Moving On or Moving Out

I helped one of my roommates move out today as he apparently decided to leave New York and head back home. I say apparently because he didn't tell anyone that he was moving. In fact, the only way we knew he had moved out was when I opened his door yesterday afternoon and found nothing but dirty carpet, lingering smoke residue, and an old pair of dress shoes in the closet. I immediately thought of Tom Arnold in True Lies when he complained about his ex-wife who took everything when she left him, right down to the ice cube trays in the freezer.

I can shake my head and chuckle at the situation because I'm not my landlord who is now missing one third of a rent check (we came into the apartment separately so we don't pay our rent together). I think my apartment-survivor's-guilt led me to vacuum my ex-roommate's room for my landlord but otherwise I'm relatively unaffected by his sudden getaway.

My ex-roommate, who I will call Brent because that's his name, was obviously having a difficult time since he moved here from Rhode Island in early December. He's twenty-five and the oldest of our (ex) trio of roommates but I could tell that he had done the least growing up. One late night while we were chatting he admitted to me that his parents still cleaned up all his messes for him: tuition bills, speeding tickets, moving costs, you name it. It was that same night that he told me (not in so many words, but the message was clear) that he often walked the streets because he was lonely and that beer was "his most favorite thing in the world."

And even though Brent lied to me about his plans I can't help but feel some sympathy for his situation.

A couple month ago I was in a similar conundrum though it now feels like it happened closer to a year ago. I was juggling impending grad school applications and the pressures of my internship, and one night I hit my first snag in my new night job. When I got back to my apartment at three or four in the morning I took to the streets like Brent did and I called home.

My parents listened to my challenges and declared their unconditional support for me. But then they urged me to keep trying. I was already considering waiting another year for my grad school applications but they helped me realize that no matter how long I waited, I would have to buckle down at some point. And if I didn't get in, well, I already faced that possibility anyway. A month later I'm very, very glad I followed their advice. It certainly wasn't easy moving past that difficult period but I know now I made the right decision to keep moving forward.

I'm not sure if Brent made a similar call back home. I suspect he did because I'm pretty certain he was very short on money and would have needed his family's help once again to move out. It's too bad he wasn't able to make a different decision because now he'll have to erase the last two months of his life from his resume and his housing history and he'll have nothing to show for it but another mess his parents had to clean up for him.

It's a struggle to not think less of him for what he did. He lied to myself and my roommate. He may have shorted us on his share of the utilities (I'm not sure if he settled with my roommate), and my landlord told me that Brent lied to her face about moving out. They crossed paths in our building's stairwell amidst moving furniture and he said that he was staying put. The poor sap.

I suppose I could have tried harder to reach out to him, but that's hard to do when somebody holds back their true intentions from you.

I'm going to do my best to remember Brent. Because I know I'll be running into challenging spots for the rest of my life, and when I do I'll think WWBD -- "What would Brent do?" And then I'll do the opposite.

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

Nearly two weeks have passed since I took Columbia's written application test so I had fallen out of my "professional journalist" mindset by the time I went in for an interview today at CUNY.

I blame my late work hours for part of my lack of focus and I blame my attempt at maintaining a pre-noon wake-up call for the rest -- that misguided project has only succeeded in making me sleepy anytime I'm not physically drooling on my pillow.

I also blame the Super Bowl for being so exciting that I had to watch it and stay out late enough that I had to spend the night at my brother's apartment before dragging myself to my place in the morning. My interview was at 3pm but I always have to set aside an extra four or five hours to dress myself appropriately. Because I suck at dressing appropriately, see.

Case in point: Of all the clothes I wore at my interview today, the shoes, pants, shirt, and sweater were either purchased today or else acquired so recently they had never been worn. I'm pretty certain tags were still sticking out of me when I walked through CUNY's doors.

Despite my inability to dress myself in a professional manner I think I actually made a good impression. I even got the impression that CUNY wants me.

I certainly found a lot to like after touring their facilities. They have state of the art equipment, and by state of the art equipment I mean stuff that flashes and beeps and does things that I can't comprehend. The students were dressed very nicely, which isn't necessarily a positive sign for me, but the faculty members I spoke to were very energetic, experienced, and more than happy to answer my questions.

If I had to compare my interview with a movie, I'd go with The Cutting Edge. I played the role of Doug Dorsey, the hockey player who carries an extra helmet to throw up in before the game because the first ten minutes of my interview I was so nervous and inarticulate that I felt like one of those zoo monkeys that hoots a lot but can't effectively communicate intelligent thought. Thankfully my interviewer was a very kind lady who didn't acknowledge my brief regression into the animal kingdom.

CUNY's program looks fresh (it's less than two years old), hungry, motivated and thorough. It also doesn't hurt that it's a fourth of the cost of any other program I've applied to.

I'll definitely be going back to check out a class or a talk and hopefully I'll remember not to hoot at anyone. Or throw up.