I am lazy, but at least I don't live in Jersey

Look, I am lazy. So I am just going to copy and paste a really long email I sent to Krista earlier in the day. It explains in painful, excrutiating detail why I am now getting ready to move back into Jason's apartment in Brooklyn, and out of fucking Jersey. I was going to change the names to protect the tragically stupid, but fuck that too.
Here it is, in its entirety:

NB: The term "super" refers in this tale to the JOB TITLE of the man in question. He is in no way super. He is not a super hero, he is not a super guy. He is NOT super, thanks for asking. He is kind of sucky, in fact. He's un-super.
You know what was super? We went to Shakespeare in the Park last week, and we had to wait on line for like six hours, and we had no reading material, and so we sang Sondheim songs to each other the whole time. It was great (unless you were standing near us). We sang all of "Into the Woods". We sang the duet "Barcelona" from "Company", which is a beautiful, beautiful song, but better if the girl singing is a soprano, which I am not. Jason sang some scary shit from "Sweeney Todd" and a song called "Buddy's Blues" from "Follies" that makes me laugh every time he sings it, even if he sings it six times in one day. That, my friends and neighbors, is love and fun and New York, because we didn't get even one odd look from anybody.
Now here is the letter:

Okay, kiddo. Here we go. Some of this you will have heard before, but I'm going to try to put it in chronological order, it might make the most sense this way. And there are things that I didn't know then that I know now, if you catch what I mean.

In March, Stephanie decided to go to Florida for a "couple of months" and stay with her folks and see what was what. I could stay at her place, paying her the rent of $610, plus internet and cable, which came to $722 per month, which I did. I also took care of any problems (leaks, etc).

So as far as the landlord was concerned, she was still sending in the rent payments. She had told me that she told the super (who lives in the building and has his stupid nose in everyone's business) that she was going away for a few months and I'd be staying there. This was not true. But I behaved as if it was, as if he knew I'd be there and I had his approval.

She came back on Memorial Day weekend, when I was out of town, and packed up a bunch of her stuff (still leaving behind all her furniture, many of her clothes, etc), and the super saw her and told her she had to call the office and talk to them.

So she called the office, then she called me and all she said was "don't tell them you're living there." Apparently she didn't even tell the office (landlord = office) that she was gone and had been for several months.
I call the landlord, the first thing he says is "my super tells me you're already living there." So I, the worst liar in the world, try
to come up with something that makes sense, which I really don't think I did very well. He's grilling me, asking where is Stephanie, like, she didn't even tell him she wasn't living there anymore! I'm all, I don't know, she might be in Florida, she might be with her parents, she might be in Weehawken... trying to make it sound like I hadn't been sleeping there every night.
At that time he also told me that the super had reported me and my boyfriend were BOTH living there, and that we'd had a screaming fight with each other, which we aren't "allowed" to do in that building. I told him that never happened, but of course he had no reason to believe me, as his super said it did, and I've already clearly been lying.
And also I'm a friend of Stephanie the Liar's.
Oh, when she called him? She said a "good friend" of hers wanted the place and then, when he asked who, she couldn't remember my last name. Moron!
[Information not in original email: we figured out that the "fight" he heard must have been us screaming at the little baseball players inside the TV. I guess, "FUCK YOU KEVIN BROWN" and "JASON GIAMBI, YOU ARE A USELESS FUCKING JUICE-HEAD UNFIT TO WEAR THAT UNIFORM" might be misconstrued as a fight by some nosy, ignorant asshole with his EAR pressed up against the DOOR.]

So on the phone he asked me for her phone number, which I wouldn't give him. I gave him her email address, and he asked me to have her call him. Which she did, and she told him she'd be moving out at the end of July. He called me back, told me that she'd given notice and that I needed to talk to the super, who'd give me an application (if I passed his, like, senate subcommittee hearings), and then assuming everything "worked out", I would be first in line to get the apartment. The rent, which was $610 a month, could not go up at ALL. (Sucks to be a landlord in Weehawken.)

I sort of dragged my feet on the application, for many reasons you may already know (not really keen on living in NJ, not in love with the fascist regime they have going there, not looking forward to getting shit every time my boyfriend sleeps over like I'm in a dorm, non-super super way too nosy), but I felt like I HAD to live there, because of the rent.

