Signing my life away on the dotted line
This morning, after waking up from just a couple hours of fitful sleep disturbed by the apartment quandary (keep reading), I got a call from our broker saying we got the apartment we wanted...or that I think we wanted, though it's really, really, really expensive. To top that off, we have to pay him and the landlord an exorbitant amount of money up front for the place, some of which will be returned -- but it's still awfully scary, especially seeing my account balance dwindle to close to zero. I had to open a new bank account here with a new bank to make the funds available.
To make an already stressful experience even more stressful, the agent we'd been working with before this place appeared, and with whom we'd gotten pretty far into the application process, threw a fit when I told her we'd found another place. She screamed at me on the phone for 8 minutes and luckily I kept my cool, though it made me pretty upset. She was convinced (or was just acting convinced) that we'd deliberately screwed her somehow, when anyone should be able to see we were only acting in our best interests as renters with not a lot of time to look around -- we were just keeping our options open.
Then on the subway back to Manhattan, where I've been transferring money to my checking account online so that I can go back to Brooklyn to get bank checks on that money, I listened to a mother describe aloud to her 4-yr-old son what he was drawing on a piece of paper: a loopy star became "four points of sadness," a dot in the middle was described as "a locus of discouragement," and puffy frills around the edges were "clouds of abandonment." At first I thought there'd been a death in their immediate family and she was performing some sort of child therapy that her psychiatrist had recommended, but then I wondered if she was projecting her own unhappiness onto her kid, who, as far as I could tell, was just drawing a bunch of kid squiggles -- and smiling and laughing as he did it. Just goes to show that the weirdest folks on the subway aren't always the ones with no shirts yelling about Jesus and tacos.
To make an already stressful experience even more stressful, the agent we'd been working with before this place appeared, and with whom we'd gotten pretty far into the application process, threw a fit when I told her we'd found another place. She screamed at me on the phone for 8 minutes and luckily I kept my cool, though it made me pretty upset. She was convinced (or was just acting convinced) that we'd deliberately screwed her somehow, when anyone should be able to see we were only acting in our best interests as renters with not a lot of time to look around -- we were just keeping our options open.
Then on the subway back to Manhattan, where I've been transferring money to my checking account online so that I can go back to Brooklyn to get bank checks on that money, I listened to a mother describe aloud to her 4-yr-old son what he was drawing on a piece of paper: a loopy star became "four points of sadness," a dot in the middle was described as "a locus of discouragement," and puffy frills around the edges were "clouds of abandonment." At first I thought there'd been a death in their immediate family and she was performing some sort of child therapy that her psychiatrist had recommended, but then I wondered if she was projecting her own unhappiness onto her kid, who, as far as I could tell, was just drawing a bunch of kid squiggles -- and smiling and laughing as he did it. Just goes to show that the weirdest folks on the subway aren't always the ones with no shirts yelling about Jesus and tacos.
posted by Seph at 10:57 AM
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