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?
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