Now I actually want to get fired.

Remember that stupid part-time gig I took with a rich dude on the Upper East Side this past summer? Well, it got really old really fast. Yet I am somehow still doing it.

I'm not really sure how I ended up eternally stuck with the dumbest job in the world, since all the jobs I've actually wanted to keep have had a really easy time getting rid of me ... but, aside from that cruel irony, I really don't have the time or patience to haul my ass all the way uptown one morning a week just to organize some guy's iPhoto and write emails for him because he doesn't know how to create attachments in AOL. Getting paid $20/hour in cash was enticing enough over the summer ... but now that I'm working part-time on campus at a job that doesn't suck, I no longer feel any sort of remote motivation to work for this guy anymore.

For the past two weeks, I've relied on him to confirm my hours the night before he needs me to come in, and conveniently not set an alarm on the nights that he fails to text me before midnight. I've made myself as unavailable as possible, and yet he still asks me to come in.* Why was it so easy to get fired from all my other jobs and impossible to get rid of this one?

*I know I'm a terrible person for doing this. I don't have the balls to quit outright, and I'm also a lazy asshole who doesn't care about anyone. Apparently.

Perhaps a job that will last longer than a semester.

I started a new job at the very end of the summer, and it's going way better than the 200 other random jobs I've had since beginning my attempt at this whole "adult life" thing. It's an on-campus gig (at the Office of Career Services), so scheduling is more flexible and people are more understanding when I show up looking bleary-eyed and thesis-crushed.* I also get to do actual design work. And there are often lollipops. That said, I am hoping not to get fired from this job. Because I actually like it.

* SWEET JESUS THE THESIS. There's nothing like a year-long-career-launching-this-is-my-life's-work-omigod sort of project to destroy your mind and body.

I still can't cook.

This attempt at heating up a pack of ramen led to a small kitchen fire and a lot of ruined cookware:



So ... no. There has been no progress on that front.

The new apartment.

I had an awful nightmare last night in which something terribly wrong happened in our apartment. I don't remember exactly what it was - but in that (highly psychologically revealing) dream moment, what really horrified me was how behind I was on blogging. So, I decided to revisit the interwebz and start picking up the slack. Thanks, subconscious.

Anyway, our new apartment is super cute. Here are a few shots of the living room (that large furry object is our beast of a cat):





And here's my room (complete with a super awesome magnetic wall that required 12 coats of magnetic paint and is my pride and joy):





I'm glad we made more of a homemaking effort this time around - the pictures and painted walls make the place look a lot cozier than our somewhat blank previous apartment. Of course, everything took a little longer than expected because of one major obstacle ...







... but it's all finally coming together. We've had one cockroach encounter (it was the size of a hampster) and one plumbing mishap (the toilet flushes now), but all in all things are going well.

We moved.

And it went well. And our new apartment is pretty freakin' sweet.

Details and photos to come.

Dear new landlord:

Why did you wait until after we desperately scrambled to pull together one month's rent plus one month's security in certified bank checks to let us know that we didn't actually have to pay rent for August?

This is so bittersweet.

Con-Ed, revisited.

So after getting a final turn-off notice, Sarah and I decided to address the Con-Ed problem once and for all. I called customer service to see if we could pay the ($1000+) bill off gradually ... and they said that, after an initial payment of $160, we could work off the rest of the bill in payments of $105 each month (in addition to our regular bill). We didn't really have a choice, so we went for it.

That was about a month ago. Today we got a letter in the mail stating that:

A TURN-OFF NOTICE IS STILL IN EFFECT.

Your payment for $160.00 was not honored by your bank account because it was altered. As a result, we assessed a fee of $12 on your account. We also cancelled your payment agreement.

I have no idea what the fuck happened, but I just paid the $160 again because apparently it magically didn't get paid the first time and no one decided to tell me. I've been on hold with Con-Ed for about half an hour, trying to get some sort of confirmation that the payment went through this time ... but I think it's time to give up and take a nap.

I almost forgot ...

