Because signing a lease needs to become an emotional rollercoaster.

I'm going to do this as calmly as possible. That is the only antidote I can come up with to the screaming in my head.

This morning, Dawn called me and told me we got the apartment in Greenpoint. For a price that we can afford. And we can sign the lease tomorrow. Hooray, celebration, etc. Everything is great.

Then my mom Googled the building (why this had to wait until 24 hours before the lease signing is beyond me) and dug up some not-so-positive blog posts about the building. Aside from the fact that the building's superintendent appears to be a potentially pornographic photographer, a lot of tenants complained about bugs and shitty maintenance in 2007 and 2008. The fact that there haven't been any posts about this stuff recently is encouraging ... but the building's history of pornography and infestation (I'm not really sure which is more troubling) is still cause for concern.

So that sort of puts a damper on the whole we-finally-got-an-apartment-hooray situation - but at least I got about an hour of happiness in before reality came and pissed on it. Given our previous knowledge of the giant bedbug problem in New York, we were already planning on completely fumigating any place we moved into - so I guess this just makes it a much more urgent item on the to-do list. We're also going to try and get through to the building management and ask if they've done anything to change their maintanence practices in the last year, since that would be a logical explanation for the lack of recent blog posts concerning the infestation (the alternative explanation being that the residents have been defeated). In any case, it's something we need to think seriously about.

And as for the perverted super ... maybe his preference for young women will encourage him to take care of our maintenance problems in a timely fashion. See, there - I found a silver lining.