Category Archives: living in new york sucks so hard

My NYC Dream Apartment

Posted by plumpdumpling on May 9, 2011 – 12:30 pm
Filed under living in new york sucks so hard
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While I was walking to Kamran’s from work a week or two ago, this cover of mist descended and blanketed all of the tall buildings around me. I expected to be soaked at any moment, but it was evidently just a veil of clouds too lazy to fly any higher.

The most impressive sight for me along the way was The Corinthian, an apartment building I’ve been admiring for years. I love Kamran’s building, but if he had to live anywhere else, I’d want it to be The Corinthian. The impressive name entirely suits the 54-story, avenue-block-wide building made to look like cylinders lined up asymmetrically. It reminds me of stacks and stacks of pennies on a rich man’s desk.

Because having a lot of pennies makes someone rich in my mind, apparently.

I’m just so in love with the idea that everyone in the building has a giant bay window overlooking the East River. Even the cheapest studio has one.

Of course, the cheapest studio still rents for $2,200 a month. And the cheapest apartment for sale right now? $650,000 for a 629-foot one-bedroom. The most expensive is a 1,666-foot three-bedroom for $1,740,000.

Guess I’ll keep saving my pennies.

I’m Really the Victim Here, When You Think About It

Posted by plumpdumpling on February 10, 2011 – 12:00 pm
Filed under funner times on the bus, living in new york sucks so hard, my uber-confrontational personality
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The other day, I had just bought some pastries from the Financier in Grand Central and was standing against the marble column outside its doors to text Kamran a question about electrons that had just hit me when some elderly gentlemen passed by and said, “You get the prize for stupidest person! STUPIDEST PERSON!” I think he was hitting on me.

The other night, I was walking up the hill to Kamran’s apartment behind a mother and her three kids. The two oldest ones, a boy and a girl, were wearing backpacks that were almost as big as they were and were holding hands. They started lagging behind their mother and saying, “We’re too weak to go any farther!”, and the other reason I didn’t speed up and pass them is that they were Asian, which everyone knows is the most adorable brand of children. (I mean, up until a certain age, of course, when they get too precocious and start babbling nonstop about math on the bus in the loudest voices possible. Stereotypes!) At a certain point, though, they were just walking too slowly for me to maintain any distance, and as I got right behind them, my shadow fell over them, and they turned around and yelled, “KIDNAPPER!” and ran to catch up with their mom. As if I would purposely acquire children.

This morning, I had to be at work early to make nice with the sales team, so I was hungry for a seat on the bus at 7 a.m. But after helping a rather frail old woman with the ticketing machine and having her tell me how nice I am, I was eager to keep the good times rolling and let her go ahead of me to get an open spot. The only remaining option was next to a very . . . large . . . hulk . . . of a sleeping person who was taking up three-quarters of a two-seater and was allowing his or her coat to spill onto the rest.

Usually I would’ve just stood, but I really want to relax, and I almost wanted to punish this person for having the audacity to be heftier than I am. (I have issues, I know.) So I plopped right down on top of that coat and scooted myself as far into that seat as I could, not caring how uncomfortable my closeness made this person. I figured it was a woman judging by the impeccable tweed of the coat and the amount of bosom it had to take to create such a soft pillow in which conceal the lolling head, but it also smelled distinctly of men’s cologne. He or she spent most of the ride snoring, coughing, and gurgling, and all I could think about was what sort of diseases I was being exposed to and would be bringing home to my delicately-immune-systemed boyfriend, godblesshim.

At Fulton Street, a heavy arm reached across me to the metal pole on the outside of the seat in front of us, and I thought it was aa hint to me to move so the person could hoist his or herself out of the seat, but you know I wasn’t moving without an “excuse me” and a “thank you”. So I continued on with my Hunger Games (what a ripoff of The Giver and Gathering Blue, right?) and ignored the hand. When it came across me again, though, this time with an “I’m sorry”, I wondered what was up and looked over at the person.

It was a lovely older lady with the nicest smile, and she explained that she was trying to push the button to signal for a stop but that it wasn’t working. I tried the button myself to no result and suggested she try pulling on the rubber yellow tube that runs the length of the bus high against the windows. Of course she couldn’t reach it, though, because I was sitting on her coat. We had a little chuckle, and then someone hit the button in another part of the bus, so I got up, and she scooted past me with some effort and many thanks.

This is your fault, other New Yorkers! If 4/5 of you weren’t awful, I wouldn’t have to treat you all with disdain just to be sure.

Living in New York City is HARD

Posted by plumpdumpling on January 26, 2011 – 12:00 pm
Filed under living in new york sucks so hard, no i really do love ohio
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My boyfriend and I like to talk about how people who don’t live in NYC shouldn’t be allowed to complain about things. It’s not that we don’t think other people’s problems are valid; it’s that problems that are manageable elsewhere are compacted by 100 here.

Hate sitting in your freezing car while it warms up? Hate driving in snow? Try waiting out in the cold for the bus. Try walking through the snow while cabs spray dirty slush onto your slacks.

Think your groceries are too expensive? Don’t have the money to eat out? Here, we pay anywhere from $1 extra to literally twice as much for the same things I used to buy in Ohio. Our grocery stores have one brand of some things and no brands of other things. We go to crappy chain restaurants in Times Square just for the novelty and drop $25 on the plates we used to pay $5 for in our homelands.

