This leads to me to my next gripe.. Right now, I am living at home. Being 21 and living at home wasn't always my dream but I blame this on my desire to live in a HOUSE in a college town (Oakland, where the University of Pittsburgh is) my senior year in college. Although I find it so tempting to tell my mom to stop being so damn NAGGY, I cannot complain about this PARADISE I am currently living in compared to where I was at this time last year. Not only were we paying like $500 a month to live in this god-awful, piece of shit house - there were 5 of us living in this bungalow, so there was never a dull moment. Not always a good thing. Sometimes, when I'm sitting in my lovely WARM bed here at home, I think back on those days of paying $500 a month to live in a slummy, shiteous neighborhood (let me note that I witnessed COCAINE being done on the hood of a car right across the street from us.. as a 100 pound white girl from the suburbs, this is not the norm for me). My mother was scared for my life just about everyday and I'm pretty sure she wanted to punch all of our Naive 19 year old faces in when she found out we signed the lease. Now, I must say - this place was good for one thing and one thing only - drinking. Alas, I blame 213 Dunseith Street for being the sole reason I no longer have the urge to get DRUNK DRUNK anymore.
Fun while it lasted.I feel like I'm the poster child for "DON'T MOVE INTO A PARTY HOUSE" and I swear to god, you CANNOT talk anyone out of this idea! Everyone thinks they know. "Oh I know I have to pay utilities and rent and buy food and fix shit when it breaks and actually CLEAN stuff." Please factor in that most of these DREAM HOMES are run by SLUM LORDS. The bottom of the barrel. My absolute favorite tale from when I lived in Oakland is when our wonderful landlord FINALLY sent a guy to look at our broken furnace after weeks of calling him since it was 15 degrees outside. What does this lovely heating/cooling man find? A simple three foot Tweety Bird stuffed animal shoved into the heating duct. Really? These are the kind of fun surprises you get to deal with. Although I think it's 100% hilarious now, at the time I wanted to call up Sylvester and tell him to go ape shit on that little bastard.
But I guess if you're into drinking a 40 in order to stay warm, not just to get drunk, a party house is totally your deal. Honestly, 3 of my other room mates did not mind this place and I don't know how they did it. The weird smell from the couch, the fact that the kitchen floor was similar to walking on arctic soil, and the constant domestic disputes from our neighbors at 3am did not phase them. Me on the other hand - consider me phased. But I'm telling you, you tell people these horror stories and they just don't care. They deal with this problem the same way they deal with chlamydia .. "That shit will never happen to me".
So for now, I'll deal with my mom's nagging. I'm sure it will be worth it when in a few years I'll have thousands saved up from not having to pay rent and I can get a cute apartment, and trust me - you will not find a single TWEETY BIRD anywhere on the premises.
