Apartment Hunting Follies for the Unemployable and the Ludicrously Hairy

I'm considering going to Grad School, or at least lying about being a Grad Student so that landlords with the quiet apartments with washing machines will rent to me. I never thought of The Graduate Student as a pillar of respectability the way the Davis landlord does. When my thoughts turn to grad school, as it has been lately, it is out of a pit of desperation that these thoughts arise. I assume that actual grad students were similarly just one breakdown shy of sticking their heads in the oven but applied to a grad school instead-- unstable types-- not someone you want inhabiting your precious, cheap clapboard tinderbox Davis duplex. And yet, the hushed, reverential tone so obvious even in Craigslist ads with the "ideal for grad students and researchers" specification conjurs an image of a monkish figure, working in religious silence by the flickering light of an oil lamp. His face is beautiful and saintly, the ecstasy and the agony of his studies giving him strength of purpose and a strange glow from within like Charleton Heston in a biblical epic.


The rental offerings available to a couple comprised of one undergraduate and one unemployed whatever-I-am are predictably nonexistent. I keep thinking of that fable about the grasshopper who frittered away the summer with enjoyable frolicking while the ants spent every free moment storing food away for the winter. Then the ants get the satisfaction of saying " I told you so" as the grasshopper shivers in the cold of the winter, not a crumb to be found. Whatever. I hate that fable.

Tonight, in response to a craigslist ad for a pretty ideal sounding apartment, I unwittingly called a distant relation who I forgot rented properties in Davis. When she realized to whom she was speaking, she expressed some reluctance to show me the apartment for several reasons, the biggest one being my "heavily bearded" boyfriend might clog up the plumbing. As a concession, she suggested that he might wash his hair in some kind of laundry basin out back. I can't help but think that this conversation could have been avoided, if only I had a masters degree.