Dream apartment listing

So I (mostly) love where I live, but it's too small, or will be, and yeah. But I'm a millennial, which means I've spent all my money on avocado lattes and thus cannot buy a townhouse in the Annex next to where Margaret Atwood lives. Below, the sort of thing I'm looking for, if you've seen one of these lying around...

Essentials:

-In downtown Toronto. (OK, on Ischia, but trying to be realistic here, and Toronto does have much better Asian groceries, so.)

-Laundry in unit. (Not just in building! It's Toronto, ensuite laundry is the default, a girl can dream!)

-Dishwasher obviously but I don't know if I've yet seen a Toronto apartment that didn't have one? (Ones without ovens, however...)

-Gym in building. (Between the traffic and the endless winter, jogging outside is maybe not a thing in this city and definitely not one where bringing a baby along could possibly work.)

-An actual second bedroom, as in one that could fit an actual twin bed, as versus (say) an apartment-staging crib and nothing more.

-Both bedrooms have doors. I'm sorry but there's no improvement over the current situation if baby's (eventual) room is just a loft overlooking a downstairs. (Also: Why are all these tiny condos spread out over two floors? Because duplex sounds glamorous even if the reality is, this is two dorm rooms one on top of the other? See also: Why do so many apartment buildings here in the arctic have cabanas among their amenities?)

-No Kitec plumbing.

-Maintenance fee not in the rent-ish range.

-Dogs permitted. (Legally as I understand it they have to be but I'd still avoid a building with a huge sign up in the lobby stating otherwise.)

-A non-stair-involving entrance. (Not actually such an issue in Toronto and also how am I the same person as the one who once helped carry a full-size bookcase up to the top of a Park Slope walk-up??)

Negotiables:

-A living room large enough to seem not too claustrophobic. (Current rental is #blessed in that regard.)

-Not a box-bedroom situation. As in, bedrooms both have windows. (This had been on the essentials list but am getting desperate.)

-Two bathrooms.

-Not on the gazillionth floor because for personal reasons with geopolitical significance that would sidetrack this post, that freaks me out.

-Near groceries that meet my exacting, pain-in-the-neck specifications. (Kensington or St. Lawrence Market, an H-Mart, Whole Foods, Chinatown...) Or, failing that, groceries. (No Frills is better than Loblaws is better than whatever the thing is that's like Loblaws but tiny.)

-Over 950 square feet. (Under 800 and this is definitive just-stay-put territory, I don't care how many 'bedrooms' they're claiming a space contains.)

-Very near a subway stop.

Electricity, snooping

First, the lights came back on. Last night, just over four full days since they'd gone out. It was unreal. Then, a few hours later, the wireless returned. Heat and hot water must have happened overnight, so this morning was one of those post-camping-trip-type showers. Wonderful.

So, on a more traditional WWPD note, on the theme of parents sharing their kids' dirty laundry, the NYT (sorry, Sigivald) is quite literally inviting parents to do this. In what universe is it socially acceptable to go into a teenager's bedroom, photograph it, and send said photo to a national newspaper?

Pudel adventures

Today was (still is, it's early yet) market day. Bisou, who'd up till now received indifference and glares from locals just trying to pass us to get to one of the many H&Ms in peace, was a real hit in this more rustic setting. A woman selling flowers really took to her, and the feeling was mutual, especially once this woman suddenly emerged with treats in the form of sausage.

As living-the-dream as it is to go to a European market with a miniature poodle, it's probably not the most efficient method of grocery-shopping. This isn't a farmers' market with only local kale and turnips, so in principle it would be possible to buy all your food at it, but when you're multitasking and trying to socialize your dog in a language you yourself don't understand (whatever I learned last time must be relearned), you forget to pick up everything you set out to. As problems go, this is probably the absolute best one to have. The apartment we're staying in has a dishwasher. No complaints, seriously.

The cars are smaller in Europe. Pictured is my dream vehicle.

Living the dream: Eiskaffee and (temporarily) serene lap-dog.

Dog "parking" at a rare non-dog-friendly establishment, a bakery.

A cheese-and-sausage stand. Why they invented leashes.

