1.The infinite walkup.
Infinite staircase in an apartment building.
  1. Is that a mouse or a gigantic cockroach emerging from your stove? Is it possible you see both?
A mouse and cockroach hybrid.
  1. Put together your new ikea desk without any help. For the next decade, take this desk with you every time you move, despite it being completely nonfunctional.
A nonfunctional Ikea desk.
  1. You and your roommate are both on the lease, and pay the same amount in rent and utilities. So why does her room seem so much bigger than yours?
Floor pattern makes it seem like two rooms are very different sizes.
  1. Stare at the brown dot on your ceiling for thirty seconds. Then look at a blank wall. Did the brown dot multiply? Are the dots moving?
Brown dot on ceiling and many brown dots moving on ceiling.
  1. Is the water stain on your bathroom ceiling yellow and white, or blue and black?
Water stain on ceiling above shower.
  1. Did your secondhand bed come with three slats or four? Do you realize yet that it needs five slats in order to keep from sagging in the middle?
Bed with what looks like three and four slats.
  1. Which is at a shorter distance?
  1. Your radiator, which sounds as if a grenade exploded inside a steel drum.
  2. Your only window, which has the insulation capacity of a damp tissue.
Arrows measuring person's distance from their radiator and their drafty window.
  1. You finally found a new roommate. Which do you see?
  1. Kayla, a twenty-four-year-old sociology-grad-student acquaintance who’s willing to split her studio apartment with you, as long as you have a full year’s rent in cash, up front.
  2. Your great-aunt Sandy, in the Bronx, who has a second bedroom, enough cat dander to coat both your lungs, and every issue of Time from 1968 onward.
Optical illusion of old lady or young lady.
  1. Which shade of smokers’-lung gray will your landlord paint the apartment, four years after you’ve moved out? Will it match the burn marks on your wall from the time your toaster caught fire, when you tried to push an open-faced tuna melt into the slot? Will it blend in with the grime covering your window screens, so that the next tenant no longer knows where the wall ends and the outside world begins?