It's 2014-03-20, barely. For the last 14 months, I've been living in a one-bedroom apartment, in Abasto, in Buenos Aires. The living room is some 4×6 meters; the bedroom, combined with the tiny patio, is another 3×6. In between, there's a bathroom, kitchen, and hallway, which together are perhaps 1.5×6 meters. This is a total of 51 square meters, of which some 6 are the patio.
It's difficult to host parties here. Beyond about 6 or 8 people, it gets hard to seat people. And there's only one bathroom, which doesn't have hot water until I can find the spring that's missing from the hot water heater. Despite all this, I've been hosting guests more or less continuously since November. Today I met up with the woman I hosted in November; she moved out so I could host a friend who was visiting from overseas; and then in January, my high-school friend Stace and her dad arrived. So out of those 14 months, the last four or five, I haven't really been living alone. It turns out (no surprise) that I hate living alone, even though living in close proximity with other people can be stressful; there are times when I've stayed in bed with my computer just to have a little private space, even though I'm not sleeping. Now Stace and her dad have the keys to the new apartment they're renting, not far from here, so I'll be back to living alone for the first time in months. And I want to stop doing that. This is not really a good apartment to live with other people in, though. I need to move someplace bigger, with at least two bathrooms. I have some prospective, interested roommates; now we just need to find a three-bedroom or bigger house. *** This week I'm having a terrible time concentrating on work. I think this is largely because I can't stop thinking about the painter. Uteri and the female reproductive system are a major theme of her representational paintings; today I crocheted a sort of draft of a uterus that I want to give to her when she returns from her current travels, improvising the form as I went. It took me a couple of hours. I'm planning to redo it in a smaller size with fine red yarn, a smaller hook, more careful stitch counting for better symmetry, and some plant fruiting bodies as a vulva and ovaries. I hope she enjoys it. In the archipelago of Tigre I fell through a footbridge, destroying it. -- To unsubscribe: http://lists.canonical.org/mailman/listinfo/kragen-journal
