2002-06-20 - 4:13 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: I can't hear it. Sounds like 80s pop, though.

So, after living within a block of a subway entrance for two months and never going down in it, I finally got Poindexter to go with me one day and assess the situation. He was okay with me using it alone, so now I've been running all over the city on it. Gotta love it. It's like driving, timewise, except I can read or people-watch, and don't have to worry about traffic lights, traffic, or parking.

Speaking of people-watching, I saw some woman on there who kept batting at her head as though she had flies buzzing around it. Repeatedly. Incessantly. At first I thought there really was a fly, but the behavior was too regular for that. Freaked me out. Bat. Pause. Bat-Bat. Pause. Bat-Bat. Head-shake. Bat. I would really, really like to know exactly what she was batting at. Some small entity whispering things into her ear that she didn't want to hear?

I must say, I miss the DC Metro. The Philly subway cars are fine -- I do NOT miss the orange-and-brown-decor of the Metro -- but the stations leave something to be desired. The floors are usually cement, and they're dark and creepy compared to the huge expansive openness of Metro stations.

Actually, many stations are all right. They've got that cool tile thing going on on the walls, with the station name in letters in the tile. I like that. And different stations have different colored tiles.

But the big main station, City Hall, where two subway lines and the trolley line meet, leaves a lot to be desired. It has a lot of long passageways that are dark and dirty. And then there's the faint odor of pee.

This, folks, I don't get. WHO is PEEING in the SUBWAY STATION!? I haven't caught anybody yet. They must do it at night. It makes me horrifically suspicious of every little puddle I see, and there are lots. It's a leaky system. This is just GROSS. Washington, DC has proven that you can have NICE SUBWAY STATIONS. Take that frickin' wage tax money you're yanking from everyone who works and lives here and put it to some good use!! Clean up the pee, and don't let anybody pee in there anymore!

Gah.

I feel guilty for saying this, but whoever called Philly a "shithole" was, unfortunately, mostly correct. There are a very few truly pretty neighborhoods or streets, and everywhere else just has a sort of run-down, dirty look.

The weirdest part, though, is that the INSIDES of people's houses are often absolutely gorgeous. You can go down a street that has a bunch of plain brick square boxes of homes with no shutters, hardly any windows, looking worn out and ugly, and then you step inside and it's beautiful.

It's as though people are spending all their money on the interior and completely neglecting the exterior. It's very strange. It makes me think that I shouldn't discount ugly streets when house-searching, because they could be quite lovely inside. But the way a street looks is very important to me -- I'm all about pleasant public spaces, as any good traditional neighborhood design aficionado ought to be.

Speaking of the housing search, we are having a hell of a time with the whole realtor business.

Lemme tell you, there are a lot of WEIRD PEOPLE out there who choose to become realtors. It's astonishing. A lot of them are just plain creepy. What is that all about? I mean, I don't even want to be in the same room with some of them for longer than 20 seconds, much less go through the house-buying process with these people.

Well, to be fair, the one woman who creeped me out may have been a stutterer. She had an odd way of speaking where she'd pause for a good 5-10 seconds, and then the words would come out. I've heard some people who stutter will pause and speak slowly to avoid stuttering. On the other hand, she wasn't very knowledgeable either, answering half my questions with, "I don't know" and no offers to try to find out, so it's moot.

Another woman was rude. She answered MY question (when Poindexter was elsewhere in the house), and then later when he asked the same question, she got all irritated with him. "I TOLD you already," she said, in an exasperated tone. Even if she actually HAD, which she HADN'T, she was supposed to just grit her teeth, smile, repeat the information, then go home to her SO and bitch about the stupid people she showed a listing to today.

We won't be calling HER again.

Anyway, Pennsylvania, as one might expect given its horrendously complicated procedures for becoming a resident, makes Real Estate an ordeal. Every time you so much as LOOK at an agent you have to sign a sheet acknowledging that you understand the difference between a buyer's and seller's agent, and how if you don't sign a buyer's agent contract with someone, they're technically working for the seller, blah blah blah.

So, we're shopping around for our buyer's agent. Meantime, so as not to waste someone's time if we don't actually want them for our agent, we've mostly been going to open houses or calling listing agents to see places.

After a little while of this, and getting familiar with the neighborhoods, we found this one guy, Kyle. Kyle is at the top of the List of Realtors We Like. He was pleasant, non-weird, about our age, had a good sense of humor, and made a really good sales pitch without being pushy. He also suggested we bid $40K below asking price (!). I think the seller must be getting desperate, but not enough to actually lower the list price yet.

But we are still waiting on a return call from a woman, at another agency, who appears to have a monopoly on listings in a neighborhood we really, really like. It seems we'd have an advantage with people just dropping listings in her lap all the time. Will we be missing out on something if we go with Kyle, who doesn't specifically concentrate on that neighborhood?

And in the meantime, there's a listing under a third agency that we wanted to see. I met one of the agents there, Jane (who may or may not be the listing agent; she didn't specifically say) and she was okay, but she didn't make our List. Poindexter tentatively made an appointment with her for the listing we liked, and then he freaked, wondering what happens if we like the place but aren't sure, then go to Kyle to look at a whole bunch of other listings, and then decide after all that, that we want the one we looked at with Jane, especially if Jane is NOT, in fact, the listing agent. Will Jane get mad? Are there legal issues here?

At this point we're either going to cancel the tentative appointment with Jane or actually tell her the truth. Not sure which.

Aside from that dilemma, what if we look around with Kyle for a while and find that he's not as great as we thought? Ugh. So we'd have to "dump" him for another agent.

(Everyone except possibly Kitters is just bored to death here, right?)

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