I'm kind of over my apartment

I've spent the last two weeks planning to clean my apartment and the last two days actually cleaning my apartment. I remember when I first got the keys to my apartment and I was standing there, I was like OMGGG!!! My own place! And I loved it - especially the well decorated living room and spacious kitchen. But now, I'm totally over it and I kind of would like to find a new place to live. HAHA

I think the one way I've changed this summer is: my love for Berkeley is starting to drop. I LOVE the school, the food and the people. But I just don't enjoy LIVING here. Once I moved out of the dorms, I finally saw what others mean when they say Berkeley is ghetto. Living in dorms, where someone cleans the common areas every day, where you eat meals in a super clean and shiny dining hall that serves organic, and where the extent of "cleaning" is periodically lysol wiping your table and doing laundry, you don't see the ghettoness at all. The sublet was a wakeup call, and my apartment is just a constant reminder of ghetto.

So the thing I've learned from this summer is: where you live matters. I used to think I could probably get used to anything, or clean anything, but there are a lot of things that are out of your hands, especially when you rent. If I were insanely rich, I'd probably redo the cabinets of my kitchen and redo the pipes. Actually, if I were insanely rich, I'd be living in Gaia instead of my current apartment. But there are just a lot of things that I envisioned for my apartment, and I don't think I'll be able to ever get it to that level of cleanliness. Even if everything is covered with a layer of bleach and then recovered with contact paper, the structure of the apartment is just ... old.

I'm hoping that by next year, I'll make a friend who will live with me in a one bedroom apartment that is small but shiny and new. Something that looks like it's out of an IKEA catalog, although that will be extremely expensive, if I'm looking at Berkeley.