Goodbye, Old Friends

[robotech_master]

Not you lot, but these shoes.

I don't remember exactly when my brother got them for me. Might have been right when I started my last job; might have been a year or so in. Maybe it was at Christmas, or my birthday. Anyway, up to that point I'd been buying cheap sneakers, wearing them a few months until they ran out, then buying more. (After all, Billy Joel said it was better than wasting my money on a good set of speakers.) My brother blew about $100 on this pair of Rockport work shoes as a present for me, and...wow. Did they ever last.

It rather reminds me of the "Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness," as explicated in Terry Pratchett's Men at Arms:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

Yeah, that's about the size of it. Anyway, my other brother and I went shopping for some clothes for me as I get ready to start my new job on Thursday, and along  the way we found me a very nice pair of Doc Martens on sale for just under $60, clearance price. I'm wearing them now. There are the occasional little new-shoe kinks, but those should iron themselves out; on the whole, they are totally hugging my feet.

So now it's time to get rid of these old shoes. As you can see, I pretty much wore them to bits. This is the longest time I've ever owned a pair of shoes, I think, and after all this time it almost feels like I should be giving them some kind of funeral.

In other news…yeah, I'm starting a new job Thursday, doing technical writing for a firm in downtown Indianapolis, just a block or so southeast of the Circle and only a few blocks from the convention center where they hold GenCon every year. I'm really excited about this. It's right up my alley, the salary is amazing, and it's going to be a great place to work. This also means it's time to find an apartment downtown. ("What is so great about sleeping downtown?" you ask, Rosanne Cash? Not having to ride the bus a whole hour in and another hour back, on top of riding my bike another half hour to get to and from the bus stop, that's what!)

The problem is, literally all the apartments in my price range anywhere near downtown are run by this one particular property holding company that gets terrible reviews on Yelp, Google, and InsiderPages. (It gets some great ones, too, but the terrible ones are common enough and consistent enough to give me pause.) The apartments all look nice enough on Rent.com, with hardwood floors and old fixtures, but there are enough horror stories to make me wonder if I really want to go anywhere near them. I'm going up to look at some of them tomorrow anyway. Thing is, what choice do I have? I'm on a bike. If I don't want to have to rely on the bus constantly, I want to be somewhere near where I'm working. Maybe I should up my price range a little, but my brother thinks it would be a good idea for me to stick with cheap and save up a few months' worth of back rent given that it's technically a contract job and could be terminated at any time.

And even if I do find a place I like, generally these places run a credit check (hello, umpteen zillion bucks of student loans I haven't always been the best at getting paid on time), renter history check (no problem there; rented my last place for ten years...unless, of course, the new landlords who took it over blame me for the entirely crappy condition it got into by the time I left because the old landlord couldn't be bothered to maintain it), and require you to have been in your present job for over a year. Otherwise, you need a co-signer. I don't think my folks or brother realized that when they invited me to move out here, into one of my brother's guest rooms. I want to be out of my brother's hair and living alone downtown as soon as I might, but I'm going to feel pretty awkward asking him to co-sign a lease for me.

So, anyway, got me some butterflies.