conspiracy fail.

it’s incredibly slow at work today (and probably will be all this week, too), so i thought i’d post a gem from my hours of web surfing. i mentioned FAIL in a previous post; this youtube video was posted by them this afternoon:

enjoy.

overseen in new york

let me preface this by saying… it’s not my fault.

it’s not my fault that the window in my living room looks DIRECTLY across the airshaft into my neighbor’s kitchen window. it’s also not my fault that both of our windows are open because it’s retardedly hot out today.

okay, so i’m sitting in the living room, minding my own business, when i hear my neighbor across the way – i’ll call her… ‘betina’, because that seems like a fitting name – scream. like, scream. so i jump up to look out the window, and it turns out that it’s just her friend letting himself in without her knowing it and catching her off-guard. fine. so (and now this part is my fault) i linger by the window because i’ve never actually really seen this girl before, just caught glimpses as she walked through the kitchen. so she goes into her refrigerator and pulls out a bottle of peligrino. and then asks her friend how to open it. how to OPEN IT.

now, her friend is in the other room, so i don’t think he heard her, so she starts doing that thing where you’re pretending to talk to the other person, but they aren’t responding, so you sort of are mostly talking to yourself. so eventually she figures out that she needs some sort of opening device. she pulls out a wine opener. at this point, you’re probably thinking what i was… “what the hell is she going to do with that?” well luckily, the wine opener has a bottle opener located at the top of it. so i’m starting to feel relieved until she starts using it the wrong way.

let me interject here by saying that this girl is NOT nine years old, nor has she been locked in this apartment for 15+ years, so she has definitely opened a beer before. or at least SEEN someone open a beer. but she cannot, for the life of her, figure out how to use this to open her g-damn bottle of water.

so she’s trying to figure out how to use this thing, but basically she’s just putting the very top of it against the bottle (where the opening of the bottle opener should have gone). she’s trying both sides of it, she’s trying different spots on the bottle, but to no avail. omg, so weird, right? why wasn’t it working??? ugh.

so finally, her (very understanding and somehow not judgmental at all) friend comes in, asks what she’s doing, and then proceeds to show her how to use the bottle opener.

“ohhh,” she says. “i get it now.”

WHAT?

adventures on the subway.

este and i hauled down to bay ridge last night to see erin and zach and alex and john (etc). obviously it was awesome times to see everyone, and este and i haven’t really been out since we moved, so it was fun! the bar was amusing. but the TRULY amazing part of the night was the ride home.

este we decided not to take a cab home, but the subway instead. fine. obviously, about five minutes after we left, i had to pee wicked bad, but the ride seemed not too long on the way down, so i wasn’t extremely worried about it. and then the train came and said it was just a “shuttle” to 36th street, so we had to change there to a different train. then that train stopped at a later stop and hung out in the station for like 8 minutes. so by now i’m a little annoyed. but finally we see a D express train, so we jump on it because that’s only like two stops to ours and not a horrible walk.

so we get on the train and sit down and we’re minding our own business when this woman, one of a group of five in ranging ages, starts yelling about something to a guy sitting near us. then she comes over, stands across from us, and pops a squat! she literally peed ON the subway. and while she was peeing, she was yelling that if she doesn’t pee when she has to, she gets bladder infections. meanwhile, i’m sitting there with my feet on este, with MY bladder about to explode. but i’m not wearing a dress over my jeans that would cover my ass, and i’m NOT A CRAZY PERSON! i absolutely couldn’t believe it.

so, you know, she carried on for a bit about how they close the bathrooms at coney island at midnight, but coney island itself doesn’t close until one, and it’s so unfair, etc etc. i guess that makes sense (and anyone who’s tried to stay at a boston bar until last call and then take the T home can probably empathize), but still. lady, i’m pretty sure i was about 9 seconds from some internal organ exploding last night, but i waited, and i power-walked home from the subway, and i was just fine.

i dunno, maybe i was just jealous that she did that and i was in agonizing pain for about twenty minutes longer, but hot damn. it was crazy.

