an apartment on the 99th floor of my block

There’s nothing quite like apartment hunting to make you feel like you’ve picked the wrong place to live. I spent three days last week with my mother, looking for a new place to live in Atlanta. It seemed like every flaw of the city was magnified—the layout, the traffic, the weather—and everything was working against us. Ultimately, it all worked out okay, but man oh man, there were some miserable moments in there. I am still tired from it all.

Maybe the biggest problem is that I expected it to be easy, and got frustrated when it wasn’t. After all, finding the job in Atlanta was fairly easy, much easier than I’d expected. I thought the apartment hunting would be fun. Instead there were apartments that my mom wouldn’t even get out of the car to view, because she thought they looked so dirty and unsafe. There were apartments that were beautiful but they were in crappy locations. There were apartments that were dumps that were in great locations. There were apartments that were seventy billion dollars a month. I thought about calling Emory to see if I could just move back into a dorm room or something. Any dorm. I wasn’t even going to be picky about it.

We’d check into hotel rooms and I would try to figure out how many square feet were in the room and how that might equate to a monthly rent figure. I started thinking how awful it was that job hunting and apartment hunting are two of the hardest things to do, since a person is pretty much always either at their job or at their apartment. It seems to me that finding the places where you’ll spend the majority of your life should be more fun. As I was drifting off to sleep the first night, I started thinking that I wouldn’t mind a world where you just get handed a job and a place to live, just so I could avoid the stress of finding it myself. “Oh dear,” I thought. “I hope I’m not a communist or a socialist or something.” I couldn’t really remember which one I was thinking of.

Then I started thinking about this story in my middle school social studies book about a guy who lived in the Soviet Union under communism, and how he purposely would get shoes that were two sizes too small, so that when he took them off at the end of the day, he could experience a little bit of pleasure in his sad, harsh life. Then I started thinking about the shoes that I wear to work and how they’re also pretty uncomfortable, and how taking them off when I get home is a relief as well, and about that time I fell asleep and I dreamt about Ronald Reagan fighting communists.

I forget where I was going with all that. Sometime during the trip I had worked out some elaborate communism metaphor but I forgot what it was.

Anyways, with the help of a perky apartment finder (and man, do those people have the worst job in the world or what?), I found a nice apartment in a fun neighborhood. At first, I was concerned that the apartment’s one drawback was that it didn’t seem to have enough room for all of my books, but I think I’ve gotten Mom to agree that I can use the entire front closet as a book closet. Mom’s rule for this new apartment is that I can’t have books in my kitchen cabinets like I did in Seattle. I guess I have to learn how to cook.