New home

I am not quite ready to live in such a big apartment. I've lived in studios twice during my career as a renter, and both times I found myself surprised at how such a tiny space can become so delightfully cozy. When you live in a studio you know every floorboard, every corner, every odd little nook where you can stash something you don't have room for. Of course, you have no choice but to know these things, since a decision as simple as purchasing a new iPod sets off a chain of displaced items so extensive that before you know it you're trying to fit your kitchen table in your bathtub. "It'll be a little muggy, but I could eat here," you're saying to yourself. That is how well you know your apartment.

This apartment is different, not least because Henry had already been living here for two years by the time I moved in. Sometimes I still feel like an occasional overnight guest, wandering through someone else's rooms and puzzling over someone else's things; other times I am stunned by some new vortex of storage I had never paid attention to before, like the built-in drawers next to the bathroom sink or the linen closet in the hallway. Space, space and more space. It's an embarrassment of spaces.

After living for a year and a half in a glorified walk-in closet, I am finding that I don't know how to live in a real place, complete with such trappings of civilization as a front hallway or a one-car garage. There are so many places I could take off my shoes or plug in my phone, so many surfaces upon which to abandon a water glass or my keys. Like most eco-conscious individuals who also happen to be women, I am in the habit of leaving a single light on when I go out at night to frighten away potential intruders, but in this apartment I have to really strategize: a light in the bedroom might scare off those considering entry via the back door, but from the front it still looks like no one's home. And then there's the cleaning. Oh, god, the cleaning. You'd have to be a real idiot not to realize that cleaning a 1300-square-foot apartment will be five times as hard as cleaning a 250-square-foot place; I am that idiot, and I feel totally overwhelmed whenever I contemplate attempting to get this place up to the rigorous standards I maintained when I was living in a shoebox.

I would also like to discuss the rapists. You know how you can check that website to find all of the registered sex offenders in your neighborhood? Perhaps you are thinking that because I am a good liberal, I would never do such a thing, as it constitutes an invasion of privacy and everyone deserves a chance to start over and I don't believe in the death penalty because I think criminals can often be rehabilitated and I should seriously try to walk it like I talk it. To which I can only say: ha. Yes, I am a good liberal, and yes, I do feel torn on the subject of whether there should be a public online database tracking the locations of those who have committed certain crimes. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to look at it. I mean, it's there.

It turns out my new neighborhood is crawling with registered sex offenders, especially below Franklin, where just two blocks south of my current address it is a veritable registered sex offender fiesta, with some registered sex offenders living two or three to an address. I guess it makes sense for registered sex offenders to live together, seeing as no one else would ever want to live with them, but I don't like imagining the conversations Registered Sex Offender A has with Registered Sex Offender B after a long hard day at the office. "Man, that was a long hard day at the office. Ever feel like pouring yourself a strong drink or raping someone after a day like that?" "Totally, man, totally."

I am sure the registered sex offenders have better things to do than attempt to break into second-story apartments, but you know how sometimes when you're home alone you get the heeby-jeebs for no reason? Well, I'm home alone right now, and I have the heeby-jeebs. And thus this long, rambling, complaining-about-nothing entry explains itself.

Econoline blues

I decided to hire movers out of laziness. I've moved the old-fashioned way plenty of times, getting together a bunch of friends and loading everything into our various cars to haul from the old place to the new place, and here are some observations I'd like to make about this strategy: it always takes longer than you think it will; you always wind up with bruises, scrapes, and a suspicious knot in your back from when you failed to lift from the knees; and it makes all your friends hate you, especially if you happen to have a substantial collection of hardcover books. Also everyone I know drives a tiny fuel-efficient car, so there's no way to efficiently transport the three or so pieces of furniture I own that can't be taken apart with an Ikea-issue hex wrench. And even those that can be taken apart with a hex wrench are never quite the same when you put them back together, have you ever noticed that? You always lose the one little bolt that turns out to be vital to the structural integrity of the item in question, and because the bolt came from Sweden, you can't find one at the hardware store to replace it.

