Witty jokes; weird tag bar on top

(No seriously I am not at all liking this line of tags running under “Whitey in Beijing.” For anyone unfamiliar with the China Match, my increasingly-inaccurately-named blog didn’t have that tag-navigation feature before, probably for the simple reason that it is hideous and now I can’t make it leave. Five minutes ago, I updated my theme to its newest version — which itself is 510 days old, apparently. This was a mistake. That’s what I get for trying to make my return to blogging coincide with a sleek new graphical update on my WordPress theme. Serves me right.)

Anyway, as you might have already surmised I’m not actually in China for this one. Or even anywhere in not-America, which has pretty much been my only blogging rule so far. Unless you count Cage-Match-related posts, or those posts I put up between China trips, but nobody read those anyway because they were mainly babbling about like, the viability of finding a homestay program in New Jersey. They’re best forgotten, let’s be honest.

About the most I can say in defense of my California bloggin’ is that it’s happening while I live in a place that I usually do not live, with the bonus that I don’t really have any friends yet, so I rarely have pesky “things” to “do” that could interfere with my demanding reclusive blogging schedule. Not that I’d have time to see my friends even if I had any, because my job is crazy — more on that later — but hey.

I guess two hundred and fiftyish words into this post is a good a time as any to mention that I’m living in Berkeley now, working at an investment bank called Pacific Crest Securities down in San Francisco proper. At least until September, when my internship ends, I’ll nominally be blogging about the weird shit I encounter in the Bay Area, which is assuredly in no short supply. I might talk about my job a little but I signed somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-seven confidentiality forms saying that ‘I won’t talk about my job, ever at all to anyone for any reason’ so I’ll have to keep that pretty limited. It’d be boring anyway. Today we’re going to talk about how terrible I am at finding lodging for myself.

Because good god. I am bad. I am so bad at it.
I didn’t even know that that was a thing that people could be bad at, but then I saw what I selected for myself. And was actually going to have to live there, but for the grace of an older brother who a) can recognize what a crackhouse looks like before I signed the lease that makes me live next to one for several months and b) lives in San Francisco with his girlfriend, who permitted me to crash in her spare room for several weeks.

“Live in Oakland,” they said. “The commute will be fast,” they said. They didn’t mention that in many parts of Oakland, unless you are consuming liquor, drugs, or religious services, there isn’t much of interest. The Craigslist ad certainly didn’t make a note of that. So yeah, I moved out into the home of the first random Craigslist person who responded to me, and moved all my crap into this weird house that was adjacent to two vacant lots and what was later revealed to be a crackhouse, without a second thought. Thankfully I was at least smart enough to not sign a lease or pay the landlord any money until he fixed my door (it wouldn’t close), which didn’t happen in the four days it took from when I moved my shit in to when I was actually slotted to begin living there.

The day I was going to sign said lease and begin inhabiting this place, Connor and my family came by with the rest of my stuff and saw the place for the first time, whereupon Connor observed that the house I was living next to had all its windows covered up, had a permanent lookout on the porch, had a TON of people coming and going, and oh-look-at-those-nice-men-having-a-meeting-in-their-car-and-exchanging-stacks-of-twenties-oh wait that’s a drug deal happening right in front of your new residence, isn’t that nice.

So I bailed on the lease and retreated back to Connor’s house, at which point I sent out another batch of Craigslist ads, and again responded to the first one who got back to me, and am now living in a place that periodically loses power and also has no kitchen. It’s basically a dorm. Which makes sense, considering that I’m like a block from UC Berkeley.
Aside from that though, I’m loving Berkeley and my part of it specifically. I’m at shattock and university, for anyone who may be in the area and wants to steal all my shit. My job keeps me busy and things are starting to settle into what’s approaching a routine, wherein 7:30am – 9:30pm is spent either working or in the process of getting to or from work. I never said it was a great routine. But I kinda signed up for it when I decided to take an internship in banking.
Again, more on that later, I think I’m off to bed. After I iron my shirt for work tomorrow. Christ, it’s like I’m a real person or something. Thankfully I can hear drunken Berkeley students shouting about something outside my window and it’s making me more nostalgic than angry; that’s a good sign, yeah?

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