The Hyperion Hotel.

Inspired by Allison's post on her apartment building, I decided to write a post on my apartment building, too. Since my building is a former hotel, I will henceforth refer to it as The Hyperion Hotel.

First off, I ended up with less than a day and a half to find an apartment somewhere in LA. Surprisingly, I did so, and with not a small amount of luck - it was the only building that was both priced as advertised and that didn't have, say, hordes of dead roaches in the kitchen when it was shown to me. I turned in a rental application only for this place, then left, not having the foggiest clue what I'd do if I didn't get accepted. Fortunately, I did, because as one will soon discover, The Hyperion is not very selective about their tenants.

So the Hyperion is old. 1920's old, and every once in a while, if the lighting is just right and you're at the perfect angle, you can almost get a glimpse of how awesome it must have been 80+ years ago. The rest of the time, however, the best way to describe it quite frankly is "falling apart." The first clue I had that it was in such a poor state came less than a week after I moved in, at which point the electricity went out. No big deal, right? It happened again, less than a week later, only this time it was only my apartment so I had to call the LA department of water and power and wait while they sent a repairman out to basically hit the electric meter until I got power back. (Literally. I had to show him where the meters were out back, so I watched him do it.) Not two weeks later, the hot water went out, just as I was about to dye my hair, as a previous blog post details.

Then there was the time a housing authority official had to inspect the apartments to make sure that we had working heat, working cold and hot water, and no overcrowding or other "unsuitable living conditions". Fortunately, my apartment seemed to be overlooked, probably because the management could assure her that it was only me in the apartment and I was mechanically inclined enough to not need a government official to help me determine if everything was in working order. However, the upside of someone having apparently reported our building for "unsuitable living conditions" (because I later discovered it's actually not routine for housing inspectors to randomly inspect apartment buildings) was that everything got fixed, fast. Even if it was only the blinds that had broken, I don't think it ever took more than 24 hours for something to get repaired. The downside is that there is near constant construction noise starting promptly at 8 AM, when quiet hours end, but no discernible improvement to the state of the building.

More recently, I found yellow liquid in the bathtub, and assumed my cat had decided to be either very dumb or very smart and decided to pee in there. Upon going to clean it up, however, I discovered that it was not cat urine, but water, tinted yellow from mold, that had somehow dripped into the bathtub. EW. Since then, I have regularly lysoled my bathroom nearly to death.

The Hyperion also has lots of insects. In fact, when Allison visited, she informed me that one particular species of insect was actually a cockroach. Icky. All this time I had thought they were beetles or Junebugs... fortunately, Orion likes to show off his hunting prowess by diligently stalking and killing upwards of 95% of all scurrying insects that venture into my apartment. Cats are good for more than just rodent control! (and I don't doubt for a second that adventurous rodents might have crawled into this place had they not smelled a cat and thought better of it) However, I've had a recent fruitfly infestation - after spending the last two days inexplicably crowding around my bathroom mirror, they've moved to Orion's food and water dishes. I guess they like shiny things?

Last, but most definitely not least, are the tenants. Some of them are OK, like the quiet middle-aged lady with the even quieter 15-year-old German Shepherd rescue, or "Cloud", who literally looks like he walked straight out of the Final Fantasy video games, or The Hipster Couple that lives upstairs on the other side. Others are not so OK. The tenants upstairs seem to entertain themselves by dropping bricks on the ceiling, which cause some of the lightbulbs in my light fixture to flick on and off. Some other tenants seem to be dealing marijuana. Still others have children whom they allow to play with recorders, vuvuzelas, whistles, kazoos, or other such noisemakers after quiet hours. Another constantly leaves things in the hallway.

Then there are the tenants across the hallway-ish. They're the awful ones. They frequently display a blatant disregard for quiet hours, sometimes by blasting obscene music so loudly I can hear it clearly in my room at 3 AM on a weeknight, and other times by having screaming domestic disputes, which are only not reported to the LAPD because the angry person always gets locked out of the apartment until he, or perhaps she, goes and finds a place to sober up and cool down. On top of all that, they got a pit bull puppy that has pooped all over the lobby, and tends to squeak loudly and pathetically at various times. They leave their trash to rot in the recycle bin in the lobby all week, and in general are some of the most abhorrent, awful people that I have ever had the misfortune of sharing a building with.

The worst experience ever living in this building, and the one that made me decide I had to move when my lease was up, was The Gun Incident. One night, as I was lying in bed trying to get to sleep, I heard another loud argument - apparently upstairs or maybe in the lobby? Fortunately, more distant than the hallway outside my room at any rate - and I was tuning it out as normal, when there was running and someone screaming "He's got it!" Within seconds, two shots rang out (from a .22 handgun if I had to guess) and there was more screaming and running. Someone else was actually alarmed enough to call the police to our building, but when they came to investigate, nobody answered their doors. I slept in the bathtub that night, as there was only a thin wooden door between my head and whatever was going on in the hallways outside, and I didn't trust the walls much more. The police ended up in our building at least once more in the following week, further confirming my decision that this was not a good place to live.

The strangest experience, however, happened just last night. I came home from class to find one of my belts hanging from my doorknob. Now, nobody in my building knows me very well, and I don't know if I've ever worn that belt in public, and I didn't think I'd even brought it to LA, and had definitely never possibly left it in the laundry room or anything like that, so I don't have the slightest clue how it escaped my apartment. Nevertheless, it does indeed appear to be the exact same belt that had come with the black skirt that I had bought to wear to my grandfather's funeral. Maybe there are some supernatural tenants living here, after all...