I've hired movers before. This was back in fall 2006, when I had just been thrown out of the Castle Grayskull by the landladies from hell and had broken my left big toe in a related incident, the related incident being my exhausted, stressed-to-the-max hunt for a new place, during which I stubbed the toe in question running up some concrete steps in an apartment building at Fountain and La Brea. Have you ever broken your big toe? I hadn't, and I felt pretty humiliated by the whole thing, let me tell you. I mean, here you have this tiny bone, probably one of the tiniest in the human body, and yet it's essentially impossible to walk without it. You're hobbling around, wincing with pain every other step, and everyone's going, "Oh my god, what happened?" And you're like, "I broke my toe." And then they try valiantly not to laugh in your face while you silently wish for a Vicodin the size of a golf ball.

So. Yes. Even though I was broke as hell and facing down a $10,000 damages charge from BLUE SKY PROPERTIES of LOS ANGELES CALIFORNIA who I personally recommend you DO NOT RENT FROM IF YOU VALUE YOUR SANITY, I decided that as a cripple, I had license to waste money on movers. And let me tell you, it was better than a day at the spa. In they came, with all their hand-trucks and rolling carts and blankets and packing tape, and out went all my stuff, easy as that. They were efficient, careful, friendly. They had a system worked out for my clothes, my blankets, and all the other odds and ends that don't quite work in boxes, and they transferred me from one place to the other in two hours.

I had different movers on Sunday. Not intentionally. I would've used the old movers again in a heartbeat, but I lost their number, and with no way to track them down, I resorted to calling up one of those local companies that leave business cards on your windshield when you're parked on the street. I should've known there was something weird about them when the guy asked me to meet him at the Walgreen's at Sunset and Western to hand over my deposit. But a lot of things are weird in LA. I decided not to overthink it.

The appointed time on Sunday came and went, and no one showed up to move me. After an hour and a half I called the number from the business card and left a message, and a few minutes later someone named Brian called me to let me know that the team of movers I'd hired was not going to be able to make it today. (Would anyone have let me know if I hadn't called? Jury's still out on that one.) "I'm about an hour outside the city, but I tell you what," he said. "I'll pick up a couple of my guys and we'll come move you. How's that?" He said it as if he was doing me a tremendous favor.

Two hours later, Brian and his guys showed up . . . IN A VAN. It was a Ford Econoline much like the one I learned to drive on when I was 15. We used to take it on family vacations to Michigan because it had so much space in the back. I guess Brian and his crew thought I would be able to fit all my worldly possessions into four suitcases and a golf bag.

"Your building doesn't have a parking lot?" Brian asked me in shock when I explained that they'd just have to double-park the van on the street. Apparently mine was the only parking-free building he had ever seen. You know, here in LA. HERE IN LA. He continued to grill me on the building, which was apparently an architectural disaster where moving was concerned, and meanwhile I was just thinking over and over again, That's a van. They are going to try to fit all my shit in a van. A VAN. "Man, this looks like a lot of stairs," Brian would say, and I would think VAN VAN VAN. Or he'd say, "You mean your apartment's all the way in the back? Oh, man," and I would smile and nod pleasantly. VAN VAN VAN.

I let Brian into my apartment -- which, I once figured out using a tape measure, is under three-hundred square feet -- and the first thing he said was, "Wow, this is a lot of stuff." Let's see: bed, desk, papasan chair, kitchen table, dresser. It sounds like a lot of stuff, I guess, until you start thinking about the items not on that list. No couch, for instance. No coffee table. No bookcase. No TV, no entertainment center, no electronics of any sort, really. Of course god only knows what would've happened if I had had a couch, considering they came in a VAN.

It was now 4:30 and getting darker out by the second, and I was eager to get everything over to the new place so I could accomplish some degree of unpacking before diving into the workweek first thing Monday morning. I asked Brian how I could help. He said by moving things. So me and Brian's two guys, who did not seem to be US citizens in the strictest sense of the term -- not that I am hating -- did all the moving while Brian talked on his cell phone, pausing intermittently to tease me about my accent or to call me mannish. For helping. Which he asked me to do. In spite of the fact that I was the one paying them.

