watch the blog

My friend told me that she and a mutual friend were talking about my life and the mutual friend said, about me, “it must be serious because she’s stopped blogging.”

First of all, nothing in my life is ever serious. 

But you will know when something is serious because I’ll be wearing a power suit and enrolling in law school like every other moron I went to highschool with who doesn’t know what they want to do with their lives but wants to appease their parents for wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on their schooling… or I’ll be 140 pounds, my face will be glued to the face of some 40 year old man and I’ll be doling out relationship advice like I’m a fucking marriage counsellor. Honestly. You will know because you will hate me because I’ll be insufferable.

So, yeah. No. Nothing is serious. I just moved. And was vaguely homeless for the first week of June. But now I’m settled in and here is a blog about some things that happened to me and what it means to be helpless.

First of all, in an incredibly valiant display of restraint, I’ve managed not to graffiti my new address all over town or shout it at passing strangers across busy intersections at midnight in downtown manhattan and I feel, more than anything, I should be commended for this.

I’m trying to be a safer and more socially conscious person and I had been giving my address out a lot, showing absolutely no discretion in the manners mentioned above (I literally graffitied my address in a male person’s novel on the subway when I was drunk once… two months ago), and in almost as reckless a fashion as I am wont to share my phone number.

So, I’ve moved. But before that, I was packing. I started at the end of April, though my move in date wasn’t until June 1. By the second day of packing, I’d successfully filled the eight boxes I thought would be enough to hold all of my possessions (books and clothing). 

Here is an idea of how many boxes were actually involved in this move.

Naturally, this miscalculation caused me an inordinate amount of stress and crippling anxiety, which rendered me incapable of folding and taping four flaps of cardboard in order to make a functional box, let alone of putting even one more flimsy white tank or 19th century romance novel into it, so I didn’t do any more packing until two days before i was supposed to move.

Then, the day before I was supposed to move, someone came to paint my very dark bedroom back to white, but when he was done - at 9:25pm - it was clear that the room needed another full coat of paint but that the guy did not have another can of paint, nor the interest or time to complete this himself, so I grabbed the empty paint can and ran out of my apartment like I was Tom fucking Sawyer and started walking towards Home Depot (because for some unconscionable reason I happen to have committed to memory the 10pm closing time of this store) so I could finish the job myself and not lose my security deposit.

I’m already in a panic from the desperation of the whole situation and being in an enclosed space with the paint fumes has left me light headed and I’m breaking out in hives from anxiety, scratching every inch of exposed skin, but now I’m trying to catch a cab along the FDR like some ratchet prosti and when one finally picks me up I can’t speak clearly enough through the hyperventilating for him to hear me, so we drive south - when we should be driving north - for two blocks and I’m yelling that he’s going the wrong way but have yet to direct him anywhere.

I manage to get the address out and at some point he makes a turn and lands us in standstill traffic and I begin shout-asking him whether this is his first day driving a fucking taxi and if he even gets that what he’s just done is a huge mistake. This also happens to be the point at which I realize there’s no way I’m making it to Home Depot, so I’m yelling purely out of rote bitchiness now and crying because there’s nothing I can do about any of it.

The driver then demands I get out of his cab.

I do and so I’m standing on Lexington and 22nd St drenched in tears and sweat googling “24 hour hardware store NYC” like a moron little genius. (this exists!!!)

I run there, despite the 24 hour thing and a man standing outside senses how badly I need help (and - perhaps more astutely - a compliment), and asks how he can help because i’m “too pretty to be crying” (who isn’t, though?). When I realize he works there I desperately ask him if he is capable of painting my apartment that evening and - more importantly - not killing me before, after, or in the process.

He says yes to both. He says that usually he charges $150 but that he’d do it for me for $60 (which I don’t feel bad about because he also, sleazily, tries to sucker me into having meals with him (I agreed…) and also because I am not convinced there is a “usual” rate (because how often has this guy just painted someone’s bedroom on a whim?) and that $150 just sounded good. Anyway, I give him a liter bottle of Grey Goose when he leaves because I have anticipated guilt about never gracing him with my presence at a restaurant.) He also says “I’ve never been in a cab before” when we take a cab back to my apartment and this sells me on his harmlessness for some reason.

So he painted my apartment back to white and that horror was over.

The day I was supposed to move into my apartment, I had to move my things to an interim living space because my apartment wasn’t ready. I did so in this truck, by myself.