Category: ultrapersonal

Debtor’s Prison

My ass is killing me! Except for an hour-long emergency nap, I basically sat in my uncomfortable desk chair for 17 hours straight yesterday, moving from some blogging to designing tedious trade show banners (and does anyone else think Adobe Streamline sucks as much as I do?) to hours and tedious hours of formatting lesson plans for a Thirteen project.

Yes, the deadlines are starting to come together, I’m in that uncomfortable space between one income trailing off and another beginning, and the IRS just realized that I neglected to include a check with my tax return for last year. You’d never know from my apparent poverty that I actually make pretty decent money. But a series of ridiculous expenditures over the years has kept me in a constant state of catch-up, and it sucks. Here are the primary culprits:

  • Moving back to New York from Boston I had no debt at all shortly before I left Boston, but a last-minute trip to China put me in the hole. so when I got back, the whole move down here basically done on credit.
  • The Bushwick Loft An enormous, awesome 4,000 square feet of raw loft deliciousness that Mark and I lived in when I first moved back to New York. It was cool as hell, but it took many visits to Home Depot and Ikea to get it to look that way. Ch-ching! Of course, all that money was wasted by the next year because the junkie we were subletting our half of the floor from basically chased us out. Oh yeah, then paying for another move 14 months after moving in.
  • Brazil An incredible trip, but it basically wiped me out. that’s what I get for travelling to exotic foreign countries on a whim. Again. It was one of those moments where you have such an incredible time that you think, “I’m young, I’m fabulous, and I have the rest of my life to pay for this. Oh wow, look at the bunda on that one…”
  • Grad school A very, very expensive way for me to learn that I have too much experience to get much out of being a part-time student in a program that’s not as customizable as it first appears. Doing just enough work to finish in time for class still had me somewhere at the top of the curve, meaning I could slack off when I didn’t have time to devote to my projects and no one would worry about it since I was still getting A’s. (And for the copy editors out there, I know there should be no apostrophe after that A, but I just don’t want it to look like “as”. Deal.) Oy! The money I spent on tuition and my projects. And those student loan people are like vultures!
  • Gadgets! I’m one of those guys with the gadget gene, meaning I begin to salivate uncontrollably when I see electronics I think I need. Now, I admit that I needed the second computer for a huge freelance project, but did I really need to splurge for the Palm V when I needed some way to keep track of my hours? I know it’s sexier than the earlier ones by half, but it was a little pricey. Oh well, as long as the G4s stay completely, stratospherically out of my price range, I guess I’m safe.
  • That one month where I had to pay my rent with my credit card Oh, I don’t even want to think about it anymore.

So remember kids, if you or anyone you know is in need of a graphic designer with a truckload of experience and mad skillz (as the kids say), don’t be afraid to come a-knockin’. My real expertise is with typography and print, but you might have noticed that I also know how to throw together a web site.

The Long Late-Night Haul

Once again, coming back to Brooklyn on a weekend night has been an odyssey of train delays, shuttle buses, and alternate routes. Ya know, if I didn’t have so much space for so little money, I might not be tempted to put up with it. But, since I have a sweet deal, I’ll just continute to rely on my thorough familiarity with the subway system. At least the Morplay show I went to was a whole lot of fun, even if Cazwell’s cute roommate still won’t flirt with me.

Body Clock Upset

I’m tired. In my efforts to shed my commuter’s sleep schedule, I’ve been staying up later and later and sleeping irregularly, and now I can’t get drowsy before 4 in the morning. It’s hell on those mornings when I have to get up for meetings and stuff. I need to pretend I have jet lag and stay awake for 30 hours or so and shock myself back into a schedule that is a little more practical. (Note: This would be slightly related to the tactic that got me in this mess in the forst place, back when I decided to go out and stay out all night, just because I could for the first time in seven months.)

Pals Is Pals

If June comes bustin’ out all over, don’t think that I’m gonna clean up the mess. I have enough to do this week.

