Somehow, you're blessed (cursed) with the following ability: by looking at any person you instantaneously know either his/her complete past, or complete future. Which would you rather see?
I would say the past because I think it would let me really understand a person, why they act they way they do, and let me get inside of their head.
After years of being bitter over the fact that someone took the name ironstove (WHY?) and left me with nothing to really use, I've decided that maybe it's time to... make a different alias. Only this time, it has to be something so fucking original that there is no way on this planet that someone else will have it.
Names that I've brainstormed:
BenWang010
XxAznUnicornHunterxX
LoBornlytesThoughtPalace
DogEater666
MysticDragonRider
(Just realized that facebook allows for you to have a ridiculously long username for some bizarre reason....)
AdultThatLikesLongWalksAndHangingOutNearPlaygrounds
SADGASGWAEVEASDFASGEMKLHABDOAISHEWKGNDDBKSLDDDBLKK
IAMSOANGRYTHATIRONSTOVEISTAKENWTFYOUHAVENOIDEA
Throw some ideas at me.
Because I fear I am become stupid myself from exposure.
Stupid-er.
I fear that I am becoming stupid-er.
See what I mean.
Friend sobbing in tears says, "You need to write a book about what you just told me." after he has come up.
I tell him, "If I wrote a book the only people that would even get it would be the people that didn't need to read it."
About a week and a half ago when I had first moved to the east coast, I went out with the buddy I was staying with down to West Village to visit a friend of his for drinks. After about 1 hour of chatting with the guy, I realized I had made an appointment to grab dinner with another friend in the area near Union Square, so I asked my friend (Kevin) and his buddy (Bona) how to get there.
Me: Hey, sorry to leave so soon, but I forgot I have to grab a drink and meal with a friend.
Kevin: Oh, you just walk back the way we came and take the subway up 1 or 2 stops. It will say Union Square.
Bona: Wait, do you have an unlimited card for the subway? If not, then you could just walk. It's literally like 10 short blocks from here and wouldn't take you more than 15-20 minutes.
Me: Hmm, well I am a cheapskate so I guess I will go with the walking. So how do I get there?
After they gave me the directions, I headed up to Union Square and met with the friend. It was fairly uneventful with just the standard drinks and conversation, the most noteworthy thing about it I'd say was that during the time, I was looking for another place to stay (Refer to New York #1) and the friend I met offered to let me share her apartment with her through a sublet to which I decided to consider (But ultimately, decided not to take up since I found the place in Queens).
After we parted ways, I called up Kevin again to ask him where he was. He told me he was still in West Village with Bona smoking hookah and that I should come down. I said sure to him so I asked him where he was.
Me: Where are you?
Kevin: I'm right around where we were drinking earlier, so just go back the way you came and give me a call. It is around 3rd and Menetta.
Me: Ok.
As soon as I hung up, I realized I was fucked. When I met with my friend at Union Square, we hadn't stayed there. She fucking led me through zig zags around the city everywhere and mind-fucked my sense of direction.
Her: OH! LET'S GO SEE KOREATOWN.
Her: OH, LET'S EAT AT THIS ITALIAN PLACE (Seems to go back in the general direction we just came, but I no longer recognize anything)
Her: OH, LET'S SEE GET DRINKS AT THIS COOL BAR (I don't even know where we went...)
Her: OH, LET ME SHOW YOU MY PLACE INCASE YOU WANT TO SUBLET IT (Walk like 1 mile making 40 turns... WTF!)
So... I do something very stupid at this point, I decide that since I am a man and men are always right, I should just pick a direction to walk and eventually I should get to where I want to go because it will inherently be the right direction due to the previous statement.
So I walk.
Don't recognize any of the streets.
Walk some more.
Don't recognize any streets.
Walk some more.
Don't recognize any streets.
Start feeling tired.
Now, here, I try to call Kevin and ask for directions, but his phone goes straight to message... Like 6 times... But he finally calls me back and says:
'Dude, my battery is dying, I only got a few seconds. Idk where you are but get to 3rd and Menetta and find the hookah bar, we'll be inside'
I progress up the stupid ladder a little bit further since I figure I'm already so high up. I see a stranger packing stuff into his truck and ask him, 'Excuse me, do you know where 3rd and Lenetta are? (NOTE HERE HOW I MISPRONOUNCED THE STREET)'
The guy looks at me surprised and goes, '3rd and Lenetta? Really? That's pretty far off man, but I'm actually headed in that direction so I could drop you off there.'
