Comrades, you must have been smoking a lot

So this is what we discovered about our apartment on Friday. (derspatchel pointed out it was the Ides of March. Did I look like Caesar? I don't think so.) We had had some problems with the landlord and the condition of the apartment even when we were moving in, but nothing of this magnitude. It is awful. We are waiting on the city inspector next week and then we will make decisions, but does anyone have relevant suggestions in the meantime? I want to fight for this home if it is worth fighting for, but I am not prepared to owe my soul to National Grid in order to make up for our landlord being either a chiseler, a cheapskate, or a fool. (And if he is none of these things, then I don't know why we don't have a single window in a newly renovated apartment that latches securely and also keeps out the cold. The temperature is dropping to 21°F tonight.)

In the meantime, because I will not consider this apartment a transitory thing—because as long as I am here, whether that's six weeks or six months, it is home—I picked up my futon mattress from Dream On this afternoon with the aid of audioboy's van and then lugged it up the stairs and into my room with the aid of Rob's lower back. Wrestling the mattress cover onto it cost me the skin of three knuckles and a lot of splinters from the plywood I am using as part of my bedframe (never again), but it is now a real bed, not an air mattress, and I will sleep on it and under five blankets tonight. I had lunch with Rob at SoundBites in Ball Square before we walked our separate ways home, which is a thing I like very much about living on this street; we rejoined in the evening for Ninotchka at the Brattle Theatre. I'd last seen the movie in high school: it was even better this time. Garbo is not just beautiful, she's a beautiful comedienne, voice, timing, deadpan, eyebrows. This time, I could notice that while the romance requires her to warm from her humorless Soviet functionality, it does not require her to wilt into Melvyn Douglas' arms like a fainting flower of Western womanhood—the second-act blackmail, in fact, depends on just that strength of commitment to her work rather than her romantic vulnerability. The script's politics also interest me: Wilder and Lubitsch evidently view the Soviet way of life as both alien and faintly ridiculous, but their sympathies are equally clearly not with the émigré Grand Duchess Swana, whose bright-smiling elegance never turns a hair as she tells the peasant-born Ninotchka, "You're quite right about the Cossacks. We made a great mistake when we let them use their whips. They had such reliable guns." (I like, though, that this is not the sort of movie in which women are never friends; Ninotchka's interactions with her cellist roommate back in the Soviet Union tell the viewer that. Most of their conversation even passes the Bechdel test, being concerned, before it turns to Anna's fiancé, with rehearsals, weird housemates, and underwear.) I love Felix Bressart; I love Sig Ruman. I don't know Alexander Granach so well, but HOLY CRAP HE WAS KNOCK IN NOSFERATU THE MAN IS A CHAMELEON I AM KEEPING AN EYE OUT FOR HIM. But most of all I love Greta Garbo, laughing in the café, letting go forlornly of a censored letter, taking Douglas' face between her hands to kiss him. "Chemically, we're already quite sympathetic."

This is where my brain runs out for the night. Doppel-Abbie is resting on my pillows. I am going to take a shower. We'll figure more things out tomorrow.