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in various states of social collapse
Saturday, March 26 2016
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
That animal rights organization where I've applied to be a web developer continues to amaze with the grueling multi-part nature of its interview process. This morning I began work on a surprisingly-big web development assignment that served as yet another interview. My job was to interface between Twitter and the web in an AJAX-style web application that used no frameworks. I didn't see that part about no frameworks initially and managed to build part of the frontend using Angular.js. It was a good exercise, though the code was actually a lot more straightforward and readable without it. I understand what Angular.js is trying to do, but I'm perfectly happy with XMLHttpRequest() and document.getElementById(); and have written some very complicated webapps using them.
My work had to be put aside this afternoon for another real estate tour of Kingston. Gretchen had arranged with our new realtor Karen to see multi-unit properties. Our first stop was at a dreary pink house that proved even drearier inside. Its floor was lumpy and covered with a dubious carpet, the walls were finished with a grotesque surface with embedded beams. There were also a number of very shallow closets and a hideous shallow stone structure that resembled a fireplace. Even without anyone living there, it was terribly depressing and I couldn't imagine making it habitable.
The next building looked good from the outside; it was a dark blue brick building where Albany Avenue crosses the railroad tracks (41.932572N, 74.009450W). It contained three units, all of them occupied. The two we saw were cluttered and disorganized, a depressing view into how random people in Kingston live. One of the occupants had placed crazy posters on his wall detailing the genealogy of Jesus Christ and mapping the genocide against Africans on a distorted world map. He said he used to teach in the public schools but couldn't continue because students "didn't want a black teacher." Though it's possible he was right, Gretchen suspected his problems might have been more psychological than racial. The house was in an inconvenient location, had inconvenient tenants, and looked to be a lot of work to renovate, so we moved on.
Then there were a couple nice big house with a couple tenants somewhere over in the triangle between Broadway, Albany, and Foxhall, but they were all awful in different ways, usually with sad tenants in various states of social collapse. Seeing the way other people live is helping me take less for granted the luck of my own circumstances. Going from our freshly-painted house to these improvised warrens cluttered with cheap tasteless consumer rubbish is bracing. (It makes me wonder if Samuel Alito, John Roberts, and other empathy-challenged decisionmakers might be a little more thoughtful in their deliberations if they could be convinced to go on such tours.)
There was one single-family house that almost commanded our interest, though it had a lot of problems: inattention to details, roughly-spackled walls, and weird rubbery ceiling tiles throughout. It was on the market for more than our Wall Street house, though it had all those problems and was situated in an inferior neighborhood.
Near the end of our tour, our realtor had to go back to the office to get a key, so Gretchen and I went by ourselves to look at a multiunit foreclosure in the hills above the Rondout. We found a cute little neighborhood of gorgeous Victorian houses, and the one we'd come to see was as cute as any of them, at least in the front. The front still had Victorian detailing and a slate roof. Gretchen snooped around and found the house was empty, and so we walked around back and found our way in through an open door. It was then we discovered that the entire back of the house was a horrendous tacked-on addition of crude little rooms resembling something in a drought-stricken Third World nation. This is just how real estate in Kingston typically is.
I got a little more work done on my job-interview web project before Michæl and Carrie came over for dinner. They'd brought a pesto soup and Gretchen had made a pesto pasta, presumably with gluten-free noodles. Carrie has been gluten-free for years, but now Michæl is too. For three months now he's suffered persistent explosive diarrhea and nothing seems to help, so now his doctor has him trying a gluten-free diet. His condition had us wading into all sorts of disgusting talk, including the eight inch roundworm that emerged from another friend's asshole, the time I explosively diarrheaed in the JFK parking lot next to a car with Republican bumper stickers, and the time I barely made it to a usable toilet on a Rome-bound train in Italy. At some point in the evening Michæl needed a bathroom for his problem and asked for the one "farthest away." We sent him to the one in the basement master guestroom.
After Michæl & Carrie left, I stayed up late working on my interview assignment. I enjoyed working on it as much as I enjoy anything, neglecting to change the audio from the podcast I've heard a million times or even to sip on the glass of booze in front of me. If it's that engaging, perhaps I should remain a web developer.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160326 feedback
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