In the Los Angeles winter of 2008/2009 Nicole and I went the entire season without heat (ok, half, because we moved to West Hollywood). It's not that our Koreatown apartment didn't have a heater. There was a circa 1960 heater mounted to the wall in the middle of the main living space but no matter how much I tried I could not get it to start. After going down to the office to mention it to the leasing manager and then finding out that his latest hired help had been crushed to death while trying to service the elevator in the building across the street (which the management company also owned) I decided it wasn't really a problem worth mentioning. So, to cope with the cold Nicole and I just bundled up (thanks Dad, for teaching me the valuable lesson of layering clothing indoors).
Last night in our West Hollywood apartment I awoke at 2am to find myself covered in sweat. Determining this unusual I went to the thermostat and discovered that even though it was set to 74 degrees our apartment was a bee-hive-worthy 89 degrees. Cursing my luck I grabbed the spray bottle and gave myself a nice misting before returning to bed only to realize that I stick to the sheets annoyingly long before I fell back asleep.
After suffering an entire night without my beloved refirgerated air I called the apt management, Alex. He was nice about it and said he would call the repair man.
Here's the thing about this kind of climate in a heat wave: Air conditioning repair men are in high demand and believe it or not there are rolling blackouts (even if they last only a few seconds as I witnessed in Northridge). So now it's the night after my call for repair and even though the central system is still ary, the apt manager brought us a portable unit which we put in our "bedroom" and this is the point of my entire long winded post:
You get what you pay for.
In Koreatown our manager had squished people to deal with (not to mention evicting families with small children, single girls robbed of their rent money [why she carried it in cash is beside me] and gang shootouts on the same street where those potentially evicted children played). Here in West Hollywood, as long as there aren't homos doing it in the bushes out front or some laid off homo isn't kicking in the front door our apartment manager usually has time to deal with the little things that go wrong in each apt. I hate to be a gentrified asshole but I kind of like it. Aside from the gay guys puking in the gutter every Thursday and Friday this is a nice place to live. I'm lucky to be here. I still miss all those families in Koreatown and pray for them almost daily but I've got my own family to worry about.
Ok, that's enough past reflecting for now.
To those who I have never heard from until recently (yes, you recent new commenters): Thank you. Thank you for your support and kind words and I'm terribly sorry if I have been too selfish to thank you personally for every message. To know that even one person reads this silly blog is a huge inspiration. Perhaps when my real work finally does end (9/11 weird huh?) I can find some time to make a significant post about job loss.
Please keep checking back. I forsee a lot of time for posting in my future.
I love you all.
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