All kinds of cool today...

I was just working on a rushed evening, too-quickly scarfed leftovers and a serious case of bedhead when I realized that I accidentally set my clock ahead an hour in the attempts to set an alarm so I wouldn't over nap. Whew, I'm good. So, I have time to write before going in for my second set of back to back overnights starting tonight. Today was packed to the brim with cool, pretty cool, awesome, and wouldn't you know it?; The highlights therein being running into a fellow UNCG alumnus at church who graduated from the G the same semester I did and, coincidentally, moved to Brooklyn the same month as me, as well as going to check out not only the first apartment of mine and Katrina's intrepid apartment search but also the first (and perhaps only), Manhattan apartment.

After having lunch at a friend's and nearly watching all of As Good as it Gets for the 4 millionth time, I headed into Manhattan on the F and met my cousin on 1st Avenue. The place was a short walk over to Avenue B and 11th Street and rather more dilapidated then either of us would have hoped but both of us might have expected. After all, for $1850 on the Lower East Side, we might have expected the only good thing to be it's location. I could have gotten to work from the place in about 25
minutes easily.

On the other hand, the size of each of the five rooms alone presented unique challenges not only to furniture placement but to general living. Kitchen, no counters, no cupboards, bathroom, no place for cat's litter pan, bedroom 1 is the size of my own and facing the street, bedroom 2 is literally half the size of the other (so one of us would require a smaller bed) and the living room would require us to invest in a flat screen TV to mount on the wall unless we wanted to have no space to walk from the kitchen to the front room. Between all that, the sloping floor (quite a sharp pitch if you ask me...any pocket change that hit the floor would likely wind up on the same side of the room), the fourth floor location, and the pot deal going down on the corner, I think we'll keep looking.

I'm not even sure it was a pot deal but the main thing we learned from today is that what that price in Manhattan looks like and that we have more need of counter space and room to put our furniture than we do of a hip location to brag about.

End of story. On a hilarious note, Katrina and I headed over to Union Square from 1st Avenue so we'd have time to talk about what we had just seen, and managed to run into the no pants subway crowd. If you haven't heard about this group called Improv Everywhere, then check out this link. They do crazy public improv, including volunteers in the process, mostly to shock or confuse random passersby in the vein of candid camera. The no pants subway ride, one of the funniest pranks they pull, is exactly what it sounds like. Check out the videos. Union Square subway station was mobbed, mostly by people wearing just about everything but pants.

What's happening now is that my time between getting up and going to work is rapidly dwindling as I just got off the phone with George, my co worker for whom I supplied music to finish off his film. They needed one last tweak in the mix to bring out the snare drum on a particular track so that they could get on with the sound design. They should be finishing soon, in fact, screening the piece on the 29th at one of HBO's theater rooms around Bryant Park. Mohammad, the director, who also used to work at NY 1, works over there and was able to book it. Thankfully, I can actually make it because I don't work until 11pm that night. I'm actually covering for George that night because he asked off the week leading up to the screening.

So you'll hear more about the screening the closer we get. It'll be the first screening of my work in NYC, as a matter of fact. Definitely something to talk about there. For now, I'd better get the rest of my lunch packed and brave the cold to meet the train into the city. Never a moment's rest.