strictly for the weather, women and the weed
Last night I had the most odd meeting with a new potential landlord ever.
So Brandt is going going back back to Cali Cali or something. In any event he's not going to stay in Philly after the lease is up, so yeah. I may have two people to hold the lease on my current apartment, but I may have to strike out on my own, which isn't such a bad thing although I have gotten very attached to the Fortress of Solitude.
In any event, I went looking around on Craigslist for places looking for housemates, and I found this beautiful place in Bella Vista (for non-Philly residents, this is a really nice neighborhood that is about the same distance south of Center City as my current place is north of it) that has a big extra room, washer/dryer, garbage disposal and (most key!) a baby grand piano. It's within my price range, so I emailed the guy and he actually set up a date the very same day.
So I go to meet Potential Landlord at a coffeeshop near the house, and when he arrives it's clear that he knows everyone who works there. I go introduce myself, he seems pretty cool, and we sit there and chat with the extremely pretty barista for a bit and I try to show off what an awesome conversationalist I am.
Things are going pretty well when the barista interjects something like, "Well, you know he's got a brain tumor, right?" Oberlin has not treated me well in the respect that when anyone says anything like this out of the blue, I assume that they are fucking with me. So I say something like, "Man, this is feeling a lot like college, where I was never sure when people were fucking with me."
But Potential Landlord actually does have brain cancer. I couldn't see it at the time because I'm so short, but he has a big, obvious scar on his bald head where they operated. I turn kind of red, but limp on conversationally and we're getting along well. I get the idea that Potential Landlord likes to drop shocking news on people to see how they'll react.
We walk back to his house, and the neighborhood is so beautiful, goddamn. The house is likewise pretty amazing: the room is, as advertised, really big, there's two floors and a roof above the guy's green realty office, the baby grand is present if a little out of tune, and the roof has this glorious view of the city skyline that just cannot be priced. Potential Landlord's girlfriend is cool and a dance teacher, the girlfriend's cat is nice, and Potential Landlord himself is someone I get along with.
So we're up on the roof, and he's telling me all his plans for solar panels and a garden up there and it all sounds very cool... he asks what my living habits are, if I'm seeing anybody, that sort of thing, and I mention that I'm sorta dating Rajiv, who's a neuroscience Ph.D. student of some sort (I never really understand what the hell he's talking about when he describes what he does; at this point when I ask what he did at work, I get things like "I sat in a dark humming box and took pictures of glowy shit").
Potential Landlord says he could have used a neuroscience person a couple weeks ago. He apparently went in for a post-surgery MRI and on his way out the hospital door, they handed him a DVD with the MRI scans on it. He asked if he could, uh, talk to a neurologist or something about what they meant, and was told no. So he was just sitting at his laptop that night, looking at his brain and what he thought probably was the tumor and trying to figure out what it all meant.
"It was really weird," he says, and then gives me this kind of bizarrely naughty look. "Wanna see?"
So that is how I ended up sitting in my potential landlord's living room with his girlfriend and cat and baby grand piano, looking at pictures of his brain. It looked basically like this, and you could scroll through different strata of the brain in three dimensions. The place where the tumor used to be was this large, empty-looking black triangle, whereas what was left of the tumor was white.
I don't know whether the guy just likes to fuck with people or what, but I think my reactions were acceptable enough that the room is mine if I want it.
So Brandt is going going back back to Cali Cali or something. In any event he's not going to stay in Philly after the lease is up, so yeah. I may have two people to hold the lease on my current apartment, but I may have to strike out on my own, which isn't such a bad thing although I have gotten very attached to the Fortress of Solitude.
In any event, I went looking around on Craigslist for places looking for housemates, and I found this beautiful place in Bella Vista (for non-Philly residents, this is a really nice neighborhood that is about the same distance south of Center City as my current place is north of it) that has a big extra room, washer/dryer, garbage disposal and (most key!) a baby grand piano. It's within my price range, so I emailed the guy and he actually set up a date the very same day.
So I go to meet Potential Landlord at a coffeeshop near the house, and when he arrives it's clear that he knows everyone who works there. I go introduce myself, he seems pretty cool, and we sit there and chat with the extremely pretty barista for a bit and I try to show off what an awesome conversationalist I am.
Things are going pretty well when the barista interjects something like, "Well, you know he's got a brain tumor, right?" Oberlin has not treated me well in the respect that when anyone says anything like this out of the blue, I assume that they are fucking with me. So I say something like, "Man, this is feeling a lot like college, where I was never sure when people were fucking with me."
But Potential Landlord actually does have brain cancer. I couldn't see it at the time because I'm so short, but he has a big, obvious scar on his bald head where they operated. I turn kind of red, but limp on conversationally and we're getting along well. I get the idea that Potential Landlord likes to drop shocking news on people to see how they'll react.
We walk back to his house, and the neighborhood is so beautiful, goddamn. The house is likewise pretty amazing: the room is, as advertised, really big, there's two floors and a roof above the guy's green realty office, the baby grand is present if a little out of tune, and the roof has this glorious view of the city skyline that just cannot be priced. Potential Landlord's girlfriend is cool and a dance teacher, the girlfriend's cat is nice, and Potential Landlord himself is someone I get along with.
So we're up on the roof, and he's telling me all his plans for solar panels and a garden up there and it all sounds very cool... he asks what my living habits are, if I'm seeing anybody, that sort of thing, and I mention that I'm sorta dating Rajiv, who's a neuroscience Ph.D. student of some sort (I never really understand what the hell he's talking about when he describes what he does; at this point when I ask what he did at work, I get things like "I sat in a dark humming box and took pictures of glowy shit").
Potential Landlord says he could have used a neuroscience person a couple weeks ago. He apparently went in for a post-surgery MRI and on his way out the hospital door, they handed him a DVD with the MRI scans on it. He asked if he could, uh, talk to a neurologist or something about what they meant, and was told no. So he was just sitting at his laptop that night, looking at his brain and what he thought probably was the tumor and trying to figure out what it all meant.
"It was really weird," he says, and then gives me this kind of bizarrely naughty look. "Wanna see?"
So that is how I ended up sitting in my potential landlord's living room with his girlfriend and cat and baby grand piano, looking at pictures of his brain. It looked basically like this, and you could scroll through different strata of the brain in three dimensions. The place where the tumor used to be was this large, empty-looking black triangle, whereas what was left of the tumor was white.
I don't know whether the guy just likes to fuck with people or what, but I think my reactions were acceptable enough that the room is mine if I want it.