Procrastination Techniques for the Modern, Internet-Savvy* Landlord: A Page-A-Day Calendar

*Don't worry, sir or madam, all we mean is that you claim to use email.

My most recent tenant-landlord interaction went something like this:

Subject line: "[Address] windows, again," which was supposed to simply be a factual statement, not a whiny complaint implying the landlord ignored the last window request, but a title that reflected the fact that I have new issues with my windows.

Politely and clearly worded, lengthier than this: dear landlord, would you please put my screen that fell out by itself back in, and look at the window that is now cracked, and remove the one storm window that didn't get pulled out of the way. Also, you should know that a faucet is dripping and costing you money, ditto the fridge door that doesn't seal all the way.

Three days later (ah, the convenience of instant, electronic mail), I learned that my landlord's computer had been down the last few days, but he'd come in the next two. Those days have come and gone, and my screen's still rattling around in my window.

In April, I emailed about having the storm windows removed, and over a week later learned that he'd "missed my email a week ago" but had recently "caught it." The email before that, I waited over two weeks (admittedly far too long) for a reply, before sending it again with the suggestion that he hadn't received the first one. Oh no, he hadn't! He'd send someone right over (didn't) to remove the old mattress and box frame that had been completely blocking the stairs of our fire escape.

Today, I started to think about this. Maybe he has a stack of ready-made excuses, and he keeps using the same one on everyone until one tenant contacts him/complains more than once, at which point he moves on to the next excuse in the stack for their benefit. Or when enough time has passed, say a week, a week and a half, he moves on to a new one regardless.

I admit, this may overestimate his organizational aptitude. And it's not like the explanations are totally random—many are season-appropriate. There was the time his workers couldn't get to measuring our windows for storms in December, because they were busy shoveling snow at all the properties. All day. (Our driveway remained completely iced-over for most of the winter, complete with a two- or three-inch thick slide of ice down cement steps to a basement door.) Or there's the time the entire first floor of his giant, old, mansion of a house flooded, destroying much of what he owned. That connected to actual weather conditions.

Okay, I believe that one. I probably believe them all. Or most of them. But I like the idea of a weekly calendar, with one or two suggestions per week for why you couldn't get to that email. Or why your team can't make it out to this property promptly. They're seasonal, they're varied, they're hard to argue with. A great way for the busy landlord to buy time in this ever-more-hectic world.

Death to the Unannounced Hiatus!

Some truths about blogging, or not blogging:

1. Mainly it's a combination of procrastination and laziness. Either you procrastinate something more important (homework and the like) by writing a satisfying blog post, or you are too lazy and/or too lacking in things that really merit procrastination, so you procrastinate the blog post, until it's too old to be relevant to anyone, until the flow of thoughts in your mind has gone stale, until you don't remember you used to be a blogger of sorts, even though it was, at times, one of your proudest accomplishments.
2. Working instead of going to school is actually way more exhausting. Who has time to think? Who needs to spend all their time on the computer when they're not not-doing homework?
3. Blogs these days require photos. My life needs photos. Hooking up my camera to my computer is a pain. My computer is too old and wants to go die. Everything is slow. No photos, no good blog posts, no blog.
4. It is embarrassing, or at least difficult and somewhat humbling, to return to something—a friendship, a hobby, a blog—after a lapse of months or years. Going from nothing to something is the biggest jump.
5. Lists are a great way to deal with awkwardness.
6. Blog blog blog this word has been written too many times in this blog post and is thereby unmasked as being completely ridiculous.

Some truths about what I have just written:

1. "Truths" as opposed to "facts" or "thoughts" is kind of horrible. Truth as a plural is a problem.
2. Number three of list one is a terrible excuse.
3. This is me, committing to being back. 
4. That (number three of list two) is me refusing to declare that I am back in the blogosphere. Oh hey, Firefox's spellcheck refuses to condone my saying that. It also tells me it's "spellchecker." Whatever, spellcheck.

So here's to this blog! Existing!

xoxo, the Lover-Cats

Emma just walked into my room to tell me, "If my cats weren't already in love, they'd be falling in love right now." They were staring into each other's eyes from across the room. Last night, the kitties decided to symbolize their love with a live sculpture.

Happy Valentine's Day!

While they slept on my bed curled up in a heart (huge Haroun making up well over half of it), the sky decided to end the delightfully over-thirty-degrees day with a splendid sunset. And after six o'clock!

It was the end of my Valentine's Day weekend—my valentine had already taken the train home and was watching the sun set over the rooftops of Detroit. Saturday was our six month anniversary, so we combined it with Valentine's Day and enjoyed a burger (me)/ribs (him) at Grizzly Peak, followed by The Illusionist at the State Theater. It was a good day, reflecting a good six months, even if I spent "five hours" "getting dressed"—the graduation/housewarming/New Year's dress I've been sewing didn't make the deadline for Valentine's Day either, so I had to go through all my old, boring clothes to find something acceptable to wear.

This morning, Emma and I are celebrating with donuts, and I bought some sunflowers to brighten up our wonderfully clean apartment. I had a productive Sunday evening, though I made no progress on my current translation project. Maybe I'll make some now. Or cuddle with the lover-cats.

