apartment hunting

I went up to College Town this weekend to find an apartment with Di. I only just moved six months ago, so I can’t get myself too excited about it. The more places you live, the more you realize that they are all the same. Especially student apartments. In College Town, they are either nicer and further from campus or older and closer. They are all about the same price and the leases almost always start in September. I think we were a bit bored with the whole prospect. We have two decent options, one of which is slightly better. They are across the street from one another. Di needs to be in town by mid-August, so it depends on whether we can move in to that place early. I don’t particularly care. If we move in early August, I’ll go to my mom’s for a few weeks to save money. If not, I’ll try to work in San Jose an extra month and earn extra money. I hate working, so it is fine with me either way. It is weird how I have absolutely nothing to keep me in San Jose, despite living here for a whole year. Not a single thing.

I’d seen the nicer one with Paddy when I went up the other week; he had lived there after moving out of the dorms. Di and I went on Saturday to see it but the management wasn’t around so we made an appointment for the next day. We figured we may as well check out the one across the street. While we were walking around the complex, my sister came out and flagged us down. I knew she lived around there somewhere, but I’d totally forgotten that she lived in that complex. We accompanied her to the Co-op, so that I could buy her beer. I made her buy Di’s lemonade. So it begins and I haven’t even moved there yet. Apparently I missed some kind of flag waving masseur in the store who advertises his services as “Asian bodywork.” I was sorry not to have noticed him.

Paddy’s in Ireland for his mother’s 60th birthday/retirement party. I wish he were back already.

camping out in the yard

We spent the weekend in the north bay for Di’s birthday. She lives in the boonies. After much deliberation, we decided that we would follow her advice and pitch a tent in the yard instead of trying to get a hotel. So on our way to her house, we stopped at Target and bought one. Have I ever mentioned that we aren’t particularly outdoorsy? We thought that it would take a while to pick one out, but it only took five minutes because they only had one that was the right size. This ended up making us inexcusably early. Well, one excuse was that I made a cake with butter frosting that wasn’t going to do too well in the heat of the car. We had fashioned an ingenious contraption that involved tin foil and salted ice, which worked fine, but the whole way up I obsessed about ending up with a wet, salty cake. The wettness could have been explained, but who would have understood the salt? All I’ll say is that it had to do with a lack of scientific understanding on my part and a desire to be supportive of my ideas on Paddy’s. So when we got out of Target, I removed the device to see if we needed to pick up an unsalted cake from Safeway before going to Di’s house, but it was fine. Unfortunately, this meant that we couldn’t leave the cake in the car while we went shopping and had to go directly to her house.

Really it was a good thing that we were there early, because we were able to have a margarita, a cigarette and still put the tent up in the daylight. If it hadn’t been light out, be probably would have rolled it out and slept on top of it in pathetic desperation. Unlike Paddy, I was all gung-ho about the sleeping in a tent thing because I used to do it in my own yard as a kid–until we discovered the area where we were trying to set it up had dog poo. After Paddy talked me down from forgetting the whole thing and getting a hotel, we set it up and sat inside. The ordeal of putting it together took an hour, so Di nicely brought out more margaritas when we’d finished. Paddy promptly knocked his over in the tent. After cleaning that up, we moved the tent to the front yard because I decided I couldn’t deal with the poo afterall. By the time we got the air mattress blown up and gotten the pillows and comforter and clean sheets from the car, other people were arriving. So it was probably for the best.

Anyway, the party was fun and sleeping in the tent wasn’t too bad. Although I doubt we will be going camping any time soon.

art.

Paddy is on a quest to become petit bourgeois and I fully encourage him in this. It may have something to do with getting a real job, turning thirty, moving to the city, getting his own place… Anyway, he decided that he wanted to buy art, preferably from someone that he knows; since he knows relatively little about art, he may as well support a friend. Being an engineer, he likes bright colors and geometric shapes. Not to say that there is anything wrong with that, of course. We went around to some reasonably priced galleries, but there didn’t seem to be anything that you’d want to look at everyday. I told him to get suggested it might be better to get a landscape or still life, but he insisted that he likes pictures with people better.

He had an old friend in College Town whose work he really liked and he mentioned to him that he wanted to buy something of his. Of course his friend started hounding him. Five years ago, this friend of his had painted a portrait entitled “An Irishman,” which Paddy really liked, mainly because it reminded him of himself. Egoists, we are not. Eventually, his friend offered to give it to him if he bought another one of his paintings. This weekend we made an otherwise utterly pointless trip to College Town, but he did get his paintings. I guess the artist had always really liked it himself, so he had it hanging in his house. When we got to the studio, he put it in Paddy’s car before we went inside, so he couldn’t back out. Personally, I was glad that he didn’t have too many choices, because otherwise he can stretch out this sort of thing for months.

When we got home, he said that he could have sworn that the Irishman had a cup of coffee in the painting that he remembered. He started to think that maybe it was another version of the same guy. He thought he might have the old card to the original showing at a coffee shop in College Town. He found it in an old box of photographs and sure enough, there was a cup of coffee in the picture–drawn in black Sharpie by his “favorite barista” at the cafe who gave him the postcard (with cute note). In classic Paddy style, ie. truly oblivious, he never realized that she drew it on or that she had a crush on him.

He calls me on Tuesday complaining that the Irishman is giving him the creeps, because he keeps staring at him while he is sitting on the couch. He was thinking of keeping it in the closet. I’m fine with anywhere but the bedroom, because I think it is creepy too, but suggested that he put it above the couch where won’t have it looking at us all the time. At least, as I pointed out, the other one he bought is a landscape.