serinde

I'm not ready to talk, or think, about Grandma just yet so I've been looking at apartments again. This is twitchy enough to make me start down other avoidance behavior roads, but I'm keeping mostly en point.

(0. For various reasons, I'm only looking in Manhattan at the moment. I would be happy to look 'round Astoria, would love lots of Brooklyn, but for this starting-off point I need to be able to get to Jersey with greater ease. Yes, Your Neighborhood Is Awesome but I've given this a lot of thought and these are my current parameters.)

1. I'm in an interesting budget place where I can afford a 1 or, depending, even 2 BR place in Inwood, Wash. Hts., Harlem, and East Harlem, or a studio on the UES, but nothing anywhere else. The more I turned over

missionista's suggestion of taking a cute, well-situated "jewel box" for the first year, the more I liked it; but the fact is that my budget limit doesn't get me anything central. I nudged up the top range a tiny bit, and that opened up a few studios on the far edges of Midtown, but most of those listings look like they might be bullshit.

1a. Inwood/Wash Hts. is too much of a pain to get to work, so I'm disinclined. Harlem is a bit better, but having taken the crosstown bus at rush hour a few times I don't know how

spride and the various other colleagues do it every day without going postal. East Harlem is dead easy to get to work, no harder to get to Penn than, well, what I do every evening, and it has the interest of being one of the few neighborhoods left in Manhattan that's actually still a neighborhood; but parts of it are still sort of run-down and I don't know what it's really like behind closed doors and it might be hard to get anything that's not Hispanic food/groceries, which though I want to explore that cuisine I need a bit more variety to hand. (I also have to find out where they were putting up the giant Target and avoid that spot like the goddamn plague.) And, then, the UES. I really enjoyed walking around it before I started going to the gym, particularly the norther-easter bits, which is what I can best afford; it's quiet, and tree-ful, and there are lots of little neighborhood Things--but it is so goddamn far from anything but the 6, and it's even a hike to that. East Harlem you can at least pop over a couple blocks and grab a red train of choice.

1b. I realize I was in error for not carving out more time in the fall to go walkabout. Walking in the winter tells you diddley-squat. There's a farmer's market nearby, supposedly, but does it suck? Is it a neighborhood where people sit out on their stoops in the evening, or one where there are stereos blasting on the street all summer long? Etc.

2. I suspect that nycdirectrentals.com is a scam. They have sample listings on their web site, which look quite good, and say if you pay their fee you can search their other listings for 6 months. There are legit sites like this, which Real Estate Maven John told me about when

dariodevil was trying to get an apartment (only the sites he mentioned were of course in NJ); but this one, I paid my money and could see nothing additional whatsoever--you get sent back to the same listings anyone can see. Now, it could just be that their web site is stupidly programmed, so I both emailed the contact address and used the "contact us" web form, and have gotten no response after ten days. I will try to reach them by phone tomorrow (they don't have one listed, I just realized) and if that fails, it's off to the credit card company to dispute the charge.

2a. I trust no listing that says "Negotiable rents, bad credit OK" and has no real information about who or what is offering the listing.

2b. I'm really not sure about manhattanapts.com, either. They have listings all over Craigslist but a bunch of them show the same "representative" photos for what are clearly, not just different apartments, but different buildings. This skeeves me.

I have other thoughts, but Mom is sniping at me for random petty shit that I had better tend to in order to avoid squabble, so I shall record them later.