The New York Times has an article on strategies kids take to get by living in the most expensive city in North America. Funny how it reminds me of something:
Peter Naddeo, a 24-year-old musician, earns $15 an hour working as a temp in Web development in Chelsea, and has perfected the tricky art of stretching lunch into dinner. He moved to New York from Pennsylvania last fall and can barely afford his $80 monthly college loan payments. He listens to a hand-me-down CD player because iPods are out of reach. He pays $600 for a 10-by-10-foot room in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that has one saving grace: a window that faces east. For lunch, Mr. Naddeo usually orders a $3.50 plate of yellow rice and beans from a Latin American diner on Eighth Avenue, and eats late to ward off hunger pangs. Sometimes he hits up a bar in his neighborhood where a $6 pint comes with a small pizza. Or he relies on friends to feed him.In the '80s this was called living through a recession and no one had pals who fed him. Though that isn't quite true as I recall buying groceries for a roommate who was down to eating carrots only. She was getting a little orange. One pal had a bag of maple leaf cookies that were put out on a plate whenever we came over. No one liked them so it was a cheap way to be hospitable. He was on mini-wage and there was only tea, cookies, cards and hockey of the black and white when we were over there. I do like the line above about a "hand-me-down" CD player. Boo frikkin hoo.
Isn't this just called being young? Don't you have to be broke for at least half a decade after school? And where is the New York of Archie Bunker? I blame George Jefferson, movin' on up and all that. Everyone wants to live like people on TV.
Comments
Yorkshireman #2 - May 27, 2008 9:48 am
When I was a young lad it was mustard sandwiches and Superior Lager (you know that cheap stuff from Sudbury)and we were happy!
satisfactory spun - May 27, 2008 10:27 am
I had friend in college that stole ketchup packets from the caf to make soup and lived in the Voyageur bus terminal for two months. He kept this clothes in the lockers and use our apartments for food, showers and such, sleeping in alternating shifts eiethr on our floors or in the terminal between buses, pretending he was waiting for the next bus to ottawa.
David Janes - May 27, 2008 12:22 pm
A bus terminal? Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a bus terminal! Would ha' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us!
Chris Taylor - May 27, 2008 1:54 pm
I am trying to think of similar stories of starving-artist privation but I don't really have any. Or I can't remember any at this advanced age. You don't get a gut like mine by letting privation stand in the way of good cuisine.
I was the guy whose electronics hand-me-downs kept a half-dozen others well-supplied through the late 80s and early 90s. Computers and Walkmans/Discmans replaced every 12-18 months without fail. Now that I am middle-aged and don't care, though, I replace that stuff about once a decade.
I wouldn't mind living like the guys on <I>Deadliest Catch</i> or <i>Lobster Wars</i>. Somewhere in my family tree there must have been a few fishermen because when I see those shows I start calculating my net worth and say "If I sell all my stuff I could probably afford a crab boat in Dutch Harbor."
But if it's living like the idiots on the average sitcom, forget it. Their houses might be okay but there's nothing going on upstairs. Give me human ingenuity and skill against deadly and massive natural elements.
Alan - May 27, 2008 2:34 pm
Lobster Wars!?!? I never knew such a show existed - but having last lived in Rustico PEI, I am well aware of the seriousness of that sort of stuff and the accompanying semi-legal forms of enforcement. And don't get the crab license. Crabs have been known to uproot and walk away. Me, I want to be a Bay of Fundy weir fisherman. All the fish with none of the seasickness.