... about the most important addition to our household:



This is Jack. He is 24 pounds of love and fluff. And he is our adorable new baby.*

*He's actually 11 years old and fairly geriatric. But in my head he's still a kitten.

This apartment hunt was still a lot easier than the last apartment hunt.

So we got the lease on the new place and, after a brief conversation with our current landlord, realized that he wasn't actually interested in letting us stay for a significant amount of time. So, we're moving a whopping 0.5 miles down the street to a sweet new chick pad.

The fact that our new lease starts on August 1st, while our current lease doesn't expire until August 15th, means that we have a leisurely two whole weeks to move ourselves to the new place. We will have to enlist the help of professional movers to take care of the beds and couches ... but other than that, we have a small army of parents and brothers (plus maybe my brand new boyfriend?) to help us out with more portable items.

We're getting better at this!

The apartment hunt, round 2.

About a week or so ago, Sarah and I stopped denying the fact that our apartment was being sold and decided to look for new places to live. This was a fairly quick and easy process that later got complicated.

We started out with a broker who sucked. Before our inaugural apartment-hunting excursion, he let us know that we'd be doing a lot of walking and that having my dad drive us around would probably be helpful.* So, my dad drove into Brooklyn and brought us to the decided meeting place ... only for the broker arrive an hour late, in his own car. So my dad drove back to Manhattan, and we drove to three apartments that sucked. We didn't call him again.

Then we met a broker who was nice and not stupid. He showed us a really nice apartment very close to where we live now (a few blocks from the Beverly Road stop on the Q), and we decided to apply for it. Then he told us that there was already an application in on the apartment, but we decided to apply anyway in case that application fell through. Then that application fell through. So we got first dibs.

By this Friday afternoon, all of our paperwork was in and we were good to go. Then a broker showed up at our apartment to show it to a potential buyer ... which meant that the apartment hadn't been sold yet (even though, when I called the landlord last week to ask whether the apartment had actually sold, I'm pretty confident that he said yes and not no). We called him again, and he admitted that the apartment wasn't selling, and that he'd be willing to let us stay for a little while longer.

Meanwhile, we were approved for the other apartment. And giving it up means losing the $500 deposit that took it off the market and the $100 we paid in application fees.

So, we need to talk to our landlord. If he can let us stay for close to a year, then it seems worth it to stay (and maybe he will be nice and pay us back for the apparently unnecessary money we spent looking for a new apartment while he lied to us and told us that our apartment had been sold). If he wants us to stay on a month-by-month basis, at the whim of the real estate market, then that doesn't really work for us. If we can negotiate our lease on the new place and have it start on September 1st instead of August 1st, and then stay at our current place for just one more month ... then maybe that would work. There are a lot of factors and people and monetary exchanges involved.

And then we have to ask our broker to either lower his fee or allow us to pay it off later ... since neither of us actually has the necessary amount of money in our bank accounts.

This was almost totally painless!


* Sarah has a stress fracture in her foot. We're not that lazy.

Employment updates.

So the past few weeks of blitz-attack job applications and repeatedly dumping my portfolio on every creative director in New York has finally paid off. I have three very part-time jobs, and I'm meeting with a lot of people in the graphic design world in an effort to make sure that the graphic design world knows who I am by the time I graduate and need a real job (I guess that's called "networking").

First, the jobs.

1) Computer slave for a computer-illiterate rich man.

An old friend connected me with this one. Basically this middle-aged dude doesn't know how to use a laptop, so he hires children of the digital age to do things for him. Right now I'm making his son's Bar Mitzvah montage for $20/hr.

2) Office assistant.

For my aunt. Who's a gynecologist. I'm learning a lot about girl parts.

3) Assistant art counselor.

This is decidedly my most enjoyable gig. I do arts and crafts with children. There is glitter involved ... and lollipops.

So all that is making me money and keeping me busy. My supposed networking efforts are going well too - it's good to meet people in the industry and gather their sage advice, and a lot of people have given me really helpful critiques of my portfolio. Granted, they're not immediately scooping me up and offering me contracts ... but I didn't expect that to happen. At least I have a solid list of people to contact a year from now when I need a job that doesn't revolve around pom-poms and rhinestones.