Somehow they managed to get almost everything in the van, not without a steady dose of hand-wringing and guilt-tripping from Brian over how much stuff I had. I took the rest over to the new place in my car, along with one of Brian's guys. It was a pretty stilted conversation, considering he knew no English and all my Spanish comes from Pitbull lyrics and reading the ads on the back of buses:

Me: Mexico?
Him: [Spanish Spanish Spanish] Guatemala [Spanish Spanish Spanish].
Me: Ah, Guatemala. Familia Los Angeles?
Him: [Spanish] Familia [Spanish] Guatemala. [Spanish] Familia [Spanish] Los Angeles?
Me: Familia Indiana.
Him: Ah! Indiana.

Over at the new place, it was Henry's turn to play the role of the third mover while Brian and I settled the bill. Unloading everything was a considerably quicker process, and soon we were waving goodbye to Brian, his guys and their van. It wasn't quite the stress-free move I had been hoping for, but you can't have everything in life. I got a live-in boyfriend, my very own office space and a kitchen where I can cook anything my little heart desires. Brian got a nice chunk of money, which I sincerely hope his guys saw the majority of. And the van lived to fight another day.

Only in LA, man.

In which I say Ajax a lot

There are many incomprehensible mysteries in the world of adulthood, and the act of changing apartments, a seemingly simple task, makes me contemplate just about all of them. Like the age-old Mystery of How One Little Person Can Accumulate So Much Shit, which I faced down over the weekend when I decided to soft-launch the moving process by culling unnecessary items from my apartment. I kind of thought living in a studio might mitigate this process, seeing as there's nowhere to store anything not strictly vital to my day-to-day life. But it turns out even studio apartments can conceal one or two strange vortexes of dust-bunny-coated miscellany. Like a subwoofer. When I was in college my brother bequeathed to me this subwoofer the approximate size and weight of an anvil, and I have lugged that piece of shit from apartment to apartment for six years now thinking one day I might use it again. Except I have never used it, because its entire purpose is to turn innocent and enjoyable music into the type of sinister thudding that makes you feel like your spine is being vibrated into jelly. I keep forgetting I have it, because every time I move into a new place I shove it under my bed, and I only see it again when I am preparing to move out, at which point I think, "Oh yeah! My subwoofer! I might use this at my new place. I'd better take it with me."

Suck it, subwoofer. You shall haunt me no more.

Another eternal mystery is that of the Mugs Full of Useless Change. I used to only have one mug full of useless change, but at some point it started to overflow, so I dispatched another mug to solve the problem, and then it overflowed, and the cycle continued ad infinitum until last weekend, when it dawned on me that I only had one mug left for actual use because all of my others were filled with pennies, nickels and dimes. I finally emptied all of them into a Target bag, which I then took to Albertson's, where I stood in front of the Coinstar machine for at least thirty minutes watching in rapt fascination as it tallied four years' worth of change. I had 1500 pennies. FIFTEEN HUNDRED. Smaller but equally ridiculous quantities of nickels and dimes brought the total cash value of my coin collection to $45. This was actually a little disappointing. I had imagined a ludicrously high number, like one of those TV commercials where an attractive yuppie couple with two picturesque children discover they can get to Bora Bora using nothing but the change that has accumulated between their sofa cushions. Thanks a lot, media.

And then there's the most baffling species of mystery of all: cleaning. How one apartment can get so fucking grungy is way beyond my comprehension. And I'm a one-woman freakshow of obsessive-compulsive tics who cleans all the time. But there's cleaning and then there's cleaning, if you get my drift; there's cleaning of the sort where you Windex your mirrors or mop your kitchen floor, and then there's cleaning of the sort where scrub your baseboards with an old toothbrush or use a special vacuum cleaner attachment to get cobwebs off your ceiling. I'm an old pro at the first kind and a blushing ingenue at the second. Many people solve this same problem by hiring a professional to do their housecleaning, but my feeling is that if I cannot clean a mother-f-ing studio apartment by myself then I deserve to live in my own filth.