Read Selam Berlin auf Englisch in Canon Translation Review

January 28th was a momentous day in my life: it was the first time something I translated was published! Lucky for you, ever-so-wide blog-audience, the publication is online and waiting for your excited eyes to peruse it.

Parked in Kreuzberg, Berlin, August 2009; featured on Canon's homepage with my translation.
 
It's the first issue of a new translation review, Canon, which is put out by the Undergraduate Comparative Literature Association at the University of Michigan. My final academic year, 2009-2010, was designated the "Year of Translation" by the comparative literature department. (Hilariously, this year is the "Year of Comparison." Shouldn't that be every year? I mean, that goes for both, but what's comp lit without the comp-ing? I always make jokes about comp-ing, and I always laugh inside.) Anyway, to go along with the Year of  Translation and to take a step closer to having an actual translation curriculum, the comp lit department started a translation workshop course for undergraduate students to be offered each semester. And I took it. And I translated part of a novel. And then I was one of the undergraduates invited to apply (thanks, Editor-in-Chief Megan!) to U of M's 4th Biannual Graduate Student Translation Conference, and so my translation benefited from further workshopping. (And because I'm someone who answers her emails, and likes to be righteous about standardized American spelling practices and comma placement, sometime during the summer I became an editor of Canon Translation Review.)

It's full of great things. You can read a little about them all here, in the letter from the editors, but then you need to read the translations. There's modern and there's old. French, Spanish, Ancient Greek, Czech. But now, conveniently just for you, all in English!

There's German, of course. Yadé Kara's Selam Berlin, translated by moi. You should read it. I don't know if this is more convincing but I'll try:

Selam Berlin is a novel about being Turkish and German. It's a novel about the Wende—the turning point—when the Berlin Wall fell, two halves of a city and a country came back together, and one half of a family learns another half exists. It's about a nineteen-year-old who feels himself very much a Turkish-German and not a Turk living in Germany. It's about becoming an adult as the Wall is reduced to a remembered shadow, as secrets and realizations come to light in the aftermath of the Peaceful Revolution. This bildungsroman by the Turkish-German author Yadé Kara was published in 2003 and won the German Book Prize for best debut in 2004. No complete English translation has been published, although the first chapter was published in English in the November 2009 issue of Words Without Borders in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall on November 9th of the same year. Although Selam Berlin takes place after the Wall has been opened, the novel shows how dramatically the division of the city affected its residents’ lives—in particular, the lives of Hasan and his family. There are not many long passages that represent the book by themselves. The first chapter is one, but it had already been translated, and the last chapter is powerful, but not standing alone, so I tried to include a series of scenes that wouldn’t be too confusing out of context. They survey Hasan’s reactions to life in post-Wall Berlin and carry the reader through the city streets.

So there you go. You want to read it. Do it.

I made this to go along with the translation—I didn't want footnotes to interrupt the enjoyment of the story, but I wanted to provide some supplemental information. So, here you go.

1994 Honda Accord

Last night I took the train home. It was the first time I’d been on a train in over a year; I’ve only traveled by rail twice since I came home from Europe two Augusts ago. Last time, it was to avoid driving. This time, it’s because I can’t drive.

I’d grown used to commuting between Ann Arbor and Metro Detroit. The first summer I lived away from home, when I had just turned twenty, I had my dad’s old car, which was my mom’s old car, and which they really didn’t need because there were three cars in the driveway, and three licensed drivers at home, and no jobs to drive to. So I took one car, and as my year in Germany came closer, I drove home from school almost every weekend. I memorized the order of the landmarks on I-94, had my litany of sights to fight the boredom.

At the end of sophomore year, I moved myself out of my dorm room. I assured my parents I didn’t need their help—the couch and the bike and the mini-fridge went to the house we took occupancy of on the first of May, and everything else I crammed into the car and kept there until I could drive it back to Ann Arbor again for the summer. There was only room for one person, me.

When I returned to Ann Arbor after a year of Straßenbahnen and train stations, I had the car again. Six people in our house, three guys, three girls who had cars. My brother used the car too, when he could be bothered to walk down the hill to our house.

This summer, last summer, the summer I broke my vow to never return home to my parents—it’s probably when the car became mine. I’d always been careful to refer to it as “the car,” “the Accord” to my parents, because it belonged to them. They paid the insurance, I shared it with my brother. But last summer, he stayed in Ann Arbor, and I took the car home, and then I drove the car to Ann Arbor most weekends. I moved away and so did my friends. Those who were staying on another year made escape plans for the summer; those who had been in and around Detroit moved away again.

The car, my car, the poor thing had been noisy, embarrassing-noisy, since I got back from Germany. The CD player rebelled for the last time and fell silent. The air conditioning hadn’t worked in years. But the car and I braved the hot sun of Friday afternoons on the expressway so we could be in town by the time someone was getting out of work. My driving code of summer 2008—set cruise at sixty-five, save gas, save the environment—did not hold. Gas prices were no longer above four dollars. I wasn’t going home to my parents and my pets, who are always there and never really seem to change. I was sweating, and I was impatient for the weekend, eager to say hello again after the week away.

