What I’m Reading
Aug
5
Pluses and Minuses
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It’s no secret that I am a New England girl at heart. I love New Hampshire and it’s tiny little fourteen-mile coastline and absurd number of vanity plates. I love Vermont for the fact that you can order up Ben & Jerry’s in every bar. I love Maine even though someone there went a little overboard with putting up signs on the highway to the point where they are completely nonsensical, i.e. “Maine: Come for a Visit, Stay For A Lifetime” and “Snack Wisely: Remember Snacks Are Not A Meal Replacement!”, and sometimes just cartoon drawings of lobsters.
If only I were kidding.
But most of all I love Boston. It’s small and manageable, yet I still feel as though there are parts of they city I have yet to discover like the South End (not to be confused with Southie!) and East Boston. And as soon as those places get T stops I will be all over that. The historic buildings are beautiful, and when people-watching in the summer you are guaranteed laughs from the dopes dressed in Revolutionary War regalia when it’s 95 degrees and the backs of your knees are sweating even when you are just wearing a cotton sundress.
There’s always tons of live music, great restaurants, and good shopping. Hell, I have four Targets within a 10-mile radius of my apartment. Now THAT is living.
But really, there’s only so much one can accept even after citing all the awesome parts of living in Boston. At twenty-nine years old I don’t feel as though I should still be saying things like, “Well, our apartment is nice if only we didn’t live on a street where children scream so endlessly that we wouldn’t even know if they were being abducted and tortured next door because it just ALWAYS SOUNDS LIKE THAT.” And maybe that joke would be funnier if Chris didn’t discover last week that there is a registered sex offender, charged with sexual assault on a minor, living three houses up from us.
We were completely excited that our next door neighbors moved last week because in close to two years they had never once turned off their kitchen light, which shined directly into our bedroom window all night long. When they were finally gone we marveled at the total darkness of our room and slept the deepest, most wonderful sleep we’ve had since moving to this neighborhood, without so much as one Tylenol PM.
We’ve considered moving to a different neighborhood. But I don’t feel that moving one mile closer to the T should equal a $400 hike in rent prices and the loss of my shoe room. Being here shouldn’t mean that I have to put up with drunk hipster college kids with their neon Nike high tops. I shouldn’t have to wear full body armor to ride my bike or live in fear that the Massachusetts trademark road rage might someday strike the driver behind me; no Schwinn helmet would save me then.
I actually tried to search craig’s list for places outside of the city. I thought maybe if we could just get a little further outside of the boundaries of the 253 colleges and universities we would feel a little less cramped, a little less like we should be watching The Hills instead of PBS specials, a little less like paying $9 for a PBR tall boy is totally normal and not completely insane. What I found on craig’s list was discouraging, to say the least, and not just because the prices were the same as the city.
The best was this house of horrors; a fully furnished Victorian mansion, where you are not allowed to have pets so as to preserve its historic nature, but it is completely cable and wifi ready. Because those Victorian era poets were NOTHING without the internet.
The only way I would move into that apartment is if I had a strong desire to be dismembered in my sleep, then sewn back together and used as a dressmaker’s dummy. Or if I wanted to see those twins from The Shining for myself. And you know, I don’t have either of those desires at all.
So for now we’ll stick with the neighbors we’ve got. They may be crappy but at least they’ve never tried to kill us.
Yet.
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Yeah, as long as you’re not a minor, you’ll be fine. And seriously, “sexual assault” could mean just about anything…
I was just talking with my mom on Sunday about wanting to buy a condo. I’m hoping to be able to do it early next year. And I was telling her as much as it would be a good financial situation to buy a place in the suburbs that would be bigger and COST LESS, I’m just not ready to move out of the city.
Because in the suburbs, you don’t bond with your neighbors in the laundry room basement to hide out when there are tornado sirens going off and someone says out loud “I should have brought beer.”
Moving is such a hard thing because it seems to involve compromise on so many levels. Don’t compromise on safety, but sometimes means giving up shoe room or short commute. Being close to grocery store means you might make up the fuel savings in rent/mortgage payments. It really is about deciding what is most important to you and what you can compromise. Like you, sometimes I think not moving is the best answer.
I want to buy a place! But where? And when? And for how much? It seems that nothing exists that we would like AND can afford. Why must those things be mutually exclusive? Finding a place to call your own should NOT be this difficult.
OH MY GOD.
