Thursday, March 24, 2005

The laundry room regularly crash lands in my kitchen sink, dear reader, and during these moments I tally the remaining days in my lease. 98, in case you’re wondering. I’m not sure what precisely causes my sink to fill with waste water from the washers upstairs. The planet’s axis needs to tilt just so, a string of people must consecutively wash their clothes, someone on a street corner sneezes, and all these factors intersect at a tender coordinate. On a weekly basis, apparently.

No place is perfect, that’s for sure, and in truth this is a good apartment, far better than the craphole of a place I used to rent. What’s interesting is the tension between reality and the marketed. The walls are concrete and virtually soundproof, declared my agent, yet they’re thin. It’s safe, yet residents have reportedly found their belongings missing. Maintained, yet burnt-out bulbs stay extinguished for days at a time.

If you ever find yourself in the baggage claim at Midway airport, look up at the monitors and you will see a colorful montage of Chicago’s best side, complete with theme song. Unrealistic? Perhaps, but it’d be foolish for the marketers to show, say, a drive-by shooting or a filthy El car.

The grittier scenes definitely stand in starker relief, however. Guess what I saw at Target the other day? An obese woman sniveling, crying wretchedly because she couldn’t extract a DVD lodged in the shelf. I mean, geez, you look at a scene like that for too long and you start counting all your bathroom tiles and labeling them with crayon. Or how about the trail of dog droppings on the sidewalk, broken by the occasional footprint? Heavy mist after a slushy snowfall? Zoloft can’t hold a melted candle to this kind of thing.