So The Onion had a cute little diddy this week about how much living in New York City sucks. Most of it was, incidentally, not untrue! And while most of the people who shared it on their Facebook walls, etc. took the tone of, “Haha! LOLZ!” I found it less funny and more, um, uncomfortably accurate.
Especially this part (emphasis mine):
“I always had this perverted sense of pride because I was managing to scrape by here,” said Brooklyn resident Andrew McQuade, who, after watching two subway rats gnawing on a third bloody rat carcass, finally determined that New York City was a giant sprawling cancer. “Well, fuck that. I don’t need to pay $2,000 a month to share a doghouse-sized apartment with some random Craigslist dipshit to prove my worth. I want to live like a goddamn human being.”
“You see this?” added McQuade, pointing at a real estate listing for a duplex in Hagerstown, MD. “Two bedrooms, two baths, a den—a fucking den—and a patio. Twelve hundred a month. That’s total, not per person.”
One of the funny — and by funny, I mean frustrating — things about New York (and, I imagine, most other major American cities, although I wouldn’t know firsthand. Except LA, which like New York is expensive and full of horrible people, plus it’s also hot and you have to drive everywhere) is the sickening wealth gap and perversely inflated living costs.
Another thing that is not actually “funny,” but, in fact, disgusting, is how Jersey Shore’s Snooki makes $30,000 per episode or watching Lindsay Lohan hit babies in a Maserati. That doesn’t make me laugh or even shake my head in shame. It just makes me want to kill everyone around me (and then myself) out of bitterness and spite and the maddening realization that while I spend the next 10 years underemployed and paying down a mountain of student loan debt, these girls will be squandering whatever’s left of their fortunes on tanning salon memberships and cocaine. (Also upsetting? Reading about how Cyndi Lauper once sued her landlord at the Apthorp to roll back her rent from $3,250 to $508. Look, I know nobody likes or deserves to get ripped off, but you’re fucking Cyndi Lauper, you bitch. Those units now sell for $54,000 a month, which is probably still less you spend on make-up and peroxide in a given week, anyway.)
I know, it’s my own fault for going to an expensive school to study the very lucrative field of — guffaw! — journalism. What a joke! I should have studied economics! Or transferred to Stern and sold my soul to some Wall Street investment firm for a six-figure entry-level salary and 80-hour work week. Because you know what? I really wouldn’t mind slaving away at some mind-numbing job I hate if it means coming home to my own apartment, with a bedroom that’s actually large enough open the door into and still accommodate furniture. Like a bed.
“But it’s New York! The capital of the world! Everything is here!”
Fuck that. (more…)
