The Great Midtown Roommate Hunt: The Craiglist Post

Now that bedroom #2 is sufficiently painted, it’s time to enter Stage 1 of The Great Midtown Roommate Hunt: The Craigslist Post.

"Female, 23, control-freak seeks easy-going roommate for the small, kind of sucky second bedroom in my overpriced walk-up apartment. Must be cool with my steady diet of beer for dinner and subsequent piss-poor decision-making skills. Male applicants: please be a tall, sexy, well-muscled masseur who would like to practice at home. Female applicants: please be a dress size 2, shoe size 9, with a designer wardrobe that I can borrow and hot guy friends I can ogle. "

Welcome, email deluge.

I was weirdly sick all weekend – no energy, slight fever, complete lack of appetite. It wasn’t really so bad, because I was at the beach where it’s perfectly appropriate to lie around all day. I lived on Gatorade all weekend. Bonus: bikini-weather weight loss! Oh right, and sunburn on my lower-butt-cheek region. Not so fun.

E and I left the shore around 7:45PM last night, determined to make my 9:30PM train from Philadelphia back to New York. We took the back roads and listened to some Top 40 radio countdown, laughing at how old we feel because we don’t know any of the songs anymore. Who the heck is Hannah Montana and should we care? We talked about all sorts of grown-up things (How great it would be to own a house! Car insurance! Graduate school!). Then it was 9:23 and we were on Schuylkill Expressway making racecar noises to help the car go faster and cracking up. Apparently we are far less grown-up than our musical tastes would indicate. “Stupid people!” cried E. “Don’t they know that when there’s no traffic on the Schuylkill you’re supposed to drive as fast as you can?” At 9:28 I got out at a red light, sprinted through the station and had my ticket by 9:29. It was a shining moment in my train-riding career.

So, I expected a deluge. I didn’t anticipate a flood.

At noon I got a phone call from my management company. My apartment was leaking. At least that’s what the idiot on the phone said. As I discovered after a rain-drenching mad dash home, the leak was actually from a pipe below my bathroom. Cease panic. Well, they snaked the drain in my shower and realized that the problem wasn’t a clogged pipe – it was a broken pipe. Then they ripped up my tile and cut a huge hole in my bathroom floor to reach the broken pipe. I now have no running water, a very pissed off downstairs neighbor who keeps coming upstairs to check on the progress (in his underwear, no less) and FIVE PEOPLE coming tonight to see an apartment with a holey bathroom. Resume panic.

I’m not cancelling the appointments. The rest of the apartment is nice and clean, and it’s July 23 so most apartment hunters are probably nearing a desperation level that would match mine. I’m just going to sweep up the floor, cover it up with a rug as best as I can, and hope that the old man in his underwear stays down on his floor where he belongs.