jmoiron.net

It's been somewhat of a busy month since I last posted, but that's really no excuse; whenever there's a lack of activity here you can rest assured that the blame lies solely on my apathy and temporary lack of writing impulse.

I spent most of July looking at apartments. I didn't think it'd take that long, and in fact I was essentially correct in this thinking, since eventually an apartment was found in about 2 days. I spent one week looking up studio's and 1 bedroom apartments in Jersey and Union city; one week looking up and visiting 2 bedroom apartments in Jersey and Union city (at which point I decided UC sucked); another week looking at studio and 1 bedroom apartments in JSQ and JC Heights, and then about 3 days looking at 2 bedroom apartments in JSQ and JC Heights. In hindsight, my experience looking around JC for something paid off since I was able to narrow down which apartments would be good the 4th time around and landed a pretty sweet deal.

My first apartment seemed to be some cause for celebration, so my mother decided to take me on a whirlwind 12 hour shopping marathon that ended with lots of furniture and household essentials covered at little cost to myself. I still need a bed and an entertainment center, and I will be returning to bastion of evil today with two identical pieces of a desk drawer in order to receive 2 mirrored pieces of a desk drawer.

Having a car for the last month has really changed my whole mental makeup; for the most part I am not at peace with it around. This was much more of a problem before I miraculously got a 2004 hoboken parking pass. Apparently the old woman at the counter was sympathetic to the plight of the Fraternities who owned their own houses and were getting shafted by Stevens and Hoboken and decided to at least extend the proper etiquette of a reach around.

The car has afforded me one luxury; the ability to return home often. My frequent visits have prompted me to look up some of my High School buddies; out of both need to have something to do and curiosity for what other people have done for themselves in the 4 year span since I last saw them. Rudy and Bruce seem to be doing ok, and it was nice to see Olger again (The Legend Lives). James is probably still alive (judging by his away messages), and it was great to catch up a little bit with Fred the Friendly Philipino.

An email Rudy sent me about a gathering we had this past weekend made me realize that of course I could have googled some old people, and so off to the races I went until about 4:00 AM seeing if anyone from my old school did anything worthy of mention. Two of my friends seemed to have graduated from Harvard (actually; one was a friend turned aquaintence, the other was just this girl that everyone liked because she was intelligent and beautiful and had big breasts at grade 6). This other girl I used to hang out with in the music wing went to some college in New Hampshire and did some work for the ACLU, which I found more selfless and honorable than my Greenpeace donations and contributions to various independent radio stations.

Nobody hit it big though; Nobody got shot into space, and the class of 2000 has yet to cure cancer or prove the string theory. I don't know anyone who graduated in any major league academic sciences like math heavy Physics or just plain inane and nonsensical Chemistry. I seem to be the only person from the Sleepy Hollow class of 2000 that majored in Computer Science; and if there are others, they were not involved with computers at all during my stay there. We produced a lot of business majors, a handful of lawyers (the ones with wealthy parents at least), a few jailbirds and an as yet undetermined number of dropouts. Weighing in at 3 pages, my google search returned the largest result of positively identified results (Of course a google search for a name like James Barber is going to yield thousands of results for the proverbial droids that I am not looking for). Overall, a bland and uninteresting class: at least 2001 has a few strippers.