"A dishpan and piece of scotchbrite"

Regular readers know that two of my favorite things are dishwashers and online-newspaper comments. So what better than a combination of the two! The NYT Real Estate section ran an article about how "Manhattanites" (cue the offended Queens residents) who used to rent and are now buying apartments, according to some real estate broker, consider having a dishwasher "'an inalienable right, not a privilege.'" The P word! Their privilege is showing.

The ostensible point of the article is that as the market has shifted more in buyers' favor, that which they used to put up with, they no longer have to: the dishwasher as barometer for changes in the real estate market. But the commenters, much to my delight, are not having it. It is most definitely about dishwashers:

"Dishwasher? I'm 60 yrs old and haven't ever lived in a house with anything but a dishpan and piece of scotchbrite."

Yup.

Non-dishwasher-use seems to bring out a certain pride. Or rather, two quite different versions. One is pride in being too important to cook. Too emancipated for that, if female, or too waited-on/non-domestic if male, but regardless, too much of a big deal to have ended up in the kitchen with counter-and-sink-fulls of dirty implements for which you yourself are responsible. Non-dishwasher-use suggests a life of glamor - nightly dinners out, or a job that pays enough that takeout poses no problem. (If you're not using a dishwasher because you're living off Wendy's or Lean Cuisine, you're either a master of clever self-presentation, or not announcing your non-dishwasher-use in the first place.)

The other, meanwhile, is pride in being a back-to-the-earth, artisanal-local-organic post-yuppie, someone who eschews modern appliances in order to eschew modern appliances. Why buy dry pasta if you could hand-knead your own? Why put dirty dishes into a machine that cleans them for you, when you could clean the by hand? Didn't Michael Pollan say something about emulating our great-grandmothers? If you're not eating processed foods, it stands to reason that you're not allowing a mechanical device to process your dishes, either. After you scrape your leftover bits of kale and quinoa into BPA-free containers or perhaps a compost heap, you're really going to break out the Cascade?

As for dishwashers being fancy, a question for (both) my readers: isn't New York unusual in that you have to be quite wealthy/lucky to have a dishwasher? That was my impression, at least. That it wouldn't be normal in another town for a young lawyer, say, to live without one.

Things that are not my dissertation

-Ombré, the eternal work-in-progress, has reached a new phase: rebleached ends, followed by one of the deep-conditioning masques (the "-que" is key; the stuff itself smells worse than the bleach, like burnt rubber, and this without heating it). Not sure yet if the ends are lighter than before, or just de-oranged, but either way works.

-What unites all Heidelbergers is ice cream. As I was having my daily cone, I noticed a woman on the other side of the bridge doing the same. The difference was that she was also wearing a burqa. She lifted her niqab (Wikipedia says this specifies just the face-veil) and... I did wonder whether "cup" might have been more practical than "cone," but she seemed to have it figured out. The ice cream really is a uniter, though, what with Islam's stance on alcohol and (some) Jews' inability to consume the stuff in large quantities. (Why are the tiny beers in Cologne, but rarely here?)

-This is my seventh consecutive month (minus a month) of communal-kitchen living. The German-guesthouse version sure beats the Paris-dorm one, but readers in whom my even mentioning these Euro locales inspires wanderlust, unless you have roommates, think of your kitchens, yes, even studio-apt kitchenettes, think of how you can go to the kitchen without getting dressed properly, how you can be sure the container of salt will be somewhere on the counter and not in another person's bedroom. How you do not need to negotiate for burner or counter space. How, when time comes to clean up when you're done, someone else hasn't just started cooking, thus leaving you with a choice between cleaning up your mess and theirs (and, once again without a splatter-guard, I know whichever mess is 99% mine and have to go with this option) or leave it be. Think, if applicable, of your dishwasher. Or even just of your drying rack - here, there are communal dishes, but you have to dry them and put them away immediately, in case someone else needs them urgently or, more likely, to avoid them getting splattered on. As romantic (or something) as daily ice cream sounds, remember that at a euro a (generous) cone-full, this is merely the most efficient and cost-effective way to reach my daily caloric requirement, one a kitchen intended for "snacks and small meals" can't quite meet.

