Welp, here we are after week three in New York.
It's been sort of a slow week, I guess. I feel like I'm just part of the daily grind. But things happened.
I started my shitty job on Monday and, unsurprisingly, it sucks. Still, though, there's really no good way to psychologically prepare for something that's going to suck as bad as canvassing door to door trying to get people to give money to a gay rights organization. And day one was brutal. Everyone around here is pretty unanimously "pro-gay-rights" but that doesn't mean they wanted to give me any money - and who's to blame them?
It turns out, though, that people DO give money to some dude "from the Human Rights Campaign," and day two I made a bunch of money. Making this money was nice because it meant I wasn't going to be fired and because I will apparently make commission on some of it. I canvassed in Hoboken, NJ and it's a really nice place - and very different from NYC. It was like Main Street, USA, just that everybody is fairly rich and everyone lives in brownstones (very well-maintained brownstones). The amateur demographing that I get to do is definitely the highlight of our job. Our office is in midtown Manhattan. Every day we come in to work and find out what our "turf" is, then we eat lunch, then we hop on a train and ride to Park Slope or Hoboken or Jersey City or Clinton Hill or White Plains - anywhere with people who are doing alright for themselves and have doors you can knock on (or ring a buzzer for).
This job's saving grace that it is very interesting to a resident tourist and that I only work three days a week: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. By Wednesday I was already ready for the week to end. It snowed in the morning, then sleeted, then rained on the snow and sleet all day and I had to walk around in it, not making very much money for the campaign for five hours. This job really makes my unpaid internship seem like an unpaid vacation by comparison.
I didn't really bro down too hard with anyone this week, other than Elena's friend Mara and her biffer (Brigeeta? Bridgetta? Bree-gee-tuh?). Mara lives in this rad loft in Williamsburg that she;s moving out of this weekend, and it's a real bummer for me, because I really liked being able to go there. But oh well.
I met Kate's ultra-friend India, and she's pretty awesome. Unfortunately we didn't have anything to do so we sat at this diner and drank obnoxiously overpriced milk shakes, then walked around the frozen ice-land of Williamsburg to the bridge, then across the bridge at like 2am to Manhattan. We're both sort of unhappy about being in New york and we talked about what it would be like to jump off the bridge. It's probably 150 feet above the water, so we figured that you'd die when you hit the water. But imagine somehow surfacing in a shipping lane, hundreds of feet from land in the 30 degree East River and realizing that you still aren't dead yet? We decided just to keep walking.
The internship has been totally awesome in its somewhat hard-to-gauge-the-progress type of way. I look at the internet. I find interesting things. I write about them on the blog. I clean stuff. I go get food. I transfer html from one website to another. I watch psychedelic movies about India. I listen to the Budos Band and podcasts of extremely obscure psychedelic garage rock. It's fun. If something like that could be your job, that would be totally awesome. It must be like what the dot com explosion was like, except without the fear of how to replace your almost-ruined pants when you only have $9 to last you the next week.
The money thing really is pretty fucked up. I think I've maybe spent a total of $725 since I left Colorado and $375 has gone to rent. So I've spent $350 in three weeks. It's an expensive city, you know. Probably sixty bucks or so has gone to the subway. And I have whatever the opposite of agoraphobia is called, so I feel perpetually compelled to sit at coffee shops so that at least I'm looking at my Macbook in a room full of other people looking at their Macbooks. So my coffee bill must be somewhere around $100. So that leaves $190 left for food, entertainment and whatever unexpected costs (laundry soap, the AA basket, papaya chips every night at 2am) I've had to pay this last three weeks. So it hasn't exactly been a luxury cruise.
Now I have nine dollars with a few coming my way and I don't get paid from the canvassing job until next Friday, and that will only be for three days with no commission, so maybe $200. It's a tough situation out here, bros. And I'll definitely need to keep this job that every cell in my body tells me to quit so that in three weeks I can have a decent paycheck and start feeling ok enough to buy a new pair of pants, in five weeks I can finally go to a record store, and in seven weeks I'll have one final paycheck to say fuck all y'all so I can take my last week in NYC off, then go to Paris for three weeks with 350 Euro.
I'm sure some of people who have accidentally read this far in this blog are probably thinking: "man, I wish I didn't have to be in school/work/whatever right now so I could go on my own foolhardy "trip" to (choose your extravagant city), but take heed: moving to a place where you don't have any serious bros, with virtually no money, in the middle of winter is tough. Really tough.
The next time I semi-move somewhere during a massive recession, I'm going to try to be better funded and have a house full of really tight bros to move in with.
I don't know, dudes. I don't want to bum people out. I've seen all this wild, impossible shit that I haven't taken pictures of because I don't have a camera because I'm poor, and it's been pretty awesome. I have done things I'd have never done in my entire life if I never came here. I'm going to make it out alive. And I'm going to get some serious gumption and backbone and grit from this whole experience that will make me a lot more depression-resistant when EVERYONE is as broke as me next year. But at this point, living at my Dad's house over the summer in beautiful, quaint, clean Boulder, CO sounds like a fucking vacation to me..
Oh! Shit! Listen to this:
So last Thursday I went to karaoke with these girls who work at the Brooklyn Label, except I was actually invited by their friend. She was really nice, as they all were. One is from Oregon and I totally have a huge crush one her (probably because she's from Oregon and I think Oregoneons and Coloradoans relate pretty well to one another once you get to a place like Brooklyn). One is from Hawaii and is super adorable and has this really nice house that I went to and ate dinner with the crew before Karaoke. And the girl who invited me is From Utah, is really hilarious, and was sort of flirting with me throughout the night (although i got the impression that a dude who was with us was wishing she would stop). Anyway, I ended up going home by myself, of course, and wasn't able to see any of them all this week because I was busy riding on the weekend and working during the week. Also, I was sort of hesitant to call the girl who had invited me because i wasn't sure what was up with her and that other dude and also I sort of didn't want to just hang out with just her as much as I wanted hang out with her crew.
Finally i made it into the Brooklyn Label after work today and Erica (the girl from Hawaii) was there and was like, "did you hear about ____ (girl who invited me to Karaoke)?"
"No."
"Look at this."
Erica typed in a name on her laptop and the first hit was the Salt Lake City Police Department Most Wanted page.
"____ ____. $60,000 in warrants including: forgery, bad checks, and retail theft."
Apparently the girl is on the run. She'd told Erica and her friends that she had cancer. She's had several boyfriends whom she ripped off by having them cash bad checks or through identity theft. She's a scam artist. And she must be pretty successful. She's been telling everyone that she works for a concert festival promoter and does shit like Bonaroo. She has an iPhone. And she gave Erica money to pay the dentist and didn't want it back, just said "I have to do SOMETHING with this money."
Anyway, it would have been a much better story if I'd have slept with her. I don't really have an identity worth stealing or any access to any money to get ripped off, so I wouldn't have been in any danger. But I could have said I slept with a girl who was on a most wanted list..
Well, that about sums 'er up. I finally rode Prospect Park. it's a really fun 3.2 mile loop with a decent 100-or-so-ft climb and some barely-rolling hills on the high side. It's a beautiful park, even in the winter. Unfortunately it was so cold that my toes froze and were swollen and had no feeling for a few hours afterward. But at least now I see how roadies keep in shape in this urban wasteland. There are 2.5 million people in Brooklyn alone. I saw maybe 20 on bikes at Prospect park that day (TWO BMCs!). Unfortunately, none of them was a match for the purple track bike..