That house is literally just STEPS away from my house. Like a 1 minute walk. You’d miss it in the bat of an eyelash in a moving car.
Holy Crap.
Ah, college students. I just moved to Cleveland Circle on Saturday and my new apartment is louder than my old apartment in Manhattan! As long as the crazy BC undergrads keep their drunken yelling to Friday and Saturday nights, I’ll be okay. But if they try screaming on weeknights when I’m doing homework there’s going to be hell to pay!
We have a factory worker that lives under us, he smokes and I would say he in the early stages of lung cancer, he’s always making disgusting throat clearing sounds. He also beats up his girlfriend every now and then. I can’t wait to not live near such a piece of crap anymore.
It seems like it’s expensive to live anywhere. It’s just damn expensive to live. Sucks, eh?
And why do places come fully furnished sometimes? Do they really want only the people who don’t own furniture to live there?
Ugh. Neighbors. When I can afford it I’m moving to a house out in the country where no one can interrupt my peaceful slumber. I’m like one step away from the lady who bangs a broom handle on the ceiling every time I hear a creak.
I love living downtown Saint Paul. I do. I love the view from my apartment and the fact that the walls are seriously thick and you can rarely hear anything (but when something does come through the vents it is the neighbor’s classical music so that’s cool) and only one crazy woman invaded my apartment when I was making parsnips.
But I am tired of paying rent. There is never any happy medium, is there? Where is the house fairy when you need her?
Am I missing something about this house? It doesn’t look that horrible. Not Shining creepy twin girls horrible. Was there a dismembered head I missed in one of the pictures?
Sigh. The building next to our house has one of those lights. It has shone(?) shined(?) into our bedroom for FOUR. YEARS. My husband keeps threatening to shoot it out with a pellet gun. I’m just going to go unscrew it.
Also: we could literally save almost $1,000 a month if we moved somewhere else – like the “valley of the dirt people”. But that would mean a two-hour commute each way every day, and quality of life is much more important to me. Unless something drastic happens and we HAVE to move, I’m not budging until it’s my name on the mortgage papers.
Mr. A and I are so not ready to leave the city, even with its serial rapists and crime and astronomical rent. We have the rest of our lives to live in the burbs!
That house looks kind of cute actually, if you are my GRANDMOTHER!
The Victorian looks more fussy than creepy, except for the tower. A tower on a house is always bad news.
One thing you failed to mention is all the bars where the people go to sing and hang out after work. I lived in Boston during the Allie McBeal era and could never find one of those bars. So I moved. Now I live in NYC where I can get serenaded by after hours drunks on their way to the bridges and tunnels just by opening my windows.
Nine dollars for a PBR?? That’s just wrong.
I’ve been struggling with love/hate of the city lately, too. I hate driving around for 40 minutes looking for a parking spot if I dare take my car anywhere after 7pm. I hate being oogled and catcalled by dirty men while I walk down my own block in the middle of the day. I hate that we know what TV shows our neighbors like, not because they talk to us, but because we can hear their TV through the wall. And I really hate not having any space to put ANYTHING.
But I love walking to work, walking to Joel’s office, walking everywhere. I love being able to say “let’s go out for dinner tonight” and having 15 different restaurants within a 5 minute stroll. I love having so many options for everything, and I love the urban feel. I would miss seeing the neighborhood bulldog rolling on the sidewalk, the crazy lady across the street who takes her cat for daily walks on a leash, and the dude who wrote all over his beat-up old car with a marker instead of just getting some bumper stickers.
It’s quite a struggle, and I think the only solution is to live in the city until you just can’t take it any more, and then flee to the peaceful burbs, where parking spaces grow on trees.
I miss Boston
I think that house is kinda cute…?
That Victorian mansion is pretty, but would definitely have me on edge if I lived there. I think I see something creepy peering at me from the upstairs window. ::Shiver::
Maybe I’m just a strange guy, but I think it’d be kind of awesome to live in that manse. Very atmospheric. As long as they’d let me use my PlayStation in the parlor.
Yeah, I could write in that house.
Dude, Haverhill. Really.
The movie Psycho come to mind?
Dear God, Haverhill?
If you’re going to make that kind of commitment, you might as well just hop the border into NH and save yourself some sales tax. We have Target here, too, you know…
Enjoyed reading your blog, by the way. Even if reading it did take the place of posting on my own this afternoon. I forgive you. Oh, and I’m linking you. ‘K?