Also, I'm taking out loans next year. So the constant stress of looking for silly part-time jobs can end in September when the federal government decides to pay me to go to school.

The problem with Con-Ed.

So I've been having this problem with Con-Ed. So far, ignoring it and waiting for it to go away has been an effective solution - but now I'm taking another step in the problem-solving direction and blogging about it. Take that, reality!

Everything was all fine and dandy with the utilities situation (following that awkward heat-not-actually-being-free thing) until the following events took place this spring:

1) For two months, our Con-Ed bill was $0.

2) Simultaneously, there were notices posted all over the building informing us that the management had failed to pay their Con-Ed bill, and that all the common spaces in the building would had their electricity turned off (the management must have eventually paid their bill, because the electricity was never actually turned off).

3) Our May Con-Ed bill was for $621.60.

So our monthly electricity bill went from the usual $60-$80 to more than $600, with a weird clusterfuck of not being billed/the building fucking up their own electricity in between. I called Con-Ed to say "what the fuck," and they agreed that it was a "what the fuck" situation and sent someone to check the meter. This person then confirmed that the meter was working fine and that we were, somehow, suddenly generating $621.60 worth of electricity.

So I decided to take matters into my own hands.

Having decided that, somewhere along the line, another apartment's electricity had gotten hooked up to our meter, I decided to investigate. I went down to the meter room, found our meter, and memorized the number it was currently reading (I also got my key stuck in the lock, forcing me to take it off the keychain and just leave it in the door, where it's been for the past few weeks). Then I came back upstairs and flicked off every single switch on our circuit breaker and waited for half an hour (I won't elaborate on how pathetically incapacitated I felt with absolutely no electricity for a whole half hour - but this brainwashed technology addict was rendered pretty helpless). I went back downstairs to check the meter again ... and it was reading the same number. Which meant that it was still hooked up to something that was generating electricity. Which meant that my theory was correct.

I called the super and told him about my masterful detective work, and then he said "um" a lot and told me he'd call me back. He called a little while later offering to provide an electrician to further investigate the situation. Of course, there was a catch - if the electrician found that the building had, in fact, hooked up our meter incorrectly, the management would pay for the electrician; if the electrician didn't find a problem, then everything is actually my fault and Sarah and I have to pay for the visit. In addition to the unpaid Con-Ed balance that is now probably upwards of $1,000.

I have yet to decide what the fuck I'm supposed to do about this ... but that seems ok, since the super has yet to provide the name of this supposed electrician and Con-Ed has yet to threaten to turn off our electricity (they've been unexpectedly nice every time I repeatedly call them asking for some sort of explanation). So, for now, I'm just ignoring the whole ordeal. Maybe if we can ignore it until we move, we can just flee the situation forever. Or maybe a cloud full of free money and electrician unicorns will descent upon Brooklyn and fix everything for me. And maybe none of this will damage my credit score forever.

We'll see.

Also.

I still don't have a job.

Could all the unpaid summer interns please stop applying for the jobs that I desperately need in order to survive? I have approximately one month's rent left in my bank account and all I do all day is sit in front of my laptop and watch Animal Planet.

Our apartment was sold.

1) Why would you buy this apartment?

2) FUCK. FUCK. FUCK.

End-of-semester recap.

Ok. Big apologies to my hundreds of loyal readers (hi, Mom!) for the major hiatus in blogging. Apparently when tornadoes of disaster prance across my daily life, it's more effective to address them than to blog about them. But, now that my semester is over and I can take 30 seconds to breathe, here's what's been up since the last time I complained to the interwebz:

1) I got fired again.

I actually prefer to refer to this episode as being laid off. Basically, my boss decided that he didn't want to budget for a designer anymore and sent all my work to some randos in Nepal instead. It totally sucked, but at least I got a severance check.

I've been looking around for a new gig (it's more constructive than sitting in my house and trying to figure out why I can't hold down a fucking job), and so far I've had a couple interviews and a handful of leads. So we'll see where that goes. Every once and a while I freelance for an undergrad professor at Pratt who runs a branding design studio out of his cat-filled apartment ... but that's not exactly a pay-my-rent sort of arrangement.