I figure at this point, I've made a huge break and I thank the guy profusely and help him load up his truck and then jump into the passenger seat and then we drive off. We talk a bit and I tell the guy how I've just moved into the city and learn that this dude apparently works for some paper company down in Brooklyn (WEE WOO, WEE WOO, RED FLAG HERE BEN, YOU FUCKING IDIOT).
So we drive, and drive... For probably about 15 minutes... and I tell myself "We sure have been driving a while... I don't think I walked this far... like ever... And I don't remember crossing that bridge either... But the view sure was nice." so I start to get a little suspicious and I ask the guy.
'Hey man, are we going to 3rd and Lenetta?'
The guy says back to me, 'Yea, 3rd and Lenetta.'
'Uh is it in West Village?'
And the guy looks at me SHOCKED and says, "WEST VILLAGE? Dude, we left West Village a LONGGGGG time ago, I'm not heading there at all.'
And I'm like 'Shit, well ok then...'
The guy straight up tells me after that, 'Look man, I can't turn around because I'm running on a schedule for work, but you can get off right now and try to get back or you can wait until we get to where I am headed and you can take the subway back.'
*Ben thinks for a bit, decides to take another step further up the stupid ladder*
'I'll get off right now... But thanks a lot man!"
"Ok! Best of luck to you!"
At a red light, I open his truck door and hop out. I look around me and recognize nothing. NOTHING! Especially since it is around 8 PM now and everything looks the same in this city at night.
I don't even fucking know which direction to start and I don't feel like repeating my 'pick-a-direction' strategy because it seems to have a 75% failure rate so I ask a group of girls walking on the sidewalk:
'Excuse me, do you guys know where West Village is?'
The group of girls stop walking, look at each other, look at me, look around where they are standing, look back at each other and then just give me these stone-cold stares for a split second...
And then they all burst out into laughter and keep walking... Without telling me anything... Ok..........
I feel like something is terribly, horribly wrong, so despite what I said earlier, I pick a direction and start walking until I see another person on the street and ask them again:
'Excuse me, do you know where West Village is?'
The lady stops and does the same thing as the girls earlier and then smiles wryly before she says, 'West Village? Sweetheart, you're way far off from there. This is Brooklyn.'
(I'm supposed to be in Manhattan in the Orange, instead I'm in Brooklyn in the yellow. Fucking crash-landed in Dumbo Lulz)
This time, I give her the stone-cold stare and then tell her,
'Sorry, I just moved here. I don't know what that means. So which direction is West Village....?'
----
Long story short, I am tired as fuck and hungry so I buy 2 40s while I walk to the subway and finish 1 of the 40s on the way and I end up getting drunk. Real drunk. I ride the subway back to Wall St to my friend's apartment because that's the only place I feel safe navigating to anymore since I don't want to get lost again and finally make it back to his place around 9-10 PM. I knock on his door drunk and angry and find him answering it, I give him the other 40 and then tell him the story. He just laughs.
The moral of the story is..... buy a fucking map.
I was having this great dream where I was imagining the Scarlet Letter reenacted in my head live-theater-style scripted exactly as it was in the book except for the minor change of Hester having a serious shopping/spending addiction which was the reason Roger Chillingworth initially left because he tried to escape going even further into debt after Hester had maxed his American Express and Visa Gold card buying massive amounts of kitchenware off of Amazon. The story progressed as usual with the book (Scarlet has bastard child, becomes outcast of town, sews giant A for 'Available' on her chest, and then etc... etc...), however it was ending with Arthur Dimmesdale having a heart attack and dying in front of his bastard child after he went to confront Hester about a credit card bill he found in the mail with unauthorized purchases only to find that there were many more letters that Hester had been hiding from him by intercepting the mail before he could read it.
And then I woke up to someone texting my phone... What is this nonsense? I normally sleep like a fucking rock or incredibly-hard-to-wake-sea-turtle back in California but ever since I've moved here, the smallest noises wake me up in the middle of the night leaving me wide-awake and wishing I had a brick somewhere nearby to hit myself over the head with. I don't know what it is. My theory is that it is either the fact that I sleep on the floor, or that bastard child who sleeps below me, however the bastard was awfully well-behaved and quiet today, so I have to rule that out and say it is probably the wooden-floor-mattress that I use (which is supposedly good for my back and letting the cockroaches/rats reach me more easily).
