On the Town

Hello, blogworld. I'm back. At least for now.

An enormous number of life changes have happened since I last laid out a real blog post, none of which are particularly interesting, and all of which involve me sending my bank account update emails straight into my spam folder every month. Life.

Anyway, back to things of actual blogportance.

I boycotted my beloved Thought Catalog after my roommate and I attended a semi-disastrous Ryan O'Connell-sponsored happy hour a few weeks ago. It wasn't disastrous, actually, so much as it was swarmed with every lifelorn twenty-something in the five boroughs, and cemented my horrible, creeping notion that I AM A CLICHE. I AM NOT UNIQUE. Free booze, though, so that was a plus.

Anyhoo. So, I stopped reading Thought Catalog for a few weeks in order to purge myself of the twee and precocious. But one of my NYC buddies posted this article, which documents the relationship newcomers have to New York as they live here over time. It's full of the usual litany of memories - high rent, love-hate relationship, the moment one realizes he or she really is one with the city.

It's a strange thing for me to read, though. New York isn't some place I moved to in hopes of making it big. New York isn't really a new adventure for me at all. I rode the subway the other day (like I do every day) and marveled at how I've been here for five months, and train throttles aren't novel to me anymore. But taking the subway, or strolling down 7th Avenue, almost getting run over by a taxi -- these things were all part of an old life of mine, and now they've merely crept back in. These things were never novel to me. There has been no moment where I've finally felt a part of New York, because it's always been a part of me.

Maybe that's what makes it hard for me to live here. It's too easy, in a way. I don't get excited when I manage to get from point A to point Q correctly. I don't make a connection with the city the way I did with Rome or Baltimore, because I've never felt like New York was a place I needed to conquer.

Maybe it's time for a new adventure. Maybe I need time away before I return again.

I miss the blogverse. I'll be back soon.

Blog/Life Failure.

OH GOD I'M SO SORRY BLOGVERSE/MOM & DAD! I've been so busy being an overworked/underpaid twenty-something Brooklynite that I haven't had any time to blog! Well, theoretically, I've had some spare time, but most of it has been spent drinking away post-grad life and/or watching episodes of How I Met Your Mother online, also in an attempt to drown out the real world, but with canned laughter instead of whiskey.

I will return. I'll be cooking up something good tomorrow. It'll probably be Easy Mac.

Life is wonderful, isn't it.

Rejection Is A Beautiful Thing

I love you.

I'm scooting off to work in a sec, but I needed to post a link to this beautiful rejection letter written by the one-and-only Hunter S. Thompson in 1971 in response to a piece of satire submitted to Rolling Stone magazine. I saw it posted on my beloved bible, the Gothamist (!!please hire me!!), this morning and felt the need to share it with my blog readership/my parents, who may be the only members of my blog readership.

You worthless, acid-smoking piece of illiterate shit! Don't ever send this kind of brain-damaged swill in here again. If I had the time, I'd come out there and drive a fucking wooden stake into your forehead. Why don't you get a job, germ? Maybe delivering advertising handouts door to door, or taking tickets for a wax museum. You drab South Bend cocksuckers are all the same; like those dope-addled dingbats at the Rolling Stone offices. I'd like to kill those bastards for sending me your piece... and I'd just as soon kill you, too. Jam this morbid drivel up your ass where your readership will better appreciate it. P.S. Keep up the good work. Have a nice day.

If I get rejected from another job, which I most certainly will, I can only hope that Hunter's ghost will fly from the heavens and tell me to "jam [my] morbid drivel up [my] ass where [my] readership will better appreciate it."

And people wonder why I've read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas approx. 17 times...

Talkin' About Things. And Things.

I really should update more... in the span of time since I last wrote a post, the United States economy went way downhill (again) and I finally learned how to snap my fingers with my left hand. What a week.

Also, today I saw SEVEN rats at the 1st Ave L stop. SEVEN. That's almost as many mice as I had in my college apartment! I became a bit nostalgic as I watched them scurry about the tracks, carrying cardboard, cell phones and random bits of machinery into their lairs. I'm not sure why everyone's so concerned about robots taking over the earth. Those damn rats are huge and will totally wipe out humanity some day.

I DON'T KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS! SCARY NUMBERS!!!

Speaking of wiping out humanity, as I'm sure you've all heard, the economy is tanking (again), China keeps chastising the US for living outside "its means," or whatever, and Obama is getting even grayer and sad looking. This is all nuts. Luckily, I now make slightly above minimum wage, so everything's dandy. I can totally afford to live in New York City, guys!

I'm still not really clear on how the stock market works, anyway, so I can't be too concerned. Money, schmoney. Living off Easy Mac and bar pretzels is nothing to be ashamed of, right?

I saw one of the L stop rats use its teeth to drag a huge silver watch into a hoarding hole. If there's one New Yorker who knows how to keep afloat when times are rough, it's a subway rat.

I've Never Felt So Close to You Before...

My commute.

Doesn't the New York subway system look glorious? I've always wondered what it felt like to snuggle up to strangers' armpits. Yummmm.

That being sad, nothing in life is more tragic than watching a throng of people exit a subway stop right as you're about to enter it. Especially if you take the L, because then you can look forward to at least 18 minutes of new wait time in the glorified sauna otherwise known as the station platform.

The DC Metro might not be as fast or as convenient, and that single-tracking system they have going on the weekends in absurdity, but man, those stations are nice and breezy.

Hrmph.

Summer in the city. Super fun times.

If I Can Make it There, I'll Make it Anywhere

After a brief, blessed stint as a fully-employed person, I will soon return to the land of the food stamp-eligible, which means I'll probably have more time to blog. True, it would be nicer to have less time to blog and more time to drum up some rent money, but hey, man, beggars can't be choosers. Though we can be bloggers.

And now, for a moment of seriousness.

I've been back in New York for two months now, shuffling from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back day after day. I've sent out job applications, though certainly not enough, signed up for unpaid/low-paid freelance gigs, and fact-checked countless magazine articles. I'm not really any closer to finding a job, but maybe some of that is because I'm still not even sure about what kind of job I want to get.

New York is the kind of place that beats the hell out of you and doesn't have any interest in letting you fight back, a quality I vaguely recognized growing up here. There's always someone better, brighter, prettier, more accomplished, more connected, and more talented than you are, digging their heels into your toes and reminding you that you really aren't anything special. I've been told time and again that I need to develop more of an ego, but sometimes I feel like it's better to be here without one. It's hard to survive if you're interested in going with the flow, because the flow in New York is more like a tsunami.

There's really nothing to do but latch on and hold tight. It's an adventure for sure, but an exhausting one nonetheless.

I miss Baltimore.