HOW DARE YOU.

fyi, i do have pictures and stories from this past weekend with the visitors and birthday bash and whatnot, but i’ve been busy packing so i haven’t really had time to go through the whole shebang yet. UNTIL NOW.

so as you’ve heard, este and i found an apartment in the east village last week. hooray! they told us that the apartment was listed for july 15, much to our chagrin. we asked, “no way for august 1, huh?”, and we were DE-NIED. fine, so we pay for a couple of extra weeks… at least we found a great apartment and now people can help us move (since the rest of our friends are moving 8/1).

shortly after we get approved for the apartment, the landlord tells este that we actually can’t move in until probably the 18th or the 19th, but anywhere between then and aug 31 is fine by them. apparently the current tenants have been there for five years, and between that and the two cats living there, the management needs some extra time to clean and paint and de-gross-smellify the place. so he tells este to call him the following wednesday (today) just to confirm all that.

i’m sure you’ve figure out by now that this story does not have a happy ending (otherwise i probably wouldn’t be going into this great of detail.)… well, pat yourself on your back, friend, because you’re absolutely right. guy goes ahead and tells este that the current tenants aren’t moving out until THURSday, and they’ll need into the middle of next week to clean. read: we can’t move in until next weekend, as the middle of the week doesn’t really work well for people who have JOBS.

okay, so here are my questions:

1. what landlord in the entirety of new york city allows tenants to move out three days after their lease is up? i mean, i understand that they’ve been there for a while, and i’m sure they’ve built up some sort of relationship with the landlord, but honestly, what the f? they’ve known for at least a month that they’re moving. when the landlord told me we’d probably have the apartment on saturday, i started packing the next day to make sure i had all my ducks in a row on time, and i don’t know this guy from adam.

2. who sets a move-in day for the third week of the month? i’ve been moving in and out of apartments for the last six years of my life, and i have NEVER seen a listing for anything other than the first or the 15th of the month. is this guy really so greedy that he needs to prorate the six days we’ll be there before august 1? especially since he already knew that he’d need extra time to clean the apartment? i can’t imagine that two weeks unpaid for will really break the bank for this guy.

moral of the story? i’m annoyed. i’m 75% packed already to appease the g-d landlord, which means i now have to UN- and then RE-pack a bunch of my shit (clothes, namely) over the course of the next week and a half. LAME.

mom: “what about the lemon hand washing ordeal”

so my sister works for a landscaping company right now (as in, for the summer). since she’s 19 and clearly has way more stamina than i do (or anyone i know, for that matter), she spends the remaining hours of her days (and nights) hanging out with friends and doing fun summer-in-the-country things like swimming and driving around in pick-up trucks. so since this leaves about 3.5 hours left in the day, and a girl’s gotta get some shuteye, she’s quite dirty.

jaime, calm down. i’m not done.

by “she”, i mean “her hands”. seriously, they’re gross. so for those of you who read this and know my mother (so… jaime and maura? oh, and my mom.), you can probably figure out the rest of the story. for those of you don’t/can’t, here’s a hint:

that’s right; barb busted out the big guns. LEMONS.

she held jaime hostage at our kitchen sink this weekend for a solid 15 minutes scrubbing her hands for her. FOR HER. not only was this a little scary for jaime, it was wildly amusing for the rest of us. here are a couple more pictures of the experience. and i’m sorry that i couldn’t get closer so you could see what was really happening, but i think you can judge by the terrified and terrifying (respectively) facial expressions that i probably shouldn’t have even been as close as i was.

in case you were curious, it worked. my sister’s hands were sparkly clean for the next 36 hours… until she went back to work.

also, i saw this in the south station bathroom before i headed back to new york.

hair hats

whaaaa?

click the picture for the website, and then click on each of the girls to see what the f is going on on their heads!

quit playin’ games with my heart.

got my computer back.

apparently they were GOING to change the display, but when they opened the computer, it was just a cord that needed to be re-seeded.

obviously.

anyway, i’m getting a desktop. not just because i one day will legitimately not recover from the panic attack i’ll endure if i have to go through this again, but also because i LOVE spending my savings.

what’s good for the economy is good for me.

barf.