In search of lost schnitzel

After having cooked dinner every night since getting to Heidelberg, in a kitchen enough better than the Paris dorm situation to make multi-dish meals possible, but a communal kitchen it's necessary to fight for burners in all the same, I was about ready to eat out for the sake of not having to deal with the pan, the one my husband and I both have a go at cleaning, but on which the char doesn't budge, and you can't soak it because someone else will need it, or at least the sink/counter space, and no, no dishwasher. I was hungry enough that I figured, how bad could #42 of the 255 restaurants in Heidelberg be? Well, precisely as bad as a bad sauce on overcooked frozen vegetables - and very randomly-selected vegetables, plus a whole lot of bean sprouts, yes, in Germany - could be. I mean, I've never been to Thailand, and the ideal to which I was comparing this was Chelsea Thai, where food comes on trays and where "quality" is not one of the draws, but where the food ranges from very good to the kind of thing you dream about when out of town. Or the Snail in Hyde Park, or even the decent-ish place not far from the dorm in Paris. So it wasn't an authenticity issue, or being accustomed to the more haute Thai food the West has to offer. This was just, well, bad.

As I was pushing the food around and trying to make the best of it, in walked a group of very authentic-looking retiree-sorts, of the German variety. My husband told me that they'd just asked the hostess where they could find schnitzel. I shot him a look that said, isn't that joke a bit obvious/xenophobic? Or possibly articulated that reaction as well. But he insisted that this was really happening, and I turned around and heard the hostess say "schnitzel," while pointing the group in the direction of a nearby beer garden.

The moral of the story is, my husband is not a xenophobe, and those folks had the right idea.

In which I buy Cascade before groceries

Got one! Well, am renting one, technically, as the apartment is a rental. After a three-week-long and overly complicated (for reasons only tangentially related to my fixation on a certain appliance) apartment search, I'm far too exhausted/preoccupied with more pressing matters such as upping the rate at which orals books get read to actually cook anything that would produce dirty dishes, let alone to figure out which box contains the dishes, but just knowing the appliance is there is enough.

The what?

Approximately every ten minutes, a broker comes by to show the apartment. This has made me regret my plans to work at home, where all my books are, and where I can make lunch without having to leave and go fetch it, blah blah. It's necessary but yes, kind of annoying - while I'm happy to answer questions along the lines of if there've been any major problems, just because I happen to be home doesn't mean I've prepared a 15-minute monologue about my emotions towards this apartment over the past two years. Is the place small for two people? Um, yes, obviously, but the place we'll head to next will in all likelihood be smaller. Is the fire escape a balcony? This could certainly give brokers ideas, but no, it's not. And yes, the bathroom is huge in proportion to the rest of the apartment, but I've never figured out whether that's supposed to be a selling point. In what's either good news in terms of our fall apartment search or just plain evil, the visitors have informed us just how much lower the rent they'll have to pay is than what we'd spent the last year, even the previous one. Gar.

Anyhow. A broker just came by and told a potential renter about the dishwasher in the kitchen. The dishwasher. In the kitchen. So I was like, the what? Apparently the apartment downstairs is identical in every way, except that it has a dishwasher under the sink, so the broker had just assumed... (No news on whether one's being installed, but we're moving either way, and if they do decide to install one, I don't want to know.) Armed with that information, the woman looking at the apartment quickly apologized for interrupting my lunch and ducked out, allowing me to do the dishes from lunch in some semblance of peace.

Food, Freud, and Fussiness

My friend Lauren Shockey has a very cool article in Slate about attempts at recreating restaurant food at home. Restaurant cookbooks, it seems, do not actually want you to recreate their food, as doing so would eliminate the need to go to the restaurant. Sneaky bastards! I especially appreciated her mentioning how many dishes one recipe took to prepare at home--this is an important question far too often left out of food writing, as though dishes did themselves. (I could go on...)

In totally unrelated news, two quotes of the day:

1) "Gordon's wife, Rebecca, 27, has the same career as his mom -- teaching gifted elementary-schoolers -- and the women share a love of cooking and talking on the phone."-from a CNN story (via Jezebel) about people who marry all Freudian-style. Gordon's in quite the predicament. Two women, both elementary school teachers, who enjoy talking on the phone and cooking, what were the chances? If it turns out both his wife and his mother like shopping for shoes, they're all in Greek-tragedy territory.

