Tuesday, September 7, 2010

1. Do not even THINK about keeping a car here, unless you're going to live way the eff out in Queens or something. Because of lease-y type issues in my grad school town, I moved to NYC a month before defending my thesis, and since I had to go back and forth between the two several times a week, I held onto my car. To quote Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, Big mistake. Huge. Have you heard of alternate-sides parking? It is The Worst. What it means is that for a couple of hours every other day, you can't have your car on one side of the street because of street cleaning, and on the other days, it's the other side of the street. So you spend the night before circling your block searching futilely for parking on the non-street sweeping side, gradually increasing your radius until you might as well have left your car in grad school town. You do this every day, all for a stupid machine that doesn't so much clean the street as it does spread the dirt and garbage around the street and make a ton of noise. The day I sold my car was one of the happiest days of my life.

2. Ladies, if you're walking down the street and a stranger stops you saying they have "a question about your hair," turn and run. This is not some nice person who wants to give you an unsolicited compliment. I mean really, you are a grad student/post-doc, do you genuinely think you have a nice enough haircut that you're getting stopped on the street by random strangers? No. This person works for some crappy salon in midtown and they want to sell you a salon package. They will allow a little haggling and it will seem like a good deal, but ultimately they want to take your money in the middle of the sidewalk, and then when you go to get your hair cut they'll sneakily convince you to get $120 highlights and/or charge you $50 for a blowout that you didn't ask for. If you do want a good deal on a haircut, go to model call for the Bumble & bumble U, and you'll have free cuts as long as you live in the city!*

3. Most management companies are pure evil. They hire these suave, good looking people to show you their apartments and who somehow convince you that a 7-ft wide living room is totally normal. But as soon as you sign the contract, you're a tiny little bug that they want to squish, ignore, and then sue for false carbon monoxide detector charges. If you can at all help it, get an apartment with a private landlord who actually cares about his or her properties.

4. Any time you hear about an event that you think might be fun, like a free outdoor concert or a food festival of sorts, there are at the very least several thousand people who also heard about it and thought it might be fun, too. Seriously, if you want to go see MGMT at McCarren Park, you're committing to at least 4 hrs in line. The Big Apple BBQ is a total shitshow. And summer movies in Bryant Park? Fuggetaboutit, as they say!

5. You WILL get called for jury duty. I should know, I've been on a trial all week. It's actually been kind of awesome, and as soon as we reach a verdict, I am going to blog the shit out of it (probs on blogspot, as is not science-related).

*I think I'm supposed to state that no one paid me to say this?