In a couple short hours, I'll be signing a lease for my first
apartment. My future roommate and another friend of mine are the only ones who know about this, and I'm lying to everyone else, saying that I'm just checking the place out. And it all just goes to remind me that I'll do
anything to help a friend -- he has no place to go after the end of May, and I'm leaving for
New Mexico tomorrow morning for over a week, so I already made the decision to stay there even though I haven't seen the insides of the rooms yet, and haven't looked into any other places at all. It's a great deal, and a brand new complex, but it's just a more hasty decision than anyone I know (including me) would approve of.
The worst thing about the whole deal is that the other friend who knows I'm going to do it was counting on me staying in the dorms again, and seemed pretty let down when I told her how far away from campus the apartment is. She wanted my dorm room to be an oasis on campus between her classes, since this will also be the first year she lives off campus. The worst part is, I can't convey to anyone (especially my future roommate) how this is a con for living at the apartment... most any rational person would tell me that it's not my responsibility to endure the depressing living conditions of the dorm room just so someone else has a place to kick off her shoes every once in a while. But it plagues me now, the thought of her unhappiness absorbing the negative emotive energy resulting from the frightening prospect of making such a huge commitment so hastily. I have too much empathy for most of my friends, and way too much for her in particular.
Update, in case you're reading this now for some reason:
Come to find out, the nice lady at the apartment wouldn't let us sign a lease until we filled out and they processed our
rental applications (lousy life experience, and my lack thereof, causing me to make foolish assumptions... argh!). And then it turned out that when the nice lady told us to
lie on the application and say that we weren't students (no students allowed at the complex, as it's some kind of family housing/government section 8 funded project) because "they'll never find out", she was completely wrong, because
they called our places of work and did, in fact, find out. So now we're probably going to live in a house much closer to campus.