I lived there for about a year. It wore me down as well. Getting through the day as an introvert was exhausting, because there are ALWAYS people around, whether you’re smashed in a subway or walking through the street. By the time I commuted the hour back to my apartment, it was hard to coerce myself to go back out again, and I was too broke to afford much at that. I think there are things I would have done differently for sure, and some of the reasons I decided to leave were unrelated to the city itself. I have a love-hate relationship with it. There’s an energy there that I miss so much, and I suppose it’s my “one that got away” of the cities I’ve lived in.
Apartment girl – I moved to NYC with my pledge sister after we graduated about five years ago. She mentioned right AFTER we signed the lease that her boyfriend wanted to move in when he graduated in a few monts. Me: “yeah okay, as long as he pays rent.”
They get engaged in December and he moves in. The deal was that he’d pay rent when he got a job. Most of what he did was work part time as an assistant (which apparently did not count as a rent-paying job), watch my Netflix account on the internet he wasn’t paying for, and post facebook statuses about “making it in the big city.”
I admit that I didn’t handle the situation very well. Things got super passive-aggressive, and it really became a “me vs them” thing. I eventually asked him why he wasn’t paying rent, and he said “because you’re taking up half the apartment.”
Me: “YES, because I am currently paying half of the rent. Pay your share and we’ll reconfigure the space.”
Things got so bad that they eventually broke the lease, moved out, and I had to find another roommate on craigslist. She worked nights as a chef, was not a serial killer, and was great. My old roommate and her fiance got married. I was not invited to the wedding and we never spoke again.
TL;DR – If you do want to do it, be VERY specific about what the arrangement will be, and do it up front. If she argues that the two of them combined should only pay half the rent because they are sharing half of the space, remind her that while sharing her bedroom is her business, he is still an extra person sharing the common areas. I was late to work so many times because my roommate’s freeloading boyfriend was in our only bathroom.
I don’t care so much if the split bill is only a few dollars over what I actually spent, but I choose to drink cheap while I’m out for a reason: I’m broke.
If everyone else is drinking $10 cocktails and I had two 3 dollar beers… sorry but I’m not forking over a $20 portion of the bill. Luckily all my friends are also pretty broke (liberal arts majors stick together) so this doesn’t really arise, but reading this gave me anxiety. Maybe this makes me Math Girl, but I’ll take it.
I always offered to split when I was dating field – especially on a first date, I don’t want anyone to feel obligated to buy my beer if we don’t click.
“Just as things were getting hot and heavy, if you will, he literally pushed me off of him and gave me this whole long speech about how he won’t take me seriously if I sleep with him right then.”
Fuccccckkkk this guy. I disagree that he’s a decent person. Props for not sleeping with her if he was going to end it the next day, but seriously? Find a less sexist justification for it. There’s no reason for him to act like her wanting to sleep with him after three dates (a common time frame) makes her less worthy of respect or less likely to be “taken seriously.” Maybe he didn’t mean it like that, but I feel like there are better ways to turn it down that wouldn’t make her feel degraded.
This hits home pretty hard. When I was 7 years old, we found a cat when we went to visit my grandmother for Thanksgiving. He was clingy, desperate for a home, and kind of freaked my grandma out. She would carry one of my brother’s toys, an orange plastic baseball bat, in case he tried to attack her while she was getting groceries out of the car. He was the gentlest cat in the world, so of course he never did. We named him Jet. He came home with us, and was the best companion to my brother and I as we grew up.
17 years later, I met my parents at my grandmother’s house for her funeral. Jet had come along with them, as they were scared to leave him alone. He was very frail and on medication for thyroid issues. That was the last time I saw him before they had to put him down a month later.
I found it so weird as an adult that it was truly full-circle… He was found at my grandmother’s, and he went nearly the same time as she did. All the times we would bring him along to her house as a kid, and then they went together. Felt like a chapter losing in much the same way. My parents eventually adopted two new cats, and it feels similar in that they are their pets, not mine.
Sometimes it’s just nice to mix it up. I’ve got an old Technics turntable and love records, but also like being able to listen to whatever I want on Spotify. I like messing around with my pour over and Aeropress, but I also drink gas station coffee if I’m in a rush. Baking hipster crap is fun and tasty, but you also might find me at Krispy Kreme. I think the dreaded hipster word is more defined by an attitude than the actual craft cocktails, coffee, rustic-ness, etc.