However, I would like to get at least a little bit of my deposit back, meaning I need to develop some sort of strategy for getting this place into a condition that would not alarm the Centers for Disease Control. What I'd really like to do is fill the entire apartment with a combination of warm water and Clorox and let it soak for a few hours, at which point all the dirt would lift off effortlessly. Am I right? Except I actually tried this strategy on my bathtub (effective cleaning of bathtubs being another great mystery of the universe, as far as I am concerned) and it didn't work for shit. Nothing works on bathtubs, have you ever noticed that? Somehow professional cleaners and moms can keep bathtubs white and gleaming for eons, probably using some kind of secret formula that can only be discerned using a mishmash of numerology and the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, but we average persons can scrub until our knuckles are raw and our fingernails are caked with Ajax, and we'll barely make a dent. Yes: Ajax. I also tried that. I left it on the tub for so long the structural integrity of the building was probably threatened, but nothing happened, except now some areas of the tub have blue Ajax stains, and scrubbing them with Ajax doesn't work. So I've actually made things worse, and I have nothing to show for it but some suspicious-looking abrasions on the backs of my hands that are probably so loaded with lethal chemicals that by the time I'm thirty I won't be able to tell my left from my right.

This is the type of thing I am thinking about while other people are out there in the world creating great works of art or unlocking the secrets of nuclear fission. Maybe I need to start volunteering.

Yes I can

The other night Hadley and I were sitting at a sidewalk cafe in Los Feliz village per our usual Thursday night routine when our friend E. and a girl went strolling by. This is something I like a lot about Los Feliz. A disproportionate number of people I know make their homes there, and it's a very walkable part of town, a rarity in LA, so the odds of encountering someone you know when you're out and about are pretty high. It makes Los Feliz feel more like a neighborhood, in the old-fashioned sense, than anywhere I have ever lived, and I am really looking forward to moving there in a few weeks. I have this image of myself walking over to the bookstore on Vermont on a bored Wednesday evening, perhaps wearing some sort of knit hat, that is quite pleasing. While it will be hard for me to leave behind the paradise that is Beachwood Canyon, I have to give Los Feliz the edge in terms of Things to Do That Make Me Feel Like a RomCom Heroine Living in Some Fictitious Idealized Version of the West Village. (In case you're wondering, this is a factor the Mapping LA project has yet to include in its stats.)

E. and his friend stopped to chat with us, during the course of which discussion it was revealed that he lives right around the corner from what is soon to be my apartment. "Really?" I said. "I am moving here, in, like, three weeks!"

"No kidding," he said. "Why are you moving?"

You should know that later this same evening, we ran into another friend of mine, S., who used to be my neighbor back when I lived in Melrose Place II. He asked where I was living now, and I said I'd be moving to Los Feliz soon and purposefully did not give a reason. As we return to the thread of dialogue I have been recounting, you will quickly understand why:

"I'm moving in with my boyfriend," I told E. and the girl.

FIREWORKS AND ANGELS was essentially the response to this news, from both E. and his friend -- a friend who, it is worth noting, I had just met for the first time. "Oh my god! Congratulations! That's amazing!" And then: "You did it!"

I have to tread lightly here, because I don't want to seem ungrateful for the warm response I always get when I tell people about this. It's really nice that everyone has been so enthusiastic and supportive of the idea.

But it is damn near impossible for anyone to be on the receiving end of this news without responding in a way that implies that I have somehow pulled something off. I understand that these responses are often given thoughtlessly in the moment, but it's sort of like how you tip thoughtlessly until you do a stint as a waitress, and from then on you always tip at least 20%, even if your server spits in your food and calls you a dirty whore. If ever in the future someone announces to me that they are planning to cohabitate, my response will always be a measured, "That's great! Are you excited?" because I have lived through this experience of announcing, endlessly announcing, and I am getting so tired of hearing "you did it" or some variation therein that I don't care anymore about the fact that it is probably uttered without any particular intention. I AM SICK OF IT.

