There is an innate human need for ownership. We are driven to purchase and acquire things that are uniquely ours. I think this is the reason why marriage has become so popular. Why else would a woman or man knowingly sign up for a lifetime of unflushed toilets and arguments over how to insert a roll of toilet paper into the holder? We have a desire to know that there are some things that just belong to us alone.
Until about 5 years ago, that’s how Kyle and I felt about a house. Well, Kyle anyway. He looked around at all his well-dressed, Lexus-owning buddies in the high-profile world of Las Vegas contracting insurance and noted that they all owned houses. It was beautiful 2006, and everyone kept telling him that owning a home was a SURE THING. That it COULD NOT FAIL.
This is why I do not trust insurance salesmen.
Needless to say, we are now in a position where renting is our only option for housing. Contrary to the popular notion that renting is gross and horrible and terrifying, I really like it. In fact, I’ll bet $100 that my apartment is better than your house, any day of the year.
Reasons to Choose Luxurious Apartment Living Over a Stupid, Boring House.
1. It’s temporary!
Ha! All you home owners with your pretty lawns and your permanent swing sets in the back yard, eat your hearts out. If something goes wrong in my apartment (for instance, the cheap hanging blinds start infighting and the whole gang ends up in a pile of plastic shrapnel on my living room floor), I just say, “meh.” It’s not like I’m going to live here forever. I also just enjoy the brand new open view onto the neighbor’s stoop, where I have a HD experience of the mini-gangsters trying to get high by smoking rosemary out of a light bulb.
2. Community
In your beautiful fortress of wonder, you don’t get the raw human-to-human connection that you get with apartment living. I love my neighbors. They are super-cool. In an apartment, everyone kinda has everyone’s back. Abigail has 25 kids she can play with at any given moment. If I need to borrow a lemon, I can walk four feet and just knock on my neighbors’ doors. Sure, there’s always the one crazy lady with the army of stench-ridden cats that attack my legs when I try to walk by her house, but, hey. Nothing better than a little adventure when you’re on the way to get the mail, right?
3. Adventures Abound
If you’re like me and your greatest fear in life is to be bored or be boring, you will die in a house. Seriously. I guess you can paint your picket fence again or whatever, but good luck finding an adventure in your own backyard. My backyard is literally 10 acres of amazing stuff waiting to happen. I can’t tell you how many times Abigail and I have just started walking the complex, just to find our world transported by the magical things we’ve encountered. Pieces of litter become clues, strange bedroom noises become monsters and there’s always that one apartment that has a bunch of creepy stuff laying all over the back porch. Is he an evil scientist? A serial killer? All I know is that the combination of buffalo skins, rancid potato peels and a mini bathtub will probably be fodder for my daughter’s adventure worlds for years to come.
4. Free Stuff
I didn’t know what I was missing before I lived in these apartments. Every month, a magical day arrives in the apartment world, more celebrated that any Christmas, more replete with unimagined gifts from above. It is called, “Moving Day.”
On the first day of every month, all the people who have turned traitor on the apartment world decide to release some of their possessions back into the wild. For me, this means that awesome-cool stuff is just lying around being ready to picked up by an opportunistic soul like myself. Here is a partial list of free stuff I have gotten this year:
- A barbecue
- a table
- a bookshelf
- a miniature clothes rack
- another table
- $5 worth of cans
- 10 VHS videos (including Citizen Kane and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective)
- a fan
- another barbecue
What do I do with so many barbecues and tables? Whatever I want! True, I now have a house that looks like the Season 3 finale of “Hoarders,” but it was all free. How could I pass it up? I will admit that I once picked up a board and then just looked at it for 6 months before I threw it away again. What can I say? I like boards.
5. Amenities
Even those of you who have a pool in your home, an apartment offers so much more than just a “pool” for amenities. In my apartments, we have two pools, two hot tubs, a mini-gym and two parks on site. That’s a lot of cool stuff if you are trying to entertain a 5-year-old. Not only that, but does your pool have built-in friends for your kids to play with? Does your hot tub have hot guys as accessories? Even if you have a couple of treadmills and a weight machine, does your “exercise room” have a group of cute young girls that offer you motivation to run faster and sweat harder just so you don’t look like an old lady in comparison? If you do, you have a much cooler house than I previously considered. Perhaps I will move in with you.
You Have Time for Just One More:
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One response to “My Apartment Can Beat Up Your House”
yeah… I also happen to love that when things break I can just call my landlord. I mean, sure I miss being able to paint my walls and plant flowers in my yard. But not THAT much.