I Took A Trip And Have A Flat!

In our last exciting episode, I'd recently moved in to my parents' place across town for the interim between leaving my apartment and finding a new one. The Craigslist apartment hunt began almost immediately after the move and I posted this ad in order to up my chances of finding an awesome roommate while I scoured the crazy places being offered by crazy people:

"Late 20s male graphic designer/vfx artist looking to live in a place with 1-3 other people. Interested in rooming with hilarious, creative types who like teaming up on awesome projects. I would not be against rigging up a switch in the place that activates Stealth Mode, making all of the light in the place red like on a submarine. I don't smoke or do drugs, but love to have drinks and discuss science, time travel, and which historical figure we'd eat and why. Looking to move into a place in Brooklyn, in or around Williamsburg, but can be convinced otherwise if an awesome place is found. Don't be stupid-messy or have hella obnoxious pets. Bonus points if you like making up mixed drinks like "I Have No Faith In Science" (vodka + warm water), "I Wasted My Youth And Am Paying For It Now" (gin + Sunny D + diet coke + sour patch kid), or "Sidesaddle Motorcycle" (hot chocolate + bailey's + enough marshmallows that it straddles the boundary between drink and food). We can always flip the couch over (for cover) and play Duck Hunt over it because I'm bringing my Nintendo."

I posted another one the following day:

"HERE is a Worthwhile Economy

Seeking to procure a room for let, as well as one to three co-tenants, in or around the Williamsburg area of the Brooklyn borough. In search of a well-plumbed flat with elec-tricity, near in location to the Interborough Rapid Transit lines as well as the automat. Would prefer a trustworthy, hygienic room-mate with good personal character and a predilection for joviality. No individuals prone to bigotry, brigandry, or bouts of fisticuffs need apply. The ideal room-mate would also be resistant to the lure of the Opium Den and would partake in tobacco-related excursions in the out-of-doors. I am a gentleman in the sunset years of my twenties with an admiration for cleanliness and a respect for the privacy of my potential co-habitators. I ply my trade of graphical-design both for stipend and for leisure and seek co-tenants similarly inclined in the creative arts. I like to enjoy an evening at the speakeasy or a night at home with the victrola and the snifter. I have been known to regularly take in the Talkies as well as the Vaudies.

You may respond to this circular via electronic-telegram at the address listed above. Thank you for you interest."

It turns out that posting ads for roommates was probably the best apartment-finding decision I made in this whole tiresome ordeal. After a day or so of the first ad's posting, I received an email from a potential roommate, which turned into twenty emails, shared beers, two days of apartment hunting, the signing of a lease, and a July 2nd move-in date. Every sign indicates that the new roommate, Ashley, is exactly the kind of person I was looking for in terms of hilarity, non-craziness, stability, potential adventuring, and worldliness.

The discovery of the place itself is a harrowing tale of daring-do. I made my way up to NYC early Monday morning and returned the following Sunday. The initial plan was to go by bus, but the bus I took last time, Sky Express, had recently been shut down by the government because of terrible safety standards, injuries, and deaths. I guess that's what you pay for when you buy a $30 bus ticket. I waited too long to buy tickets from the only competing bus line from Charlotte to NYC and discovered that tickets were sold out until Wednesday. I gave in and bought JetBlue tickets, which were about $200 more than the bus tickets, and $250 BELOW the other airlines, and resumed my Monday-to-Sunday plan. This turned out to be a fantastic decision, as it left me with a full night's sleep, extra leg room, two travel hours of relative comfort, all of the free soft drinks I could guzzle (zero, because I was sleeping), and virtually no fear that I would die sometime during the transportation leg of the trip. We, as a species, and as North Carolinians, invented flight for a reason, and that reason was to lessen the Probablility Of Dying on long voyages. By Air truly is the most godlike way to travel.

I saw a place soon after arriving in town that I considered pretty seriously for a while. The place is a loft in Bushwick, Brooklyn, inhabited by three motion designers. My subject line about render farms in my email instantly won them over. The place seemed like a good bohemian-style artist place, which I imagine would be fun for a good long while. I think I'd probably have taken the place and loved it if I hadn't met up with Ashley and realized that we could actually get our own place without worrying about fitting into someone else's already-existing (and probably-shitty) lifestyle. Honestly, though. There are people on Craigslist who have ads that say things like, "No guests can ever come over ever." What in the hell fun is that? Who am I supposed to drink made-up drinks with and who will eat the all the hot dogs I baked up? All of these nachos will go to waste in my stomach while I cry myself to sleep.