2) My apartment is for sale.

This one sort of came out of nowhere. Basically, whoever it is who owns our apartment (I know nothing about him aside from the fact that his name is Steve) decided that he wants to put it on the market in hopes of selling it by the time our lease runs out in August. This mystery man has claimed that he'll allow us to renew our lease in the event that the apartment doesn't sell by August ... but he refuses to put this anywhere in writing or make any sort of legitimate agreement. He also only communicates via text message and is usually an enormous douchebag. So that totally sucks.

But aside from the fact that we're dealing with a loser text-sender (what professional adult does that?) who might boot us out in a few months but might decide not to and isn't going to let us know in advance either way ... there's also the incredible annoyance of having brokers show the apartment to potential buyers. This is where the situation gets tricky.

If we can create an undesirable domestic environment for potential buyers, we have a better chance of keeping our apartment. But if the powers that be catch on to our attempts to sabotage them, they'll refuse to renew our lease regardless of whether the apartment actually sells. So we're walking a fine line, but so far no one has seemed that interested in buying the place. So maybe it's working.

3) I finished my first year of grad school.

This item doesn't really belong on a bitch list, but it's worth noting.

Stupid shit: a synopsis.

Lately I've been noticing that I make a lot of stupid mistakes. This wouldn't bother me so much if they didn't tend to cost me a lot of money/dignity. There have been a bunch over the past few months, so I'm just going to summarize them here.

1) Not realizing that heat wasn't actually included in our rent.

Apparently, despite the fact that our broker told us that both heat and hot water were included in our rent, that was a total lie. Only hot water is included in our rent. Sarah and I didn't realize this until we received a $266 gas bill. I called our super, who acted like I was going crazy for ever thinking that heat was included in our rent, and I called our broker, who ignored me all four times. So that was a stupid mistake.

2) Locking myself out of my apartment.

This was a really airheaded move that ended up costing me $250 and most of my dignity. In the middle of a recent laundry day, I grabbed my wallet and headed down to the basement. It wasn't until I got back upstairs that I realized I had forgotten my keys. So there I was - locked out of my apartment in the middle of the afternoon wearing scrunchie-bottomed sweatpants and fuzzy slippers armed with nothing but my wallet. Long story short, after a few failed attempts at breaking the lock with my laundry card and a series of phone calls placed from two different neighbors' telephones, I ended up back in front of my door watching a locksmith drill the entire mechanism to tiny pieces. That was an even more stupid mistake.

3) Mailing the rent to the wrong address.

This one wasn't entirely my fault. When our broker wrote the managing agent's mailing addres on our lease, she wrote the wrong zip code. So, every time we mailed in our rent, it ended up getting re-routed all over Brooklyn and arriving three weeks late. This would explain why I kept getting angry phone calls asking where the rent was. It was only after three or four of these mishaps that our super finally decided to let us know that most renters just slipped their checks under his door. So really, I think I can blame our axis-of-evil building management team for this one.

In conclusion, I wish I didn't do as many dumb things, since most of them are very expensive.

Take that, recession.

I'm on a four-hour bus ride to Boston (to re-live college for the hundredth time since graduation), so it's time for a blog update.

Long story short, getting de facto fired from my job turned out not to be the worst thing in the world. Sure, I moped about it for a few days and at one point caught myself pouring a shot of whiskey into my bedtime hot chocolate (which, by the way, was disgusting), but I was pretty quick to get back on the blitz-job-application bandwagon. Five million emails and a few interviews later, I landed a new job. And it is way, way better than my old job.

It is, however, just as random as my old job. This time around, I'm working at a Tibetan carpet showroom on East 59th Street. I'm basically an Illustrator monkey, creating digital renderings of textile patterns - but, besides the potential carpal tunnel syndrome and blindness that could result from sitting three inches from a computer screen and clicking a mouse for up to seven hours a day, I like the work and I'm pretty confident that I won't randomly stop having this job for no apparent reason. Plus sometimes I get to play with pom poms, and other times there are cookies. So I'm pretty much set.

