(no subject)
I gave sixty days notice on my apartment today!
The things I will not miss about living in city housing are also the things I will kind of miss: the old guys who call me Jackie, the pharmacy downstairs full of methadone patients and old unhealthy widows buying canned soup, all the people in motorised scooters, the chatty crackheads, the dirty elevators, the old guy in the lobby with the cat on the leash that asks me why I'm not wearing shorts every day of the winter, chatting with the guy on my floor about all his operations, trying to get my neighbour's german shepherd to like me. All this adds up to a certain kind of community feeling that I remember from my childhood neighbourhood, that palpable feeling of everyone just trying to get by, and the certain brand of camaraderie that comes with that.
I can't entirely say I'll miss Drunk Bob coming on to me, or all my missing mail, or the constant preventative bedbug sprayings, or the constant false fire alarms set to Senior Awareness volume levels, or the racism against the filipino social/domestic helpers and the asian international students that the seniors perennially try to implicate me in. Or keeping a lookout for the return of the woman who thought a girl named Cathy lived in my apartment who needed to be fed, and ended up throwing half of a dumpster-dived ham sandwich into my apartment as I tried to close the door after politely trying to disabuse her of the notion I needed food. All those things I can do without.
The things I will not miss about living in city housing are also the things I will kind of miss: the old guys who call me Jackie, the pharmacy downstairs full of methadone patients and old unhealthy widows buying canned soup, all the people in motorised scooters, the chatty crackheads, the dirty elevators, the old guy in the lobby with the cat on the leash that asks me why I'm not wearing shorts every day of the winter, chatting with the guy on my floor about all his operations, trying to get my neighbour's german shepherd to like me. All this adds up to a certain kind of community feeling that I remember from my childhood neighbourhood, that palpable feeling of everyone just trying to get by, and the certain brand of camaraderie that comes with that.
I can't entirely say I'll miss Drunk Bob coming on to me, or all my missing mail, or the constant preventative bedbug sprayings, or the constant false fire alarms set to Senior Awareness volume levels, or the racism against the filipino social/domestic helpers and the asian international students that the seniors perennially try to implicate me in. Or keeping a lookout for the return of the woman who thought a girl named Cathy lived in my apartment who needed to be fed, and ended up throwing half of a dumpster-dived ham sandwich into my apartment as I tried to close the door after politely trying to disabuse her of the notion I needed food. All those things I can do without.