She's got tofu the size of Texas.

The thing about looking for a new place to live is, you open yourself up to meeting and talking with all sorts of strange people. I think I might have told you guys about the time I was accompanying a friend while she looked at apartments, including one whose tenants had clearly not been told about the visit, as they were in the middle of getting it on when we all trooped into the bedroom.
Like a lot of the weird occurences and people that flock to me when I'm least appreciative of them, there was more than a bit of the faux and/or washed-up hippie about those two crazy kids. I've also lived above washed-up hippie homeschoolers and been drawn into extremely revealing (for her) phone conversations with rabid Dave Matthews fans, for example.
Now, this isn't to say that I haven't had some hippie-ish friends that I've loved. In fact, until I moved here, I've pretty much always had a hippie girl buddy. Like my super-awesome junior year dorm floor-mate Liz, who was always a good person to visit if you wanted to make a huge dinner (we had a teeny little kitchen on our floor. In fact, most of my friends from that year were girls I hung out with in the kitchen while we waited for pasta water to boil or Jiffy corn muffins to bake.), bitch about a women's studies class, or concoct some insane reason to take two buses to Michael's. I've also had good luck with friends of the so-punk-they're-hippie variety, with the added bonus that so-punk-they're-hippies are usually too surly to have any of the above problems I've had with hippie-types.
But, of course, I was still surprised at the level of flakiness I got when I called a woman about an apartment last night. Granted, she wasn't as bad as the gentleman I spoke with before her, who felt that it was necessary to have the tv on at TOP volume while speaking with a potential tenant*. However, it doesn't really bode that well when the best thing someone can say about an apartment is how cute the windows are, over and over.
She was also surprised at my gas/electric stove question, and then kept saying how sure she was that it was gas. That's when she shifted gears and began to tell me how small the kitchen was. But cute.
Then she asked me if the jerks were declawed. Which, hell no. But I mentioned that they don't tend to scratch much, which isn't really a lie if you've completely forgotten about that old mattress, which I had. Then she starts describing the floors of the apartment, and trying to remember if there were "Berber rugs". At least I think that's what she said. I should also maybe mention here that everything I know about Berbers comes from an episode of Tony Bourdain's A Cook's Tour. They make tasty-looking bread, those Berbers. And roast sheep (or was it a goat?) in pits in the ground. Tasty-looking sheep.
I didn't remember any mention of rugs or cats from the episode, so I basically did the phone equivalent of nodding noncommitally while thinking, Get on with it, lady. But I'm really wondering, if she so didn't want her cute, tiny apartment scratched, why not just say no pets? I'm a librarian; I know how to limit searches to get the most valid results for my query. Had she, like another listing I found, said something like "one tiny quiet declawed cat which isn't a cat at all, but is actually a kitty robot like that creepy thing Cara has," I never would have called.
Some of the notes I made while on the phone with Berber rug lady:
"only declawed cats!? or not"
"kinda flaky?"
"deck"
"too flaky!"