You Wanna Know What's Fun? Moving Into A New Apartment 🏠

(In other news, I self-published an essay collection 🥳)

A Quick Announcement…

This is very important, so let’s get it out of the way first. I self-published an essay collection!

Cover art by Leah Lu

For nearly the past year, I’ve been in a writing group called Write Away with friends Jin and Celeste, and we decided a few months ago, after having written several personal essays of our embarrassing and meaningful life experiences, that it was time to publish our work for the masses. Since then, we’ve been going all in. We reached out to designers, edited three of our essays over and over and over again, sent our work to printing presses, and reached out to NYC venues to do live essay readings.

Suddenly, it all started happening. We got emails back from venues— “Thanks for thinking of us, we’d love to have you perform!”—and USPS delivered our freshly printed essay collections to our doorsteps, and friends were messaging us how excited they are. Now, we’re doing a reading on Saturday, November 13, at Pete’s Candy Store in Williamsburg. And then we’re doing another one at TALEA Beer Co. (also in Williamsburg). You better get your bottom over to one of them. Or else I’ll find out, and I’ll be very upset.

Voilá—Pete’s Candy Store. Come through on Sat, Nov 13!

Let me present to u, TALEA Beer Co. Come on Mon, Nov 15 for a beer and a story!

That last thing I’ll say about this is that I can’t believe this is happening. I feel like I’ve been very casual about all this, but it’s pretty f**king crazy that I can hold in my hand a printed copy of months of my work that I’ll be performing at two beautiful Brooklyn venues. This is something I always dreamed about but dismissed as unlikely for a long time.

But here we are, and it’s happening. Would love to see you there. Oh yeah, and I’ll be selling copies of my collections at these venues after we perform! For anyone not in NYC who wants one, I’ll figure out a way to ship them to y’all soon—just message/email me! 🤠

Anyways…

So listen. I know I’m a week late to this newsletter post. I know I know I know. Initially, I wanted to answer the questions filled out in my newsletter survey, but alas, the best laid plans of mice and men, etc., etc., you know how it goes. Let me explain. About three weeks ago, I discovered this amazing, fun new way to spend time that I had no idea was possible before, which sidetracked me from my writing.

Basically, at the end of one month a year, you take all of your most essential possessions and stuff them into shoddy cardboard boxes. Bonus points if you leave these boxes strewn around your place. Books? Shove em in there! Electronics? Wrap em in plastic! Toiletries? Sayonara!

Once you get all of your most prized belongings (many of which you likely associate dear memories with) stacked and smushed into cardboard like the ultimately ephemeral collections of atoms that they are, you’ve completed the first step. But there’s more.

If you haven’t already (which we hadn’t) you must locate a new place to move your boxes of shit. We found some beautiful places in Park Slope and Gowanus and Bed-Stuy, all mouth-watering options, but rats!—they were all scooped up by white families with dogs. No home for us yet. Darn!

Then, our building management joined. Uh-oh! They said, “Um, you guys aren’t allowed to move out of the building on weekends.” And then we said, “Okay, we can move Friday evening, I guess, even though we still have two days left in the lease,” and then they said, “No, building move hours are 8am to 4pm,” so then we said, “Wow, that makes so much sense that an apartment building full of young professionals only allows moves to happen during prime working hours. Thanks for simplifying our lives.”

So our fun game accelerated! Cortisol slowed through my veins! I slept six hours every night last week! We moved all of our belongings, including most of our clothing, our kitchen utensils, bedding, books, and other things, into our neighborhood CubeSmart. The coolest part of this was that we had to hire a special company to move our stuff into storage because of our building’s insurance requirements, so we ended up paying $1,200 just to move everything over! Hahaha, who needs money anyways.

The clock was a-ticking! We had three days left in our lease, yet we still hadn’t been accepted to any of the apartments we’d seen! We called agents willy-nilly. We bought an air mattress to stay in our now-evacuated old apartment. We considered the possibility that we might not find a good place in our price range and might have to AirBnb until Thanksgiving as we looked for December leases. We prepared to stay in and watch TV Thursday night, but then our Wi-Fi stopped working. Oops! 🤪 And then, underneath our roommate’s kitty litter box was a massive gray stain the shape of a smoke cloud caused by leaked cat urine. Remember that security deposit? I sure don’t!!! Haha.

Cleanup in aisle three, anyone? ROFL!!!!

Finally, over the weekend, we got our application accepted by a kindly young broker for a building in Brooklyn Heights. Great space! Skylights! Fireplace! Huge living room! Heaters/AC in each room! But then when we moved in it was unclean! Appliances covered in dust! No hot water! Smoke detectors not attached!

So here we are in our beautiful new place—forget that there are still several boxes, or that we need to leave the shower on for fifteen minutes before it actually heats up. The joy of moving faded, and fatigue set in. I slept for thirteen hours the three nights after we moved in.

The last day of our lease was when the game maybe felt a little less fun. A little party pooper-ish. We came back to the old place one last time to move out various scattered belongings like cleaning supplies and bedding in backpacks and tote bags, and we said goodbye to our doorman, Marlon. For the past several months, he’d stop us as we came up and down from the apartment to tell us about whichever new anime show he was watching. We’d shoot the shit for minutes. On my birthday, we brought him a plate of pav bhaji we’d cooked, and then weeks later, he brought us Trinidadian food. He’d ask me about the dates I was going on that day, that week, and how all that would change, and then he’d show me standup comedy sets about dating next time I’d come upstairs. Before we called the Lyft to leave, he stood up—which I never saw, his job left him mostly sitting and checking the security cameras on screen—and lumbered over to us to give us a big hugs. “I’m gonna miss you guys,” he said.

And then he loaded our stuff into the Uber and waved us off into the night.

Other Things of Note

CoolStuffNYC: A newsletter about cool stuff in NYC. Look for their upcoming post. 😎

Our reading at Pete’s Candy Store: Just a little reminder.

Our reading at TALEA Beer Co: ^ditto.