Carmel Corn

Devil Elevator

2008-02-12T06:04:00.000-08:00

So, it's no secret that our building has the crappiest, ghetto-ist elevator in the world. After months of the elevator breaking down every week, I'm simply fed up. I live at the very top of the building, which means hauling myself and all my stuff up and down tons of stairs. It's the old people I feel bad for. Sometimes they'll just sit in their apartments for days on end just because the elevator's busted. Then just the other day I got stuck inside. I was so pissed--just rushing downstairs when the elevator just shut down with me inside it. I did everything I could for about five minutes (which is a long time to be stuck in a box suspended from the 8th floor), but then I finally just called the emergency line. They sent the fire department down to help me out. Alas, I managed to break out myself after about 15 minutes. I was so angry, and late, and frustrated, that I didn't have the time to complain again to our management, but really. For the thousands of dollars I spend to live in this tenement, don't I get a functioning elevator? I swear that someone's going to get really hurt one of these days and then someone's gonna get in trouble. I know that there are a lot better things I can do with my time than to sit and bitch about a busted elevator, but it's only the beginning. If you're gonna rent out apartments for people to live in, then you've got to give them half-human accommodations. If you're gonna let them live like this is Sarajevo, then charge them Sarajevo rates. We're all fed up.

2007-11-20T16:55:00.001-08:00

Life goes on

2007-11-20T06:33:00.000-08:00

So we're now well into the colder months of fall and being reminded again about what a substandard building we live in. The heat doesn't work, then it works too much and we're sweating bunches in bed. All winter long the windows will be open to let in cooler air, while we run around with nothing on just to stay cool. I've been way too tired to post but everyday I'm reminded how utterly dysfunctional our management is. Ugh, ugh, ugh. For the past two weeks they've been pouring noxious chemicals around us somewhere. All the fumes waft up to my home office and I get the most vicious headaches that take a day of recovery. My whole life I avoided glue sniffing, saying NO to drugs, just like Nancy Reagan told us. And now I'm getting my brain cells fried and paying for the privilege. Not so much in the mood to complain right now. Too much to complain about.

Dishwasher-Safe

2007-03-29T08:35:00.000-07:00

Sigh. ¶ Another day, at work. I was just sitting alone watching the sun outside and thinking about how great life is. KNOCK-KNOCKITTY-KNOCK. Who's there? Oh, a new maintenance man (I haven't met YOU yet). Makes face like he's afraid of the dog. Oh, no, no. She's just a big old sweetheart. SIT! SIT! SIT! DOWN! ¶Long story short, after 3 years of asking and repairs, the Carmel Partners man has come (like an angel) to REPLACE the dishwasher. That means new dishwasher, right? And I'm beginning to regain my faith in humanity (just a little). Ah, but such joys fade quickly. The dishwasher man, upon momentary inspection, began to deride the manner in which I do the dishes (not my fault-that's Dexter's job!) Still, he tells me the dishwasher's fine and that I just don't know how to do dishes. ¶WOW. Did I lose it pretty fast. I couldn't believe how loud I got. But man, that's just the way it is with Carmel Partners. After years and months and days of being chipped away by the little things (like cockroaches on your toothbrush and chunks of your ceiling collapsing), then they have the nerve to blame you (consistent slumlord behaviour). ¶So I lost it. Asked dishwasher man what the hell was he doing in my apartment. If he was here to replace the dishwasher, then replace it already (we've been waiting for two years now). If he was here to play Martha Stewart to my dishwashing abilities, then GET THE HELL OUT--and take the non-functioning, cockraoch-infested dishwasher with you or catch it as I toss it out the window. ¶Man did not back down. Insisted the dishwasher was working just fine, and that I was just a dirty person. So I invited him to sit there for 2 hours while I loaded the dishwasher with clean dishes and turned them into dirty dishes with a flick of the dial. Maybe my invitation was a bit loud (honestly, I'm usually not a screamer), but he quickly left to go get his tools. And that was 2 hours ago. ¶Now come on folks. It's one thing to do this the first time around. But after a few years of maintenance guys wasting days on our wet kitchen floor, and several unfulfilled promises of a new dishwasher, and then new promises that they've ordered it. And now, it's here-our brand new dishwasher is actually here in the buildilng. To send someone up who tells me he's trying to determine if we really need it is like taking a newly-assembled happy meal toy away from a kid. I was so pissed I had to phone Dexter for support and he made lots of wonderful gory threats which I won't write down so as to keep my blog under the 'drama' section and not 'horror'. Now I am considering a dinner party in which I invite all the Carmel Partners folks over and feed them off the dishes that have been cleaned/dirtied in our current dishwasher. Our plates are white, so there's no disguising the little cockroach pieces that get magically appliqued to the edges.

