I have a few terrible stories about renting in NYC.
Like the time the single light in my Central Park West studio kept burning out, and the super didn’t believe me and left me to live in the dark for days at a time.
Or the time a different pervy super tried to walk in on me in the shower and then implied that I had an incestuous relationship with my dad.
But Kelly, my friend/mentor/blog Samaritan, has the best horror stories. I mean that in general. If horror stories were apartments, she’d have a whole building somewhere in Brooklyn. And if apartment horror stories were contests, which Curbed has gone ahead and done, she’d be story number three.
To reference Sinatra, I’ll sum up the last year this way: “When I was 27, it was a very bad year.”
I’m optimistic that things are different, starting today. I’m stronger and wiser with experience. Things have been looking up for weeks. No one gets this much rain without eventually seeing some huge effing flowers.
And everybody knows it sucks to grow up. I’m not alone, and I’ve got exhibits A-C to prove it.
Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, recently interviewed Mindy Kaling of The Office. I’m a huge Mindy Kaling/Kelly Kapoor fan and am hoping to ingratiate myself to her via Twitter someday. (Start small!)
Kaling had some great advice on keeping things in perspective:
I love theseNewspaper Blackout horoscopes by Austin Kleon. The above is mine for March. But yeah, it pretty much covers my always. Read yours here or learn how to make your own (and check out my headscarf).
Thanks for reaching out to me via email, Formspring, Twitter, and smoke signals to say, “Hey! You need to blog more!”
If you groaned at the pun in the title, congrats, you paid attention in English class.
I’m a fan of artist Christoph Niemann. You might remember that he’s responsible for I LEGO NY. When I saw that book, I didn’t want to finish it. Had I borrowed someone else’s copy, they’d have been like, “Hey, leggo my LEGO!”
If you groaned at that, congrats, you watched morning cartoons in the eighties and nineties.
Over the holidays, The New York Times published Niemann’s whimsical take on creationism called “Let It Dough!” I didn’t cover it for a couple of reasons: 1) I’m not religious, and 2) ugh, I don’t do Christmas. On December 24, I volunteered at a soup kitchen, ordered food, and spent the rest of the night imbibing and watching Netflix with my favorite mensch. The next day, I ate at a diner and came home to find my apartment’s boiler broken.
But I still thought “Let It Dough!” was cute. I just needed to wait a bit for people to stop playing Christmas carols at deafening levels. Here’s a belated gift (not a Christmas one, a just because one) for you:
I’ve dreamed of urban exploration since I was a kid yearning to break into the decrepit Corpus Christi courthouse. I never did, but I once dated a boy who first impressed me by saying he had done just that. (He was lying).
If you have a half-hour, check out Andrew Wonder’s short documentary Undercity. In it, he explores the forbidden tunnels of the NYC subway system, including the abandoned City Hall station downtown.
If you love this, I also recommend you check out one of my favorite documentaries, Dark Days.
In the name of all that is good, okay, and “c’mon guys, it’s not that bad,” someone made a United States of Awesome map in response to the United States of Shame map.
Yeah, the low high school graduation rates in Texas are worrisome, but have you checked out their wind power production? Top of the charts.
New York has the worst daily commute, but the highest use of public transit. Like anyone thought those things were mutually exclusive…
Still, the researcher was scraping the bottom of the barrel with some of these. I’m not sure we should be proud that Kentucky has the highest rate of gun ownership.