2) "'I don’t even look at [manicures] as luxury,' she said. 'It’s basic cleanliness.'"-Some woman foolish enough to agree to be interviewed by the NYT Styles section, who seems to have confused nail polish with Purell.

Slow food, fast food, and fancy kitchen equipment

Vindication! I am not the only person who chooses steel-cut oatmeal over the efficient varieties on the market. At the store recently, Jo gestured to some "quick oats" with a "hint hint" and I'd have to agree, he has a point. But if prepared correctly, cooked in milk and some (read a good amount of) maple syrup, the result is as close to rice pudding for breakfast as you can get without eating rice pudding for breakfast. Which also works. What doesn't work: getting the pot totally clean after a weeks-long oatmeal-as-pudding kick. Dreams of my dishwasher, indeed.

In other culinary news, Chelsea Thai has the absolute best food I have ever eaten, ever. I don't understand it. There's something in the Pad Gra Prow that makes going from Park Slope to the Meatpacking district for lunch seem reasonable. I believe I was even talking about this Thai food in DC, frustrated that even with the Megabus, it was not an option. I want someone more knowledgeable about Thai food than I am (trained as I was on Hyde Park's finest) to taste the dish and tell me what ingredient is making it so much better than all other food, so that I can pour it on everything. Except maybe the oatmeal. Chelsea Thai sells a wide range of Thai-food sauces, but going through them one by one seems inefficient.

And, in the final culinary news of the day, suggestible viewer of NYT Video that I am, I insisted we pick up, at the kitchen-goods store in Chelsea Market, a ketchup-type squirt bottle to store salad dressing in. Was it worth the dollar? Only time will tell. We saw, but did not buy, although it was tempting, little glass bowls like the ones Mark Bittman (see Item 1) uses in his Minimalist cooking videos. (This reminds me, to finish up the post, that for dinner I once again made salade nicoise, and this time, thanks to Jill Santopietro's dressing method, the results not only tasted good, but did not look like they'd been vomited on.) Making a meal by tossing in pre-chopped ingredients from little glass bowls into larger glass bowls looks like it would be fun to do at home, to pretend one had one's own cooking show, but this, like everything, will have to wait for The Dishwasher.

All about the dishwasher

As a grad student, it would seem that the new trend in cutting back would suit me perfectly. At last, five nights of home-cooked pasta is in! There is now pride in wearing headphones till they're merely decorative! But... no. To participate in the cutting-back trend, one has to sacrifice, to make a change from the lifestyle to which they've grown accustomed to one 'times like these' demand. I could certainly stand to spend less (starting with seven nights a week of pasta, hmm) but to be part of the frugal-chic movement, you have to come down from on high, to switch not from buying two GAP t-shirts to one, but from haute couture to overindulging at J.Crew.

Praising those who 'make do with less' can be a bit much when the less is, well, more. At the NYT 'Well' blog, Tara Parker-Pope and her commenters just can't get over how noble food writer Mark Bittman is to stick with his "bad kitchen." Now, I don't begrudge someone who's both in the culinary field and a Real Grown-Up a kitchen better than my own--for him to work with one like mine would be a shame.

But what, precisely, is supposed to make Bittman's kitchen "bad"? Have a look. First, he's got a huge window next to the cooking area. (I'd settle for a vent above the stove.) Then there's the build-in microwave. Then there's Bittman's complaint that makes me less pro-Bittman than I was going into this: "I bump my shins on the dishwasher." Who cares if "[i]t’s a terrible dishwasher." (You know what's an even less efficient dishwasher? The kind that worked all day and, at 11 PM, notices dishes and puts on the gloves.) Knowing full well that my own kitchen problems are first-world, I'm finding it truly difficult to see what about Bittman's kitchen, save the lack of uniformed butler, reveals his willingness to lead a humble life.

And, a commenter makes a good point:

Obviously, as betrayed by the comment “I don’t have a food processor in Manhattan”, Bittman does have one in another kitchen elsewhere. I would bet with his level of success and true to his type, he owns a country house–upstate or the Hamptons most likely–with a huge, wonderfully appointed kitchen that he visits and cooks in on most weekends. He’s pretending to slum it in his Manhattan pied a terre.

