So, I found an apartment, I think. I mean, I signed a lease, so I hope so. As I should have expected, maybe, it is outside of my original price range, and probably a little too small, but I'm fairly psyched about the location: It's on 41st St. out in Sunset Park, very close to a wonderful transportation hub (36th St.) and my wonderful girlfriend (Nina). It was not easy to get, though. (All of my friends have, I think, heard this story, but for those of you out in Internet land...) The place was being shown by this company called Rapid Realty, which is not really a real estate brokerage but a "rental agency" (which means they don't get exclusive rights on showing the apartment, I think) and they were suspiciously eager (manically, even) to get me to put down a deposit and fill out an application on the spot. So I did, with some trepidation, only to get a call the next day from one of their secretaries explaining that they gave me the wrong one. The real application, she said, required several times as much information and cost an extra $100, but needed to be complete by the end of the week or I'd potentially lose my deposit. Could I move in by the 15th? Of course, she said, just get the application in. Could I confirm that it was okay to have a cat? Of course, she said, just get the application in. So I did, even though it ended up requiring around 50 pages of personal information to be reluctantly faxed over to them.
I went to the lease signing up at the management company on Wednesday. Waiting for the representative from Rapid to show up, I went through the lease and the management company's rider. Right up front the rider said, "Absolutely no pets allowed." "Excuse me," I said to the management company guy, "Rapid told me I'd be able to keep my cat." "You have a cat?" he said. "Nobody said anything about a cat." So. The woman from Rapid showed up eventually, but showed up with cash, which Yuco wouldn't accept. They directed her to a check cashing place on 45th that did money orders, but she returned empty-handed because she didn't have ID with her. So I ended up having to go back down with her and hand over my ID and Social Security number at the slightly scuzzy check cashing place to get the money orders. The Yuco people got on the phone with their lawyers and the landlord, and (I think) came to an agreement over Kitty -- she can stay, but I have to send them a picture of her so that they can prove, on an ad hoc basis, that I am not playing cat-bait-and-switch. Jesus.
Enough complaining, though. What else have I been doing? Tom and Jill had birthdays; the 680 people had a barbecue; I chipped a tooth on a salad fork. Work is gearing up to release a new version at the end of this month, which means that I am deliriously tired most days out of the verging-on-55-hour work week these days. The fridge is empty -- except for beer -- because I don't want to buy any food and have it spoil. You know. Moving stuff.
Oh yeah -- I got tickets to some of the shows in the High Line Festival. Gonna go see Arcade Fire this Wednesday and then The Gerv in a few weeks.
I went to see Talk Radio last night at the Longacre Theater with Ted and Emma and Katharine. Liev Schreiber, who is the star, is pretty fucking fantastic, but the rest of the actors are not really very good, and the play itself is all over the map in terms of its intent. It's a lot like Network in that regard -- angry, but not clear enough about what it's angry at -- and the hero, played by Schreiber, is pretty much a cipher (which is maybe the point? Not sure). As I was saying to Ted, maybe the 80s (when the play is set) were some kind of watershed period for cultural / political criticism -- like, the very act of complaint was somehow revolutionary? My memory is kind of hazy on the topic, being mostly occupied with plotlines from The Real Ghostbusters.
The high point of the evening, though, came as we were leaving the theater and passing by the side door where all the fans were waiting to get Liev Schreiber's autograph. I was wearing my laptop bag and wasn't really paying attention to where I was going, and I bumped into the rear view mirror of Liev's limousine. His driver yelled, "Hey, look where you're going!" I turned around and made a reciprocal gesture and kept walking -- but Katharine apparently heard him come back with "retard." Awesome.
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