Phallo-Centrist

2007-03-26T06:19:00.000-07:00

So our building got vandalized yesterday. Which is a good thing, really. All that hard work to dress up our lobby with ultra-modern San Francisco hyper-chic design, and we all started thinking that we lived in a real building with real management in a real classy neighbourhood. Alas, corporate artwork and halogen lightbulbs are only skin deep--all it takes is some sex-hungry vandal to remind us that we live in the ghetto-est building on the planet. I was bringing my laundry down into the basement this morning and then . . .(did I just see what I think I saw?) a PENIS! And not just a penis, but a penis in action, which is not an easy thing to draw. The anonymous artist used mixed media--what I assume to be magic marker (in the elevator), and then for this larger work, shaving cream. The work carries a striking Keith Haring sensibility and frightens the viewer (by its ominous size) but equally delights for its subjective snapshot of male sexual bliss and the creative metaphor of semen=shaving cream. The model seems to have been a circumsized gentleman, and the off-red background is yet another (un)intentional perfection of the artist's execution. Bravo to the daring artist, whoever he or she may be. Best of all is that this spontaneous expression occurred on a weekend, right during a LEASING EXPO. Regardless, it took Carmel Partners two days to remove the offensive material, by which time we residents already felt humiliated, scandalized and thoroughly ghetto-ized. (You can see that one resident attempted to erase the right testicle, only to abandon the project: coitus interruptus). You'd think a clever CP authority would have left the artwork unharmed, seeing a market advantage in all this. This is Dupont! GAY, GAY, GAY! Given a choice between leasing two apartments, I always choose the one with penis.

Some Rents are Bigger Than Others

2007-02-13T22:01:00.000-08:00

It's snowing outside. Not snowing. Raining. Or Icing. That's very Washington precipitation, when ice falls directly from the sky and we're given a number for the accumulation of ice that's expected. Three quarters of an inch. ¶Whatever. The government got shut down at 2PM, fast-forwarding the impending traffic jam by three hours. Now everyone is sleeping restlessly, some praying for a snow day, others not being able to sleep until they figure out whether or not they get the day off tomorrow. I feel the worst for the school teachers who have to figure it out by 5.30 AM. ¶Luckily, our heat kicked back in with a vengeance yesterday. I saw some suspicious activity by maintenance staff around 9.00 PM, so they've been working away, and then wham, yesterday morning I felt the heat emanate from the pipes in the bathroom. It is a small miracle-fixing the heat in only 5 days. Thanks guys. Staying home on a snow day without heat would just suck. 'Cuz what if you had to go to the office just to get away from the cold at home? ¶I promised myself I wouldn't do this blog thing. When you start gushing about cool music and restaurants and hoping someone else taps into your opinion and values it, or else simply recognizes you as an authority. No, I swore I would never do that (just like I swore that I would never blog), BUT, here I am, just returned from the greatest live show on the whole east coat (and perhaps west coast and the gulf coast too). My favoritest band of the present (and the past 3 years): STELLASTARR*. Great, great, adrenalin. I heard them here in DC way back when, and then heard them again when The Killers (ah, yeah . . I know them) were OPENING for them. That's how great they are, and while The Killers have totally sold out to marketing hell, Stellastarr* stays true to their music, which would sound so cliché if it wasn't the truth. They make really good music, and what's more, they know how to perform it. I've heard them live four times now and they never disappoint. Gush, gush, gush. Why are they so great? Check 'em out and find out. ¶Venue was the Rock'n'Roll Hotel-a place I've always heard about but never seen. Way out in dangerous NE, on a street that I've never set foot even after all these years in DC. As were waiting in the falling ice and waiting to be let in, I told a friend, hey-this street reminds me of U Street way back in the day. (Back when you could get robbed regularly, but with respect). His response: 'You mean before U Street its balls cut off?' And I said yeah, back then. I spent the rest of the night contemplating Washington's many hoods and imagning myself being forced to live in NE (bet¶I was also there with my bestest, bestest friend ever Susanna. She's a big Stellastarr* fan too. She lives way up in Friendship Heights because it's safe, way safer. I convinced her to move to Logan a long time ago and she prompty got mugged. Since then, she's put up with the quiet open yards of quasi-DC, which is the part that feels nothing like a city.