The Ultimate Saturday-Night Blog Post

Jo and I got a bookcase! Well, another bookcase, but the current crop are at capacity. The bookcase, which is huge and usually in the $200-300 range, was $50. Even with schlepping and assembly charges, this came to less than the Ikea equivalent, which would, of course, not be assembled. After a dachshund and a dishwasher, in that order, a bookcase was what the apartment needed most. Now, we will not only be able to clear off the book-mountain that is our coffee table, but we might even be able to get a few more books. Which is good, because I'm not getting shoes any time soon.

I should note that Jo and I both recently turned 25. We're old, allow us these simple pleasures.

Modesty, then and now

I'm sure I'm not alone in being a bit tired of reading about the 'hook-up culture.' This could be because most people I know (UChicago or otherwise) spent college either fully single or in relationships (some consummated, some not), not randomly sleeping with whomever, so I tend to think the whole thing is, to use a word that sounds odd in this context, overblown. But I had to cut Wendy Shalit some slack: the book of hers I just read, A Return to Modesty, is a product of the late 1990s. It's an era I remember reasonably well, but it's also an age when I divided my weeks between track practice, "Designing Women," and discussing boys with my female friends. In other words, I was in high school at the time, so I really don't know whether the college hook-up culture existed in 1995 in a way it did not in 2005, nor do I know if Shalit was original in bringing up the subject when she did. Clearly she was not the first to make an argument along those lines, but today, the moment many of us see "hook-up culture" in an article, we stop reading. Was that true in 1999 as well?

The main problem with the book being out-of-date is that I can't tell if some of the terminology she uses is her own invention or a relic of the 1990s. When I got to the part when she discusses the apparently standard procedure called the "post hook-up check-up," I assumed she meant getting tested for STDs. Apparently the "check-up" is part of hook-up etiquette--post-hook-up, it was considered polite to check in on your not-quite-ex every so often, just to say hello. Not only have I never heard of this term, but the phenomenon sounds bizarre. People may stay friends with exes, but that's because there was once a meaningful relationship, something Shalit says college students no longer have. (Where, one wonders, does all the cohabitation Shalit complains about come from, if young people today cannot commit for longer than an evening? But I digress.) I realize the "check-up" is not central to her argument, but she did devote a good number of pages to it, early on, and I'll admit that I got bogged down.

But now, onto the book's less dated, substantive points.

Shalit is a good example of what Adam Gopnik calls "conversion sickness." (The New Yorker article is not available, but the relevant excerpt is here.) Her blindness to the dangers of communally- or governmentally-enforced sexual restraint comes from her having not grown up with such restrictions--those who have often see things quite differently. She assumes that premarital abstinence leads always to bliss, never to regret of paths not taken. She takes one line from Tocqueville, in which the 19th century French observer of American life remarks that women in America are raped less frequently than their French counterparts, and uses this as evidence that rape was practically unheard of in 19th century America. (I seem not to be the only one who found the Tocqueville-out-of-context jarring.) I guess this helps if you want to get a polemical book published, and that Shalit does not claim this book is a scholarly work of history, but the constantly-repeated about how everything pre-1960 (or better yet, pre-1900) was a chivalrous utopia grow less convincing each time they're repeated. I know this is a problem I have in my own writing, so I'm sympathetic, but, to repeat, this book was on the repetitive side. The 50th time I learned that men she dated told young Wendy that she should "lose her 'hang-ups,'" I started to side with the men; by the 100th time, I stopped caring either way.

As is often the case in polemics, all social ills can be blamed on a single culprit, in this case a culture of casual sex. Shalit's choice of anorexia as a stand-in for the damage this culture does to young women is messed up in too many ways to count. She attributes eating disorders to premarital sexual activity, conveniently ignoring the prevalence of eating disorders among observant Jewish women (a recent link, I realize, but the phenomenon did not begin in 2008), not to mention among girls of under, say, 13, at an age when sex, even in this "postmodern" era, is rarely an issue. She asks, rhetorically, why none of her grandmothers' friends were anorexic, and answers that this is surely because they were raised in more chivalrous times. Anything's possible, but how does Shalit miss the fact that being very thin only became associated with wealth and (consequently) beauty very recently? No, anorexia is not just about wanting to look like a model, but it's a safe bet that when thinness was equated with poverty, there weren't as many upper-middle-class women starving themselves. It would be one thing if anorexia were just one example that failed among many that rang true, but references to the eating disorder come up again and again (see here), as though if we only hear it enough times, we'll all agree that there's a zero-sum choice young women must make between chastity and starvation.