I lived in a top floor apartment in NYC during grad school (yeah i know, username checks out), which meant the sun beat down on it all summer with no AC. Being from the south, i had no idea it got so hot “up north,” and as a broke-ass grad student, I was determined to stick it out. Got to the point where it was hotter in my apt than it was outside, and it was just a giant, nasty sweatshow. I used a toaster oven so I didn’t have to run my real oven and had a million fans blowing constantly, but before I knew it, I was on Craigslist buying a cheap window unit. Best $100 bucks I spent that summer.
I’m 5 years out of school, make less than the average intern, and worked multiple unpaid internships back in the day – one of which tasked me with cleaning the litter box for the office cat.
What universe is this 50k straight out of school + $18/hour internship stuff in? Because clearly I’m not living in it.
I used this program called “You Need A Budget” (that’s the actual title of it, google it!) and it’s helped me a lot with looking at the reality of what I’m making vs. how much I can afford to spend on certain things.
You create your budget and you can set “goals” – like setting aside $25 a month as a gift savings fund so that when December rolls around, you aren’t scrambling and broke trying to buy everyone’s gifts, or $25 a month to cover an inevitably expensive checkup for the dog in six months. These things are super obvious to some, but looking at it this way helped me a lot. I currently have a credit card with 0% interest the first year, and i’m budgeting how to get that paid off by the time the year is up. The program is $50 a year, but free for 30 days… Honestly, it’s stuff you could calculate yourself, but having gone from virtually no money management on my part, using it for at least the trial has really put things into perspective for me.
I recently encountered this over the weekend. My friend dragged me out at 10 PM (my nights usually start much earlier than that nowadays) to go drinking. Initially I felt old and boring, but as we bar-hopped, I realized I’d forgotten how much fun it is. Granted, there are some bars I enjoyed more when I was 22 as opposed to 27. I like hanging out at breweries or quieter places now. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to drink and have fun, and I will never say no to a concert! Tastes change, but my ability to go out and enjoy it hasn’t.
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I love Customer Care forms. Thanks for the Amazon gift card, Delta. Did not work with U-Haul. Fuck U, U-Haul.
*fcked a Duda on an air mattress?
Yes! I lived in East Harlem (116th/1st) and it was great. In my experience, it was mostly families though (this was 2012/2013).
I lived there for about a year. It wore me down as well. Getting through the day as an introvert was exhausting, because there are ALWAYS people around, whether you’re smashed in a subway or walking through the street. By the time I commuted the hour back to my apartment, it was hard to coerce myself to go back out again, and I was too broke to afford much at that. I think there are things I would have done differently for sure, and some of the reasons I decided to leave were unrelated to the city itself. I have a love-hate relationship with it. There’s an energy there that I miss so much, and I suppose it’s my “one that got away” of the cities I’ve lived in.
Apartment girl – I moved to NYC with my pledge sister after we graduated about five years ago. She mentioned right AFTER we signed the lease that her boyfriend wanted to move in when he graduated in a few monts. Me: “yeah okay, as long as he pays rent.”
They get engaged in December and he moves in. The deal was that he’d pay rent when he got a job. Most of what he did was work part time as an assistant (which apparently did not count as a rent-paying job), watch my Netflix account on the internet he wasn’t paying for, and post facebook statuses about “making it in the big city.”
I admit that I didn’t handle the situation very well. Things got super passive-aggressive, and it really became a “me vs them” thing. I eventually asked him why he wasn’t paying rent, and he said “because you’re taking up half the apartment.”
Me: “YES, because I am currently paying half of the rent. Pay your share and we’ll reconfigure the space.”
Things got so bad that they eventually broke the lease, moved out, and I had to find another roommate on craigslist. She worked nights as a chef, was not a serial killer, and was great. My old roommate and her fiance got married. I was not invited to the wedding and we never spoke again.
TL;DR – If you do want to do it, be VERY specific about what the arrangement will be, and do it up front. If she argues that the two of them combined should only pay half the rent because they are sharing half of the space, remind her that while sharing her bedroom is her business, he is still an extra person sharing the common areas. I was late to work so many times because my roommate’s freeloading boyfriend was in our only bathroom.
Oh yeah, I’m a fan of the individual check in a small group, but this post seems to be more focused on the large, one-check type of group.
I don’t care so much if the split bill is only a few dollars over what I actually spent, but I choose to drink cheap while I’m out for a reason: I’m broke.
If everyone else is drinking $10 cocktails and I had two 3 dollar beers… sorry but I’m not forking over a $20 portion of the bill. Luckily all my friends are also pretty broke (liberal arts majors stick together) so this doesn’t really arise, but reading this gave me anxiety. Maybe this makes me Math Girl, but I’ll take it.
As a southerner, replace Bojangles with Chick-fil-a (not that we don’t also love Chick-fil-a down here). Spot-on with Cook Out, though.