UPDATE! it’s been one full day since i got the computer back, and it’s still fully functional. hopefully, i didn’t just jinx it.

sad mac. again.

that’s right, folks… i’m computer-less, yet again.

it all started on saturday, when i brought my laptop into the kitchen to show lucy this video:

(adorable, right? my sister found yet another gem.)

so i show her the cuteness, look away, and when i look back, my screen is dark. weird, i think… maybe it fell asleep really quickly. so i touch the mousepad, nothing. hit the spacebar! nothing. so i’m like okay, maybe it’s the brightness. did i hit the key by accident? nope. sure did not. okay so long story short, it keeps flickering black, so i brought it to the apple store later that day, and the genius guy i talked to took it into the back room, reconnected something, and it was fine! miraculous! except the miracle lasted LITERALLY 27 hours.

so cut to yesterday around 7 pm. i’m videochatting with my mom (yes, we’re that awesome), but i only have the lamp on in the living room, so it’s dark. so i set the laptop down on the trunk in front of me, get up to turn the light on, sit back down, and the screen’s black. wtf!? this time it wasn’t even flickering. it’s just straight up black, and not budging.

so the abridged second part of the story: i took it back to 14th street, where i talked to charles, who told me to talk to bernie at the 5th ave store, who had me talk to janel, who told me they’re replacing my display AGAIN, and i can have it back in 5 to 7 days.

so, i’m now officially in the market for a desktop computer, because i can’t take this anymore.

UPDATE! i just remembered that i wasn’t showing lucy that youtube video, i was showing her pot psychology, a sex advice (kind of) videocast that ross told me about. my bad.

on a scale of 1 to 10 (part one)

note: i plan on making this a mini-series, hence the “part one”.

how awful was today?

you tell me! i’ll show you chronologically.

11 am: get home from este’s after realizing i hadn’t designed the tshirt i was supposed to screenprint this afternoon
1145 am: finish designing
1150 am: screen goes black. won’t act normally
1240 pm: leave for domestic construction to screenprint
215 pm: leave early from domestic construction to go to apple appointment
225 pm: wait for a car to pick up lucy because she’s seconds from puking on the street (that’s right, lucy, i said it)
227 pm: have este move back my appointment to 320
245 pm: arrive at L station, only to discover that the train is running in two sections, and the one i have to take does not go to my stop, but ends at union square (aka, 6 avenue blocks from where i need to be)
326 pm: arrive at apple store (after power-walking in flip-flips and 75-degree weather)
345 pm: meet with apple guy, who promptly figures out that my screen cable is unhooked or something AGAIN, but instead of stealing it away from me, takes it in the back and fixes that mother right up
414 pm: realize i haven’t eaten anything besides a tofutti cuti and half a pickle all day
430: eat gross tuna salad at one of the cafeteria things on 34th and broadway
445 pm: leave said “cafeteria” and realize that i’m basically in times square.

SO! i’d give today probably a two? what do you think? i only give today points because my computer is still alive and well and in my lap, and my loved ones and i are still alive and well. but those are the ONLY reasons. ugh.

we’ve got to hooooooooold on

this blanket or jacket or something has been hanging on by a thread for months. MONTHS.

seriously, before we even left for the road trip, it got stuck on that ultra protective wire mesh stuff. it started right under the window, and then slowly made its way over and eventually pretty much off the fire escape. so it was already swingin’ in the wind when we left at the beginning of march. when we got back, it was STILL hanging there, but like two weeks later it was miraculously placed back in a heap right under the window. it’s now been over a month since then, and it’s back.

do these people not care? they have to know, right? and it must be scaring the crap out of the people who lives below them. the first night that i slept in my room here, there was a wire swinging back and forth in front of my windows, and i didn’t have thick enough shades yet so it was making shapes in my room. creepy. anyway, i couldn’t sleep until i had hung a blanket across both of my windows. how do the people there handle it???