4 posts tagged “nyc”

I AM HAVING A DANCE PARTY TOMORROW NIGHT. If you are reading this, you are invited.

The party takes place in the downstairs room at Loreley, 7 Rivington Street between The Bowery and Chrystie. It begins at 10PM and will likely last until 2AM-ish. Obviously it is free, and there is a bar. Josh Huffman and I are your co-hosts, and we are each DJing two one-hour sets in fierce competition. Whose grooves are the funkiest? Who will get you the most bodied? Come and find out!

Seriously, though, you should come: This is the dance party you've always dreamed of, where cool folks with no attitude make fools of themselves to pop music new and old. We don't care who you are, we just want you to come have a good time. And if you think you're a terrible dancer, don't worry: I guarantee you are not worse than me and I am going to dance until there's blood on the floor. So you've got no excuse, y'hear?

Come get sweaty with us! Come tell Josh how much better my sets were than his! Come watch me engage in white-boy overbite again and again and again!

I made a big mistake.

At the end of June, my roommate, Ashley, informed me that she intended to move out of our apartment at the end of August, i.e. one year into our two-year lease. She intended to move to Park Slope with her friend Gem. I was not invited. I found this to be quite annoying, since I was the person who did all the legwork on finding both the apartments we've lived in in NYC and I feel like I've caught nothing but crap from her about both of them -- the first one (literally a block from her school) was too expensive, the second one (in a gorgeous, safe neighborhood 20 minutes from the Village and Midtown) was too small and she didn't like the neighborhood, even though it is awesome. I would've been a lot angrier with her if our landlord had not let us out of our lease so easily; as it stands, I've just decided not to be all that pissed about it. It's been pretty obvious that we were growing apart (I've sensed a real feeling of contempt on her part for all of us who went to high school together), so maybe this was the best thing.

However. I made a mistake. I decided, shortly after she told me this, that instead of trying to find a new roommate for the apartment we're in now, I would move out as well, and try to find something here in Greenpoint that had more space, as the room I currently occupy is 7' by 9' and the rest of the apartment is not huge either (the other bedroom is a decent size, about 9'x9' or 10'x10' overall, but the living room is not enormous -- the whole brownstone is quite thin). My rationale was that while this place was cheap ($1400 a month), and I could afford to pay $750 or $800 for the larger, nicer bedroom and offer the small room for only $600 or $650, the apartment on the whole was simply too small for me to share with someone I didn't know well (nobody I know was in need of a room right now, so I would have had to just find somebody on Craigslist). So I decided to go out and find a Craigslist apartment share for myself.

I saw a lot of places I liked here in Greenpoint, and some nice places in Astoria too (I wanted very badly to stay in Greenpoint, as I love the feel of the neighborhood and it's starting to seem like I've put down roots here, but I was maintaining Astoria as a back-up neighborhood), but initially none of them panned out. Trying to find a room share combines all the worst aspects of straight-up apartment hunting and, essentially, speed-dating or auditioning for a play -- you've got to come across as exactly what these people want in the space of a five-minute meeting, while ensuring that they match what you want or need as well. Ultimately, I did see a place, at the northern tip of the neighborhood, that I was offered and wound up taking -- it's a basement apartment, in nice shape, with a super-cool guy who couldn't be friendlier and is into a lot of the same things I am (his eyes lit up when he heard I worked at DC). The room is $800, which I can swing (though I'm in a fairly serious financial crunch right now), and I was pretty much at peace with how things worked out -- the block the new apartment is on is farther from the subway and amenities, and is not as pretty as the block I'm on now, but it is close to the bridge into Long Island City and the 7 train, which makes the late-night commute easy (at least in good weather, since there's an 8-10 minute walk).

However, I went over there today to give him the checks (deposit for the old roommate and first month's rent for the landlord -- the latter I had to get from my parents, unfortunately, which I hate to do since I'd been so financially independent up until now), and was disappointed to realize that the room is not as big as I'd remembered it in my mind's eye -- it's really only about 7' by 12', without much closet space, and with an angled door that makes furniture layout slightly problematic. At the same time, Ashley moved her furniture out today while I was with my sister and mother, and walking around the apartment I'm realizing how nice it would have been to have taken her room, and how much I really appreciate the block I'm on now.  But it's too fucking late. I've paid for the new apartment, and while the checks haven't been cashed I can't ditch the guy who needs a roommate just days before he needs one; the landlord has already started showing our  current apartment to potential new renters as well, and I suspect one pair has already taken the place. So I'm left sitting here tonight in a half-empty apartment (packing my hundreds and hundreds -- thousands, actually, in total -- of books, comics, and CDs is going to be a nightmare) coming to the realization that I faced a crossroads and I took the wrong path. It's not pleasant.

Between this whole mess, and my distressing inability to save any money, I feel like I'm really just moving in the wrong direction entirely in my life. Perhaps the new apartment will work out better than I'm expecting, but right now I'm glad to not be on the lease, because I may just want to stick around for six months or so and then try to move on to something better. In any event, the last thing I can really take right now is another period of time where it feels like I'm just killing time, treading water until things can get better. That's what living in this tiny room has felt like for the last year, no matter how much I loved the neighborhood, and unless I can get this new place to feel significantly different, then I just don't know what I'm going to do. Life should be getting better, y'know? It's not like it was already so good that a little setback doesn't sting. My happiness was contingent on a few fragile things going right and they're just not doing so anymore...

Holy shit, I suddenly have a Vox blog. I'm not sure how this upgrade occured, but I think it might be Lia's doing. And so I must now fulfill the promise I made to her over a dinner of delicious fried chicken a short while ago: I must record, for posterity, the greatest story ever told. And no, it has nothing to do with the Bible.

So: this was told to me by a coworker, and I believe it happened to somebody he tangentially knows, but frankly, the identity of the persons involved, or indeed the factual nature of the events, is completely irrelevant. Just go with it.

A young woman was dogsitting, I believe on the Upper West Side, for a family she knew here in New York City. And naturally, on the second day that she was taking care of the dog (a largeish mixed breed), it died.

Distraught and feeling guilty, she had to call the family, who were vacationing in the Hamptons, to break the bad news to them. They were very understanding -- the dog was quite old, after all, and it was no doubt simply his time to go, there was nothing that the young woman could have done. But they did have one request -- because they all loved the dog so much, and because the whole family was together out there in the Hamptons, could she possibly bring them the dog's body, so that they could bury him and have a little service? Still feeling slightly guilty, the young woman felt she had to agree.

Seeing no other real option, she loaded the dog's sizeable corpse into a large duffel bag and began the schlep to Penn Station. But upon entering the subway station, she realized that she could not lift the duffel bag over or through the turnstile on her own. She tried and tried, but it was simply too big and heavy. Luckily, a man passing by saw her struggling and stopped to help her lift the bag. Once through the turnstile, she thanked him profusely. "No problem," he said, "but damn, that bag's heavy! What's in there?"

Naturally, she didn't want to tell him that he'd just helped her lift the stiffening corpse of a dead dog. So she improvised on the spot: "Oh, you know, just some books, my dirty laundry, my laptop --"

And the moment the man heard the word "laptop," he punched her in the stomach and ran off with the bag.

...

BEST STORY EVER. Welcome to my Vox blog, ladies and gentlemen!