We All Live in a Noho Submarine (part 3)

The Submarine is growing on me by the day. This is partly because I've finally managed to get things arranged more or less as I'd like them, which makes things homier; partly because I've got some nice little houseplants to look after, which makes the place feel a bit more alive; and partly because I've now been here over a month and am starting to get used to the downsizing that I've undergone. It's always a great concern of mine that I not become a bourgeois cliche - in Philly I underwent great inner turmoil every time I began to be annoyed with the lady (an Eritrean refugee paying her son's way through college) whom we paid to clean the apartment, even when she did things like showing up 36 hours late, because I was afraid that made me seem petty and entitled: "My, my, one just can't find good help these days! And do count the spoons before she arrives next time, my dear landlord/roommate, as I don't want her making off with our fine silver when we're not looking." Any time I feel myself sliding into this way of thinking I try to remind myself that most people inhabiting the planet would give up a limb or two to have what I have - and, indeed, I'd wager that most people reading this blog right now would be more than happy to switch me places and receive a reasonably middle-class salary in exchange for doing absolutely nothing 80% of the time (I'm asleep the other 20%). So what follows should not be taken as a litany of woe-is-me complaints but rather a description of some of the challenges that I've encountered with my new apartment, challenges that would pale to insignificance if my day-to-day existence weren't otherwise as hassle-free as it is.

1) The size. Several people who saw the photos I posted of the place remarked that the place looks "cute". If this is true, and I'll concede that it may have some validity, I suspect that it has more to do with my decorating/arranging skills than with any inherent cuteness in the apartment itself (in which case I thank you for the compliments). But all the same: puppies are cute, babies are cute, chipmunks (even chip-punks) are cute - but I wouldn't want to live inside one. The kitchen floor is 5'x4' (I just measured) and has all the counter space of two shoeboxes placed side by side. This wouldn't be a problem if I were a frozen-pizza-and-bagel-bites kind of guy, but I'm not, and what with all the organic produce around it'd be nice to have a decent kitchen in which to transform that produce into tasty meals. I'm doing what I can, but it's a bit cramped - and you can forget about trying to fit more than one person in there at a time. The bathroom is similarly tiny - with almost no counter space at all, and not even a medicine cabinet behind the mirror. And the shower? Man, it was like week 3 before I managed to get done what needs to be done in there without banging an elbow or a knee or a shoulder into a wall or a knob or something. I've finally got the hang of it, but do you have any idea how hard it is to shower with your arms straight down against your sides? It's like being in a cryonic tube. The bedroom (through which you have to pass to get to the bathroom) is big enough for the fairly large bed I have, but just barely, and many's the time I've had to vault over the bed from the living room to get to the bathroom because I couldn't manage to squeeze my way around the bed. The living room itself is not bad but quite narrow - you've got to scoot the bouncy chair back quite a bit if you want to watch tv without actually sitting on the tv, and then scoot it forward again if you want to get out the back door (to do things like laundry).

All this has forced me to get quite creative with my space - living vertically, I believe the interior design magazines call it. So I've installed a hanging dish rack above the sink, a hanging paper towel holder above the counter, a wall shelf in the bathroom, etc. I'm not sure what the rules about drilling holes in the walls are, but I'm pretty sure I've broken them.

2) I hear EVERYTHING my upstairs neighbor does. I only met the upstairs neighbor once, today as it happens, when he came down to get his clothes out of the dryer, clothes which I had just moved out of the dryer and into a basket so that I could get my own clothes in the dryer (hey! his were in there all night). I don't know his name, so I've decided to call him Stompy. Stompy McStompstomp, actually, with a few variations such as Noam Stompsky, Ostompa bin Laden, and Samuel Stompers (extra points if you can identify the namesake of that last one). Stompy hasn't earned that name all on his own - the shoddy construction of the place has a lot to do with the noise that travels from his place to mine - but I'm calling him that all the same. Stompy usually awakes around 5:20 and immediately goes to the bathroom. I know this because the pipes from his toilet run right past my head in the bed where I lie, and the sound of his flushing resembles a herd of rabbits running rapidly downward from his apartment into mine. Frightened rabbits, wearing tap shoes. He then proceeds to walk rapidly around his apartment for about the next 16 hours, sometimes pausing to lift up a piece of furniture and hurl it mightily into a wall. Indeed, Stompy appears to be a practitioner of what I've come to call "furniture bowling," which is a sport in which you take a chair or table and roll it across the floor as forcefully as possible into other pieces of furniture, and then jump up and down atop the wreckage. A few weeks ago I was home trying to watch "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff" when Stompy had what I believe was a furniture-bowling party: dozens of voices and footsteps could be heard directly above me, the general hum broken only by the occasional "thwack!! thud!" of some unfortunate piece of furniture being smashed to bits, and so loud was the party that I seriously had to lean forward and strain my ears to hear Elizabeth Taylor's histrionics on the TV (if you've ever seen this movie, you have some sense of just how loud one has to be to drown out Elizabeth Taylor). I've been trying to retaliate by hammering nails into the walls at irregular intervals, but so far this seems to be having little effect.

3) Whoa, did this thing just move? As mentioned previously, the floors of the apartment slope downward to the east. This is because the apartment is sinking. I've arranged the furniture in such a way that one rarely finds oneself on that side of the apartment and thus doesn't notice the slight balance adjustment that one's body automatically does while moving from the sloping part to the not-sloping part, but there are still a few rough spots. In particular, if one is sitting at the desk in the rolly office chair (as I am now), one notices a quite strong tendency on the part of the chair to move eastward, like it's being pulled by a tractor beam. This requires some serious maneuvering to keep one's midsection from getting crushed up against the desk as one is typing on one's laptop. And let's not even talk about the difficulties of playing marbles on this floor.

4) It feels like a basement, even though it isn't. The entryway consists of a low ceiling and three steps downward, giving one the impression of descending into the earth (like a Hobbit) as one enters the front door. Once inside, it's clear that the bulk of the apartment is, in fact, at ground level, but it's so totally surrounded by trees and other buildings that very little light gets through and you still feel like you're underground (or underwater, as the case may be). This sensation is enhanced by the fact that the laundry/storage room - a dank, filthy, cobweb-ridden excuse for a room - looks and feels an awful lot like a basement (and Edgar Allan Poe's basement at that), even though it's on exactly the same level as my apartment and reachable through my apartment's back door.

(Scary, huh?)

These are the major things. There are a handful of other little items I could gripe about (the state of the walls, the toilet that keeps breaking, the lack of a light in the big closet), but that's enough whining for one day.