Ashley, who's a New York native, immediately helped me out in my "Between Zero And Five Bullets" rating system for the various parts of Brooklyn and I fear I may someday owe her a Wookie Life-Debt because of it. She borrowed a car and we drove all over Brooklyn on Thursday seeing potential apartments. We posted an ad on Craigs that morning to see if we could scrounge up a third roommate on short notice in case we found the perfect three-bedroom place. A gentleman by the name of Jamie, who was quickly renamed Boy Jamie, responded to my ad and we determined a meeting time/place between apartment viewings. Boy Jamie got lost, so we ended up picking him up off of a street corner in the sketchiest way possible (me leaning out of the car window at a red light and yelling, "Jamie!" and then waving him over to get into the car with two people he'd never met) and interviewing him as we drove to our next apartment viewing. Jamie seemed to have an air of Radness about him and I imagine he would have made a great roommate, but just before we dropped him off at the subway, Ashley and I viewed the second-to-last apartment of the day.

We loved it.

We called the gentleman who showed us the place and let him know we wanted to take it. He smiled (over the phone - I could tell) and told us we could come in and fill out applications in the morning. That's when everything started to go to hell. I called the gentleman early the next morning to confirm the 11:00 appointment and he informed me that he had bad news: someone had begun filling out an application for the place just before he showed it to us on Thursday and the office never called to tell him. Eff. You. See. Kay. Ashley and I kept our appointment at 11:00 and filled out applications with the fleeting hope that the person in front of us for the place would somehow fail to pass the application process or maybe die. We left the office feeling defeated, but hiked up our trousers, straightened our respective hats, and resumed the search in short order.

After checking out a few more lackluster places, the gentleman who showed us FailHouse the day before informed me that he had one other place that was comparable to the place we'd seen the day before. That's when everything stopped going to hell! The new place was great. A half a step from the green line, two big bedrooms, high-assed ceilings, two bathrooms, and a giant living room/kitchen area. Ashley and I exchanged stunned glances, looked around a bit more, and decided then and there to take the place.

With our hopes rising back up through the cloud cover of the day, the only thing that stood in our way was the singing of the lease. I won't go into too much detail, but I think I would definitely classify the lease signing as An Ordeal. My questionable employment status was cancelled out by my perfect credit and, after probably the single longest look of hesitation I've seen in all my twenty-eight years, the fellow at the leasing office said he'd let us have the place. A traipse to my bank in Manhattan for a cashier's cheque and a flick of the pen was all it took to seal the deal. Ashley celebrated by going back to work and I celebrated by eating food for the first time in more than twenty-four hours.

So the weekend ended on a high note. I got dinner with my chum Jimmy that night, where we hit on the ladies and, more importantly, discussed computer animation and visual effects. Saturday was an all-day Gaming Fiasco with Rym and Scott, et al., and Sunday was a leisurely day of Brooklyn wanderings and the plane ride home. The trip was fraught with other small adventures too numerous too mention, except for the one that stands out the most.

I was setting up flat-viewing appointments Thursday morning and called up a gentleman about his place. Below is transcribed our phone exchange:

Me: "Hi! I hear you're showing a place at [street name] and [street name]!"

The Gentleman in Question: "...." "What is this, an interrogation?! WHO IS THIS."

Me: "Er...I saw...that you're showing an apartment?...On Craigslist?"

The Gentleman in Question: "Oh! Well why didn't you say that to begin with? Jesus!"

So it looks like the adventure has already started. I saw a man pee in a subway station, I saw a rat in the street, another in the road, and I saw a crazy guy yelling the fuck word in the park over and over. I think I'm going to love this place.

"The beginning of the adventure of finding yourself is to lose your way." - Joseph Campbell

Updates? Updates!

Last week I moved out of my apartment that I've lived in in NoDa for something like four years. My folks helped me move stuff to their basement in South Charlotte over a couple of days, my landlord's husband checked the place out and said I was a fantastic tenant, and then I spent one last official evening in NoDa. My shower curtains were gone, so I saw it as the perfect opportunity to take the first and only bath I've taken in that apartment (and probably in a decade), with The Swiss Army Romance blasting from my phone. I've vowed to take many, many more of these baths. I had eight Yueng-Lings and half a pony keg in my fridge left over from Sean's visit that I took, along with Josh, down to my friends Chris and Krista's place to watch the RiffTrax to The Room. I understand what people say about that movie now. I understand completely. Finished it all off with a couple hours' reading at Amelie's, and then I came back to the flat around 1:30am, packed up my computer and the data server, walked around a little, said goodbye to the place, turned off the lights, and left with A Favor House Atlantic blasting and NoDa fading away in the glow of my taillights.

