Some Rents are Bigger Than Others

It's snowing outside. Not snowing. Raining. Or Icing. That's very Washington precipitation, when ice falls directly from the sky and we're given a number for the accumulation of ice that's expected. Three quarters of an inch. ¶Whatever. The government got shut down at 2PM, fast-forwarding the impending traffic jam by three hours. Now everyone is sleeping restlessly, some praying for a snow day, others not being able to sleep until they figure out whether or not they get the day off tomorrow. I feel the worst for the school teachers who have to figure it out by 5.30 AM. ¶Luckily, our heat kicked back in with a vengeance yesterday. I saw some suspicious activity by maintenance staff around 9.00 PM, so they've been working away, and then wham, yesterday morning I felt the heat emanate from the pipes in the bathroom. It is a small miracle-fixing the heat in only 5 days. Thanks guys. Staying home on a snow day without heat would just suck. 'Cuz what if you had to go to the office just to get away from the cold at home? ¶I promised myself I wouldn't do this blog thing. When you start gushing about cool music and restaurants and hoping someone else taps into your opinion and values it, or else simply recognizes you as an authority. No, I swore I would never do that (just like I swore that I would never blog), BUT, here I am, just returned from the greatest live show on the whole east coat (and perhaps west coast and the gulf coast too). My favoritest band of the present (and the past 3 years): STELLASTARR*. Great, great, adrenalin. I heard them here in DC way back when, and then heard them again when The Killers (ah, yeah . . I know them) were OPENING for them. That's how great they are, and while The Killers have totally sold out to marketing hell, Stellastarr* stays true to their music, which would sound so cliché if it wasn't the truth. They make really good music, and what's more, they know how to perform it. I've heard them live four times now and they never disappoint. Gush, gush, gush. Why are they so great? Check 'em out and find out. ¶Venue was the Rock'n'Roll Hotel-a place I've always heard about but never seen. Way out in dangerous NE, on a street that I've never set foot even after all these years in DC. As were waiting in the falling ice and waiting to be let in, I told a friend, hey-this street reminds me of U Street way back in the day. (Back when you could get robbed regularly, but with respect). His response: 'You mean before U Street its balls cut off?' And I said yeah, back then. I spent the rest of the night contemplating Washington's many hoods and imagning myself being forced to live in NE (bet¶I was also there with my bestest, bestest friend ever Susanna. She's a big Stellastarr* fan too. She lives way up in Friendship Heights because it's safe, way safer. I convinced her to move to Logan a long time ago and she prompty got mugged. Since then, she's put up with the quiet open yards of quasi-DC, which is the part that feels nothing like a city.

Still Cold, after all these years

It's still really cold inside. ¶I got home from the gym last night and found this gem of a letter taped inside our elevator. I read it through and audibly cheered, it felt like Christmas. I haven't met the author yet, but he's far more eloquent than moi. He also raises some important points, like how there's an incessant clanging noise emanating from the basement up through all of the freezing pipes and it bangs/BANGS/BANGS all through the night. I wish that I could bake him cupcakes just for the way he used the word emanating to describe something in our building. And the fact that he too has discovered our friendly open-back-door policy. ¶Seeing as the tenants of our building have no faith in public recourse, we are limited to scotch-taping letters in the hallway. Some of them (like Susanna the Stripper) use lip-liner to get their point across. Others (like Attorney) use fancy legal-speak. Both are equally effective in getting us all riled up and making our building appear even more ghetto to outsiders. I just turn to my little blogspot blog and pray that someone out there reads the thing. ¶After reading Attorney's fantastic letter, I marched over to the office to fill them in on the fact that we have no heat. They were in the middle of the LEASING PARTY in which they are luring unassuming professionals to move into our building. Bright-eyed consumers mincing about and looking at pretty graphics of apartment layouts and furniture design and being fed machine-processed soft bake cookies and drinking up all that PR copy: realizing your potential; urban lifestyle trendster, it's all about you, blah blah. ¶The minute the management saw me enter, they performed a total body block not unlike the Chicago Bear defensive line. They knew that there was absolutely nothing that I could say or do that would convince all these hipsters to sign up for inflated leases. All I said, was hey, you know that I haven't had heat for the last four days? And they were all exasperated with the old news, as if I'd just announced that Hilary Clinton might run for president. ¶"Yeah, yeah we know (GET OUTTA HERE). The whole back tier of the building doesn't have heat (I KNOW SOMETHING YOU DON"T KNOW). It's this thing in the pipe. We're going to order a part, maybe on Monday-it'll be fixed by next week" (MAKE ME). Ah, that word again. Parts. Man, they're always out of parts and it takes them ages to get 'em, like my light that took 5 weeks to repair because of a part. ¶When I got back to the lobby, there was an impromptu gathering of tenants congregating around Attorney's letter and voicing complaints. Susanna was saying, yeah I'm too cold to stick around. I just bought a plane ticket to get out of here. And this other guy told me he's moving out next week. The other Susanna said that the management had told her it would be fixed in a week. ¶Another week without heat in February? This is starting to feel just a little bit like Sarajevo. After we stood around and had a huge bitch session, the old, old man followed me up in the elevator and told me that for the 25 years he's lived here, the heat has never ever gone out. And he should know. He explained the whole heating system and how the clanging is the boiler trying to shoot hot water up the pipes but it just falls back down again, over and over. Dear me.

