In which the world falls apart and my fish and chips are late.

Yesterday I managed to accomplish a rare feat of unintelligence, even for me. I left home having forgot to bring my lunch. That alone is not so unusual. This happens to me about once a week. Usually I notice before I get to the highway, and I come racing back to my house, ushering forth a flurry of expletives as I crash through the front door, thunder into the kitchen, and grab my lunch from the kitchen table. But yesterday was different, because after turning around and racing back home, I walked into the kitchen, drank a glass of water, petted the cat, and then went outside and got back into my car, having forgotten my lunch again. By the time I remembered, I was five minutes late and still two miles away from work. There was no chance of going back for that lunch.

When I forget to bring lunch to the school that I work at, it's more of a hassle than a serious problem. The school is very close to a mall, and all the chain restaurants that exist in symbiosis with the mall. There's a Red Robin and McDonalds and a Friendly's. There's also a small pizza shop and fish and chips store, which is either locally owned or corporately modeled to look locally owned- plastic booth seating, the menu done up in those little plastic letters on the black background, etc. That's where I went on my lunch break yesterday, where I ordered some fish and chips.

As I waited for my food, I received a text message from one of my roommates, hereafter referred to as R1 (for roommate one) that said:

"There is a real estate agent here telling me that there is a closing on the house TOMORROW and we'll have new landlords. WHAT THE FUCK"

Now, back up two years.

Essentially, the house has been on the market since we moved in almost exactly two years ago. It hasn't sold because it is full of asbestos and lead paint and the outlets aren't grounded. It would cost many thousands of dollars to turn into a safe living space. Because nobody can afford to pay thousands of dollars to do so, we have lived here happily, playing less than what we would usually pay in a comparably convenient place for the privilege of exposing ourselves to carcinogens and electrocution. Kids about to graduate college- this is what adulthood actually looks like.

Every now and then, I would check in with my landlord about the state of the sale. I would encounter him in one of the rare moments when he was actually doing something he had said he would do, like when he came to cut the grass once a year, or that one time he shoveled our driveway. I would say, "So, how's the real estate market?" and he would chuckle and say something like, "Bad as usual!" Once in a while an unannounced Realtor and a gaggle of enthusiastic potential buyers would track their muddy shoes over our living room rug and let the cat out when they forgot to close the back door. Once in a while inspectors would come over, also unannounced, and awkwardly try to measure walls and take paint samples while we were still occupying the beds laying against those walls. We would become outraged. Then we would sigh, knock back some brewskies, and agree with each other that, "It's not bad for downtown, really."

But there was R1's text message. The house had been sold. Realtors had come over thinking that we were expecting them, shocked that our absentee landlord hadn't notified us of the sale. This began approximately 75 phone calls I would make to my landlord's various phones from different numbers over the course of the next 24 hours. Not only is he avoiding me, I'm starting to suspect that he has actually left the country.

So that happened. Then, while I'm on the phone trying to reach my landlord who I hope was cowering in a corner, shaking at the sound of my voice on his machine, I notice on my Device that I've received a new e-mail from Toronto. I open it to find that the University can't offer me admission officially until I get my college to send them a letter saying that I graduated in good academic standing. My college didn't have grades, which was one of the best things about it, but for some reason it took the University this long to figure out that they couldn't tell from my stellar recommendations and the evaluations on my transcript that I had actually graduated correctly. This meant a call to my college's registrar's office, a notoriously scary place from which people sometimes don't emerge for weeks at a time. They're good at losing your paperwork, especially the important paperwork, and suddenly forgetting not only which classes you registered for, but that you're a student at all. I crossed my fingers as I dialed, wondering where my fish and chips were.

"Hi," I said, "I'm and alum and I need to prove to my graduate school that I finished College in good academic standing."

"We don't do that," was the response, "We don't do GPA equivalencies."

"OK," I said, "I don't think that's what I need..."

"Well we don't do that."

"But surely," I said, "Surely students from this college go to graduate school?" I know some who have.

"You know what, you need to call Becca Barker*."

When I heard that name I knew it was OK. Becca Barker is who everyone gets sent to when nobody in the Registrar's office knows what to do with them, and somehow she always knows the answer. Sure enough, after a phone call to her, she had the entire letter drafted and in the mail by the time I had received my lunch. I had to eat it on the go- the conversations and e-mails and ordering had taken up my entire lunch break. It was OK.

Today I remembered my lunch, but I have no idea who my landlord is. It's not bad for downtown, though.

*obviously fake name