I am willing to bet a thousand dollars that when Henry tells people we're moving in together, they don't say things like "You did it." It's just the first thought that pops into everyone's minds with women, because we're women. You know? We're women, so naturally this is all we've ever wanted in the world, and we've probably plotted and schemed and cajoled to get it, and now we have it, so it's like we've won something. Si se puede! I am just missing that feeling of accomplishment everyone seems to expect from me. This is a natural next step in me and Henry's relationship. I am excited about it, but not because I feel like I've actually done something. In true me form, I have yet to do anything. I don't even have any boxes. Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure how this move is going to happen two weeks from now. Just that it is.

I think the real accomplishment is living with someone, not moving in with them. The transfer of items is simple enough, as tasks go. But Henry is unwittingly proceeding headfirst into a social experiment of epic proportions. Were it a reality show, it would be called "Can You Live With That Bitch?" So truly, if any congratulations are owed, they are owed to him. For being courageous to the point of insanity. And also for making it this long with yours truly as a girlfriend (four years come November!). And, in general, for being the best ever.

Meditations in an emergency

I'm at a work conference in Arizona. I go to these a few times a year. My first one was when I was 24, a dizzy, confusing 48-hour trip to San Francisco during which I relished every opportunity to use my corporate card and, the first night, got so drunk that the second day was a hungover blur. I was a year from the magical line of demarcation that seemed to sweep through my life at the age of 25, delineating kid stuff from adulthood.

After a few of these things you get the hang of it. Your back and feet will always hurt. A glass of white wine at the end of the day will always taste like liquid gold. You learn new and exciting things, like that almost every room service meal comes with a tiny bottle of Tabasco sauce, or that the front desk will squirrel away your luggage all day if you have to check out in the morning but aren't leaving until 6 p.m. At the nicer hotels, when you dial the operator the person answers, "Yes, Miss V____, what can I do for you?" At this hotel they also do it in the restaurant, which is supposed to be the last word in gentility but comes off kind of bizarre, like the waitstaff has a secret dossier with your ATM pin code and deepest darkest secrets in it.

You learn to take mental notes on the topography, landmarking the halls of the hotel for future reference (at my first trade show I got lost coming out of my very first session and had to be directed to my room, which was just an elevator ride away). You learn to take everything with you in your laptop bag, because you will never in a thousand years make it back to your room during the day, no matter how fast you sprint. You learn to bring a box of granola bars for when your blood sugar hits a precipitously low level, and you learn that the hotel staff will bring you a glass of ice water or a coffee anytime you ask for it at any point during the day.

What I never get used to is being treated like someone fancy. Someone who, for instance, has $240 a night to drop on a hotel room in the middle of the desert. Here at this hotel everyone bows and scrapes every time I walk by. The room service guy went out of his way to ask me if every little aspect of my stay had been to my liking -- his words, not mine. Earlier, coming inside, I encountered a man wiping the glass doors clean. Not only did he get out of my way -- it would've been easy for me to choose another door and bypass him entirely, leaving him to his business and me to mine -- but he also opened the door for me and held it, bottle of Windex still clutched in his hand. It makes me wonder what kind of person stays in a hotel like this. Or what kind of person is expected to stay here.

This hotel is also "Native-American-inspired" to a degree that borders on the offensive. The whole thing is done up from the outside like an adobe, with red concrete shaped to look like mud clinging to timbers that are actually just more concrete. On the inside, the paintings are of Kokopellis frolicking against brightly colored backgrounds. Actually, only the male Kokopellis frolic; the female Kokopellis carry things, like women should:

If all you can tell from that poor cell phone photograph is that the art is UGLY and in NO WAY Native American, that's all I need you to know.

The "Native American" stuff doesn't end there. The doors are done in Southwestern geometric patterns. The palette is one of sandstone and sticks. Most annoyingly, instead of numbering the conference rooms, which would clearly be too easy, the hotel has named them after Pima words, so I spent all day wandering aimlessly looking for K'AI and ALEKU and who knows what else until I wanted to vomit. Translated, these words mean things like "gila monster" and "blizzard," some helpful signs informed me. I was really soaking up the Native American culture. Especially when I saw two actual Native Americans, the first non-white people all trip. Of course, they were members of the hotel cleaning staff, not patrons, but I'm sure they feel right at home here.