Trader Joe’s boxed Cabernet Sauvignon, because I’m broke.
Pairs well with Bachelor/Bachelorette seasons, where I go through wine extra quickly.
I always offered to split when I was dating field – especially on a first date, I don’t want anyone to feel obligated to buy my beer if we don’t click.
“Just as things were getting hot and heavy, if you will, he literally pushed me off of him and gave me this whole long speech about how he won’t take me seriously if I sleep with him right then.”
Fuccccckkkk this guy. I disagree that he’s a decent person. Props for not sleeping with her if he was going to end it the next day, but seriously? Find a less sexist justification for it. There’s no reason for him to act like her wanting to sleep with him after three dates (a common time frame) makes her less worthy of respect or less likely to be “taken seriously.” Maybe he didn’t mean it like that, but I feel like there are better ways to turn it down that wouldn’t make her feel degraded.
“I’m sorry, the old Avril can’t come to the phone right now”
“Why?”
“Oh, ’cause she’s dead!”
This hits home pretty hard. When I was 7 years old, we found a cat when we went to visit my grandmother for Thanksgiving. He was clingy, desperate for a home, and kind of freaked my grandma out. She would carry one of my brother’s toys, an orange plastic baseball bat, in case he tried to attack her while she was getting groceries out of the car. He was the gentlest cat in the world, so of course he never did. We named him Jet. He came home with us, and was the best companion to my brother and I as we grew up.
17 years later, I met my parents at my grandmother’s house for her funeral. Jet had come along with them, as they were scared to leave him alone. He was very frail and on medication for thyroid issues. That was the last time I saw him before they had to put him down a month later.
I found it so weird as an adult that it was truly full-circle… He was found at my grandmother’s, and he went nearly the same time as she did. All the times we would bring him along to her house as a kid, and then they went together. Felt like a chapter losing in much the same way. My parents eventually adopted two new cats, and it feels similar in that they are their pets, not mine.
Great article!
Sometimes it’s just nice to mix it up. I’ve got an old Technics turntable and love records, but also like being able to listen to whatever I want on Spotify. I like messing around with my pour over and Aeropress, but I also drink gas station coffee if I’m in a rush. Baking hipster crap is fun and tasty, but you also might find me at Krispy Kreme. I think the dreaded hipster word is more defined by an attitude than the actual craft cocktails, coffee, rustic-ness, etc.
I lived in a top floor apartment in NYC during grad school (yeah i know, username checks out), which meant the sun beat down on it all summer with no AC. Being from the south, i had no idea it got so hot “up north,” and as a broke-ass grad student, I was determined to stick it out. Got to the point where it was hotter in my apt than it was outside, and it was just a giant, nasty sweatshow. I used a toaster oven so I didn’t have to run my real oven and had a million fans blowing constantly, but before I knew it, I was on Craigslist buying a cheap window unit. Best $100 bucks I spent that summer.
I’m 5 years out of school, make less than the average intern, and worked multiple unpaid internships back in the day – one of which tasked me with cleaning the litter box for the office cat.
What universe is this 50k straight out of school + $18/hour internship stuff in? Because clearly I’m not living in it.
I used this program called “You Need A Budget” (that’s the actual title of it, google it!) and it’s helped me a lot with looking at the reality of what I’m making vs. how much I can afford to spend on certain things.
You create your budget and you can set “goals” – like setting aside $25 a month as a gift savings fund so that when December rolls around, you aren’t scrambling and broke trying to buy everyone’s gifts, or $25 a month to cover an inevitably expensive checkup for the dog in six months. These things are super obvious to some, but looking at it this way helped me a lot. I currently have a credit card with 0% interest the first year, and i’m budgeting how to get that paid off by the time the year is up. The program is $50 a year, but free for 30 days… Honestly, it’s stuff you could calculate yourself, but having gone from virtually no money management on my part, using it for at least the trial has really put things into perspective for me.
First fight is at 6 months in? HAHAHAHAHA.
I recently encountered this over the weekend. My friend dragged me out at 10 PM (my nights usually start much earlier than that nowadays) to go drinking. Initially I felt old and boring, but as we bar-hopped, I realized I’d forgotten how much fun it is. Granted, there are some bars I enjoyed more when I was 22 as opposed to 27. I like hanging out at breweries or quieter places now. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to drink and have fun, and I will never say no to a concert! Tastes change, but my ability to go out and enjoy it hasn’t.
http://www.tmz.com/2017/06/13/bachelorette-peter-kraus-planned-reality-fame/
I love Peter and I don’t really care what TMZ says, but it’s still entertaining.