This song has been running through my head all day. It came up on my iTunes this morning while I was standing in the kitchen removing the saran wrap I put on my ice trays to keep rust out of my cubes. Man, talk about apropos. When did my life become this absurd?

I spent the afternoon with Ricky Roma, a slick realtor I met checking out an open house who stalked me for five or six calls before I was able to talk to him. He has awful timing; maybe that's why he's so persistent. He's tall and vaguely handsome with great hair, dark and shiny. He dresses well and went to Rhode Island School of Design and gets animated discussing interior decorating. Beneath his effeminate exterior is a hustler who takes his job very fucking seriously. In this favorable light, we'll overlook his almost total lack of irony.

Stuck in construction traffic on Mass Ave, I asked idly what sort of music he liked. The radio was low and playing soft rock. "Classical," he told me, and changed the station. "WCRB hasn't been coming in." CRB is a Boston station broadcasting 50,000 watts. He lives in Boston's South End. I don't personally care if he likes the Pet Shop Boys or Kenny G, but he's touchy about his image.

But like I said, he hustles. He had six places lined up with a fellow realtor at each one. He has excellent parking karma; I'd love to know how he pulls that off. We hit two places in Back Bay, three in South End and one in Bay Village in three and a half hours, and we still had time to stop at a bar for a drink and a chat and some work with a handy calculator. You see my point with the nickname.

I was blind exhausted by then. He was talking percentage down and price points and square footage and, seriously, interior design. When I'm very tired, it shows, but I finally had to tell him I couldn't concentrate. I had told him on the phone that I tire easily, but this is not a concept he seems to understand well. Maybe he wasn't programmed for it.

I saw some nice apartments, but only one really struck me, and it was one which for various reasons just isn't appropriate. Like it's in a section of town that realtors call South End and everyone else calls Roxbury, the edge of the 'hood. Someone was stabbed a few weeks back at the nearest subway stop. And a block or two away, someone shot at me in the summer of 1994. Roma hadn't meant to take me across Mass Ave; he'd gotten the address wrong and we followed through anyway because a realtor was waiting.

If you want to call me a snob, remember that I'm also a small, single woman.

After the tidy brick and paint of the South End, the building looked shabby and used. No, not in a cool way. We climbed a few stories up steep stairs and finally rounded a corner into a really fantastic apartment. Unlike the others, it was empty. The renovations weren't done yet; there were open spaces in the walls and the microwave on the floor. But it was a great room, big and full of light from the skylights. The floor was beat-up wide-plank hardwood. A black metal staircase led to the roof hatch. The fridge had a brushed-steel door. It had potential and an air of waiting.

It was also about 200 square feet larger than the other apartments we looked at, which contributed to the effect it had on me more than I expected. Location, location, location. "They're trying for a sort of hip industrial loft feel here," Roma told me sotto voce while the guy who let us in sat in the bay window and hustled on his cell phone. They're succeeding. I'm having Real World loft fantasies again. Damn.

I was so tired when he finally dropped me off that I crawled right into bed and fell asleep for a while. I had hoped to get my laundry done this evening, but not a chance. And tomorrow it's going to pour.

Things have gotta change.