If a cow ever got the chance...

About half the apartments I've looked at (or stood outside) have seemed really unsafe to me. Just in terms of layout. The second apartment was one of those U-shaped buildings with a gate in front and six separate entrances ranged around this long, narrow courtyard (probably 20 feet wide by 100 feet deep). Well, the courtyard was pretty--ivy and little twisty paths up to the entrances and a few big trees--but I would have been scared to come home after dark. I mean, the front gate not only didn't lock, there was duct tape wound around the locking mechanism a bunch of times to ensure that it would never lock. And the trees effectively hide the courtyard so that you can't see into it from the street, and vice versa. So what you have is a charming, ivy-covered blind alley in a marginal neighborhood. (Trust me on this--I live around the corner. I feel safe because I need to open three different doors with three separate keys, one of which is the special expensive kind that can't be duplicated, to get into my apartment, which (unlike the building I was looking at) is on a well-trafficked street.)

A lot of the people in this neighborhood are clearly in need of money. I mean, not my kind where I have to bring a lunch at the end of the month instead of buying one because I don't want to run up my credit card any further, and am sad because I can't afford a $1200 pillow-top Stearns and Foster mattress. If I was one of the three or four prematurely aged guys who sleep on the sidewalk in back of the abandoned theater every night (i.e., across the street from the courtyard building), I would be a little intrigued if I saw me get out of a cab at 2 a.m. and go into that courtyard fumbling for her keys. I would see a well-fed-looking, slightly uncoordinated girl who had money at the start of the evening, at least, to spend on taxis and nightlife. I would assume (rightly) that she could spare whatever was left.

You know, it kind of puts the whole apartment search in perspective. There are about a million people in this city alone who would love it if they had to find a bigger apartment because they, um, had too much stuff. Landlords can make me wait all they want to, but I know that eventually I will have another place to live, much like the one I have now. Five hundred yards from where I'm sitting, there are people who have probably never been able to say that. This is why you won't hear me whining about the apartment thing again.

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