Battle of Measures

Dexter hates Farenheit and he insists that we only speak metric at home. I rebel on occasion because A) we're in the US of America, B) Farenheit is part of my heritage, and C) I don't appreciate the deflation of cold temperatures that goes on with Celsius. You can say –10° C and Europeans may freak out, but really that's only +14° F and no cause for concern. When I say minus ten, I know what minus ten means and it's really minus, like below zero Farenheit. ¶Anyway, today my trusty clock/thermometer tells me that it's exactly –1° C outside, and a whopping 15° C inside. Carry the one, that's a toasty 59° F indoors, so what am I complaining about? I should be amazed that without heat for four days I can still keep my apartment in the upper 50s. I am still burning the gas stove to boot and taking Tylenol to deal with the monoxide headaches. (I know, I know, who still uses Tylenol? Sigh, I am a child of the 80s). I've also been wearing long underwear all week, so perhaps the Washpost can tell me that my RealFeel ™ is somewhere in the low 70s, I dunno. That doesn't include the wind blowing through my five windows.

Wind Chill

So I've been sitting at my desk all morning and found myself curled in a tiny ball. I was rubbing my legs and jumping up and down before I realized that I was really, really cold. You see, my mind works backwards, and I suddenly realized that it's been cold for days. My brain finally confessed that my body was freezing. That makes sense because the wind is howling like a bunch of drag queens and it's 25 degrees outside, or as the Washington Post tells me, it feels like 12 degrees. But normally, we're quite warm as we get all the heat rising up from the lower floors, so why am I freezing? ¶Because the heat's been turned off, that's why. NO HEAT. In February and with it so cold outside (wait, stop. I just killed a giant cockroach with a post it note; really I just did). ¶So I went over to make sure my 1920s radiator was on and yes it's on but it's stone cold and all the wind is blowing straight through the air conditioner and into our apartment. So that means the heat for the whole building is busted. It never stops, does it? If it's not one thing, it's another. So because I'm freezing, I do the unthinkable. I call the office--not because I want to be a whiney crybaby tenant, but because I'm freezing and trying to work, and the rest of the building must be freezing too. And its 12 degrees outside!!!! So I dial the office for the first time ever. ¶Thank you for choosing Barclay, Ravenel, and Regal apartments, professionally managed by Carmel Partners. We are currently out of the office. Our regular hours are (uhm, now). If you are a resident facing a life-threatening emergency, please hang up and dial 911. If you are enquiring about one of our beautiful apartment homes, then blah, blah, do come by. If you are a resident and would like to make a service request, please blah, blah, go away. Thank you for choosing Barclay blah, blah, apartments. Using the dial pad, please blah, blah. Click. ¶Yeah, why would they be in the office during their office hours when the heat shuts down for the whole building? And I love how they give you a nice pitch for their mother company before they let you know that if you're hair is on fire you should really call 911 instead. It's ok though. I can suck it up. One pays rent so that one may stay tough. I'm reverting to a trick that I learned in Russia, which is to crank up the oven and light all the burners on the stove. Yeah, it totally wastes natural gas and if you're not careful you can get carbon monoxide poisoning, BUT given the choice, I'd rather die of a headache than the cold. Wouldn't you?