Life used to be so easy when I had a job. Okay, maybe that’s overstating it a little. Subway travel was easy, or at least buying a fare card was. Life was hard then too, just in a different, more financially enriching way. And subway travel was and is always an adventure, like the flume [...]
Category Archives: New York
Advertising Week… unemployment still weaker
Friday, October 2, 2009
Many of the daily emails I receive are useless. They may even be less than useless, costing me two seconds to delete, two seconds I could have spent scratching myself or staring off into space. The nextNY newsletter is actually worth the time. The first of the week gives a huge list of technology events [...]
Adventures in unemployment… trial membership at the fancy gym
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
I was walking down Broadway last Friday evening, south of Madison Square Park but north of Union Square. This is a ritzy part of town, where nannies pay other nannies to push strollers and restaurants offer $25 lunch specials one week a year, by reservation only. Design Within Reach – whose name assumes the customer [...]
Unemployed guy fits right in at the US Open
Friday, September 4, 2009
Tourists and Manhattanites don’t come to Queens. They’re still scared of Brooklyn‘s tonier neighborhoods, where killer mothers, nanny henchmen and four-headed demon newborns of death rule the parks, boutiques and cafes. So this side of the East River, a little north of Brooklyn, where all the foreign people live, might as well be Sadr City [...]
Vacation from unemployment, part 2
Monday, August 24, 2009
Wifey and I enjoy flying to fancy, far-off places – like France, Crete and Wyoming – where people dress and speak funny. We also like to tack on road-trips to the end of those long plane rides. For one of my favorite vacations, we flew to Sioux Falls, SD, rented a car and drove across [...]
Don’t let desperation cloud your judgment
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
[Ben continues to fight the good fight, looking for work wherever he might find it. He fell a little short of the promised land in his last post. This time, well, he's even further away and feeling a little desperate.] Ben Breier, 23, was a reporter and web producer for the New York Observer’s Politicker.com, [...]
My New York anniversary
Thursday, July 30, 2009
It’s my ten-year New York anniversary. In July of 1999, I moved here on a day a little warmer than today. In honor of the occasion, I’m expecting a gift of tin, as tradition dictates. Aluminum would be okay too, me being the modren man, with parts made in Japan (domo arigato). eHow tells me [...]
Summertime, and the living is sweaty
Friday, July 24, 2009
The date on my calendar is July 23, at least it was when I started this post. School-age kids crowd neighborhood stores and street corners during the day. Michael Bay has arranged some explosions to resemble a movie and released it into theaters. All evidence suggests that summer is in full swing in my fair [...]
Adventures in bus riding, part 2
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
My bus trip to DC featured a typical cast of knuckleheads. But the trip back was special, short bus special even. (Like how I bring it all together?) I arrived at the station at 7:45 a.m. to find the line winding all the way back to the exit. The previous two buses didn’t run, we [...]
Adventures in bus riding, part 1
Friday, July 17, 2009
Traveling long distance by bus is terrible. How terrible is it? You really want to know? Can I get a “how terrible is it, Norm?” It’s so terrible that it requires a second (and third) post to fully appreciate the heights, err, depths, err, breadth of… well, it’s really bad. And for those wondering, I [...]