Welcome to My Apartment

Today was a mercifully unbusy day. After a couple hours in the office, I realized I could do the rest of my work from home. I'm not used to being home on the afternoons, especially on weekdays. It's pleasant.

I've waited all year to find out what shapes the sunlight makes on the floor of our living room. My last apartment had two windows, both facing north/south. It was dark all the time, and I didn't realize until I moved here how claustrophobic I'd been for the previous year at my old place. Oh well, at least it yielded this.

My old place smelled really bad, and the fire alarm went off every time I used the oven. Actually the fire alarm goes off all the time here too, but at least it smells good. I didn't even know what it was like to have an air freshener budget before I lived there.

The light lines are gone now, and to suggest that they'll be back tomorrow is to suggest that light is recycled. That's just strange. On Sunday night I was watching the Discovery Channel, something about black holes and the universe. I didn't know that at the center of our galaxy is a supermassive black hole. I also didn't know that the "singularity" at the very center of a black hole is actually just a euphemism for "fuck if I know," but there you go. Apparently our universe may just be the other side of a black hole.

Muse had a song called "Supermassive Black Hole" on their album Black Holes and Revelations. The album after that, The Resistance, I didn't really like that much, so now it just sits on the strange shelving unit that houses our cds, dvds, records, and books. You can see it right there by the record player, which is currently playing Sunny Day Real Estate's debut album Diary. This album had a huge influence on me growing up. Apparently it had a huge influence on a lot of people.

The album art alone is worth your time. It's got several paintings of those old Fisher Price toys, but in real awful situations. I bought this at Avalon on Sunday before going home to watch the Discovery Channel. Outside of their doors they had a free records bin, where I picked up an old swing record, a "Movie Themes of the 30's, 40's and 50's" record, and a classical record. As much fun as I have buying music by my favorite bands on a medium that by all rights shouldn't still exist (though I'm so glad it does), picking up these strange castaways is always one of the most exciting things.

Of course, my record collection began by rescuing castaways. About half of my current collection first showed up sometime in 2002. A friend of a roommate was going overseas, and he gave them to the roommate as sort of a permanent loan. The record player we had at the time was ancient and nothing sounded particularly good, but we felt pretty cool to have a record player.

You can kind of see it in this picture, taken after an epic cleaning session in 2003. The records are mostly obscured by the green plastic picnic table, which my roommates had fished out of one of the local lakes sometime in the year prior. We left it out on our front lawn for a while, but then decided it was a perfect bench for drinking games and moved it inside.

That was a great place to live. My roommates were messy, left dishes everywhere, and they took naps in the living room in the middle of the day, but at least that place didn't smell bad.