I have taken a moment, though, for a shout-out to a bunch of my Internet pals. As a nerd, there are a whole lot of folks I chat and correspond with regularly — and have even met in person occasionally — who I’ve come to know and treasure, but yet it seems odd to put them in the same group as all the friends who’ve been on hand for road trips, breakdowns, and other assorted hijinks. I dunno.

Very Important Mini-Treatise on Electronic Self-Publishing

More blogging than journal-writing today. Can’t tell the difference? Than you’ve probably just been reading this, my half-assed journal, instead of my half-assed blog over at the Rumpus Room. Journal = self-indulgent ramblings that only Internet voyeurs like you may enjoy. Blog = pithy observations about stuff I read on the Web or movies I watch.

There, that’s my spin on the whole debate.

What’s the Rumpus?

You know, even in the 12 years or so since I’ve been in high school, I can see that things have really come a long way. Check out this great story about New Orleans’ gay prom. It’s so sweet I’m about to pass out from a hypoglycemic fit. All things being equal, I would much rather worry about finding the right skaterboy to take to the prom, rather than finding the right beard or sympathetic female friend. (Props to Don for the link. Go read his saucy site.)

And for the record, I did not go to my high school prom, even though it was being held at the swanky Plaza Hotel. However, I did go to another prom at the end of my freshman year of college at the highly overrated Tavern on the Green. It was there that I began to really appreciate the charms of the beautiful woman (not my date, but that’s another story altogether) who I would date for the next year-and-a-half. Yes, it’s true. Actual, true love — with a chick! Life is a journey, as they say.

Now that I’m working from home again, I’ve been playing all these CDs I have that I never liked enough to listen to all that much. (Ouch! Did that sentence throw grammar to the wind, or what? You try diagramming it.) so I slap in this Hooverphonic CD someone sent me and suddenly realize that I own the piece of music from the vapor-colored Volkswagon commercial that everyone seems to be scrambling to identify. I guess I was cool enough to dismiss it months ago. By the way, does anyone else think that every under-30 dot-com millionaire is scrambling to be one of the 2000 lucky owners of those things? I bet we see a hundred of them up on eBay before too long, at double the price.

Mosh Pit Hazards

Dave makes a good point about mosh pits:

The fear of having your glasses knocked off and smashed in a pit is easily replaced by the fear of having someone elbow you in the eye and scrape your lens across your cornea. There’s no way to win.

Too true, my friend.

Hot Punk Rock Action

I forgot how sexy mosh pits are, what with all the jumping and the sweating and the smashing into testosterone-charged punk boys. Being able to safely stand on the edge of a pit while watching a show is just another reason to be glad I ditched my glasses. Of course, I’m still too much of a pipsqueak to really throw myself into the fray.

Last night I went to CBGB’s to see the big Homocorps show. It was hot-punk-boy central, yesirree. It was a rollicking good time, too. Dean Johnson from the Velvet Mafia, who organizes the show, is probably shaking things up at CBGB’s more than anyone has in years by booking an assortment of dyke bands, glam bands, drag queens, and all sorts of others for the Homocorps shows. As Cazwell from Morplay put it, “You wouldn’t see a faggot and a dyke rapping on stage at CBGB’s if it wasn’t for this guy.” I don’t think they see much like the Duelling Bankheads, either. The great thing about putting on a bunch of small acts like them, Cunta Kinte, and my friend Russ is that it really cuts down the annoying lagtime between bands. There were only two or three breaks in the action all night, and lots of raucous fun the rest of the time.

It was great to go see a show again. I’m a big advocate of loud music and jumping around in enthusiastic crowds, at least when it comes to shows in pretty small-scale venues. Despite my profound love of music, I haven’t gone to see too many shows since coming back to New York. I’ve been slowly getting back into the swing of things, as much as my tenuous financial situation will allow, but there’s so many venues to keep an eye on here. It can be a real pain in the butt to continually scan for bands I like, or ones I want to check out.