It's not all bad. There's a deck area outside the hotel bar with big cushioned chairs gathered around deep firepits where you can warm yourself against the cool desert air at night. It would be a lovely place to hang out with someone, if I had someone here to hang out with. That's the other thing about business trips: no other form of travel can make you feel so achingly, crushingly lonely.

Female troubles

ALERT: This entry is going to be all about periods.

You can feel free to throw rotten vegetables at your computer screen when I admit this, but I never used to get cramps. I probably went eight years without ever experiencing the slightest indication that my period was on its way. Which actually kind of sucked. Every other girl I knew had a solid two-day window during which her lady organs were loudly proclaiming, "Period coming! Stockpile your black underwear!" But not me. Once in a while I would fake cramps to get out of something -- here I am thinking specifically of the volleyball segment of my freshman gym class, because the thing about volleyball is that if you haven't learned to spike by a certain age, you are probably never going to, and as a result the whole experience was so humiliating that to this day I won't even play a round of beach volleyball because of the post-traumatic stress. So cramps came in handy there. But until I was 22, my actual experience of cramps was limited to hearing about it from other people. Aside from the usual annoyance and occasional mortifying incident wherein I was out with a group of guys when I realized my period had started and had to make up some insane excuse for getting to an all-night convenience store in the thirty minutes or so I had left before I visibly bled through my pants and as such had no choice but to go home, draw a warm bath and slit my wrists, things were pretty rosy.

Why am I being so graphic in my description of all this as to use the words "bled through my pants"? Because to this day, I don't think guys get exactly how traumatizing any given period has the potential to be. Don't get me wrong: things have improved with time. I no longer feel the need to behave like an MI6 agent when I need tampons, for instance. And once, a couple of years ago, Henry and Matt decided that they had some pressing questions about tampons and were by god finally going to get them answered, which led to a pantomime demonstration of how the cardboard applicator works that I think all of us will remember for quite some time. This definitely counts as progress.

But I have my doubts as to whether any guy I know could handle the sheer organizational challenge of menstruating. Like the time Henry told me that if there were a birth control pill for men, he would happily remove the onus of contraceptive responsibility from my shoulders -- a proposal to which the only honest response is "Bitch, please." Like I'm going to turn over the administration of a pill that has to be taken every day at the same time to a guy. I'm sure there are dozens of psychosocial reasons that birth control remains largely the responsibility of women in our culture, but number one on the list has to be the plain and simple fact that dudes can't handle the pressure.

So it would go with periods, if guys got them. The very trappings of our day-to-day existences would have to be permanently adjusted to accommodate menstruation, because there's just no way any but the most organized of men would remember to bring tampons with him every time he left the house. There would be baskets of tampons hanging from streetlamps. Or pants would be sold with stylized red blotches pre-printed on the crotch, and they'd become all the rage. There would probably be a federal subsidy for Midol. It makes me sick just thinking about it.

Anyway, I seem to dimly recall that I was originally talking about cramps, which I never used to get. Then, at the age of 22, I went off birth control, because I had just been through a traumatic breakup and saw no possible future for myself but one of using aromatherapy candles as a substitute for love and accumulating a collection of cats. At this point everything I thought I knew about menstruation went out the window. After two years of being strictly controlled by artificial hormones, my body went rogue, giving me the adolescence I never had in the form of cramps, headaches, periods that lasted ten days, periods that came early and periods that arrived so late I was practically standing in line at Planned Parenthood by the time they finally meandered down the pike. Oh, and my skin went to shit in a way it never had even when I was a teenager. It was a magical time.

Eventually I was driven back to the pill -- which was probably the Ortho corporation's secret plan all along -- and most of these issues subsided. But I still get cramps once in a blue moon. It's kind of a double-wallop when I do, because I never expect to, and honestly, I'm just not conditioned to the pain. I always think I'm dying of a rare kidney ailment or experiencing the world's least productive stomach troubles. And then at some point -- generally when putting on a bra and realizing my boobs feel like rocks -- it dawns on me that oh yeah, I'm getting my period in a couple of days. That's why it feels like someone is using my uterus as an accordion.

