This is what we look down on. Well, I guess it is New York* The Building - well, I guess we were thinking it would be a nice "walk", being the furthest down 116th street and thus the furthest of the 116th buildings from campus. And it's fine when you're walking toward the building, down the hill. Except if you're carrying a lamp. Or a box. But at least you're going downhill. The only trouble was keeping the carts from rolling down the hill on move-in day and just sliding into Riverside Park. But on the way out of the building, when you're walking toward campus, up the hill? In the rain? Ugh, brutal. At the corner there's this Chinese restaurant, the sidewalk of which is always crammed with Chinese guys screaming at each other because apparently their blood pressure is even higher than mine. They seem to be delivery men, but you know, I don't exactly have the Chinese skills to decipher their yelling. The building, sadly, has only four washing machines and four dryers (for about two hundred residents). At least there are elevators, even though they're sort of old and creaky and creepy and I don't like taking elevators alone anymore, not since The Eye movie. *shiver* The building is old, and it too creaks at night - pipes shifting and the like. When it was unfurnished and empty it was sort of creepy. These buildings were erected in the early twentieth century, after all. There's lots of history lurking in the shadows.
The kitchen. Apparently that wall there had a burst pipe behind it, which necessitated repairs. You don't even want to know how it looks now, after facilities staff have dissected the ENTIRE wall and our kitchen is completely inaccessible* The Suite - shared with five other girls, it's not bad, and it's not great. I mean, there are rooms and furniture in the rooms, and the appliances work. Except they painted over one of the outlets in the kitchen. And the walls in the kitchen are rotting. I mean, they seriously seem to have tumors bubbling up underneath the surface. They're also made of cement, which means we can't use push pins in the walls. *groan* So we're left with white pasty, prison-like walls with god-awful paint jobs (they paint over hinges, understand? Everything looks like melting wax in the kitchen). And we can't really file work orders because they just switched to an online work order system (they think they're SO technologically advanced) but of course we're not in the system, because we've never used it, so we have to email this lady to be put in the system, and... it's all so convo-fucking-luted. The suite itself is organized around a narrow corridor. My room is the first on the left, and three other rooms follow, the two singles at the end. It winds around, followed by an overhead pipe-electricity thing (there's lots of pipes and random things sticking out of the ceiling), and the floor is basically patchwork linoleum, and seems to have been assaulted by a small child with markers. The doors are bright turquoise. It could be worse. We could have purple walls, like one dorm on campus.
Turquoise doors and winding hallways* The Room - shared with saffron. We have a huge window that looks out onto a tree, which is lovely, because on the other side of the tree are brick buildings, the backs of other apartments, and a strange little courtyard area where people look to have been murdered, in all probability, and where abandoned bicycles sometimes lie. To our far left is what seems to be Columbia housing, since there are boys (one has a poster of Inside Man!) and they have loud parties. Across from us, it could be anything, and some of the apartments we see don't seem lived in at all.
Some, however, blast weirdly eccentric music on Friday nights. Unfortunately, our pretty-looking window is non-functional. I opened it and then couldn't close it. Maintenance came and closed it, but said "eh, they were stupid and didn't finish it, so they have to come back over winter break and fix it" and "it's best if you don't open the window until then". Insert swear words here. So at least now we're not freezing at night, but it's stuffy as hell. We have two narrow windows on the side that we could theoretically open, but they're so small they don't do much. And one's hidden by saffron's dresser. The walls have random nails sticking out and are littered with the remnants of blue sticky tack. There's also random hooks. I almost died impaling my head on one of them. The room is also filled with furniture. We have two beds, two wardrobes, two dressers, two desks, and two bookshelves. That's a lot of shit, and it took my ingenuity to figure out how to make it all even accessible (jutting the desks out instead of having them rest against the wall was the answer). There's two mirrors - one hanging on the other side of the door, which looks very nice and even has gold rims, and one that hangs, 80% concealed, behind my wardrobe. God knows how the hell it even got there. Oh well, at least the outlets in our room work. That wasn't the case in two of the rooms, and the other room has only two-pronged outlets.