Hair.

I'm generally not a girly kind of girl, but I do a lot of things with my hair. And when I say "a lot", I'm really not kidding: it has, at some point or another, literally been every color of the rainbow (or at least parts of it have been) except white and every length between almost 3 feet and just over 3 inches.

So, when I moved to LA, I had what was then a pretty normal, somewhere-between-chin-and-shoulders, some-color-between-red-and-blonde style going on. Then on one bright, sunny, probably near-100-degree day, I decided to go hiking in Griffith Park. If you've been reading this blog, you know that the phrase "Griffith Park" should be prefaced by the word "misadventure", and if you know me very well, you probably also know that I'm not the most coordinated person in the world. I ended up hitting my head on a tree, and of course it was a pine tree with a big bit of sticky sap on it.

I turned to Google: since pine sap apparently cannot be easily removed with shampoo, and since I'm the type of person to choose the quickest, easiest, and most importantly, simplest (see: Murphy's Law) option available to me, I decided that the best course of action would be to cut it out. The only problem was that I didn't have money for a professional hairdresser, but I had scissors, right?

I ended up cutting the sap glob out of my hair, which left an awkward chunk on the side, so I chopped the rest of it off to match. This resulted in my hair being very short, and for a few days after I cut it, looking very much like it had been blindly attacked with scissors. But, as my hair does, it managed to look cute after a couple weeks - in fact, the girl working at the $4000-sparkly-purse-store (right around the corner from the $284,000-handcrafted-from-unicorn-horn-watch-store) was the one who used the word "cute".

Since I can't leave my hair alone for more than a month, I decided to dye it red again. I went down to the drugstore to pick out a shade of red that hopefully wouldn't fade out in two weeks' time. As fate would have it, the L'Oreal Feria "Power reds" was on sale and I had a coupon! I bought it, figuring that it looked like the best candidate for "not fading out".

So I mixed up the dye and put it on. Now, I've never actually tried to dye my hair with blood before, but if I was to ever become a serial killer and decide that would be a fun idea, putting this dye on was exactly what I imagine dying my hair with blood would be like. Not only was it the right shade of dark, opaque red, but there was some sort of exothermic reaction going on that made it warm, and I was wearing some of those blue nitrile gloves that I had swiped from a lab. The only thing that was off was that of all the colors that bloodstains can be, bright pink isn't quite one of them, although salmon, grey, brown, and even a kind of greenish shade are possibilities.

If you've dyed hair before, you probably have read the part where it says to put the dye on unwashed hair. In the excitement, I had entirely forgotten that the reason my hair was unwashed was because when I tried to turn the shower on earlier, there hadn't been any hot water. So, when it was time to wash the dye out and I turned on the shower again, I suddenly realized that what I had just done was probably not a smart idea. As it turned out, there had been a maintenance person desperately trying to fix the problem all day, and with no success, but I figured if he'd been at it all day, he'd have to be close to fixing it, right? An hour later, still no hot water, and it's been in for WAY too long, so I decide to suck it up and rinse it out in the freezing cold shower. Cold water, aside from being painfully unpleasant to shower in, also happens to cause dyes and stains to set into things, whereas hot water usually makes them fade.

So, after leaving the dye in for 3x as long as I should have and rinsing it out in a way that made it brighter, what the box described as "auburn" turned out to be something on the border of "blood red" and "magenta".


(imagine this in the sunlight, so it's more intense and more magenta-ish)

Despite this incident, there was one awesome thing that happened: I was riding a bus, and sitting across me was an adorable, rather flamboyant teenager with blue hair. When the person sitting next to me got off the bus, he got up and sat down next to me. We didn't need to say anything like "nice hair" - we just looked at each other, and smiled, and went back to listening to our respective mp3 players and happily being different than everyone else on the bus.

So guess what I'm going to do over winter break, since I'll have weeks for it to fade back to a work-acceptable color?

I'M GOING TO DO IT AGAIN! Only, with warm water this time...

Things I will buy when I have a job.

I've been very busy lately, mostly applying at 20+ places, which so far have resulted in one interview and zero jobs. But, when I do get a job, here's what I'll buy, in no particular order:



Another warm, fuzzy blanket.

A small couch or love seat, because right now I just have a blanket and an extra pillow on the floor against the laundry hampers. If I were ever to get most of my laundry done at once, it would present a problem.

A TV stand, as mine is currently on the floor

A second set of color-coordinated towels.

Pierogies, even though I might have to buy them at Whole Foods.

At least one outfit that doesn't make me look entirely clueless about fashion.

A membership to the San Diego Zoo.

Bus tickets to San Diego, of course.

Christmas presents for my cousins and parents.

Nicer Christmas presents for my siblings.

Some sort of shelf thing to store my dishes or silverware (which are on an out-of-the-way corner of the floor).

A table for my microwave, which is in the same place as everything else in my apartment (ie, the floor).

Warm socks.

Combat boots.

A coffee table or end table, because who wants to guess where I put my dishes when I eat?

A DVD player.

Books.

CHOCOLATE!

Orville:

[unfortunately, the 3G on my phone appears to be broken, and so I cannot post a photo of him. He is an adorable orange-and-white cat that likes to stand or lie on people's shoulders, even while they're walking around a room.]

Well, I won't be buying him, but I will be paying the pet deposit, buying his food and dishes, his litterbox and litter, his bed or carrier, and his toys.