Move for a job, they said. It’s the only way to advance your career, they said. Move out of your childhood bedroom, they said.
To be honest, I can’t really fault that last point. There is little more disheartening than a prolonged unsuccessful job search during which the formerly independent college student has to move back home.
But spending the better part of a month living out of a suitcase and sleeping on a friend’s couch has to be pretty close. I’m more settled in my cubicle than in the city where I am supposed to be living.
Welcome to the futon stage of life. It’s that period of young adulthood when my friends have moved out of their dorm rooms but are years away from being able to offer me a guest room. It’s part of the uncomfortably long limbo between getting a desk and getting a permanent address. I’m in it right now: I’m employed and apartment seeking.
Sadly, so are thousands of other millennials who moved to the D.C. area and helped make it the supposed “best city to live in during your twenties.”
Supply and demand is Econ 101. And given the flood of interns, recent college graduates, and others all arriving for fun jobs in the city, rent is sky-high. There are too many of us and too few places for rent.
Welcome to Craig’s List, home of houses rented month by month and room by room. It’s the rolodex of girls whose third housemate got engaged and moved to Ohio, new faces in town who need help to make rent, and opportunistic suburban homeowners who figure that someone desperate enough would pay to live in their basement, scammers, and people with questionable command of written English.
Sometimes they post pictures and sometimes addresses and, if you’re very lucky, both. That’s the sign to make contact.
It’s time for the first email. Take all the first-date clichés born of 10,000 romantic comedies and condense them into two sentences to send off into the digital void. How do you strike just the right note?
I’m quiet, but not averse to being social. I like to stay in but sometimes to go out. I watch Netflix and follow some cult shows, but understand that you, the potential housemate, find Game of Thrones just too much gore. For the duration of this conversation, I will restrain my disdain for reality TV. There is no such thing as perfection, after all.
I have nonthreatening hobbies that are endearingly quirky. I read Russian novels and like to ballroom dance, unless you think that’s too nerdy. Then I’ll tell you that I listen to Irish punk rock and like watching James Bond. I am the manic pixie dream girl, unless you want the ghost roommate.
Does any of this even matter? I’m not really sure.
In the world of apartment rentals, housemates, and finding other people who can pay bills on time and clean up after themselves, good options disappear more rapidly than a steak thrown to a swarm of piranhas, a lamb that falls before the wolf pack, a young gazelle to a pride of starving lions. One scientist who spent a year watching great white sharks hunt off the coast of South Africa found that those beasts got more than half of the prey they attacked. If I could be so lucky! In my experience, when the homeless and enquiring send out emails, only one in three gets a reply, and even those sparse responses are mostly duds.
One is a scam, one begins by calling me someone else’s name, and one foists me off on another website, there to enter a labyrinth of questions about my zodiac sign and smoking preferences. (If I’d really thought that being a Capricorn would influence my housing search, I would have asked a psychic for my address, rather than the Internet.)
And the last response? The one that makes grammatical sense and sounds like it comes from a real person? She’s free for two hours on Tuesday and might make a decision after that.
Or might not. I’ll never know because that’s the last I’ve heard from her.
In the meantime, my coworkers have started to suggest that I just move into the office and sleep curled up in an abandoned blanket under my desk. Time to send one more email and hope to stave off the prospect of corporate shantytown.
