Apartment-Hunting Sucks

Okay, my plan for this three-day weekend was this: I would take Saturday off for fun and games, then Sunday I'd do some driving around to look for apartments with "For Rent" signs out front, and Monday I'd call some places from that expedition and from the paper.

Well, it took me a hellaciously long time to get myself out the door and up to Palo Alto/Menlo Park to drive around (and even when I did I realized I hadn't had lunch yet and went to the Peninsula Creamery for a burger. Their burgers are pretty yummy despite the light rolls they put them on, and of course their malts are to die for).

Well, I drove around Palo Alto for a while, located a number of apartment buildings near downtown which I hadn't previously seen, and did see one with a "For Rent" sign out, the phone number for which I duly wrote down. (Bet it ends up costing a bundle to rent, though!) I drove around some of Menlo Park - around the area where I saw that apartment that had already been taken a couple of weeks ago - and only saw one more sign. I also realized that I'm not too wild about that part of Menlo Park; there are hardly any trees or greenery! Heck, the apartment building I saw two weeks ago is just about the only one with substantial greenery on or around the property. I'm not sure I really want to live in such a stripped-down area, so I ought to look on the other side of El Camino at the apartments over there.

Or maybe I oughtn't to be so picky? I dunno.

Anyway, it soon got too dark to effectively kept looking, and those two places were the only ones I'd written down.

I keep feeling in my life like I'm always really well prepared to fight the previous war. I feel like I could easily track down apartments in Madison or maybe even buy a house there without too much trouble. But out here, where the prices are higher, and the areas I'd be willing to live in fewer, it seems really hard to feel like I have much of a chance of finding what I want.

So I came home pretty much with my tail between my legs and a lousy feeling in my gut. I don't think there's anything else in my life out here that makes me feel quite as crummy as looking for an apartment.

But, I will see about calling at least the Palo Alto place, and see what the newspaper yields tomorrow. We'll see.

I spent some time while driving around reflecting that it feels lately like my problems with living out here are not all that different from the problems I had in Madison: I spend a lot of my time feeling lonely, I'm a glutton for social activity but also want to spend a lot of time working on my own projects, and trying not to neglect my kitties. I just don't feel like I'm getting what I want out of life, and I don't really know what it is that I want anyway.

I think the thing that frustrates me the most lately is that my social circle these days seems to be fixed. I rarely meet new people, and when I do they turn out to be passing acquaintances. Yes, some of this is definitely that I wish I were dating someone, and not only do I feel like I'm too weird to meet many compatible women, but I'm not meeting many people anyway, much less available or compatible ones.

(Have I already told the anecdote about my pointing out an attractive woman to my cow-orker Tom and he observed, "Aaah, you like attainable women!" They never seem "attainable" to me...)

I've gotten pretty good at planning my schedule so I can see friends regularly despite living as far from them as I do. I keep vacillating between trying to look for exactly the place I want, and trying to get a more affordable, probably larger and nicer place, which is not exactly where I want it to be, but which cuts out most of the 15-30 minute drive I need to make to visit almost any of my friends. It's a tough decision. I think not knowing what I want is a big part of my ongoing paralysis in my apartment hunt.

Are these all things that I talk about every three weeks, or what? It feels like they are, and it doesn't feel like I'm getting any closer to answers to these problems.

Comic book time:

The Finder trade paperback collects issues #1-7 of Carla Speed McNeil's small press comic (Lightspeed Press). This makes me sound more knowledgeable than I am, because I'd never even heard of this comic before seeing it when on my vacation over the holidays. After having it recommended to me by two different people, I decided to pick it up despite glancing through it and passing on it the first time. (See? I'm not all that stubborn!)

It's not bad. It reminds me a little of Thieves & Kings in its light sense of humor and sketchy-yet-effective art style. The similarities basically end there, however.

Finder's protagonist is Jaeger, a young man (or seemingly young) who is a "finder", he has special, largely-lost skills allowing him to track down objects (and perhaps people) with great accuracy. The story takes place at some point in the future, possibly on Earth though perhaps not. (Reference is made to Jaeger being an Indian, although that could mean anything.) The story opens with Jaeger returning to the city of Anvard, which is a domed city, but the technology to maintain the dome was lost decades or centuries ago, and pieces of the dome occasionally fall off. (The collection's cover, to the right, shows Jaeger sleeping in the bowl of a statue, with the city's dome in the distance.)

The city is still considerably more advanced than we here in the 20th century, but it does have the feel of being a stagnant society. Nonetheless, there are human/animal hybrids (of the "human-with-animal-heads" variety and of the "sentient-animals-which-can-speak" variety), advanced medical techniques, artificial intelligences. But internal combustion engines and television are still prevalent, and there are scattered references to today's culture.

The bulk of the story concerns Jaeger's involvement with a woman named Emma and her three daughters (aged about 8 to 15). The girls' father is a former soldier named Brigham who during a war apparently went nuts and ended up going to jail. Jaeger's been acting as a spy for him on Emma and the girls, though none of the women want to have anything to do with Brigham (as far as we can tell).

It's difficult to determine exactly what the point or points of the story are. It's told in a very matter-of-fact style which doesn't judge the characters nor does it work to build particular themes in the story. Jaeger, his friends, and two of Emma's girls are all intelligent and witty which keeps the book engaging, but I wish I knew exactly where things are going, and a bit more about the background of the story. Perhaps I'll have to order the next seven issues from the publisher; it's good enough that I'm curious.

Anyway, while not your typical science fiction story, it does at least "play fair" with its SF, which is a lot more than most comic books do. So you might want to check it out.

In the Forum I added a topic about comic books being published these days.