SUBLETTING

My current living and relationship status has me subletting throughout this sweltering summer in New York City. I'm just gonna throw it out there for the intellectually curious......if you ever want to question WHY you live in NYC, and your answer is because it's so great...then I humbly recommend you mix in a sublet situation and see if you still feel the same way.

As it stands, I'm currently paying $750 a month for the following ammenities:

shoddy internet,
an AC unit that pushes about as much cool air as a camel's anus,
a filthy kitchen,
an anti-social roommate,
one beach chair serving as a the only seat in the living room,
1/2 of a spatchula with which to cook,
a broken toilet that takes 45 seconds to flush everything (if you get it all on the first try),
and oh yes......BED BUGS!!

I have been particularly enjoying the latter experience. Of course, there are better situations out there, but I was in dire straits due to another unfortunate incident which put a huge damper on my plans (which was to live in a place with a 55 yr old Chinese man with broken English way out in Brooklyn).

Given that he pulled the plug on me at the last minute, and that I wanted to be closer to my fiance', I was hell bent on hustling for a room to rent for the summer in Astoria Queens.
So, in my desperation of foreseeable homelessness, I agreed to this room. It was furnished and was only gonna be for 3 months.

What is my point? My point is that I have a hard time justifying living in this city sometimes given what you get for what you spend. $750 a month is not chump change to me or any normal person. $750 would probably get you a tight one-bedroom apt all to yourself in Charleston South Carolina for all I know (which, I hear, is a nice little city to live in). But no. Apparently I'd rather spend $750 on bed bugs and a floor that screams "flip flops now!"

So why am I doing this? Because if I want to survive in this city and carry out my plans for the immediate future, I have to. It just chips away at my conscience (also another word for wallet) and reasonability to think about wasting money like that. All because I really didn't have a choice. Sure I could have paid less for a sublet, but I might have lived with 4 college dudes in an even dirtier place, perhaps with cockroaches large enough to bum a smoke off of me. In fact, all of the places I looked at for around $650-$700 were all styes. Not livable to anyone with decent standards.

I sincerely hope for my sake that when I've moved on and I look back on the NYC days, I'll think of it as the best thing I ever did and not the biggest waste of my assets.