New Furniture 2

Today I scored a free dining room table, four dining room chairs, two loveseats, with one extending into a bed, and a reclining chair. And later, in the same day, someone offered to deliver me a free Lazyboy chair. I don't know what this is, October 22nd, the Day of Furniture I guess. The unit's going to be crowded, but everything being offered is better than what I currently own, and it's so against my nature to reject opportunities of great value.

I have a roommate for next month. An acquaintance from Conestoga's Social Service Worker program, same as me, but he was from a different year, So now I've got his furniture moving in as well as all the new furniture I just got.

It was kind of fun doing tours of my unit. I've been in the position where I was looking for a place to live inside the second half of the month with no fallback solution twice before, and I gotta say, it's a lot more comfortable being the one offering a space in their home, than it is to be the one hoping to find a space in someone else's home.

Everyone else is like "Please, I need a place ASAP, or I won't have anywhere next month" while I'm all "I need someone by next month, or I won't have a place to stay... in four months."

Okay, it's a little depressing because I can relate with some of the people that I need to reject, but it's still nice to see the challenge present, without addressing itself to me.

I moved into the large room. My first set of roommates were a couple, so even though I found the unit, and even though I was the largest, I got put in the small room. At my interrim sublet place, my roommates called dibs on the larger rooms and I got put in the small room just the same, since I was away for the Extend-a-Family Summer Program Overnight Program when they found the spot. In my current place, after my roommates moved out, I was planning on subletting to an elderly woman in the community, which would have required me to give her the larger room out of respect, but  that didn't work out because of lease agreement technicalities, and then after that another couple, but that didn't pan out either. When things turned into me trying to sell the room without leads, I realized it was ridiculous that I was still sleeping in the small room despite having been the only person in the unit for a month and a half. So now I'm in the larger room and I feel like a king. I haven't had such a nice room since I was in highschool.

I still need a coffee table for the living room... And I guess kind of a coffee table for my room. And I need two more paintings of faces in the landing between floors. I have a painting of an elderly Native Canadian man, and a painting of a young African female. I want two more belonging to different demographics so that I've got a hallway of faces.

My old roommate once knocked in his bedroom because he'd locked himself out of it. By the time that I am currently occupying this room, the hole in the door is still a reminder of times past. It was my most difficult explanation for tours of the unit. I found a Bob Marley poster from my old roommates, and wondered what was more acceptable, having a suspicious large hole in your bedroom door, or being a Bob Marley fan.  Despite Marley's popularity, I decided to hold off my poster in favour of something a bit more generic.

Remember how I made a big deal out of curtains? How I'd accidentally bought a set that advertised their patterned side, but had a light pink underbelly and were too short for the living room windows to boot?And I had to buy a complete new set for the living room because of this. Well, because the larger bedroom has posts to attach the curtain rod to, it invites curtains to be hung, while the smaller room only has a few bent-up nails in which you can place a curtain rod, but the metal rungs of a curtain will be incompatible. My solution when living in the small room was to sling an elephant-patterned sheet over the curtain rod set by the pair of upturned nails. In the larger room this wasn't an option, so I wound up using those detestable curtains.

I had the choice of setting the curtains so their desirable, advertised side faced me inside the room or alternatively to the rest of the world. I got to choose who would be subjected to the nauseating, Pepto Bismal colour. Would I choose to prioritize how I saw myself, or how the world saw me? It was quite a poetic conflict.

In the end, I chose to set the cool-looking pattern to face inside the room, and the Pepto Bismal to face outwardly. Quite like a Social Service Worker, to take care of what is happening internally as the first place to look