Last week I finally got the application, lost it, got another one, gave it to the super, and got a call Thursday from the landlord that I needed to come to his office TWICE - once for the "interview" (a better word would have been "interrogation") and then again to sign the lease, if it came to that. He *generously* offered to do it all in one step, because the office is on 189th St. That's by the Cloisters. My office is on 18th St. It's a wee bit of a hike.

So I go up there Friday, in the rain. I sit down and talk to this dickhead, who demanded to see my social security card, license, passport, tax returns from the last two years, three most recent pay stubs, and a whole bunch of shit I'm sure I'm forgetting about. I had most of it with me, all I could put my hands on in one day.

He does the "interview", grilling me about everything - my life, my job, my relationship, pets, salary, just all in a very confrontational nasty tone. Then he takes $30 from me for the credit check, and tells me that if I don't pass the credit check, I'll get it back. He says it will take about a half hour. OH! He also tells me that he is going to need, on Monday, certified checks for a) $610 (one month's rent), b) $915 (1-1/2 month's rent for security deposit) and c) $500 to PAINT THE APARTMENT WHITE. I don't want the apartment painted white. It is very unusual for the INCOMING tenant to have to pay to paint the apartment. Remember that I'm also going to have to buy a fridge, because the one there is broken. It's also going to be a huge pain, because I'm not moving the furniture out, and there will need to be coats of primer and multiple coats of paint, and he gives me a sob story about how it will cost more than $500, but he will pay $500 too and the rest will come out of Stephanie's security deposit, and he can't raise the rent and wah.

I go outside and walk around, and I talk myself into paying the $500, on the grounds that if I had to find a place on my own there would be a broker's fee, and it would be much more than 500 clams, and again, the rent is SO CHEAP. But I have a bad taste in my mouth about the whole place. I'm in no way psyched at this point to live there.

I get back, he walks up and says, we have a big problem. Apparently my credit was fine, but once, in 1998 (yes, seven years ago), I paid the rent late in Riverdale and they filed some sort of court document. It wasn't an eviction proceeding, just some legal document reporting non-payment of rent. I have no memory of this at all, but now that I've had some time to think about it, I think what happened was this - I would often send them rent checks that they'd hold for 3+ weeks before cashing. So I had no way of knowing they didn't receive my rent until I got this notice. I called them, they said they didn't have the check, I said, it must have got lost in the mail, and I mailed them another one.
End of story. I lived there for another seven years.

But this jackass says that ANYTHING of this nature is an automatic denial in any of his apartments. So that's it. I can't have the apartment. He won't even buzz me into the office - I'm standing in the tiny vestibule, like he's afraid I'm going to get violent. He also won't give me back the copies he made of my SSN, pay stubs, ID, tax returns, any of it. He has everything he needs to steal my identity, and he wouldn't give it to me. I have no idea if this is legal or not.
I also think it was utter bullshit. He had made a few comments about what was really bothering him was the deception, and although I told him that Stephanie had lied to me, too, he honestly has no reason to believe that.
I think he was looking for any reason not to let me have the place, and he found one.

I left, and I was really upset for about five minutes, then angry, and now I'm getting kind of excited about the progress we're making on Jason's apartment.

We have to go to his family reunion in Tennessee the last week in July (30th - 31st), and we thought we had this past weekend, one more weekend, and then we'd be gone. As it turns out, there is an extra weekend in there that we forgot about. Thinking we had no time, though, we got a TON of stuff done this weekend - threw away bags and bags of crap, cleaned out the closets and repacked them in ways that make sense. I drew floorplans and measured the furniture we have, and the furniture we're taking from Stephanie. I think we're going to be able to make this into a decent place to live, comfortable at least.
With the money we save on the extra commute to NJ ($4 a day, about $160+ a month for the two of us) we will more than pay for the cable internet and digital cable we'll be getting.
And our rent will now be $350 each, plus we'll be splitting phone, electric, etc.
We should both be out of debt in a few months, and then we can start saving, and when we're ready we can either get a nicer apartment together or I can get my own place.

So that's it. It's a long story, but it has a happy ending, I think we're going to be able to make Jason's place look really nice and feel like home. Which he claims he has been waiting for "some woman" to do since the day he moved in there four years ago. [Ew! Sexist!]
It will be good. We'll get rugs and hang pictures on the walls.

That was the easiest post I ever posted, because I wrote it earlier today.
But that's what going on in my life, kids.
Now I must go watch "Hellboy", can someone please stage an intervention with this thing? It's past midnight and time for bed.