As I've been looking to get an apartment, I've started reading the Times' Real Estate section now and then. But I'm frequently frustrated by their focus on people who are clearly in the top 1% or less of wealth in this country, and on "trends" that only those people could possibly be part of. There was a recent article about one such "trend," toward making one's residence look like a hotel. This is already stupid enough. They talked about one guy who hired the architect of a Las Vegas hotel that he liked, to design his living room. Who the fuck can afford to do that? A while back there was another "trend" article about parents who, rather than housing their children in college dormitories, simply buy houses for them. What?! I have enough trouble comprehending how people are able to buy one house in a lifetime and actually pay for it. Is any of this really newsworthy? I would be far more impressed by an amateur being resourceful and using what they had to create an unconventional place to live. Another recent story raised my ire with its content, rather than with the presence of the article at all. It was about a planned building by Santiago Calatrava, the guy behind some pretty cool things such as the new PATH Terminal for the WTC site. His new project is a building with 12 stacked staggered cubes, each of which houses 1-2 families and has 10,000-12,000 square feet of space, on the lower east side. In other words, a huge building with ludicrously large apartments for a few very, very rich people. Is this really what we need? In general I've finally realized that in my current environs, most of the people around me are rich and perhaps that's why everything seems expensive. I think once I move I will really be in a place that is more suited to me.

(More soon--I'm trying to provide more frequent entries by not packing several ideas into each one)