Finding a place

I haven't done much blogging the past couple of weeks because I've been on a mad quest to find a place to live. Currently, I reside with my sister Jane in my hometown of Arcadia. Working in West LA, my morning commute is enough to make me want to stab some people in the chest. (Just people I'm not particularly fond of. Although it has been grating more on my nerves recently, thus perhaps motivating me enough to want to stab a few people of whom I'm moderately fond.) The gas prices remain insane, and my fill-ups are quickly approaching the 50 dollar mark. Is there no respite to the torture it has become to visit a gas station? I liken it to... having to go take a dump, but having every bathroom you enter have shit all over the seats. You've got to go, but getting to the destination is very pricey.

The search has been grueling. The places to live that I've visited haven't been the ideal locations of course. There are three types of people I've noticed at my potential residences. The first are college kids looking to fill in a room left by a graduating student. These are usually not too bad. The only major downside is that most of them do not know how to take care of a place, or to make it feel like a home. It is a temporary place for them, and they treat it that way. The second type of people are post graduates or older folks who are still moving from place to place, looking for random people to help drive down their rent. These places I found were the sketchiest to view. They clean out a closet to rent or put up a curtain in the living room, claiming privacy and lots of space in order to get suckers like me to come and actually pay them money for any living space. I am not (yet) that desperate to move out to LA. The third group are people who own homes. They rent out their rooms for a variety of unknown reasons and seemed overall pretty odd.

None of these places would do. As much as I hated driving out to LA every day, most of the time in grueling amounts of traffic, I knew I would hate it more if I ended up taking a place that would be dreadful to come home to. I figured if I kept searching long enough, something really good would pop up.

There were a couple of close calls of course. Two different places in an ideal location. The first one I was interested in, I was passed over for a girl. The apartment would've been with two nerdy asian guys, whose only method of getting a girl in their general area was to have her live with them. Their last roommate was a girl, and their most recent choice appeared to reinforce my conclusion. The second place I was late by an hour. They had had a fellow say that he would take it before I had a chance to check it out. I was obviously bummed out about the turnout, but I kept pressing forward.

And it paid off. To make a long story short, I found a place to live with people my age, at the same place in their lives, and the girl that lived there the longest had decorated the apartment to make it feel like a home. Did I mention that she happens to be gorgeous? Jackpot. I mean, the place to live was nice, but living with an attractive female definitely ends up on my list of pluses. I'm glad I decided to stick things out and keep searching. Tenacity definitely pays off.

There's no deeper lesson here. Just... it sucks not having a place, to live specifically, and to belong in general.