wise decisions and colorful apartments

I don't want to catch any flak for not exactly updating everybody on the whole Move To Chicago portion of S&K so I'm here!

So I drove about 1500 miles total over the last week and a half (10 days to be exact). It was a huge step for me as an American human being. I spent a lot of time thinking Deep Thoughts but also thinking about furniture, so I think it all balanced out to neutral on the Shallow-Not Shallow spectrum.

I don't know if any of you have ever driven a far distance to try to find an apartment in a city you only know moderately well, but it is a bit difficult. I found that the overwhelming number of ads on craigslist that I had to digest was the hardest part; it's like, you have a few criteria, you weed out things based on your maximum rent, and then you find yourself viewing an apartment in real life that is being rehabbed by a shirtless man who is insisting that you call the owner because the realtor you've been dealing with hasn't shown up yet.

So I saw 6 apartments total in the course of 3 days and 3 of them were absolute crap. So I guess I'll just give the run down of the apartment hunting process:

Apartment 1)
In a high-rise building that was nice enough, with the man who lived on site and did all of the management work. He showed me an 1100/month apartment that he had knocked down from 1300/month, and it was the kind of apartment that would have cost about 5000/month in New York. So the apartments in the building were nice but the building itself was essentially a hotel and filled with Loyola students. I picked up some applications but the bottom line, however, is that you really can't go for the first apartment you see...especially when it's more than you were really hoping to pay.

Apartment 2)
Oh god...it was horrible...the kind of thing that would give me nightmares. Its one redeeming quality was that it was on Clark Street in Andersonville, which is a nice street to live on with lots of stuff, including this great bar called the Hopleaf that has tons of fancy pants beers. However, the carpets were blue and horrible (any of you who are reading this from Oberlin, they were exactly like the apartments in East dorm), some aspects of the apartment were being rehabbed, there was little natural light and no windows that looked out on Clark Street. No.

Apartment 3)
This apartment I never went inside. In fact, I never even looked at the right building. I hate to admit this, but I actually had the wrong address. The thing was, when I made the phone call, the woman would not speak clearly to save her life. Part of it was that she had an accent, but for real, I can understand accents--it was just that when I asked her to repeat things she never slowed down the way she was talking, so I ended up writing down the wrong address. Regardless, once I got to the general area in which the apartment building was located, I knew it wasn't right. It was just too far away and everything looked a bit too grim. So, no.

Apartment 4)
Ended up being the first apartment I looked at by myself. The landlord was funny, odd, but nice. Once again I had written down the wrong address (how does that happen so frequently?) so I took the train one stop down and then ended up having to walk to the entire distance back when I realized where the apartment was supposed to be. When I showed up, sweaty and stressed out and severely regretting wearing skinny jeans, the man was like "omg you should have told me I would have picked you up in my car!!" The building had an indoor bike rack and a typical Chicago back courtyard with lots of wooden staircases. Chicago is the city of wood, brick, ivy, and revolving doors, IMO. The apartment itself was wonderful and the right amount of strange: blue, green, and purplish grey walls with the best bathroom I saw in any place. I was sort of in love instantly but only filled out an application and paid for the credit check and agreed to come back the next day.

Apartment 5)
Was across the street from the apartment I had just seen and the entire experience was a debacle. I was dealing with a realtor named Jack who had even called to confirm the time for the viewing an hour beforehand; when I got to the apartment, he was nowhere to be seen and his phone was off (always a bad sign). There was a shirtless man inside the apartment painting the walls and generally looking sweaty. My brother and I debated just leaving; the apartment was on the first floor and had some very robbable windows--besides the fact that the entire place looked like crap because it was being rehabbed. However, when we were in the middle of the decision, the shirtless man came out INSISTING that we call the owners of the building. So, I called them, and the woman who answered was just as confused as I was. She kept insisting her husband, Tony, was supposed to show us the place and that he thought the appointment was tomorrow (NO I'M DEALING WITH A MAN NAMED JACK, i told her over and over) and then proceeded to describe the entire apartment to me in excruciating detail even though I was standing on the front porch and looking at it. Finally, out of the blue, Jack shows up while I'm still on the floor with this woman and I can barely get her off the phone. We look around the place and I find myself saying bull shit things like "wow these are nice windows" because I am painfully aware you couldn't pay me to live in that particular place. What is it about the apartment hunting experience that always reduces me to paying obvious compliments to the owner about the apartment? Like, heaven forbid I don't agree that the windows are nice.

Apartment 6)
The last apartment I was supposed to see was in the morning before returning to the colorful apartment I really liked. Apartment 6 was in Lakeview, a neighborhood that, on the whole, has a bit more going on then Edgewater in terms of the proximity of residences to shops, but the apartment was on the ground floor and yet again I was faced with rob-able windows (robbable? robb-able? likely to be robbed?), so though some tortured decision making in the course of an hour, I went with my gut and got the colorful apartment.

So now it's final--I'm moving to Chicago at the end of the month (leaving NC on the 29/30 most likely) and then my roommate will be coming along in another week. And then the job hunt begins, as does getting to know Chicago as a city-entity.

To top all of this off, I dyed my hair back to my original color (or tried to anyway). It's now brown (was blonde before). For those of you who know me, it is a shocker.