A Totally Dramatic Story Involving A Bookcase, Part I.

Sometimes I wonder what strange turn of events it was that allowed my landlord to end up in the building-owning business. Not because I want to follow his lead, but because he is so excruciatingly bad at being a landlord that I find it hard to believe nobody ever tried to steer him toward a better-suited job.

Landlord's HS guidance counselor: So, have you given any thought to your future? Your career?

Landlord: I want to be a landlord.

Guidance counselor: Ah... well, you know, being a landlord requires a very specific set of skills.

Landlord: What kind of skills?

Guidance counselor: Well, things like building repairs and money management and, oh, I don't know, not being a total asshole. Which you are.

Landlord: Oh. So... I should pick something else.

Guidance counselor: Right.

Landlord: What kind of career would suit me?

Guidance counselor: Shark bait.

But alas, as evidenced by the fact that we now pay him an obscene amount of money every month, my landlord was never subject to this sort of useful guidance from an authority figure.

Or maybe he was, but he ignored it, because he is a total asshole.

Anyway, as a result of our landlord's asshole tendencies/general incompetence, we have experienced more than our fair share of apartment-related catastrophes. We've suffered mouse infestation, electrical outages, week-long periods of no heat or hot water in the dead of winter, the inability to watch television and run our air conditioner at the same time during a heat wave, and a hideously bad smell that permeated the entire building for months and, ultimately, turned out to be coming from a homeless person who had taken up residence in the basement. (How is this possible, you ask? Because our asshole landlord refuses to install a security door in the building.)

Every time one of these incidents occurs, Brad and I vow to move and never come back. Sometimes we even look at other apartments. But in the end, confronted by the fact that we pay below-market rent for a large (by NYC standards, anyway), dog-friendly space in a cool neighborhood, and daunted by the prospect of moving, we are forced to reconsider... and then – like a battered wife returning to her abuser – we abandon our plans and slink back into our apartment with our collective tail between our collective legs.

This past week marked our most recent bout of apartment-hunting, this time sparked by an incident in which our asshole landlord concluded that, because the tenants in one of the first-floor apartments had opened their windows, it must be too hot and that he should therefore shut off the heat to the entire building. (Note to landlord: Those tenants have the windows open because they smoke massive amounts of weed every day. It is freezing outside. TURN THE FUCKING HEAT ON.) And then, as with all our previous attempts at seizing control and finding lodging elsewhere, our initiative burned out quickly and we resolved ourselves to continued residence under the thumb of the asshole landlord. Except that this time, the whole incident concluded with the following conversation:

Brad: Maybe if we overhauled our current apartment, it wouldn't suck so bad.

Kat: Good idea. Let's rearrange our furniture and install a bookshelf.

A bookshelf? – you are probably saying. What good is a fucking bookshelf when you have no heat?

And to you I say: Clearly, you have never seen our What Does This Do Room.

The What Does This Do Room is a random sort of alcove that sits between our bedroom and living room. It is so-called because, when I came back from a date with our broker and gleefully announced to Brad that I had found us a big, beautiful place to live, he took one look at my painstakingly-rendered layout sketch and – with a look of utter contempt on his face – pointed sneeringly at the little alcove and said, “What the hell is this? What does this do?!” (My response, naturally, was to burst into tears. I'd tell you why, but I'm pretty sure that a) non-New-Yorkers will still think I'm crazy, and b) anyone who's ever lived in NYC needs no explanation as to why apartment-hunting could cause a nervous breakdown.)

Obviously, we overcame that little hurdle and moved in (apparently, crying is a really good way to get what you want), and the What Does This Do Room became a sort of combination office/library/catch-all space for things we didn't otherwise know what to do with. It was, essentially, a Room Of Crap – but we continued to call it the What Does This Do Room, as though the room was just having a little crisis of personality and would eventually realize its fabulous destiny as a Library or Office or Moroccan Boudoir.

Which made us feel a little bit better about what the room has looked like in the meantime.

Okay, okay-- so I might have thrown a couple extra things in there just before I took this picture in an effort to maximize the impact of the “after” shot. (What “after” shot? You'll see.) But really, as representations go, this is pretty accurate. The books on the floor, the randomly placed furniture, the computer speakers thrown carelessly on top of a chair... all standard fare for the What Does This Do Room.

And so begins a very exciting story, a story called: Kat Does Home Improvements (or, Now I Know What The What Does This Do Room Does.)

But because this post is getting kind of long, and because I loooove a good cliffhanger (see: The Penis Serial, Chapters 1 through 5), I'm going to pause here. Come back later this week for:

Part II: In Which I Find Furniture On Craigslist, Talk About Vaginas With Someone I Have Just Met, and Break My Car's Windshield. From The INSIDE.