A few months ago we went to a friend's birthday. It was in Santa Monica, at a pizza place on Main St.
Steve was becoming one year older, but he still didn't want to admit to us that he had turned 37 and tried to keep everyone guessing.
We started to talk about where life took us all these years and eventually the discussion steered toward our place.
At this time, we were living on Colorado St. in Santa Monica; we didn't like it and it was one of these temporary situations that lasts too long to be good. He told us about a friend of his that was looking to rent her upper floor, but we dismissed it at the time.
Fast forward to 6 weeks ago...
On the night before a trip to Vegas, Steve comes by and talks about this place again. After all it was the end of the month, we had no obligation to give notice to our current landlord, didn't like our place at all and we were going to be away for a couple weeks. So we went to visit the place he had in mind and met his friend: Kasia.
Kasia is like a Wal-Mart version of Dolly Parton, where cheap parts don't entierely fit together. And although she's devoted to a Bio lifestyle and her readings include 'secrets' such as 'how to turn cancer off like a light bulb', she looks like she's been raised in a Serbian refugee camp. But she was in the good side of her bipolar cycle and appeared friendly, so we said yes.
Then we went to Vegas. We gambled less than $5, while waiting for a restaurant table and that ended up paying us the dinner!
We came back to Santa Monica a couple weeks after and moved in that evening. But Kasia was in a different part of her cycle, the evil was starting to ooze out.
She possesses very limited communication abilities; the whole palette can be summarized as: silence, scream and SMS. That first day, SMS was the method of choice.
They slowly came one by one, and polite with that: 'Please, don't take a shower in the evening', 'Please, don't use the washer in the evening' and we respected that, not knowing the house rules yet; but we were naive!
The next day, she explained why some things are organized the way they are, etc and it was fine... or it seemed to be at first.. until we were confronted with a daily addition to the list of DOs and DONT's. Every single day would be spiced by a number of SMS or little notes and a staggering number of rules started to accumulate as common sense and logic had vanished to be never seen again.
It turns out that the first clash really exposed the whole situation:
The place is located in the center of Santa Monica, and is bound by rent control; the actual rent is about half of what it could be today. The person renting it is named Joseph and he used to live there, with another girl, named Jennifer, until Kasia drove the two out through her crazyness and we were about to be the next victims...
Maybe that's what she thought, but... that self-proclamed tough little illegal Polish girl was about to realize what it is to fight against people that are not scared of her.
The following posts are going to cover events that are past since I write this, and the ones to come. It is useful for us, as a tool to log what is happening here, but, ultimately, they are for your amusement.
what a bitch!