And before that...

I HAVE AN IDEA!

If like, you were a landlord in the los angeles area, and you had an apartment vacancy and wanted to not have an apartment vacancy anymore, you could PUT A CLASSIFIED AD IN THE NEWSPAPER! Think of how dope it would be! And like, if lots of people did it, then people who were looking for apartments could look at that section of the classifieds and then they could find an apartment!

This city is a fucking real estate nightmare. There are like 3 inches of rental ads in the paper, and half of them are just fake ads that point you to these paid listings services where you pay $60 to look at 3 or 4 ads that match your criteria, and then you call them and they've already been snatched up by magic telepathic aliens that don't REQUIRE real estate listings. I spent the day today just driving around copying phone numbers off buildings and leaving message after message after message. The closest I got was that a woman is gonna call me back this week and make an appointment for me to look at an apartment that is too expensive and doesn't allow cats... oh and at one point I saw a nice LA-looking (by which i mean it was white stucco with weird blue tiles on the front and it was very sqaure and had those stupid fucking sideways slidey windows to which there is no point whatsoever but anyway) 8 unit building with a big "1 BR for rent" sign on it, so i call the number and whoever answered at first tried to tell me i had the wrong number; so i repeat the number to him just in case and he says, "that's this number" and I say "Your number is on a sign in front of a building that says it has an apartment available" and he says "OH! Yes! Come to apartment 2." Clearly. So I go to apartment 2 and the guy who answered the phone introduces me to a very nice, very old, very Jewish man, who tells me that the apartment is a 2 BR ("It's a MANSION," he says. "Too expensive for you." Funny, I thought, it looks like not a mansion at all, but an 8 unit probably carpeted apartment building with blue tiles on the front) and it's $1250. Which is funny since the sign said 1 BR. I think there's a good chance that Ben the Very Old Jewish Man just didn't like me so hot. I did walk into his home talking on a cell phone cause someone had just called me back to say there was an open house at an apartment that I was later unable to locate, but I can't imagine that a landlord who's put off by cell phones would have any tenants at all in this godforsaken smog-infested satellite dish of a city. Sigh. I like it here, i swear. At least I suspect I will like it when i get a fucking apartment.

Oh speaking of mansions though, I went to a barbecue at a house that... in my world it's definitely a mansion, and it was on the beach in Malibu. So you walk out the back and instead of a swingset it's the pacific fucking ocean. And not just any pacific fucking ocean, it's MALIBU. Dude, that's where Malibu Barbie is like FROM. That house was the equivalent of a big warm sunshiney star with a nice cotton chair in it and a cool but not cold glass of water in your hand and hey, fireworks and a cute boy to make out with, why not right? People LIVE there. But they're nice people so it's ok. I mean in that house. The houses around there were probably full of less nice people. Did I mention it's where Malibu Barbie is from? I think you get the picture.

It would be nice if i could live there. It would also be nice if i could live in a dank carpeted studio that's not 800 traffic-clogged miles from culver city and costs less than twenty six million dollars a month. But hey, beggars can't be choosers.