Previously, on "The Valley"

The start of 2005 will see Robert finally moving out of the apartment we've shared since last May. I really thought we had something special, but apparently he's had a girlfriend for about 10 months and it's time for him to move in with her. And her sister, because they needed sitcom potential.

Anyway, this leaves me the obvious three options.

1) Find another roommate. No. Not happening. I have no homeless friends, and I'm not doing open calls. I don't want to try to get used to sharing a bathroom/kitchen/TV/parking space with a stranger, especially when the apartment is really not all that big to begin with. Which leads us to...

2) Stay in the place and cough up the rent on my own. Never having had a place of my own, I've kind of coveted this idea for a while; and now that I have a steady job in a nonvolatile industry, it's a viable option. I'd have a second room to do whatever I want with, total dominion over everything apartment-related, and tons more closet space (Robert's room is the one with the giant sliding-door closet; mine is the one where the closet is almost too small to even hide in). But the rent -- while pretty low for a 2-bedroom -- would eat up more of my salary then I'd prefer. (Okay, "prefer" isn't the best choice of words; technically any amount of rent would eat up more of my salary than I'd prefer, since I'd prefer to live rent-free, but... back to topic.) Saving, for example, wouldn't really be happening much.

(Drumroll please)

3) Find another place. The problem with this is that I'd be breaking a promise. After the second time I moved (June 2002), I promised myself I'd never move again. Because it's impossible for that process not to suck. I mean, I've seen "Newlyweds"; it's even hellish when rich people move. I really dont' like to think about trying to schlep a big TV and half the Ikea catalog to another part of town. But if I could find a place I like better than this one while also saving a couple hundred dollars a month, then it might be worth biting the U-Haul bullet. So, to that end, today I officially started looking. I paid my $60 for the two-month westsiderentals.com membership, pretty much the one unassailably sound investment one can make in the moving process, and I clicked the search button. Unsurprisingly, there is very little to be had for under $1000 in the "cool" neighborhoods such as Larchmont, Fairfax, etc; and even here in Palms they're fairly pricey for what you get. I went back to the main search page and decided...to check out... the Valley. Like most City-dwellers, I hold the Valley somewhere between Scientology and low-carb candy on my offensiveness scale. But offensive or not, it's got a lot of potentially nice one-bedrooms for around $850. And I'd be walking distance from friends. And people wouldn't have to drive around for 20 minutes looking for a parking space every time they visited. And the drive to Ikea would be much shorter.

But... god, it's the VALLEY, right? How did it come to this?