All of which is my long-form way of saying I don't feel very good. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

Apt angst

As Project Cohabitation approaches blastoff (t-minus six weeks), I am looking forward to the move for many reasons. These include romantic crap that you probably don't want to hear about as well as other, more pragmatic factors:

1. Storage space

I live in a studio apartment where space is at a premium, and have been forced to develop several innovative storage solutions to get by. These include keeping my toilet paper in the kitchen and my shoes in a dresser drawer. Okay, two dresser drawers. I have a lot of shoes because I am a woman, and according to the seminal television program Sex and the City, that's what we women do. We drink cosmos and buy shoes. Shoes shoes shoes.

2. Recycling

I currently live my life as a recycling criminal. My landlord, the man who once suggested I boil some water for a bath when the hot water was out for 30 hours, is too cheap to pay for recycling service, so every Thursday night, under cover of darkness, I sneak my recycling into other peoples' bins. The state of California considers this a punishable offense. Personally, I feel I should be rewarded, preferably with some kind of generous tax break or vodka subsidy.

3. Proximity to children

I like children. Again, because I am a woman, and that's what we do, we buy shoes and like children. Living in an urban area where the demographic skews strongly toward the young and coked-out, I don't get a lot of opportunities to be around children. But Henry's downstairs neighbors are in possession of two live, heartbreakingly adorable kids. After I move in I have every intention of launching a nefarious campaign to become their favorite person ever. I am not afraid to use bribes.

4. Peace and quiet

Living in the back of an old building on Beachwood with nothing but the canyon wall behind me, you would think I would have all the peace and quiet my black little heart could ever desire. To which I can only say: Ha. Murphy's Law being what it is, I had the ill fortune to move in directly across an alley from the luxurious private townhome of the Couple From Hell. It's bad enough that they're both shouters and that their open windows are literally fifteen feet from mine. Not content merely to torture me with the mundane details of their everyday existence (it is not uncommon for me to bolt upright in the middle of a nap, panicked because it sounds as if a burly music industry lawyer is standing at the foot of my bed screaming at me about WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL THE BROWNIES HE BOUGHT), they also insist on entertaining at least one night a week. Their guests tend to be shouters as well. Some of them also play the guitar. Then the Annoyingtons hired contractors to come in and retrofit their townhome with central heat and air, and guess what? Even the contractors were shouters. So here I am Tuesday, minding my own business, listening to some Chopin nocturnes and trying to concentrate on polishing off a 2500-word article on something so boring I won't even bother explaining what it is, when suddenly I am jolted from my journalistic reverie by one of the contractors shouting, "SO THEN I SPENT ALL OF CHRISTMAS DAY IN THE SHITHOUSE THANKS TO THAT SHIT MEXICAN TEQUILA." This was followed by a round of guffawing so violent I thought one of them was going to have a heart attack.

You know how you move into an apartment, and it has its flaws, as all apartments do, but you learn to deal with them, to appreciate the good and ignore the bad, because it's where you live, and there's no point getting worked up every time your neighbors' friend tells a bigoted joke at the top of his lungs and everyone at their cocktail party applauds like he just issued a thoughtful and well-reasoned argument for the economic viability of universal health care? This system collapses entirely when you're within six weeks of getting the fuck out of there. I suddenly hate everything about my twee little canyon aerie. I hate how the door on the medicine cabinet doesn't shut all the way. I hate the crappy sequential wiring between the closet and the bathroom, which requires that I turn on the closet light before the bathroom light will work. I hate the kitchen floor, which, no matter how often I clean it, always looks disgusting. I hate the fact that I get spiders. I hate the tiny fridge, which is not deep enough to accommodate my 14" casserole dish. I hate the stove -- it's vintage, which sounds adorable, but you know what? Vintage is for clothes and accessories, NOT KITCHEN APPLIANCES USED TO PREPARE FOOD.

How have I survived in this shithole for a year and a half? More importantly, in what backwards universe is this glorified walk-in closet worth $1,000 a month in rent?

Get me out of here!