The Start of Something

Hi there. I'm bsguru. I make blogs, commit to them for a short amount of time, and then forget about them. This time around, I'm turning that weakness into a strength. I'm moving to New York City in a couple days, and since I haven't been able to find a guide or anything online, I've decided to chronicle my move, my culture shock, and most importantly (I think), my apartment hunt in the hopes that someone else will find it useful when he moves to the city. I figure this blog will end either when I find an apartment and get moved in or once I begin referring to myself as a New Yorker. If it keeps going after that, it probably means I'm making money off Google Ads and am milking you, dear Reader, for all you're worth.

A little about me: I'm a newly mid-20s white male who's never lived north of 40º latitude. I recently accepted a job offer from a startup based in midtown for substantially more money than I'm comfortable admitting to. (It's one bedroom in Manhattan money - two if I still didn't have a car payment.) I'm going to be editor in chief of a soon-to-be-wildly-popular website. I'm moving to New York at the end of this month.

I lucked out, because my employer is people-centric and has generously rented me a place in the city for a month, long enough for me to find a place of my own and begin paying for it. They claim it's nearly impossible to find a place in the city without being on the ground. I've been looking a bit at craigslist in my spare time, and I can confirm this. There's more neighborhoods - some of them have more than one name - than you can fucking count, and Google Maps hasn't been good enough to incorporate demographics and crime statistics into its bag of tricks.

What's more, all the neighborhoods sound the same: Brooklyn Heights, Crown Heights, Washington Heights, Stuyvesant Heights. Realtors on craigslist also like expanding the traditional borders of nicer neighborhoods that border less affluent ones. And to make matters even more confusing, the places that have historically been warzones, like Harlem, are now full of graduate students. All I've put together so far is Manhattan is really, really expensive.

Anyway, my plane leaves this Sunday, 10 hours after my goodbye party ends. It's a short trip up there, but the trip from JFK into Penn Station will be a fun story to share with you.