Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Assorted first-world problems

-I'll be spending the summer in Paris. (Yes, I suffer for my work.) The question: where to live? I have some good word-of-mouth leads for places, but nothing definite. Someone on the H-France list claims that the housing websites others have recommended are in fact scams. Does anyone have non-scam suggestions?

-Tonight, I made the mistake of making and serving the full recipe for this pizza dough for dinner on a day when neither Jo nor I had really had lunch. We might one day be able to get off the respective couches. Might.

-The doorman strike! Yes, yes, hilllarrrious. I would like to bet that 85% of those mocking the frou-frou sorts affected by this development are themselves paying more in rent for East Village/Lower East Side walk-ups, SoHo or Williamsburg lofts, etc. than I am. (Not unrelated: doormen even pre-strike make more than grad students.) Yes, yes, living in a dishwasher-having Manhattan apartment for what was once my lousy-Brooklyn-apartment rent is mostly as good as it sounds. But not when there are changes to the lifestyle to which I've grown accustomed. It's not the door-opening, which I find awkward and unnecessary, but the ability to get deliveries, to throw trash down the chute, and so forth.

1 comment:

Jeff said...

I was wondering about this whole doorman thing when I lived in the city - how do you get these jobs? Do they make $16K? $160K? What are the qualifications? Are the guys at smaller buildings ruthlessly job-hopping to larger buildings? At the time I searched Craigslist and did not see a single such job being advertised. Seemed like some sort of strange cult, like how Howard Hughes had a bunch of low-key Mormons doing stuff for him all over Los Angeles.

Now, with this whole strike thing, the facts are starting to come out.