On my way to Trust Market, part the backlog

Hi Readers and Lookers,

Two weeks of pictures for you, minus the one time my boss bought me lunch. Enjoy!

**An editorial note: In my layout here, the text looks swell. On the interweb, it looks like ee cummings mauled it. I'm okay with this, but mostly because I'm too sleepy to fix the problem and this blog post is already long overdue.

 I like this building.

 Partially uprooted tree thanks to Irene.

Bricks.

                      I was walking to TM with S.H. and she saw this.
                      I still haven't googled it to see what it's all about.
                      Maybe one of you guys will.

 Trust Market hatch.

                     So, technically this isn't on the way to TM; it's on 

                     the way to another deli I was going to with 

                     awesome co-worker J.R. I liked the many layers of

                     signage. 

              

                     Snapped in about two seconds while waiting for 

                     co-worker B. "R.K.P." R. to pay for his sandwich.

                     I mean, his hoagie. 

          

Window.

Moving Right Along

Hello from my new apartment! Moving is about 95% complete at this point - just a few things left to grab and to do at the old place, and I can relinquish keys for good to the slumlord management company that runs my first Philadelphia apartment. I am very excited about this.

I owe you, dear readers, a week of On my way to Trust Markets. I have been diligently and dutifully taking these pictures, but until today I had no internets over here, which has caused quite a delay. But a nice gentleman from Comcast came to my house between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. today (read: 11:35 am) and I'm all hooked up. Internet withdrawal - begone!

There are some really awesome things about my new apartment, the most important of which is that it is all mine. No roommate/s! In all my years I've never had my own place and I think it is going to be really good. From my bathroom I can hear some traffic noise and my neighbors but in every other room in the apartment it's whisper quiet. Since in theory I'm supposed to be writing a book and a dissertation and a few talks right now, this is the greatest thing ever.

Here is something else wonderful:

Look, it's taken with my laptop iSight camera, and it's a weird picture, to be sure. BUT CHECK OUT THE TREES! From every window in my living room, bedroom, and kitchen I see a whole lot of trees. It's amazing. I know that in the winter all the leaves will be gone and I'll just see a bunch of backyards. But it's sunny and green and pretty to look at now, and the cat is super stoked to finally be able to bird watch again after four years of apartments with crappy views.

The slumlorded place I just left looks like something out of a Jacob Riis photograph. Since one of my dissertation chapters is on Riis, I didn't mind this so much. The front of the building was a looming, imposing Victorian townhouse, but the back - where my apartment was located - was a maze of fire escapes and brick, and you could probably reach into your neighbor's window from your own if you tried. Back in the air shaft - as my housemate called it - every sound reverberated and you couldn't always tell if it was sunny or overcast. You always knew if it was raining, though, because the sound of it pounding down on the metal fire escape maze was deafening.

Before that I lived in a graduate student apartment in another town. It was a ground floor apartment that happened to be right next to the bus stop for the campus shuttle. So there was always a smattering of stressed out graduate students mulling over math problems or whatever and staring into space outside, except staring into space usually meant they were staring into my bedroom and living room. Also, the path of least resistance to a cluster of other apartment buildings entailed walking between the bus stop and my window, so there was always a lot of foot traffic about a half meter from my bed. That combined with the contraband cat in a no pets apartment complex meant that the blinds were always down. It was dark and sad in there - fitting for graduate school, but not good for me or for the cat.

The new place is not perfect - it is small, and it is really going to break the bank for me. It's on one of the Grand Boulevards of Philadelphia which is much less desirable than the cute one-way street the air shaft apartment was on. But I don't even care. I'm glad to be here, and without any further ado I shall resume listening to old episodes of This American Life and unpacking.

On my way to Trust Market, part 5

Oh hi, Internet. It's Trust Market for me all week, because I'm moving on Friday and my whole kitchen is packed up. And so without further ado:

Three things

1. This delightful homebrewed Baahston-accented video is just delightful. I love that accent so much. I could watch this over and over. What is this: eeerrrrrrth fuhruit?
Maaaaaahtians

2. I've just spent the morning going through some uncatalogued photographs from the 1930s, all stacked neatly in boxes just big enough to hold them. And now my hands smell like darkroom. If you've ever worked in one, you know what I'm talking about and you probably love it. If you know what I'm talking about but haven't worked in a darkroom, you probably hate it. I find it so staggering that fixers and developers from almost a century ago can still leave their mark on me. I really love it.