To explain further on the bastard child, there is this baby on the floor below me of this apartment I'm staying in whose walls (The apartment's, not the baby's) seem to be about as thick as paper-mache. Whenever that son of a bitch wakes up, he lets the whole fucking world know and sometimes I just want to... UGH.... not do very nice things to that baby. I get so irritated when I am lying on my back on the floor staring at the ceiling as I hear the cries and wails of this immature and inconsiderate individual stopping me from obtaining any sort of slumber.
'WAAA, I'M HUNGRY, WHERE THE FUCK IS MY FOOD!' he screams
'WAA, I'M NOT TIRED ANYMORE, EVERYONE WAKE THE FUCK UP!' he shouts
I am thinking about breaking into the apartment downstairs and just plugging ear-plugs into the baby's head so that when he wakes up and starts crying, he won't hear himself and think that he is isn't crying and then trip-balls and think that he is in a dream within a dream, and the only way to wake up is to fall back asleep.
Or maybe I'll just use the ear plugs myself to stop my savage urges to punt the baby out of a window or off a bridge or something.
That was a bit of a tangent, but back to the main point of this poast: Seriously, what did my dream mean? Any English teachers around to provide me with some insightful, thought-provoking analysis?
As I sit in this courtroom for 8 hours mindlessly typing people's names, how much money they owe, and where they live, onto a spreadsheet that I send out at the end of day so the company I work for can then send out their letters of harassment to the people that owe money about how much money they owe.
And when I get home, it is off to sending out more applications to land that elusive interview for that well-paid job that I supposedly went through years of college for which nobody seems to want to hire me to do because so-and-so got the opportunity to figuratively fit 12 dicks into his mouth before me because he got a referral from his gay, homosexual, not-straight relative within the company who is secretly out to get me and make sure I remain trapped typing in this limbo called the 'Juror's Waiting Room'.
I'm also going to try to figure out a way to code a program to automate my zombie-level job so that I can just watch porn all day through a proxy and get paid (refer to the dancing dinosaur at the upper right-hand-corner for better understanding of what I mean, only replace 'fuck bitches' with 'stream pron').
Soul-crushing job is soul-crushing. Sigh... Going to my friend's apartment after work so I can use the free gym is literally going to be the highlight of my day. Followed by knocking out on the floor.
But overall, New York is a good city... It really reminds me of LA except without a car to drive in or a bed to sleep on.
PS. The women here are beautiful 
AND THE RENT IS TOO DAMN HIGH.
I got a menial job working at the courthouse in Manhattan which will serve as a temp gig until I find a real engineering job. I plan to give it around 6 months here looking for better work before I decide to head back to California.
And I spent like $200 yesterday... what the fuck? Why is alcohol so fucking expensive? UGH. I think my friend's roommate resents me enough to just wake me up
----
Edit: I stopped writing after that and literally fell backwards on the couch for ... 3 hours
I believe that the last time I left off I was in the process of being kicked out of my friend's apartment by one of his roommates. Yes... That was the last thing I mentioned and so after that I went on a long, eventful journey of finding a place to live on top of trying my best to enjoy my stay in this fucking horrible, horrible city.
So on the first night that I was looking for a new living quarters, my friend asked if I wanted to go out to meet one of his friends down at west village for a few drinks to which I agreed to. Meeting the guy (Bona) was pretty uneventful, but he ended up bringing a friend of his named Rose who I got along fairly well with. During our conversation I ended up telling her about my living situation and how I needed to find a new one to which she responded,
'Oh? You're looking for a place to live? That's funny. I'm looking for someone to sublet my apartment right now as well. You should take it if you're interested.'
At first I thought that this was perfect timing and a sign from the flying spaghetti monster that perhaps good things do indeed happen to terrible people, but I eventually found that things were a little too good to be a true. HAH.
Rose lived about a 5 minute walk from Union Square, which is apparently a 'great' location. The only catch was that her apartment was only big enough to fit 1 person and she was living with her friend instead of at her own place because there was a cockroach problem.
I mean, I can handle a few annoying insects if it is what I need to do in order to survive in this city, but to add on top of it, she was paying about $1000 a month for her shitty basement studio apartment and wanted me to pay $30 a day aka $900 a month to stay in that windowless shithole due to it being in such a 'great' location.
