i'm boring

jess and i started to clean a bit because corey and sarah are on their way to richmond tomorrow, and we had a bunch of garbage and recycling to take out. jess threw down a bag of shredded paper and receipts and such, and behind the fence where the garbage cans lie, the neighbor whose house is just beyond that stretch of stench and nastiness, i see, is smashing some of the stuff that the tentants, us included, didn't decide to take care of.

so i immediately get defensive: "well, most of that isn't our stuff, so i'm not gonna destroy all the boxes to make room for all of it." of course he was nice about it, and when i got around the other side, we started talking about my landlord, and apparently his nemesis. i can imagine in the summer, especially when he walks out of his house, the rotting garbage, which mostly overflows from the cans that have probably been used from the late 90s or before, overflows. it does. so he starts smashing more boxes, and we start talking.

when i first talked to babs, who is our landlord, and that's of course not her real name, she was a bit scary. she's old, mean, and has a hearing aid. but she's not a jolly older woman with a hearing aid. she's pissed. she can't walk well. she can't hear well. and i think she likes to take it out on her tenants. when she first met me, she said, "well, how old are, you around 22?" then i was 25, and i know i look like i'm 16, but goddamn. i'm used to it when i'm getting carded at a bar, but not in a situation where i'd like to purchase a living space for a year at least.

but bill, the neighbor, and myself started bonding a bit. i talked about how it took an unreasonable amount of phone calls to get her to deal with putting the awning back up. we're on the third floor, so instead of a roof and a light like the first two, we have an awning. i had to do a ridiculous amount of prodding for that thing to make its presence known.

either way, i bonded with my neighbor, the non-tenant neighbor. and i told him we'd at least make sure we were crushing boxes and such.

we love this place, but it's funny how much ludicrous stuff you have to sometimes put up with, especially when our landlord says, "i do as much as possible for my tentants," etc., when she really doesn't make much of an effort to do anything.

hopefully in a year or so we'll be homeowners. or close to homeowners. it ain't gonna happen in richmond. so hopefully somone wants me at their school for a ph.d. with some kind of ta appointment or fellowship.