Eclecticism

Cleaning up around this building gets all sorts of interesting at times.

Section 8 of the National Housing Law Project is “housing assistance, in the form of direct payments to private landlord, secured from a local housing authority that low-income people can use to rent apartments and homes on the private market.” There are various Section 8 buildings around Seattle, the residents of which form your usual mix of welfare recipients — some who are using welfare as intended, to get back on their feet and get life together, and others who are some of the less reputable members of society. Fairly standard stuff, really.

Well, one of these Section 8 buildings happens to be the Jensonia Hotel, directly next to my building. Part of today’s project was sweeping out our part of the alleyway between the two buildings — while not quite up to the level of Hercules cleaning the Augean stables, it certainly wasn’t a quick and simple task, either. Apparently, some of the tenants next door feel that using garbage cans is more trouble than it’s worth (after all, once they fill up, you do need to take them to a dumpster — what a chore!), and prefer to toss a fair amount of their garbage out the window and into the alleyway. It’s an interesting, if disturbing, mix of garbage, to say the least — everything from smashed TVs to used syringes, all mixed in with a generous helping of broken glass bottles.

On the bright side, I was able to get our part of it swept up without getting stuck with anything — most of the trash is actually on their side of the divider, so I didn’t have to wade into the real thick of things.

I think the most disturbing part of the whole project was just that while I was down there sweeping things out, I’d occasionally hear the soft ‘thud’ of something else landing on the ground. The things that were being tossed were landing on their side of the building, though, which I was fairly happy about. I kinda figured the last thing I needed was some cracked-out junkie deciding to use me as target practice for their bottle, needle, or whatever other implement of destruction they’d just lost any use for. Kinda creepy.

It’s things like this that keep driving me home that no matter how much of a “big city boy” I thought I was after growing up in Anchorage, it’s really a whole different world out here. I’m enjoying it, even with the creepy bits…but the more I live down here, the more I realize just how tiny Anchorage really is!

This next bit came out of a chat session today…I thought I’d save it. Wasn’t bad, for right off the top of my head.

Me: lol hey…I’m a geek…but I found a personality somewhere along the line, and can generally bury my geek-ness enough to cope with society fairly well…lol

dorkgoddess_ack: LMAO
dorkgoddess_ack: I thought the geek part was normaly devoliped as a coping device to deal with society

Me: yeah, I’d agree with that…but it generally happens with people who have weak personalities — which leads to both the societal problems, and the adoption of the geek persona — which is where i used to be…then I realized that I not only could, but did have my own, fairly strong personality, and managed to reconcile the geek with the non-geek
Me: wow…and that was one hell of a paragraph…lol

dorkgoddess_ack: lol
dorkgoddess_ack: do you realize you just sumed up your teen years and mid 20’s all in one paragraph

Me: lmao
Me: damn…I did, didn’t I?
Me: I should save that

dorkgoddess_ack: lol yes you should

So I did. :)

Saturday was a fun day. At least, it was if you consider that I’m using ‘fun’ in the most bitterly sarcastic way humanly possible.

I spent five and a half hours crawling around on the floor of an apartment, using 80-grade sandpaper (incredibly rough stuff) to sand paint and plaster splotches off of the hardwood floor that we uncovered after pulling the carpet up last weekend. By the end of it, my hands were rubbed raw, fingers were blistered…all in all, while the end result was nice to see, the process of getting there was severely un-fun.

Then, when I was done and Melvin came down to check it out, he said, “next time I’ll dig out my electric sander, and it won’t be that hard on your hands!”

I really think homicide would have been justified at that point. (Un?)fortunately, I didn’t want to see if I could grip anything enough to actually try.

This, incidentally, is why it took until tonight to start tossing posts up on the page again. I haven’t wanted to spend a whole lot of time typing for the past few days! But, I’m back now…woohoo?