Finally, Shalit argues that it's a feminist myth that what women really want is sex, in the way that men want sex. What we really desire, she explains, is marriage, romance, a meaningful experience, and only once those conditions are met are we interested in sexual activity. She argues furiously against the idea that women who are modest-by-choice simply don't like sex as much as other women. Why is this necessary? Why can't she just admit that there is variation in sex drive, among men and women alike? Why not just say that some people are more turned on by religiously-motivated restraint than by sex, whereas others have no use for that song-and-dance? Here's why not: because polemics and nuance don't mix. But that's only part of the story.

Shalit's not content to accept a world in which some women lust and others fantasize about their future weddings. Unfortunately for women today (or a decade ago) bent in 'saving themselves,' there are other women without those inclinations. Women who have sex are typically looking forward to the experience--not 'giving in' to keep a man interested--but the effect is, alas, that sex keeps men (and women, but the point here is about men) wanting a relationship to continue. Shalit decides that because she wants premarital virginity, and her success in this path requires other women doing the same, it must conveniently follow that all women want to follow the same path. She urges young women to join forces and refuse to give in to those horrid young men who ask for sex, because then and only then will the marriages for which Shalit and those like her are saving themselves finally take place. Shalit first seems to be asking to be tolerated as a woman with traditional values; it's when she reveals her own refusal to tolerate women with different outlooks that her argument goes too far.

As I mentioned before, the book I've just discussed is nearly a decade old. Shalit, I see, has succeeded in finding a husband, despite all the women who give away their milk for free. If any of the above response to the book seems especially bitter, you can attribute this to the fact that the author's bio I found online while still reading it makes reference to how she owns (and "enjoys") a dishwasher. This is her way of joking about not being a total reactionary, but for me, it's about really, really wanting a dishwasher and not having one. Shalit might say that this is God's way of punishing me for cohabitation. If so, it's a cruel punishment indeed.

An endless array of olives

I did not leave Brooklyn for the whole weekend. That said, I managed to see Swedish furniture and mermaids; eat Turkish food and yuppie cupcakes; and attend a Republican book party. All in Brooklyn.

This is somewhat helping me with my regret of the moment, which is that Jo and I did not move to Queens. Astoria, or Greater Astoria, or whatever the area was we took a look at, seemed far superior to Park Slope. When I mentioned to anyone that I was considering this move, my sanity was questioned. But why? Why would lower rent, less smugness, a comparable commute, and proximity to Greek cafés and groceries possibly seem like a bad idea? The answer is that Everyone Loves Park Slope. It's the Obama of neighborhoods. If you don't like it, no, if you don't love it, you're the one with the problem. As someone who likes--but does not love (or for that matter hate, or else I'd have moved)--both the candidate and the neighborhood, I do sort of feel like a bad person. There's so much about it that's great, and while what initially drew me to the area still holds, there are drawbacks to liberal paradise, the East Coast edition.

But I'm kind of, kind of, coming around. Thanks to Northern European household accessories (and to a certain Northern European individual capable of installing said accessories--window shades, at last!), my apartment no longer looks like a grad-student hovel. Sure, for an infinite selection of olives (a dreamlike vision, much like that of having a dishwasher) I have to go all the way to Sahadi's, not to a corner grocery store, as might have been the case in Astoria, but as first-world problems go, this is minor indeed. The contrarian in me wants to hate, but the UChicago alum in me who remembers life without ready access to non-rotten fruit and fancy cheese is still a little bit thrilled.

A slippery Slope

It's official: I prefer another year in Park Slope to another month spent on Craigslist. Sheer proximity to the Food Co-op is going to push all my political opinions further and further to the right, until the Vlaams Belang starts to look, from my vantage point, like one giant kibbutz. I have only so much energy to be directed towards research, and would rather it go towards ye olde French-Jewish newspapers at the New York Public Library than to the quest for a probably non-existent dishwasher apartment in a less self-righteous neighborhood. (Note to the less inert: Astoria seems lovely. Oh well.)

