Bonnie Chau bchau@media.ucla.edu Click Here for more articles by Bonnie Chau

The apartment was perfect. Well, perfect in the sense that two of four roommates had wandered around the complex for about 10 minutes and decided it was perfect. But, surely, the two other roommates would agree that it was The One. And it stayed The One until several days and a third roommate later. At that point, the apartment turned out not to be “The One,” so much as “The One With the Cockroaches.” The third roommate asked the girl who was graduating and moving out if she’d had any problems there. “Yes,” the girl said.



“Cockroaches.” Fancy that.

So The One on Glenrock went the way of The One on Kelton and The One on Gayley. And so the apartment search begins all over again.

When it comes down to it, it seems like nobody really has the apartment hunt method down. Back in the day, my plan was to find an apartment with my friend and get a dog. But that in itself already required both of us to find more roomates and a place where the rare “Pets Allowed” policy was actually extended to an extremely rare “Dogs Allowed Too, Not Just Cats (which are inferior )” policy.

That would also probably mean somewhere far. We would have to all take the bus because who wants to deal with permits on campus and double parking, right?

So sometime in early January, I asked a friend when I should start looking. Now? “Nooooo,” he says. “You’d be better off just waiting until March or April.” OK.

I proceeded to put it off until about mid-March. Excited as I am to be moving beyond the rancid tofu poisoning experiences in the dining halls, this apartment hunting situation has really escalated into an out-of-control mess of complexities.

I was having trouble finding a roommate. There were several groups of three girls looking for one more girl and some people who were “maybe working in the dorms.” There were people telling me horror stories about rooming with a good friend and rooming with a not-really-good-friend.

Apparently the only concrete things I had at that moment were a male roommate, a desire for a dog, and the probability of living somewhat far from school.

Meanwhile, pressure continues to build. How many times in the last several weeks has someone asked you if you know who you are going to live with or where you’ll end up?

After a while, my friend found his roommate, but it still seemed highly unlikely that I would suddenly find a female roommate after having made little progress for the last three or four months.

I buckled under the immense pressure to decide something and settled on living with three girl friends, shelving the dog plan.

But the search is not over. Working around the schedules of four people is not easy, especially when apartment offices tend to close at 5 and everyone has class or work or a birthday party or a tattooing appointment at one time or another.

The best part is walking up the front steps of a building to find the sign that reads “We will be starting a wait-list in February” when it’s almost April, fearing that come July, I will be wandering the mean streets of Westwood homeless.

And of course we all have to reconcile our idiosyncrasies: We must be somewhere in the midst of the lively apartment scene, but we wouldn’t want to be caught in one of those complexes with mandatory weekly keggers. We need a large place, and one not too far from campus, but miraculously it must also be cheap. And we don’t want to forget the cleanliness factor. Not everyone can be at one with the roaches.

My high school friend thinks it would be a swell idea to live in Los Angeles this summer and thinks that I should help look for a house in a happening place so that he can create some sort of bohemian commune with a bunch of creative people constantly in and out, sharing cool ideas and playing music and being one with the L.A. art scene or something (but Silver Lake is so passe).

Seeing as I can barely handle my life as it is, I’m thinking to just put the apartment search off for a bit longer. I have faith that The One is waiting to be found, just around the next cockroach-infested corner.