My friend told me to tell her that I wanted something cheaper so I finally haggled her down to $150 a week and thought that would be that until she told me last minute aka an hour before I was going to move in, that another one of her friends wanted a place to stay so I would have to share the cramped, cockroach-infested studio with him as well, a total stranger who I had not even met once. At this point, I told her,
'Yo, I want to pay less rent then.'
And she shot back, '$150/week is already an extremely generous offer for Union Square.'
To which I, already fucking sick of haggling with this law-school whore, told her that I would get back to her in a bit after I thought about it.
Just when I thought all hope was lost and I was back to square one, my phone rang and I got a call from someone named Jeff regarding my housing ad on craigslist. Apparently, Jeff was living in Canada and wanted an Asian guy (me) to take care of and do some repairs on his apartment up in Harlem in return for a place to stay so he wanted me to come by and check out the place to see if we could work out a deal. I figured I didn't have anything else going for me so I said OK to meeting the dude (Who by the way, sounded shady-as-fuck).
So I rode the C train all the way up (Or down?) to Harlem and when I get out, the area looked surprisingly... Not dangerous (As opposed to what my friends were telling me about the area). I took a lot of pictures and I would show you guys but unfortunately, I left my camera cable back in California so haha, epic fail.
Upon entering the apartment, I was greeted by a man who looked like the Fonz from Happy Days only much, much fatter, older, uglier, and less Fonz-looking.
(He did not look anything like this)
The man's name was Nevio and he was apparently Jeff's lackey staying in NYC watching over the apartment and the tenants as well. I discovered that in this 2 bedroom apartment, there were 5 people living in it and I was going to be the 6th, sharing the living room with some Asian girl who did not even fucking speak English. The apartment was about 10 blocks away from Columbia University so all of the tenants were students of the school... Some scrawny Jewish kid, an Aussie, and 2 blondes. The apartment was pretty dirty and Jeff asked if I could do flooring or painting in return for free rent. When I said yes and told the guy I had done similar work in the past, the guy was ecstatic and said that we could probably work out some 'great' deal. (I've come to learn that whenever someone says the word 'great' in New York, they only mean that it is great relative to themselves, and not you. In fact, fuck you).
When I told Jeff (Who by the way, looks like a fucking creep)
that I would do all of the work within a month assuming he paid me for the materials and tools, the guy kind of cringed for a second which gave off a huge red flag. He quickly recovered and said 'Sure, sure... I'll reimburse you for all of the work you do on the apartment... Of course...'
Upon seeing his reaction, the fake smiles of all of the tenants, and how shady as fuck this entire situation was, I decided that I would take it and agreed to move in ASAP under the assumption that I could be just as shady and not pay a single dime to fix a single thing in that trashy-ass apartment.
So alas, we all shook hands and I proceeded to head back to the subway to get to my friend's place.
What happened after that over the next 2 days was a systematic series of people calling me and trying to screw me over. Eventually Jeff himself realized that I was probably going to screw him over as well since everyone in this fucking city screws each other over so he told me that he also wanted me to pay rent on top of the work that I was doing/paying for so I decided last minute to go back and live in Rose's place. Just as I was packing up my stuff, I got a call from one of the companies I applied to and got a phone interview on the spot which I did fine on so they gave me a second phone interview which I did not do so fine on. Sigh...
Then as I was about to head out with my suitcase to Union Square, I shit you not, my friend's girlfriend called us and told me that her co-worker had a 3-bedroom in Queens he was willing to rent out to me for $500 a month.... SO I FUCKING DECIDED TO MOVE TO QUEENS!
AND SO. That is where I am now, a 40 minute commute from Manhattan living in a really nice apartment with some 35 year old dude who works at S&P. He told me I can only stay a month though because his wife is out of town and she wouldn't be cool with me being in the apartment once she got back...
And to be honest, I am fucking exhausted of moving around/looking for a place to live so I'm glad this bullshit is over, but now I am really reconsidering finding work here. Maybe I should just enjoy my 1 month here and consider it a vacation while I apply for jobs in California so that I can schedule interviews for when I head back... Really, I hate this place. I haven't had good sleep in weeks and everything is fucking expensive as shit. I got piss drunk yesterday and I woke up with severe pain on my side which google tells me is either my liver telling me that it is failing or my kidney telling me that it is infected. Either way, I am not drinking anymore... for like a week... and I need to make up my mind on whether or not I want to really make the effort in trying to figure out a way to stay here, or just say fuck it and pack my shit up to move back to California after this month is done......
Btw, not having a car is really, really gay. Yea, I think I'm going to move back........
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