3. My On my way to Trust Market from yesterday, which did not get posted as I accidentally ended up at a dinner party until late. GARGOYLE!

On my way to Trust Market, part 4

Today it was dreary and chilly and rainy. When I left work, it was so dark that the patio lights were on, something I haven't seen in ... well ... many months. I'm already feeling autumn and that's just fine by me. I like me some seasons, and when suddenly everything in sight is pumpkin-flavored.

Anyway, on my way to Trust Market it was pouring and my umbrella broke so I was unable to take a photo without putting my camera in harm's way. BUT I have a backlog of pictures from when I'd started the project but hadn't yet begun blogging the results. So here you go, a walk to Trust Market on a sunny summer's day:

Dogs. Creepy twin stuffed dogs. Staring at YOU!

Look Around You

Look Around You is some sort of brilliant British spoof on those ridiculous educational films we all had to endure in the 1970s and 1980s. Here are links to a few episodes:

Look Around You: Maths

Look Around You: Iron

Anyway, I've had the introduction to these episodes lodnged in my brain - the part in which the narrator calmly repeats "Look Around You" to the bad synthesizer soundtrack - as I spend more and more time wandering around my neighborhood. Note that this wandering is not because I did not pack a lunch, though I can promise you that there will be an On my way to Trust Market post tomorrow. Instead it has been because I am moving in a few weeks, and the real estate company who owns my current apartment has been showing it every other day, and I do not want to be present for this. Thus for an hour or so in the evening I go find something else to do.

Mind you, there is no rule that requires me to be out of the apartment when prospective tenants come by. But I feel it's best for everyone involved. When I moved to Philadelphia last year, I only had a few days to find a place, and there was just not a lot available. I took the best of what I saw, but this apartment has tons of problems. It's very poorly insulated and doesn't get enough sunlight. There are repairs that need to be done that the management company has ignored. I could go on, and I could also point out that the ads for my apartment on Craigslist list the rent as over $200.00 more than what I currently pay, which was already too much for a place that's falling apart. But anyway it's because of this that I don't want to be home when they show the place: I wouldn't have the heart to lie to prospective tenants and tell them the place is great, and I wouldn't have the nerve to be honest in front of the people who still owe me my security and refundable pet deposit. It's a real moral quandry, and so I've opted out of it every time I get a (less than 24 hours notice) message telling me when my apartment will be shown.

Many of these times I have just gone to a friend's place to hang out, or done some work in my office. Today, though, my friends in the neighborhood were not home and I really didn't want to go to work on my day off. And in observance of Labor Day, nobody was laboring and so all the coffee places were closing up when I needed a nice place to sit for an hour. So, I decided to take a walk around town, knowing that I couldn't go too far because I had things to do up the street soon after today's showing.

In large part I was enthusiastic about this wandering. My Trust Market project has made me realize how little of my neighborhood - which itself isn't terribly large - I've actually deeply explored. In particular, that little hobbit door (mentioned in my most recent post below) prompted me to look around me - I have crossed that intersection so many times and never actually managed to notice that door, which is just absurd. I want to know my neighborhood in such a profoundly deep way - the kind of familiarity that allows you to notice when someone has painted their front door a different color, the kind of looking that will end with a mental map of historical site markers, every corner deli, all the good graffiti, quirky architectural details, funny bumper stickers on cars regularly parked on certain blocks. I love Philadelphia so much, and making a point of learning it like this will help me love it all the more.

Today I discovered an Indian restaurant I didn't know about. And I also saw these two wonderful things:

1. A stair railing of decorative lyres

2. The weirdest window décor ever

I mean, what is up with that? It is not a shop window unless it's an unmarked storefront. I even walked around to the block parallel to this to make sure it wasn't a building that went through the block - it isn't. Is there some cultural reference I'm missing - is this a narrative that makes any sense to anyone? And moreover, why would you do this to your front window? And most important: how long has it been four blocks from my house?