Still Cold, after all these years

2007-02-11T06:18:00.001-08:00

It's still really cold inside. ¶I got home from the gym last night and found this gem of a letter taped inside our elevator. I read it through and audibly cheered, it felt like Christmas. I haven't met the author yet, but he's far more eloquent than moi. He also raises some important points, like how there's an incessant clanging noise emanating from the basement up through all of the freezing pipes and it bangs/BANGS/BANGS all through the night. I wish that I could bake him cupcakes just for the way he used the word emanating to describe something in our building. And the fact that he too has discovered our friendly open-back-door policy. ¶Seeing as the tenants of our building have no faith in public recourse, we are limited to scotch-taping letters in the hallway. Some of them (like Susanna the Stripper) use lip-liner to get their point across. Others (like Attorney) use fancy legal-speak. Both are equally effective in getting us all riled up and making our building appear even more ghetto to outsiders. I just turn to my little blogspot blog and pray that someone out there reads the thing. ¶After reading Attorney's fantastic letter, I marched over to the office to fill them in on the fact that we have no heat. They were in the middle of the LEASING PARTY in which they are luring unassuming professionals to move into our building. Bright-eyed consumers mincing about and looking at pretty graphics of apartment layouts and furniture design and being fed machine-processed soft bake cookies and drinking up all that PR copy: realizing your potential; urban lifestyle trendster, it's all about you, blah blah. ¶The minute the management saw me enter, they performed a total body block not unlike the Chicago Bear defensive line. They knew that there was absolutely nothing that I could say or do that would convince all these hipsters to sign up for inflated leases. All I said, was hey, you know that I haven't had heat for the last four days? And they were all exasperated with the old news, as if I'd just announced that Hilary Clinton might run for president. ¶"Yeah, yeah we know (GET OUTTA HERE). The whole back tier of the building doesn't have heat (I KNOW SOMETHING YOU DON"T KNOW). It's this thing in the pipe. We're going to order a part, maybe on Monday-it'll be fixed by next week" (MAKE ME). Ah, that word again. Parts. Man, they're always out of parts and it takes them ages to get 'em, like my light that took 5 weeks to repair because of a part. ¶When I got back to the lobby, there was an impromptu gathering of tenants congregating around Attorney's letter and voicing complaints. Susanna was saying, yeah I'm too cold to stick around. I just bought a plane ticket to get out of here. And this other guy told me he's moving out next week. The other Susanna said that the management had told her it would be fixed in a week. ¶Another week without heat in February? This is starting to feel just a little bit like Sarajevo. After we stood around and had a huge bitch session, the old, old man followed me up in the elevator and told me that for the 25 years he's lived here, the heat has never ever gone out. And he should know. He explained the whole heating system and how the clanging is the boiler trying to shoot hot water up the pipes but it just falls back down again, over and over. Dear me.

Battle of Measures

2007-02-10T05:16:00.000-08:00

Dexter hates Farenheit and he insists that we only speak metric at home. I rebel on occasion because A) we're in the US of America, B) Farenheit is part of my heritage, and C) I don't appreciate the deflation of cold temperatures that goes on with Celsius. You can say –10° C and Europeans may freak out, but really that's only +14° F and no cause for concern. When I say minus ten, I know what minus ten means and it's really minus, like below zero Farenheit. ¶Anyway, today my trusty clock/thermometer tells me that it's exactly –1° C outside, and a whopping 15° C inside. Carry the one, that's a toasty 59° F indoors, so what am I complaining about? I should be amazed that without heat for four days I can still keep my apartment in the upper 50s. I am still burning the gas stove to boot and taking Tylenol to deal with the monoxide headaches. (I know, I know, who still uses Tylenol? Sigh, I am a child of the 80s). I've also been wearing long underwear all week, so perhaps the Washpost can tell me that my RealFeel ™ is somewhere in the low 70s, I dunno. That doesn't include the wind blowing through my five windows.

Wind Chill

2007-02-08T07:51:00.000-08:00

So I've been sitting at my desk all morning and found myself curled in a tiny ball. I was rubbing my legs and jumping up and down before I realized that I was really, really cold. You see, my mind works backwards, and I suddenly realized that it's been cold for days. My brain finally confessed that my body was freezing. That makes sense because the wind is howling like a bunch of drag queens and it's 25 degrees outside, or as the Washington Post tells me, it feels like 12 degrees. But normally, we're quite warm as we get all the heat rising up from the lower floors, so why am I freezing? ¶Because the heat's been turned off, that's why. NO HEAT. In February and with it so cold outside (wait, stop. I just killed a giant cockroach with a post it note; really I just did). ¶So I went over to make sure my 1920s radiator was on and yes it's on but it's stone cold and all the wind is blowing straight through the air conditioner and into our apartment. So that means the heat for the whole building is busted. It never stops, does it? If it's not one thing, it's another. So because I'm freezing, I do the unthinkable. I call the office--not because I want to be a whiney crybaby tenant, but because I'm freezing and trying to work, and the rest of the building must be freezing too. And its 12 degrees outside!!!! So I dial the office for the first time ever. ¶Thank you for choosing Barclay, Ravenel, and Regal apartments, professionally managed by Carmel Partners. We are currently out of the office. Our regular hours are (uhm, now). If you are a resident facing a life-threatening emergency, please hang up and dial 911. If you are enquiring about one of our beautiful apartment homes, then blah, blah, do come by. If you are a resident and would like to make a service request, please blah, blah, go away. Thank you for choosing Barclay blah, blah, apartments. Using the dial pad, please blah, blah. Click. ¶Yeah, why would they be in the office during their office hours when the heat shuts down for the whole building? And I love how they give you a nice pitch for their mother company before they let you know that if you're hair is on fire you should really call 911 instead. It's ok though. I can suck it up. One pays rent so that one may stay tough. I'm reverting to a trick that I learned in Russia, which is to crank up the oven and light all the burners on the stove. Yeah, it totally wastes natural gas and if you're not careful you can get carbon monoxide poisoning, BUT given the choice, I'd rather die of a headache than the cold. Wouldn't you?