My bed on the bottom, saffron's on top - as you can see we are not the neatest people* The Bathroom - it's ok, it's liveable. I mean, the toilet's not a squatting toilet, at least, right? It was, however, a yucky brown along the bowl, with grimy-colored water. And recently the handle has decided to stop flushing properly. A plumber came after five attempts to dial the correct number for "emergency services", and kept coming in and out to get more gadgets to fix the porcelain god, but it still doesn't flush properly. We just have to hold the handle a long time to make it understand. But at least now the toilet's clean - Shout and a scrubbing brush did the job. The shower is something out of an Indiana Jones movie. It'll work fine for a while, at a nice warm temperature, even if the pressure is somewhat hard and pounding, and then you'll hear a distant clunk from somewhere in the old creaking building, and suddenly the water will be the temperature of molten lava and you'll jump two feet into the air and slam yourself against the far wall of the tub to get away from it. Slowly it returns to normal. Occasionally someone in the building feels the need to flush four times and you're just fucked, basically.
The bathroom! Yay! The shelf thing was supposed to go the other way but the damn pipe was in the way.* My Computer - this is part of the "residential life" post because my computer is like my home. I love this fucker. I freak out when it freaks out. When it gets viruses I feel as though I'm the one dying. If the computer crashes and burns, there goes my writing, my music, and my pictures. I've had one experience with the "blue screen of death" already, in eighth grade, when our family desktop computer was fizzled by an electrical surge during a storm. By some grace of God, it was that 1% of cases in which the blue screen of death appeared but the hard drive was unaffected and could be salvaged. Miraculous, no? So anyway, the computer transition to college was at first working well, but suddenly after removing it for an hour to watch a couple episodes of DB, it decides not to reconnect to the LAN internet connection. On a Friday, mind. Ah, fuck, right, because the computer help desk is nonoperational over the weekend, and the wireless is spotty at best. I'm freaking out because I don't know what's wrong, and I have to study for my Globalization class. I didn't get a lot of work done this last week because of this computer malady. The computer helpdesk couldn't help me, but referred me to a tech repair company, and it was hard as hell to schedule appointments with them - the tech dude was like two hours late, the first time - but eventually, on Thursday, I got an external ethernet "card" to replace the one that apparently decided to croak inside the computer, that's attached to the motherboard. So now internet is back. Then I downloaded iTunes 7.0 during a massive revamping of my desktop appearance and theme, and it almost didn't install (it kept installing itself for like, half an hour, as if it couldn't quite finish the job). Then it installed. My world was saved. Then I couldn't open the iTunes store. On another Friday. I was like, fuck, why on weekends? Why me? WHY? But after screwing around reading the iTunes help discussion board and the like, I managed to get to the iTunes store web site, trigger a thing that said, "iTunes not detected on your computer", and then clicked the button "I have iTunes", and got a pop-up about phobos.apple.com, and how if this was not an expected pop-up, it could be a malicious attempt to compromise my computer. But it is an expected pop-up, I launched the application, and now miraculously the store is back. So if anybody's having similar problems of being unable to connect to the iTunes store after downloading iTunes 7.0, and you have Windows XP, first make sure that you can receive pop-ups from phobos.apple.com and apple.com, then go to this web site, click "I have iTunes", and click "Launch Application" when the pop up window comes up. Cross your fingers that your iTunes comes up with the store. On the happy side, everything now seems to be functioning on my computer. I have a very cutesy desktop background and I downloaded a new skin for my Firefox, something about "Japan" and "Max" (always good words to have in your desktop skin, ne?). I just hope this little bugger's not gonna choke again anytime soon.
My desk area. Notice the random paper circles on the wall - we decided we wanted a "bubble room"Damn, I love how the "computer" section is the longest in this blog. Heh. I'm so Generation Whatever-Generation-This-Is, aren't I? I've heard it described as "iGeneration", in a song by Mc Lars Horris - a good song, when you think about it:
"The Berlin Wall fell and out we came, the post-Cold War kids laid claim to AIM
LOL, OMG, yo, BRB. Space, colon, dash, closed parenthesis
We sat at our laptops and typed away, and found that we each had something to say
Web-logged our fears, our hopes and dreams,
Individuated by digital means
Fiber optic lenses, DVD, Coca-Cola, Disney, and Mickey D's
Flat mass culture, the norm that took hold; I hope I die before I get sold"
