A lot has happened since the last time I reported on our domestic situation. First off, we lobbied our landlord to fix the shower–and he finally did, after 6 years! He did, because I told him N had scalded himself. “Scalding” is a magical word in NYC housing law. I was pretty impressed with my savvy.

So he sent someone to fix it, and they did, with mixed results.

On the plus side, we got new, non-leaking fixtures that actually allowed us to control the temperature of the water.

On the negative side, it took two weeks of us showering in a tub sealed off with contractor garbage bags and gaffer’s tape before they sent anyone to put tile over the gaping hole the plumber had created.

On the plus side, we met the super from the building next door*, a gracious former death metal drummer. (I don’t know what it’s like to go from touring Europe and getting blowjobs every night to living in a basement with your mother, in Queens. I imagine it’s not much fun.) We told him how much we hated hated HATED our neighbors and our apartment and the building, and he told us that if anything opened up in his building, he’d let us know. Because we are nice people.

Flash forward a few weeks and N & I had begun perusing Craigslist apartment ads daily in order to temper the escalating bloodlust we felt toward our neighbors. I was literally hitting Apple+R every 15 minutes.

An apartment from the building next door appeared in the list. A 2BR in one of the two most coveted lines in the building (this building is identical to ours, and is a prewar job, so each apartment line is–for some bizarre reason–a different shape. There are two lines with absolutely enormous living rooms, and this place was in one of them) and it was available for March 1. We went over to see it that night. We overlooked the quirks–the cabinet- and drawer-less kitchen painted bright green, the decrepit bathroom (I know, I know…)–because all we could think of was HOW BIG THIS PLACE WAS and how we could fit ALL OF OUR SHIT and THEN SOME. We grilled them: Are the neighbors noisy? Does anyone downstairs smoke? How is the water pressure? They claimed everyone was really quiet and kept to themselves.

So we decamped our 1BR with the awesome view of the city and not a single good quality beyond that, found someone to take over our lease**, and moved in last weekend.

It’s the biggest place I’ve ever lived in NYC. You could fit most studio apartments inside our living room. So that’s cool. The wood floors are nice and level. The bedrooms get good light. And they were right–the neighbors are pretty quiet.

So our first night, we got into bed, all proud of ourselves that we’d finally escaped all the screaming, banging, slamming, hammering, drilling, sawing, and smoking. It was so very quiet.

At first.

At 1 am, a startlingly loud whirring noise woke us up. I lived next to a long-haul trucker growing up. Sometimes in the winter he’d leave his truck running all night (or else it wouldn’t start). It sounded like that. We wandered around the apartment trying to figure out its origin–the floors were actually vibrating.

And then it clicked off. And 45 minutes later, it clicked back on. And then off. And then on. And then off.

It turns out that we live above the building’s boiler.

Which means that everyone whose name I cursed for the past 6 years has had the last fucking laugh. Oh, but let’s just see who’s first up against the wall when the revolution happens. At least our living room’s bigger now.

Lullaby for the Strange, by Gabriel Hart. [Via A Little Necrophilia.]

*Who, unlike the super from our building–the Serbian war criminal who once told me, when he was hooking up my gas stove in a rather cavalier way, “In my country, is man talk and woman listen, you know?” –actually does work.

**More on that later.

Yesterday afternoon I told my office mate I was leaving early to see my accountant. We’re dissimilar, politically, but we share some things in common — namely, a highly inappropriate sense of humor.

Him: Good luck. I did my taxes last week, and my refund was less than half of what it was last year.

Me: Socialism.

Him: [simultaneously] Obama.

Me: Well, I just hope I get enough back so I can rent a small plane.

Him: If I don’t see you tomorrow, I’ll look for you on CNN.

Sometimes–and only sometimes–part of me wants to pick up and move down to Florida* so that I can see my extended family and inlaws more often. I learned a couple years ago that I actually like my family. (My mother’s family.) I grew up not seeing much of them. And now that my father’s side of the family has stopped inviting me to family gatherings,** I have nothing keeping me up here.

