Leaving Irvine is very difficult for me. Not only because there are people here that I like and care about and because I love being in America just because it is America, but also because breaking a lease can be very expensive. In fact I found an envelope stuck to my front door the other day with a dry 3087 $ move-out bill in it. Besides my last month rent, I had to pay 1700 $ in lease breaking fee. That almost equaled my two last months rent, which meant that I could just as well stay in the apartment and tell my university that 'sorry, I can't afford to come back to Denmark'. But somehow, I wasn't sure they would look favorably at that option. I went online again and changed my ad on Craigslist to include words like 'desperate', 'rent negotiable' and 'this is a good deal'. I realized that if I didn't find someone to take over the last two months, I would have to live with my parents through the summer. Don't get me wrong, I love my parents to death and really started to get along with them after I left the country for several cconsecutive longer periods of time. But my value on the single market would seriously decrease because attempting to have a casual relationship where him picking you up for the first date means meeting the parents, tends to turn off certain guys. On the other hand the thought of having at least one of my brothers around was not bad at all.
So you might ask why in the world I had signed a lease for 7 months when I knew that I was very unlikely to actually stay this long. And this question brings me to the real point here, which I hope will put practicalities of life in perspective. There are three ways you can get a place to live in Irvine: You can stay at a hotel and pay day by day. No further elaboration needed. You can get corporate housing where you pay month-to-month. This option is really good if you have money (which everybody seems to have in Irvine except me and my friends); the cheapest place I have seen was 2000 dollars per month, it was a nice little dark ground floor studio with all the American furniture and all the appliances you can wish for. The girl who showed it to me eagerly proclaimed that it came not only with a dishwasher (who needs a dishwasher when you are just one person?) and washer and dryer in the unit, but it also came with an iron, a huge coffee maker (sorry, I prefer to go to Diedrich's in the morning), 10 towels and tons of pillows for the couch (what do Americans use all these pillows for? Pillow fights before bedtime?). The third way you can get a place to live in Irvine is to sign a lease, which comes in 7, 9 or 12 months.
I have to admit that I secretly hoped that my university would let me stay all 7 months. That, and the fact that I found an adorable junior 1-bedroom apartment in walking distance to my office and the essential coffee shop made me decide on signing a 7 month lease. 'Junior' basically means that there is no door between the living room and bedroom and who needs a door when you would never close it anyway? But now I had to deal with the cold facts that I either had to pay my lease break fee or find someone to take over the place. I was settled on going for the best offer; even if I got 500 dollars a month for the place I would come out even. And I would hate if the Irvine Company (the company that owns all apartment complexes in Irvine) made more money out of me than they already had, they knew as well as I that they could rent out my place the minute I had left. The very next morning I got a phone call from a woman who was very interested in the apartment, she offered 850 dollars already over the phone. As it turned out it was not for her but for a visiting physics professor from UC Berkeley who was joining a 2 month project at UC Irvine. After a bit of negotiation and practicalities I agreed to give it to the professor for 950 a month. I had already received two other phone calls by interested people (the new ad had apparently paid off) and knew that if I kept receiving offers, I was very likely to get better ones. But having been in a situation like the professor's and realizing that this was a good opportunity to help out another person without the hassle of dealing with multiple people and multiple offers, I accepted her deposit check on the spot. I was in a good mood the rest of the day, not only because my apartment trouble was (almost) solved and fairly painless, but also because I had done something good for somebody. It made me feel really good to decide on this rather than be gready. I know very well that I wouldn't last a week on The Apprentice; last week I watched one girl getting fired because she became 'emotional' in a critical situation (I still can't believe that they used it against her because otherwise she did a good job). But I believe that when you think of other people in the business process you have a much better chance of being a happy person than if you think of only money. Not that money cannot buy lots of happy moments (I for example have a lot of happy moments with my new Chanel sunglasses), but in the end it cannot buy a good conscience. And by the end of the day, I slept better than I had done for weeks, due to the good deed I had done.
Posted by Louise at March 5, 2004 05:31 PM