How Discovering I’m Not A Pro At City Living Deterred Me From Success This Week

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Last weekend, I wrapped up my first full year living in the city. My naïve ass thought I was a pro at city life by this point. I know all the big streets that ran north/south and east/west. I’m able to give directions to the nearest L stop as long as we’re on the north side. I can even give a halfway decent taco recommendation if you’re coming in from out of town.

Would I say I’m a native? Fuck no. Not even close. There’s so much to do here that it takes at least a few years and a healthy checking account to do a large chunk of it—neither of which I have. But just because I’m not a native, per se, doesn’t mean that I’m totally clueless, right? Right? Well, last week I learned that I was very wrong about all of that. Here’s how I know.

I went to a hot tub party the night before moving apartments.

Let’s be very clear: the hot tub party was awesome. It was a ton of fun, I got to see new sides of my friends, and we all got drunk and ate grilled cheeses afterward. Any other night of the year, I would be able to aggressively dehydrate myself like that with the comfort of knowing I could wake up whenever I wanted to the next day. But this weekend, I went into the hot tub party knowing full well that I had an 8:00 a.m. sharp wake up call the next day.

I don’t know what my problem is. Every time I move apartments I always think, “So what? Just throw your shit into a box and then take it to the new place. What’s so hard about that?” Sure, it sounds easy enough, and then you realize how much shit you have and that you don’t have the right vehicles to transport stuff and that you never asked your landlord what to do with your keys and that you have to spend 2 hours on the phone with Comcast trying to activate your router. And then it doesn’t seem as easy anymore.

I got chewed out by a waiter.

For the second part of Hillary’s birthday, she got a smaller, tight knit group to go out for dinner to a restaurant called 90 Miles Café. It’s an awesome Cuban place that serves amazing food, and also happens to be BYOB. I have never been to a BYOB place before, but I always just figured that you could bring your own booze and then figure out something to mix it with once you got there. I never realized that every once in awhile, the restaurant will provide the mixers for you.

So when we rolled up to this Cuban place, everyone else was packing red wine for sangria or white rum for Cuba Libres and Mojitos, and I brought a fifth of vodka like an idiot. What self respecting Cuban drink involves vodka? A Miami Vice? Is that even Cuban? What even goes in a Miami Vice?

I wouldn’t be thinking of it this way if it weren’t for our waiter. When he came to take our drink orders, he mentioned all of the mixers that they provide and then looked at me and said, “Oh…you brought vodka…we actually don’t really have anything that goes with vodka. Do you want to just stick with water?”

No, motherfucker. Give me a lemonade or pomegranate soda or some shit and let me suffer alone.

I overestimated the size of my new bedroom.

Before the movers came to take our furniture to the new place, my roommate E went to the new apartment to measure her bedroom and make sure that everything would fit, and to decide where she wanted everything to go. I, on the other hand, was hungover from the previously mentioned BYOB restaurant, and thought that having eyeballed the size of my room was going to be good enough.

And so later that day, when the movers were dropping furniture off in my bedroom, we ran into a slight problem: my room is fucking tiny. They put my bed where I wanted it and the door wasn’t able to close. It wouldn’t have been an issue if they hadn’t already filled the room with my other furniture. I spent the rest of the time the movers were there plotting out where I wanted everything to be moved to, only to have them leave. All I could do from there was take everything out and move it myself, which kind of defeats the entire purpose of having movers.

I got upset with my mom on the phone.

Over the last 5 days, my mother has called me 3 times. Each of those times, I’ve been in an inexplicably bad mood. Either I was exhausted from moving, had just gotten told that I would have to take an entire week off of a project at work, or I had started the Whole 30. None of those things bode well for pleasant conversation.

It sucks because I care a lot about my family, my mom especially. At one point during one of our calls, she subtly implied that she was the reason for me being in a bad mood, and that kind of shit is what will really bring you back down to earth. Being both sleep deprived and craving tacos, tried to say, “No, Mom. It really isn’t you, I’m just having a crappy week.” However, it came out as, “No, Mom! Seriously, it’s not you. I’m just having a shit week and am not really in the mood to chat right now.”

After having a few days to think about it, I feel terrible. I’ve never been one to talk to my parents in a disrespectful way, and this has been sitting with me all week.

Here’s to another year of city livin’. Let’s hope I can come out on the other side as a pro..

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Charlie

Using sarcasm as a defense mechanism since 1993. At any given moment I'm either tired, drunk, or stressed out. Get at me at charliepgp@gmail.com or whatever.

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