Arthur Rimbaud Mon Héro

2007-01-21T19:12:00.000-08:00

I'm sick of all the celebrity/hero worship around me. On TV, people gushing about movies and even on freakin' YouTube with all these homemade tribute videos (choke). But you wanna know who my hero is? I've got way too many. A lot of them live in this damn building. Anyone who can compete with cockroaches for their dinner, well, I take my hat off to them. But for the sake of following trends, here's one of my heros. A minute of silence please, for someone who never really achieved the silence he sought. Dear, sweet Arthur Rimbaud. He rented a room, once upon a time, in Paris. It didn't go so well. I think he got in trouble for urinating in his landlord's coffee. Totally inappropriate but worthy of mention for history's sake. Arthur was a poet and a genius, but then he went off to travel the world and ended up running guns in Ethiopia. ¶All I see is coincidence. Like how most of Washington is basically Ethiopia, and how there's people running around with guns here too and how Rimbaud's first book of poetry is entitled 'A Season in Hell'. Tell me about it. I think I'm gonna have to make a YouTube tribute video. With a soundtrack by Prodigy or Nitzer Ebb. Cool. ¶Wait. I just checked Wikipedia and they claim (in hypertext) that Rimbaud was the 'archetypal enfant terrible'. Whatever. He was just plain typical. All the crazy rebellious Europeans I know trade in their anarchist card by age 21 and forget the meaning of angst just in time to create over-coddled terrible infants of their own.

Cops

2007-01-11T21:17:00.000-08:00

Today I saw two undercover cops hanging out on the street in broad daylight. How did I know they were undercover? 'Cuz they were Hispanic, with shaved heads, wearing hoodies and sitting in the two front seats of a beat-up grey Ford Taurus. How did I know they were cops? 'Cuz they were parked next to McDonalds, they were eating McDonalds and they wore bulletproof jackets that said POLICE on the front. And on the dashboard of their beater was one of those clip on disco lights that cops use in a car chase. How obvious. It made me really sad to think that in between chasing bullets and solving homicides our cops have to catch a late lunch off the dollar menu. The guys on Law & Order are always getting classy New York street food, like polish dogs with relish or deli food wrapped up in wax paper. Poor DC cops get MickyD's washed down with a big gulp. It's way more manly, but also totally humiliating. (You know what? I've never ever seen a cop eat a packed lunch. White bread, plastic baggy, drink box, apple? Nunca!) If I was a cop, I'd have my morning snack at Dunkin' doughnuts, papusas for lunch, and my afternoon snack off the dollar menu. I would also probably keep beef jerky and altoids and a box of Little Debbies in my glove compartment and come nighttime I'd be hitting one 7/11 after the next for frozen burritos and slurpees. I'd love an excuse to eat that stuff (I gotta night shift *shrug* start stuffing face). ¶ A while back, City Paper did this article on how all the cops are soooo fat and soooo lazy and how they can't chase robbers like they used to, but come on, that was a little one-sided, non? Maybe those rayon cop pants only come in 42 inch waists but that doesn't mean we've got crappy cops, because really, do you have to be able to run a 5 minute mile to be a good cop? Heck no. You've just gotta be able to stay up all night and be able to know the difference between the suspicious looking creep who's actually a model citizen and that normal looking guy who's about to shoot someone. And for me that would take more junk food than two aisles at CVS. ¶Men's Health gives out these awards to people who lose a ton of weight and still look good, and a while back they gave one to a cop who lost something like 112 pounds. His 'after' picture was hot--he was wearing biker shorts and a tank top and running uphill in the mountains. But anyway, this totally ripped cop explained how all those late and blood-filled nights got him eating all this trash and before he knew it, wham, he was like 350 pounds. I gotcha. I could so do the same. Some days I feel like that's exactly what I'm doing. It's like I'm racing backwards from the after picture to the before. Except I'm not a cop. I mean, I do eat stuff off the dollar menu, but I don't shave my head and wear a hoodie or drive a ford.