Some of you may have heard stories of our ridiculous landlord situation in the past. I tend to joke about things I know are bad because, well, what are you going to do? We were in a lease, the rent was cheap, and as long as their fucked up existence stayed on the second floor, I was prepared to run under the radar.

Of course, this isn’t exactly what happened – even before Thursday the drunk made creepy statements and we did have to suffer through their fights and his screaming to himself and stumbling. But I would just close my eyes and think about how fast we were saving for a house and carry on.

The problem with people who are unbalanced/abusive is that eventually they will focus their crazy onto you.

Thursday night, the drunk was screaming to himself again, maybe into his boyfriend’s voicemail (we soon found he liked to leave long, screaming voicemail messages) and we had just had it. We were on a path towards a night like the night we decided we were going to look at houses – a night of being woken up repeatedly for hours with their screaming raging stumbling falling crap.

Megan called up there. She asked if he could keep it down. He responded by directing the crazy, violent language at us. Though I wrote a transcript of the actual voicemail, the words in print don’t really do it justice. It was seething, raging stuff. He was screaming so loud you must have been able to hear him down the street.

After ignoring calls to Megan’s phone and my phone and with no break in his screaming for about 15-20 minutes (I heard the message he left just being in my apartment because he was screaming), that was it. There was no way staying in the house was safe – and we both knew we were never going to sleep in that place again.

We grabbed our computers, shoved Mila in the cat carrier and tried to shove Rufus in with her – we only had one carrier then, that has changed – but we couldn’t get him in. So we stuck him in the only other thing with a zipper: Megan’s computer bag.

Of course, that was a bad idea. Computer bags are not made for cats. This is obvious. However, in the moment it seemed like the best idea of any. When we were rushing to our cars, Rufus got out and ran into the street. I am so thankful that he is loud, because he just parked himself under a truck and started crying. Of course, I was crying because if I lost Rufus because of that fucking loser drunk I was going to lose it myself.

Megan grabbed him and we threw him in my car. So that was fine then.

We got to my friend Angie’s house at about 12:30 a.m., dog and cats in tow. Didn’t sleep much.

Some people asked why we didn’t call the cops at the time. Here’s the thing: even if the cops had come and hauled him away, the longest he was going to be held for is like a day. A day is not long enough to pack our stuff and get out. And I had no idea what kind of shape he would be in coming back. Priority one was escaping.

Anyway. Friday morning.

First thing we did: call into work, email our professors, go straight to the post office and change our address. Then we went back to the house with no small amount of anxiety to pack up anything we might need in the next couple of months. For the hour and a half we were there, the drunk was still ranting upstairs. About us. I’m not sure he’d ever gone to bed. About 10 minutes before we left, he stopped – we presume it was because he passed out.

I organized on Facebook and Twitter to get people to help pack and rented us a storage space. Decided that it was most advisable to hire movers.

I should break in here for a moment and say that – especially in light of what it was like actually filing the police report on Monday – I am so lucky to have had the help of my cousin, who works with the precinct we lived in. She was there with us the whole time we were there Saturday, and Sunday until the movers came and we were getting out. Most people aren’t so fortunate.

Anyway – Sunday we packed like demons. We had so much help all day, and there’s no way we could have done what we did without those of you who came. We finished packing up most of the house in about 6 hours. It was amazing.

The drunk didn’t bother us for the rest of the weekend, by the way. Like many awful, violent people, he’s a coward and without the fuel of the right mixture of rage and booze/drugs, he’s afraid of confrontation. This isn’t to say I didn’t have massive anxiety the whole time. Because I totally did.

Saturday night we moved from Angie’s to a basement apartment of the parent of a friend of Megan’s.

Sunday we cleaned up the last bit at the old house and waited for the movers. They were supposed to come at 4, but didn’t actually get there until about 7. It was nervewracking, but it eventually ended and they finished the move at 10:30 p.m.

Yesterday we filed the police report. It sucked. To have been taken seriously by everyone all weekend, it really sucked to go in and not even be able to talk about everything that happened. We were rushed out, nothing was written down but our names and the drunk’s name, and I have no idea what’s actually in the report.

This upset me for a while, but screw it. We filed the report, we mailed the landlord a letter saying we’d filed a report and he’d broken our lease by making us live underneath someone who threatened us, and we were out. If he wants to come at us for something, the cops may not have cared to listen to the screaming lunatic on our voicemail, but no one who actually listens to what he was saying and how he was saying it will have any qualms about backing us up.

We’re moving again tomorrow. We’re very tired. Mila is so stressed out she has hives and rashes all over and I had to take her to the vet and get a freakin cone on her head so she doesn’t lick all her skin off. I am *so* *mad* at the drunk and the landlord for their stupid, screwed up lives and that their stupid, screwed up lives made our lives hell.

So there we are. That’s what happened.

There’s lots of talk in my academic life of “authentic learning,” something I’m personally quite the fan of. But I’m thinking of it in terms of my writing. I had this dumb idea that I would create a second blog that would be just for compiling all of my research into one place and commenting on it.

Why was this a dumb idea? Because it’s not at all how I actually process information.

I don’t think it was a dumb idea to start a second blog to save you good people from having to read things about academia and research (not that I’ve even written anything yet, that’s how dumb this idea was). It was just a dumb idea to think that it was useful to force a round peg like me (learns by talking about ideas/informal discussion) into a square hole (an empirical blog – seriously! dumb!).

It really shows some deeply embedded (and wrong) philosophy in my own brain about what writing is. It’s what I’m going to call “Research Paper 101 writing.” Like forming coherent paragraphs and boring sentences somehow means you know something/learned something. I don’t believe that even in theory, so why do I believe it in my gut? It feels like a religion I have to unlearn, to get deprogrammed from.

And so it goes. Screw empirical writing on blogs. That’s totally inauthentic. Give me colloquial…fragmented sentences…thinking out loud and in public…sticking my foot in my mouth…setting myself up for a challenge…