Masticate Or Flush: That Is The Question

Masticate Or Flush: That Is The Question
You will be happy to know that I was able to gather the 92 pages of paperwork required to reinstate my iPhone, bribe my friend G with sushi to help me fill in all the blanks and sign in all the right places, make triplicate copies - one for me, one for Orange and one for God - and then mail 32 of the documents to one place (somewhere in the Alps, I think) and then mail 12.5 documents, plus my bank RIB, canceled check and the last 7 years of my tax returns to another place (somewhere in the catacombs, or under the pyramid at the Louvre or maybe it's Dan Brown's pied-à-terre in Paris, where he writes bestselling books badly), by last Friday. Even though God has not yet received her copy (I'm still trying to find her address - a lifetime pursuit), I had my phone back online on Tuesday. This proves that as long as Orange is happy, God is happy too. Or something like that.

Meanwhile, back at the prison cell...

I told you a while back about my little odyssey of trying to find an apartment after I arrived in Paris in August. And how I was grateful to find an apartment the size of a really cheap hotel room, or in American standards, the size of a bathroom. I was willing to stay here for my one-year lease duration, even though:

• The toilet masticates LOUDLY (It's one of those toilets they use on boats. It goes ERRRRRRR! in the middle of the night for no reason whatsoever. So charming!)
• The shower floods the floor no matter where I put the curtain.
• I can't open the one-and-only window because it's directly on the street. I've opened it before and on good days that just means that all the people on the bus waiting in traffic outside stare down into my life and make decisions about my furniture, my organizational skills and my state of undress. On bad days it means that drunk men can lean in and ask me if I have an open slot. Or something like that. I also have forgotten, several times, that the window is open, and sit down on the toilet, much to the entertainment of the people on the bus.
  
• The lady who cleans the building and takes out the trash in the mornings arrives at 5:45AM shuffling loudly, grumbling to herself, and slams the front door closed, opens and slams the courtyard door, drags the trash cans back down the hall, crashing them into the walls as she goes, grumbling even more because someone didn't put their recyclable garbage in the RIGHT CAN!, and slams the front door again. Then the trash trucks come at 7:00AM and park outside my window while they dump our garbage. Then she comes back and drags the empty cans back through the hallway, slamming doors as she goes. I just gave up on sleeping past 6AM.
  
• The guy across the hall from me starts playing really loud music around 6:30AM, which he ululates to while slapping....something. I just don't want to know what he is slapping.
• There is no closet. A minor detail, unless you're a girl.
  

But then we met Jessica, who lives on the 2nd floor (which is really the 3rd floor in America, because French people call the ground floor zero and Americans call it one). And Jessica happened to be moving out of her 23 square meter apartment (mine is 16), which faces the courtyard, has TWO windows and has a cuisine séparée. This means that the kitchen is its own room, versus what I have now, which is a tiny little corner in my living room (if you can call it that) with two burners, one cabinet and a tiny fridge.

All of this is fine and dandy, but what mattered to me the most is that the toilet in Jessica's apartment is a normal one, that flushes down a drain that's outside of the building, which me and my neighbor G have listened to, fondly, many a balmy summer evening, as we dined on her patio in the building's courtyard. Our conversations went like this:

"Oh, it sounds like The Hot Chick just had a flush."
"Mmmm. No. I think it was The Hot German Guy's Angry Father."
"Why's that?"
"Well, he's across the hall and so it first has to go through that horizontal pipe, and then down this vertical pipe. It took longer and had more force to it."

So, we've become connoisseurs of flush sounds. And, as you can see, we also have pet names for our neighbors. The Hot Chick lives upstairs from G, looks like she's in her 20's, is thin and tan and well... hot. We hate her. But she is very, very nice. I even lost G's cat one day and had to retrieve her from The Hot Chick's apartment. She was so sweet. And we hate her. The men who come and visit us from America love her, and fantasize that she spies on them from her window as they do calisthenics in the courtyard.

The Hot German Guy is the tall, blond son of the old man who lives upstairs, across the hall from The Hot Chick. One night, when we were outside on the courtyard having a great meal with friends and we got a bit LOUD, the Hot German Guy's Angry Father yelled from his window for us to shut the hell up. Later that week, The Hot German Guy came to G's door about something else and I answered the door and almost wept at his hotness, but was also glad to know that he wasn't mad at us for waking his Angry Father. This would have been a shame.

There's also a guy who lives upstairs from my current apartment, who G calls Your Future Husband, where Your means Mine. He is cute, balding, and if we stood face to face, the shiny top of his head would come up to my chin. I might consider tossing him around, but he also has a masticating boat toilet and therefore, I know too much about him already. Besides, he has unwittingly proven to be bad luck for G. Every time she has seen him out on the street, she drops something important. The first time, it was a bottle of Champagne. The next time it was our long-awaited Ramadan soup.

So, Jessica moves out tomorrow, and I move in, and up. My current landlord wasn't extremely happy about me leaving, but in the end, he was very nice about it. He didn't make me honor the required three-month notice. That's because he needs to do some repair work in the apartment. One whole wall of the apartment is bubbling under the wall paper because there's a water leak from the office building next door. I'm getting out just in time, because there's a multi-year, multi-insurance-company fight ahead, and if I had stayed, me and my insurance company would have been in the middle of that fight. Because, believe it or not, once the renter moves into an apartment, it is THEM and their insurance company that are responsible for all damage inside and out of the apartment. If My Future Husband's masticating toilet suddenly falls through the ceiling with him on it, me and My Future Husband's insurance companies fight for three years over who's responsible for the damage, while me and My Future Husband would have to pay to get it fixed and then wait for the fight to be settled to get reimbursed. Just think how well we would know each other by then!

I meet with my new landlord tomorrow morning. He's a little Portuguese man who doesn't get along with many of the other owners in the building, but who loves G. Thank the God-whose-address-I-can't-find, because G recommended me and he didn't bother to try and find anybody else. My move will be easy, with the help of friends.

Once I'm settled, if you're wondering where I am, I'm probably sitting on my new toilet.