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Losing Weight in Seven Simple Steps
1. Decide it’s time to leave your current place, and begin your Apartment Search eight weeks prior to the end of your current lease.
2. Rush around the entire fucking city because you have a self-set deadline of just-before-Christmas, when you’re setting off for a Exhausting Big Fun Roadtrip.
3. Return home, exhausted from said trip, to find that the place you had your heart set on won’t actually work, due to the technicalities of an agreement and the practical difficulties of interacting with…… humans. Start your search all over again, only this time just four weeks before the end of your current lease (which most NYers call normal, but which I call insane).
4. See a bunch of crappy apartments, getting your hopes up with each one that the end of this fine torture may be imminent. Wander the streets in 5 degree weather, waiting out in the cold for always-late brokers to show you said crappy places.
5. Don’t eat anything after Step Two. Immediately expel anything that you do swallow. Rail thin yet? I thought so.
6. Break down after Day Nine of the search. Buy yourself an entire cake. Eat it.
7. Sorry, did I say Losing Weight? I meant Losing Weight And Then Putting On A Bunch More, bitches. Here we go.
More when we have a place to live again…
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$$$ / 2br – ELEVATOR/LAUNDRY BLDG CONV2BR GREATLOCATION
We’ve been searching for a new place for about three weeks, and my brain is already so fatigued with the process that I’m now ONLY DREAMING APARTMENTS. Nothing else. No pretty parks with green grass and colored balloons or frolicking across the ocean to strange places or revisiting childhood memories in the classroom. Just layout, windows that look out upon brick walls, ooh, a terrace?!, and what’s the closet space like?
Square footage-obsessed dream torture is almost worse than event planning dreams just before a big conference or moving dreams about forgetting to pack and the movers breaking the couch in half.
Here, it’s just constant lists, requirements, moving money for deposits and application fees, climbing stairs that seem to get smaller as we go up and up, padding through uninspired layouts, and evaluating endless pro/con lists. If we give up this, we could get that, and it’ll be worth it to take that if we can save the money with this.
Sounds relaxing, right?
Now if we only had another two thousand per month… Actually, think about that — two thousand extra dollars every month would be life-changing for almost every household. Perhaps instead of the public option, we could just do that.
($2k x 12 = $24k per household per year)
($24k x 80,000,000 (75% of total US households) = only another $1.92 TRILLION per year. Obama’s budget team can handle that for sure.)*
*Or this is my sleep debt talking.
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Rainbow Room, Dubai
From the finest student paper in the city, we learn that
An Italian architect said he is poised to start construction on a new skyscraper in Dubai that will be “the world’s first building in motion,” an 80-story tower with revolving floors.
The idea is to give luxury dwellers a skyline that’s constantly in flux. Like a bunch of stacked Rainbow Rooms.
The project combines just about every construction buzzword. It’s a modular design, built in Italy and assembled in Dubai. There will be fans between each floor to power the entire building, and elevators will transport penthousers directly from their cars to their doors, which actually sounds like a fantastic Dubai safety feature. But one that probably doesn’t matter; if you’re buying here, you’re also toting a security guard.
The scary thing about this place is that
the spinning floors [will be] hung like rings around an immobile cement core.
And I just ate this delicious cookie this morning, kind of messy, though, what with the flour, eggs, and chocolate chips all over the place. Similarly, I don’t think cement is all that immobile.
But this explains everything. The Italian architect spearheading the project has a phony degree.
The biography also said he received an honorary doctorate from “The Prodeo Institute at Columbia University in New York.” No such institution exists, however, and Columbia said it had never awarded Fisher an honorary degree.