And I like my inlaws. In fact, I’m currently penning a how-to book called How to Renovate Your House on the Cheap by Enslaving Your Elderly Parents.

On the other hand, though, that would severely curtail My Alone Time, which mostly consists of drinking bourbon, eating peanut butter out of the jar with my hands, reading Metafilter, and listening to the music that N can’t stand. And sometimes it’s music that no self-respecting musophile would admit to enjoying, under pain of death even. Like post-Gabriel Genesis. Or Josh Turner (whom NPR seems to like, so maybe he’s not totally uncool)(that was said in half-seriousness). Or the Dead.

Or post-Toys in the Attic Aerosmith. Very post-.

Twenty years ago, when I was in high school (and oh my god I can’t believe I just typed that), I got mono. I started coming down with it the week of spring break, but I didn’t want to tell my parents that I was running a fever and feeling a bit delirious and tired, because I had plans to play tennis*** with this cute boy from school and I was not about to be stopped.

So, the Monday school resumed, my mother found me standing in the shower, dry, staring numbly at the hot/cold water knobs and unable to figure out what the next step was. The doctor confirmed it and thus began my month of quarantine.

As much as I like to be alone, I can’t say that I enjoyed this month, because I also had an almost unbearable–and tenacious–case of strep throat. Seriously, it was bad. It was so bad that for the first time in my young life, food held no appeal, and I couldn’t taste anything. My parents made me milkshakes every day, which I refused. Milkshakes.

MILKSHAKES!

I lost about 15 pounds, which actually put me at a healthy weight. (When I returned to school, people would stop me and ask what happened, and I told them I’d been away at an unwed mothers home.)

The school sent a tutor every week to bring me homework assignments and give me tests and whatnot. I finished everything within an hour. Public school is a joke.

This meant that I spent most of my time watching MTV. You might not remember this, but 1990 was not a great year for popular music. As such, in my febrile state, I watched an unchanging and fairly small rotation of videos. Of them all, Nothing Compares 2 U was the most tolerable, but then there was also Adam Ant’s pathetic comeback attempt, Room at the Top. Also, we had Onion Skin, by Boom Crash Opera, a band so mind-blowingly awful and improbably popular that I have to assume they made a pact with the devil. And then, of course, there was “Hold On,” by Wilson Phillips (which, by the way, was the number one song of 1990), who had not sold their souls to the devil in exchange for fame–they were actually his henchmen and I will not be linking to their video.

Finally, though, there was a song that somehow resonated with me, as bad as it is. To this day, I really, really love it. I even bought the mp3 from Amazon last year.

Aerosmith, “What It Takes”

So when I am alone, I listen to this song. Really, it’s not so bad. A sad accordion song will do it for me every time.

*Other times, I want to pick up and move due to the fact that we do, in fact, own a house there now, and also to the fact that the weather in NYC is ready to kill me right now.
**I can’t imagine why, though I suspect I should blame Obama. I miss the Struffoli but not a lot else.
***All these odd revelations about me today! I think that was probably the last time I picked up a tennis racket, by the way. I should be glad my spleen didn’t explode.

I can assure you that if you haven’t bought your significant other* a Valentines Day gift, you’re practically SOL. Don’t be one of those people who picks up a shop-warn teddy bear and a heart-shaped container of bath salts at the drugstore the morning of. So, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Love Is a Four-Letter Word: True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts (or buy it here, and have it overnighted or something). It will make you laugh, cringe, hate me because I don’t like Henry Rollins, and pity everyone involved because we don’t have traditional family values. Read some reviews here. Read an excerpt here. Catch the spirit, catch the spit.

*I was thisclose to typing “sweetie,” just because the term irks me so much. I see it cropping up everywhere on the web, and it conjures up images of furries and Ren Faires. You can’t call an adult a “sweetie.” (Unless that adult is a bunny.)