Wish you owned your own home? Think your kitchen’s too small? Want more storage space? Hate not having a guest room? Need a new washer/dryer? YOU ARE RIDICULOUS.

I don’t mean to pretend like there aren’t a million benefits to living in NYC, and obviously I love it enough to have spent five and a half years here. It’s just that sometimes I look at my friends lives, and they just seem so easy. I mean, not to put my best friend on the spot here, but she has a bazillion-room house in Ohio with a guest bedroom, an office, and a craft room that she had to put something like 3% down for. (Here, it’s no less than 20% down–even that’s oftentimes not enough–and we’re talking 20% on half-a-million-dollar one-bedroom condos.) She has a two-car garage, every retail giant imaginable right down the street, two personalitied cats and a place to put their litter boxes, the ability to do her laundry right in her house, and three bathrooms that ensure she, her husband, and I can all poo at the same time when I visit. That’s livin’ the dream, man.

But sometimes–and I don’t intend at all for this to sound mean–everything outside of NYC all seems a little generic. Everyone has their carpeted floors and their beige walls, their drive to work with their favourite radio station, their Walmarts and their Red Robins. They have boxes of decorations for each of the holidays and garages full of lawn-trimming equipment, a TV in every room and newspaper clippings of TVs they’d like to buy. The idea of once again having church-going homophobe friends who birth a bunch of babies because they mistakenly think their DNA’s worth passing on sort of makes me sick to my stomach.

Of course, it also seems very familiar, and I’m nostalgic enough to be attracted to that. Sometimes, when my best friend sends me a recipe for homemade Pizza Rolls and I look around my boyfriend’s 250-square foot studio and notice he has no oven, I think, “I will look back at this time in my life someday and ask myself, ‘HOW THE HELL DID I SURVIVE THIS?”’ Sometimes I think about the one-bedroom apartment my boyfriend almost bought, and I crave that extra room and a TV for it. Sometimes I crave an apartment in someplace like Los Angeles or Irvine–places that seemed so not New York City not so long ago–where my boyfriend and I can cook dinner in a room that isn’t also his living room, dining room, office, and bedroom.

How old do you have to be before you can’t live like a college student anymore? But how much will you miss it when you’re not?

Get Back on the Slow Bus and Quit Your Bellyaching

Posted by plumpdumpling on January 21, 2011 – 12:00 pm
Filed under funner times on the bus, living in new york sucks so hard
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I love New York, but I think of most of the other people who live here as miserable narcissists who put razorblades in their Halloween apples and board up their chimneys come December. So it wasn’t surprising to me when on the bus yesterday morning, an otherwise polite woman next to me started going off on the M15 Select Bus Service.

Read the rest here.

A Tale of Two Crazy People

Posted by plumpdumpling on January 18, 2011 – 12:00 pm
Filed under funner times on the bus, living in new york sucks so hard
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Crazy people exist in such abundance here that I usually forget about them moments after our encounter, but here are two from last week I happen to remember:

1) I was on the bus Friday morning, reading A Short History of Nearly Everything on my Kindle, when I realized someone was singing. It was soft enough that I thought it was coming from the back of the bus, and I figured maybe he was just so excited to be getting off and going to work that he felt like humming a little ditty.

But when most of the people left the bus at Wall Street, he moved to a seat quite near me and began singing loudly and reeeeeally awfully, all high-pitched but not on-pitch nor even close. He was a 50-something black guy, faceskin pock-marked to beat the band, navy blue suit, brown loafers, thick white gym socks pushed down, and one of the nicest Jheri curls I’ve seen since A.C. Slater. He was singing some song that went something like, “Girl, I’m going to get you,” which freaked me out a little at first, but then I realized it was actually much better than the time the guy behind me in the train sang into my ear, “L-l-l-l-lick me like a lollipop.”

2) On Thursday night, I went down to the lobby of Kamran’s building to pick up our dinner from the delivery guy, because for some reason, food delivery guys are allowed to come upstairs at lunchtime, and wine delivery guys are allowed to come up at all hours of the day, but at night, you have to go downstairs to meet the guy.

Like, the other day, I was in the lobby, and the doorman called up to someone’s apartment and asked her to come down to pick up her delivery, and she said all annoyingly, “It’s WINE!”, and he said all apologetically, “Oh, so sorry; I’ll send him right up.” Meanwhile, I’m there in my flannel pants and Christmas slippers with the fringe that Kamran says makes it look like my feet have mustaches picking up my food.

Anyway, on Thursday night, I was coming up the elevator after grabbing our dinner from the delivery guy, and this old lady was their with me, but neither of us even acknowledged the other, which is fine with me. But then, seriously out of nowhere, she looks at me and says, “I did my laundry earlier today and then went to D’Agostino, and when I came back, someone had stolen my jeans out of the dryer. They were nice jeans! At least five pairs of Ralph Laurens.” I’m too nice, and she had a pretty great Irish accent, so I pretended like I cared and said, “Oh, that’s terrible. Maybe someone just took them out of the dryer and put them somewhere else.” The door opened to her floor, and she stepped out. “Oh, no,” she said, “I looked everywhere down there.” I said, “Oh, I’m really sorry. It’s awful to think that could happen in this building.” The door began to close, and she said, “Goodnight, honey.”

And I thought, “Why did she just tell me that? Was there no one else she could tell?” And that is why everyone needs a blog.