Another plus is that this is a legit job, not a freelance-gig-turned-wishy-washy-part-time-thing. As much as I thought I liked making my own hours and getting paid off the books at my old job, I'm starting to realize that being on a real work schedule and recieving a real paycheck is way more conducive to earning a significant amount of money. Which, in turn, is more conducive to not panicking every time my rent is due. So there we go. It all worked out.

Make that three weeks.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume that I no longer have a job.

At least I finally got my FAFSA to work. Goodbye employment, hello debt.

If your boss doesn't contact you for two weeks ...

... does that mean you're fired?

This happens every time I try to apply for a loan.

Why doesn't FAFSA know what Pratt is?

Another step toward the real world.

Apparently, in order to have a design career these days, you need to have one of those new-fangled website things. Given that I'm nowhere near becoming a web designer, the website-making has been pretty touch-and-go so far (my process lies somewhere in between free downloads of Adobe Dreamweaver and mooching off the skills of anyone I know who can use Flash) - so I decided to set something up on Carbonmade in the meantime.

I'm not a huge fan of free upload-and-hit-go portfolio sites, but it'll do for now. So check me out.

Oh.

So I didn't give Mint.com a fair shot. Apparently you can take a more detailed look at all your transactions and assign different purchases to the appropriate categories (thank you Sarah Telson for allowing me to hover over your shoulder while you did this on your account). This should solve that pesky "uncategorized" problem - provided, of course, that I actually take the time to look over all my transactions and categorize them appropriately. This would be a lot easier if I didn't pay for $1 tubes of toothpaste using a debit card while simultaneoulsly paying for my share of the groceries by covering my roommate's bar tab for a weekend - but I'm sure I can figure it out.

Because I'm still unclear about where my money goes.

I spent my last semester wondering how I could possibly be so broke if all I spent money on (aside from my monthly rent, utilities, and MetroCard) was, to my knowledge, $3 PBR and the occasional $1 coffee. So, I decided to make a better effort to keep track of my spending and set some sort of budget. Following the wise advice of Ms. Sarah Telson, I set up an account on Mint.com.

Mint.com pulls information from your online checking account in order to determine where you spend your money. It allows you to set specific budgets for different categories of spending (rent, restaurants, travel, shopping) and keeps track of how well you stick to your budget. I figured the fancy tracking-my-checking-account's-every-move feature would finally answer my eternal "where did my money go" question, so I pulled up a pie chart of my account activity for the past few months. This is what it looked like:





So about 50% of my spending falls into the "Uncategorized" category. What the fuck does that mean? How is it that even this magical new-fangled interwebz thingamabob can't figure out where my money goes? All I want is for some fancy technological bot to tell me what to do with my bank account. The bot should not be more confused than I am.

Anyway, I set up some budgets and swore that I would stick with it. We'll see how that goes.

I finished a semester of grad school.

So the groundbreaking maturity updates have been few and far between lately. This is probably because I've stopped doing exciting and meaningful things with my life ... but it could also be because I've been doing so many meaningful things that I no longer have time to blog about them. I'll let you decide.

Anyway, I did manage to finish my first semester of grad school without any major disasters - which is something worth telling the world ("the world" being a select readership of very close friends, plus probably my mom). And now that I've got a whole semester under my belt, I can more confidently conclude the following:

1) I like Pratt.
2) I like doing graphic design.
3) I therefore chose the correct school.
4) I also therefore chose the correct career path.

These are all reassuring things. Sure, I didn't sleep for the last month of school and nearly went blind after three straight days in the cutting room and spent the equivalent of half my rent on printing and binding - plus, I might have ended up with the lowest GPA of my life (apparently grad school is, in fact, harder than college) - but as my eyesight returns and my x-acto wounds heal, I still think that grad school is pretty awesome.

So now I'm in the middle of a month-long vacation that's allowed me to recover from the end-of-semester madness, pick up some extra hours at work, get started on the freelance gigs that I totally neglected until now, catch up on ANTM, and get all my wisdom teeth pulled out of my head. If that's not multitasking, I don't know what is.