it. She admitted this. To my boss. To me she never said anything (of course).
Douchebag.
So after all that I went home kind of needing a drink, only I made the (in retrospect) poor choice of picking up my mail before going into my apartment (I should have put that off as long as possible). Why? Well dear readers, let me tell you: My lease for next year – for my apartment – had just arrived. And it was a doozy. Just how much is my rent being raised? (It’s always being raised, no matter how bad the economy is.) Go on, guess – what would seem like a fair hike off of $1600 a month?
If you guessed $2100 a month you’re right! The prize is you can kiss my ass! I am fucking done! $500…mother…fucking…MORE…dollars…a…month.
(Deep breaths. Deep breaths. Deep fucking breaths…)
Goddammit this isn’t working. So now I’m trying to figure out where the hell I’m going to move, how I’m going to find the place, how freaking expensive moving is, how unbelievably depressing looking at apartments in NY is, and how I DO NOT want to deal with this right now.
Needless to say, I’ve been having a bad week. And contrary to popular opinion around here, I’m not actually a bad person – so this fucking bad karma is really starting to piss me off. I don’t deserve it. I’m one more bad day away from moving in with Fancy Pants here. (Note: I’m fucking kidding, calm down.) But still, if anything good could possibly happen right now, I’d really appreciate it. Thanks.
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9 comments:
No complaining from me this time. This was a hilarious post and helped me make it through a very long afternoon. Thanks.
As someone who makes only enough money to buy almost all his furniture unassembled, I can tell you, with enough time, you can become a sort of furniture assembly savant. Dressers, bookshelves--you name it, I can build it, now.
I suppose the real lesson here is: wait for the paperback. Glad the cat escaped unharmed, though.
I wish I could give you some apartment finding advice, kiddo, but, for me, the main requirement is "big enough to hold my crap" with "cheap" close behind. Of course, I do my home shopping in Philadelphia, where a three bedroom house with hardwood floors goes for well under $1000. Best I can suggest is to start bargaining with various higher powers for stumbling into rent control.
Great post.
I don't see how you hate everyone, though. A lot of this seems like circumstance. Just sayin'.
Love,
J. Barleycorn
P.S. Big fan.
Here's to hoping things start to look up, or you at least have a big motherfuckin' bottle of booze hanging around.
They're raising the rent by about a third in a bad housing market...and the place is so lousy a pipe burst? (head explodes in awe of the stupidity).
And I gasped a bit when I heard about the bookcases. We once had a flood in our basement that wiped out several boxes of my books. I was closer to tears than I want to admit.
jack: Your compassion is overwhelming - thank you.
mr. thursday: The thing is, I can assemble things too (I may not be a savant, but I'm not incompetent). But after it took me for fucking ever to put my bookshelves together, I went back and reviewed the assembly instructions, and there were steps that were just flat out wrong. Not unclear - wrong. Incorrect.
Yes, I generally want a place that's large enough to hold my crap and cheap as well, but I also want a place that's safe (ie. in a good area). Oh, and in NY getting a rent controlled apartment is not that easy. Unfortunately.
john: Semantics.
p.s. Thanks.
losingit: Always.
mcb: Yup, you pretty much nailed it right there - on both counts.
paine: I'm sensing a bit of animosity towards my boyfriend here...can't say I blame you. Although I will say this for him - he doesn't need to hire anyone to do his fucking. (Hey, we all have our strengths.)
Well, on the bright side...
...
um...
yeah. Good luck!
It is not directed at him, just a general malaise I feel directed towards the "modern" American male. I am working on a theory that surmises that, should the current generation of American males aged 16-35 be asked to fight World War 2 all over again we would lose it.
At least it would be well-docummented because of all the war blogs we`d write.
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