The trunk accumulated a collection of things: my snow boots had been stored in the very back, with the jumper cables and some rags, since winter had finally left us sometime in March. That summer we played tennis once, and after that I kept the rackets and tube of tennis balls there, always prepared to submit to further embarrassment. Later, there were backup champagne flutes from my apartment in case the New Year’s party grew larger than anticipated, my black figure skates so I wouldn’t have to rent strange skates if we ever made it to the ice rink downtown.

Come fall, I moved back to Ann Arbor, but he moved back to Detroit. The commute couldn’t end. I had to work at least one weekend shift, so I worked Fridays, late, getting home from work and showering and packing and getting in the car around 12:30, sometimes 1 am. I’d head home again late on Sundays, early on Mondays. Sometimes earlier on Sundays, because I’d picked up an extra shift. A few times, overcome by stress or uncertainty or hormones, I cried in that car half the way home. And over the weeks, the months, my old list of the sights along the way had faded away. Now I played an estimating game, especially on those tense Friday night drives when all I wanted was to be in bed.

On the road to the expressway: forty-five minutes. Maybe fifty. Maybe fifty-five. Took the last of the stressful bends near Ypsilanti; heading straight, soon to pass 275. Five minutes to the airport. No, less. Airport. Twenty minutes left. City limits. Ten, fifteen? Less.

Turning the last corner onto his street. Yup, forty-five minutes. It took forty-five minutes almost every time. I’d joke that I was so tired, that it might not be safe, that I might fall asleep. I had a seven-hour shift, all standing, before the drive on Friday nights. He didn’t think that was funny. It wasn’t.

Every time we left his apartment, I’d check to see that the car was still parked there on his street. Without the car, how would we continue? But it never disappeared. The windows never got broken. It was fine, my old crappy car with the escalating rust but still only 153,000 miles. Forty-seven thousand to go, I thought. Two hundred thousand until a Japanese engine should meet its end. Still, my parents hesitated every time it needed something fixed. We didn’t want to throw money at a lost cause. There hadn’t been collision insurance on it in years, and still my dad spent more on it than I approved of. We even fixed the slow oil leak. Got the leaking tires fixed. One of them had had a nail in it, but it never leaked enough to give it away, never endangered me.

I felt safer in that car than in any other car. It had such a solid steering wheel, it was comfortable to drive unlike my parents’ newer Honda Fit with the super-sensitive steering and the bump bump bump on the highway, and it wasn’t a monster like the minivan. I had come to like the “champagne” goldy color that I found bland and ugly when my parents bought the car from my aunt about ten years ago. But it was old, built before antilock brakes had become a standard feature. If only she’d splurged on ABS instead of the CD player. In the back of my mind, I worried about this. When I braked at stop signs between home and campus last year, the car would swerve in the unplowed snow. But nothing worse.

Then last week, there was some stupid ice in Ypsilanti just before exit 183—six miles, I had six miles more to drive on that expressway before I was safe and home and on my way to work—and I lost control, and the car was crippled, and we zoomed across three lanes of traffic and down the ditch and into a tree, but thankfully not into the water beyond the tree. The car, that trusty car I drove to Kalamazoo and Muskegon and Port Austin and Athens, OH, and back and forth between my various homes; that carried my mother on her forty-five-minute commute four days a week for years; that was an unspoken gift freely given without constraints, that had become a part of who I was—it got my dad eighty dollars for scrap.

I know that the important thing is that I’m safe, and I didn’t hit anyone, and all five cars that skid on that ice and went off the road kept their passengers intact as well, but it’s too scary to think about what could have happened during that terrifying moment that brought to life almost every nightmare I can remember, that horrible blur where the steering wheel didn’t work and I was speeding across all the lanes. Instead I think about how much more broke I am now. I’m broke, without the freedom of movement I’d grown used to. If I had any money to shop with, places to go besides visiting friends in far-off places, I’d feel this more acutely. It would be like a phantom pain, an itch to go downstairs and turn the key in the lock, unlock the steering wheel, start the car, back out the treacherous driveway and turn right on Liberty.

Instead, I have to try to take the train to Detroit some weekends. The 11:30 pm train that comes from Chicago, and two nights in a row this week arrived over three hours late. I didn’t take that train. But I took the other one home last night, and my roommate picked me up at the station. Life continues.

Trip to the beach, August 2006.

A year and a day after losing my car: here. Now I only have a bike, and my boyfriend's car.

Reasons My Roommate Needs a Serious Boyfriend

For one, she wants a good excuse to skip Thanksgiving and/or Christmas with her family this year.

Two.

What's going on here?

Why is there the lid to an IKEA 365+ pan duct-taped to our kitchen wall? (Besides that it actually looks kind of cool.)

Oh, right. It's Michigan, it's mid-January, there are huge beetle-things in our apartment. Why not. (That's a wooden kitchen match next to its delicately-patterned body.)

Anyway. The point is, taping kitchen instruments to the wall isn't the normal way to deal with unwelcome creatures, and that's why Emma needs a live-in boyfriend.

(At least in the Krankenhaus it was summer and all the bugs made sense.)