So, Gabby and I were talking about apartments. Now I have had a small little thing going for Gabby since the day I met her, it isn't really based on anything other than the fact that she exists inside my world and there aren't a lot of women who do, so it doesn't even have a lot of bearing on hardwood floors, but maybe it is something I thought you should know.
Gabby had been going on and on about this apartment she had looked at with her boyfriend. Well at least I assume the guy was her boyfriend, although she just referred to him by name, as if I was supposed to know who he was or something. I never caught the neighborhood the apartment was in, although I do know that Gabby herself lives in the oh-so-trendy Central West End area of St. Louis. Now I had been considering moving to the even trendier Washington Avenue Loft District so I had been shopping places for a while. The boyfriend apparently didn't like this apartment (which was actually a Condominium, that he would be purchasing), because his furniture wouldn't fit the place properly. Now this frankly didn't interest me all that much and if I am going to talk to Gabby I would rather it not be about how the guy she is sleeping with isn't smart enough to realize that his $400 worth of furniture probably shouldn't be too much of a factor in his purchase of a $125,000 piece of real estate.
So I move the subject over a bit, asking if the place had hardwood floors. After 30 years of life I have decided that there are really only one acceptable kind of flooring in this world, hardwood floors (although concrete floors come in a close second). Everything else fails to stand up. They look better and they are easier to clean. While it might be possible to stain a hardwood floor with effort, I have found that carpet stains are almost a certainty, any time anything hits the floor. I once spent five years living in an apartment with carpets so bad that I still have nightmares about them. Needless to say I will never live anywhere with carpet ever again.
I wanted the young and oh-so-lovely Gabby to understand that not only were hardwood floors easier to clean, they also looked better, gave any place a sense of class, and were often a sign of a building that featured superior construction. in fact they went right along with exposed interior brick in making a statement with the place you lived in.
Gabby replied that she liked carpet better. I was amazed, I couldn't even imagine why she would like carpet better. Perhaps as a child she liked to roll around on the floor, perhaps she still does? Either way, she preferred carpets to hardwood floors, and there was nothing I could do about that. I really didn't have anything else to say to her after that, so I never spoke to her again.