Or who knows. Perhaps, in a year's time, I'll be wearing Crocs and a canvas tote covered in slogans about how much I care about not using plastic bags, pushing a stroller filled with triplets, each of whom sports a shirt declaring her or his support for a different Democratic politician.

Another NYC real-estate post

Question: If first-year NYU doctoral student housing is $X a month, this is, one imagines, the amount the school believes we should be spending on our rent. It seemed high but doable; most first-years take NYU up on the one-year subsidized-housing offer. Yet in New York, both in and out of Manhattan, no one will rent an $X-a-month apartment to someone making what an NYU doctoral student makes. Which isn't even that little, considering, and, again, is well enough to pay the $X it seems is necessary to rent anywhere. In New York, in order to be permitted to rent a place, you need to prove that you make a zillion trillion times the monthly rent, not that you can pay and have paid this amount in rent on your current salary. NYU offers to act as a guarantor, but realtors, one after the next, explain that no landlord wants to deal with NYU. One realtor last year told Jo and me what we could realistically expect to rent in Manhattan, and it was a reasonable enough amount to pay... in Hyde Park, Chicago. The amount he calculated for us would have meant, in New York, either public housing or sharing one small room, perhaps with another couple, in an apartment with several roommates. Ick.

So, my question is, what does the school suggest for those who wish to have an under-four-hour commute to campus, as in, to actually show up to teach/take classes? Mixers with the business school? I ask not to insult the university, but because I feel there's something I'm missing, some obvious answer to this paradox. I guess one might be that the advice we were given during the open house--'be open to the outer boroughs'--made sense a few years back, but now that you need a guarantor or a banker's salary to rent a shoebox in the South Bronx, not so much. My guess is that things have changed quickly, real-estate-wise, and those in charge of figuring out where grad students might live do not realize that it's basically a fluke that any of us are able to get to Washington Square in a reasonable amount of time.

Next stop, paper plates

You can learn a lot about different neighborhoods from what realtors tell you about why you should not bother looking for a dishwasher. Because they all say it's hopeless--and I get it, it is--but for a wide range of reasons. In the Village, and in Manhattan generally, realtors will explain that there are dishwashers, but (insert sneer) not in that price range. If you have to ask, and all that. In Queens (still not totally clear on the borders of neighborhoods), you will hear again that there are no dishwashers, but that a good woman doesn't complain about having to do the dishes. One realtor, his wife cooks for a large family, what am I doing complaining about doing the dishes for two? It was apparently a given that I do my boyfriend's dishes. I cook, he does the dishes (remember, two incomes, thus how we are capable of paying rent). But I decided not to explain this and just to agree that dishwashers are totally useless appliances. Because demanding a dishwasher is the very height of princessy uppitiness. Well, I don't go in for rhinoplasty or Manolos, door-manned buildings or hardwood floors, but I'm not afraid to admit this one materialistic dream.

After some investigation, I've learned that there do seem to be some apartments with dishwashers in the sad little price range that is ours. These apartments are all in the middle of highways, half-hour bus rides from subways, or in neighborhoods where getting shot veers from possible to probable. Turns out my old place had a dishwasher because although my rent was low and the block had only a moderate number of shootings, I shared with two roommates, putting the total price of the apartment in the big-numbers range at which dishwashers begin to appear.

Meet the parents (but briefly)

As first-world problems go, a dental possible-emergency plus finals plus a possible apartment search,* all converging at once, is certainly up there. What was supposed to fix all this was an episode of "Gossip Girl," the one in which Serena was set to explain what she meant when at the end of the last episode she confessed to killing someone. Well of course she didn't kill anyone, which is extremely disappointing. The show is back to its illogical ways, with everything happening either too quickly or too slowly for you to care what's going on.

But the real issue here is addressed in the Gawker recap of the episode. Praising the actress who plays Mrs. Van Der Woodsen, Richard of Gawker writes, "You've almost made me care about the parents!" With teen shows, you never care about the parents. I remember finding the parents-related scenes of "My So-Called Life" excruciatingly dull. Same with the inferior but at times riveting "Dawson's Creek." At the time I thought it was an age thing. But now that I'm ancient, it seems just the same. Parent drama is simply no fun. If I had to guess why, it's because the 'teens' on these shows are played by 30-year-olds (while the parents look not a day over 40), and have all sorts of grown-up relationship mess. Real-life parents should be able to identify with the 'kids' just as much as their children do. So it's not clear which demographic the parent plot-lines are meant to entice. Another reason the parent-plot always stinks is that in its attempt at being the realistic angle that grounds the show, it is always very... realistic. The marital troubles of 40-year-olds, the whole 'will this marriage work?,' is just dull, dull, dull compared to first loves and hard drugs.

So what's the alternative? Leaving parents out altogether, as is done in noted teen dramedy "Sex and the City," is an understandable approach but ends up leaving too many unanswered questions, even when the teens themselves are actually 40-year-old women portraying the same. Can't there be some token nod to the parents' existence without delving into their predictable marital woes? Estelle Constanza aside, no TV parent has ever merited as much screen time as he or she's been allotted.

*The strangest thing on Craigslist, apartment-wise, has to be the listings that focus on the toilet. Either only showing a photo of the toilet, or advertising "porcelain toilet" as one of the place's key selling points. I get that in NYC, amenities that have long since become the norm for the US middle classes are rare for even the wealthy. But toilets?

Can dachshunds do stairs?

This was a work-filled weekend indeed. I spent Saturday writing about fascism, and Sunday doing the same, after spending Friday, Thursday, and so on reading and taking notes on... the same. The 19th century is a whole lot more uplifting. The cheery moment of the weekend was running into a former classmate and her golden retriever puppy. Golden retriever puppy! The three happiest words in the English language. (No offense intended to my future dachshund, who will be no less adorable). Insert clichéd but true remark here about how there would be no wars if puppies ruled the land.

Another weekend low point, although not on the scale of fascism, was reading an real estate article about how fantastic it is to live in the top floor of a walk-up. As someone who does, I'm not going to claim I don't have fantasies about installing one of those chairs there used to be commercials for, meant for the elderly and infirm, that hook onto the banister and pull you up, flight by flight, at the rate of one flight every ten minutes.

But that's not all. One of the brokers mentioned in the article was the first I met with in my apartment search last year, back when I still saw living within walking distance of school as a possibility. This broker insisted upon speaking to "your mother," aka my mother. Had he met my mother? Did he even know for sure that I do not have two daddies? Clearly not relevant. I feel bad saying this so close to Mothers' Day, but let's face it, a good way to be demeaning is to ask to speak to someone's mother. It's not a question you ask unless your first-grade student failed his math test. I could harumph and say, well he didn't get my business, but then I remember that the whole problem stemmed from the fact that my "business" is so minor. Renting basement closets (not to be confused with Austrian dungeons) out to graduate students is not Manhattan realtors' primary interest. It is at this point that I remember that it could be worse. But (she says, dreaming of social democracy--not to be confused with national socialism) things could also be better.

Puppies, puppies! Better now.

I'm not picky

I would like to find an apartment with the following traits:

1) A dishwasher.
2) A dish washer (searching for both on Craigslist expands the set of possible apartments).
3) Near a train that might actually be of use (i.e. not the M or G).
4) Enough room for two people.
5) By #4 I mean nothing "cozy," nothing "perfect for a student," and most of all, nothing that involves "five young professionals looking for a roommate" who for whatever reason decide to list their available room on Craigslist as if it were a free-standing one bedroom. To those who list their $1200/month one-bedrooms in the West Village, you're not fooling anyone.
6) In a neighborhood where people tend not to get shot. My old block in Brooklyn had a shooting or two, and Hyde Park, where to begin? So, somewhere gentrified enough that shootings, say, are rare enough that they make it to the news.
7) The need to live near-ish to NYU eliminates the Bronx and Staten Island from the search; as #3 made clear, all of Brooklyn, Queens, and (as if) Manhattan are fair game, assuming train reasonableness.

Other people do care about the following. I do not:

1) Near a park.
2) Exposed brick.
3) Hardwood floors.
4) Good schools in the area.
5) On-site parking.
6) Exciting nightlife nearby.
7) A community of recent college grads. I'm fine with a community of recent immigrants, recent retirees, recent Chabad devotees, anything but recent purchasers of handguns or explosives. In terms of neighbors, almost anything goes.