Here are a few pics from the move. The first is probably the saddest picture. It's the magnets left on the fridge after I took down all sorts of postcards, pictures, and a whole lot of other shit that really means a lot to me.

Yes, I took the magnets off and packed them right after I took the picture. I didn't leave them there.

This is what I was left with at the end:

My laptop sitting atop my company's data server. How incredibly representative of a large percentage of my life in Charlotte since graduating. Next up is the moments-before-final-carry-out-of-things shot.

I don't really miss the apartment, since it and I had good years and it was our time. But the pics of it empty like this sure as hell make me miss the times I had with people here. So One Long Infinite High-Five for everybody who made this The Place To Be.

Next up: a Roast Beef sandwich signed by Chris Onstad in Austin, Texas. Thanks to Scott and Cara from Austin and My Life for this wonderful treasure. There was no place for it and it really has to stay in a freezer, so I said a long goodbye to it, caressed it a bit, and tossed it in the trash like any decent sandwich. In hindsight, I probably should have thrown it onto a roof or at a train or something. Ah, well. I plan to keep this photograph of it in my next freezer and then hopefully get Onstad to sign that someday. Maybe I'll even put it between the layers of a NEW sandwich!

This last picture has become pretty representative of my life at home. It's one of my mom's old coffee mugs that I've now claimed as my own.

I use it for my breakfast coffees and my stay-up-too-late coffees. It is wonderful. My folks are great too and I'm forever indebted to them for giving me a place to stay in these uncertain times. I wish my sister was here right now to complete the picture, but we'll work that out in due time.

In less sentimental news, I've officially resumed the Craigslist apartment hunt, the job hunt (submitted a NOTABLE application yesterday), and I'm heading up to NYC sometime around Sunday or Monday to stay with a friend for a week and see as many apartments as humanly possible. Perhaps I can somehow line up last-second job interviews for that week too, eh? I started a couple of new design things recently too, so I'll stick those on the 'Nets soon when they're finished. I'm getting beers with some dudes tonight, so it'll have to wait.

"The family - that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to." -Dodie Smith

Perfect Packing Progress

The last week has been full of Actual Paying Work that's distracted me a bit from the NYC design mission. But this was to be expected at some point. In lieu of design work, however, I've been ransacking and disassembling my apartment, focusing on the most significantly stuff-full part: my studio.

After two failed attempts at roommate-gathering when I first moved in four-ish years ago, I decided to keep the second bedroom of my apartment for myself for the foreseeable future and turn it into a sort of screenprinting/art studio area. I started by covering the floor in a thick layer of painting plastic, then some thick dropcloth, and finally some puzzle piece-style rubberized floor cover things for the main standing areas. Karl and I spent a couple of days in my parents' garage constructing a really nice and sturdy work table and we put enough forethought into it to make it modular and held together with bolts instead of screws, for easy disassembly should the need arise.

The rest of the studio was taken up by an old computer desk topped with a typewriter, metal shelves that held a ton of art supplies and art projects, two bookshelves containing my Decent collection of books, and an assortment of drawers, boxes, and containers that held other art supplies, costumes, computer parts, and general Hilarious Items.

After taking video and pictures of my entire flat last week, I went into the project face first and started tearing down the studio. Some late, coffee-fueled evenings, much like tonight as a matter of fact, resulted in five huge trash cans full of stuff that ended up in the dumpster. Given, a lot of it was made up of boxes, which take up a lot of space in a trash can, but still. Five is a lot. I honestly didn't know I had this much to throw away. And I'm really glad I'm going through it all too. I even played Hoarders on Netflix Instant while I was cleaning out some of the room and I like to think it helped me get rid of even more stuff.

Five of those. With more to come.

A lot of things that weren't thrown away were condensed into an unbelievably small amount of space. All of my Adobe Creative Suites and subsequent upgrades were in their own huge, heavy boxes. They are now all in one box. If I lose that box, I'm as good as fucked professionally. A huge surprise was that all of the art media that I wanted to keep fit into ONE cardboard box. Things in bags and boxes really do take up a lot more space than they need to. I took all of my oil pastels out of the fancy arranged-by-color box they came in and fit them into two small IKEA tins; every single pen I own, from Sharpies to Pilots to those smelly graphic design markers with the numbers on the tops fit into ONE large IKEA tin; all of my charcoal fit into another; all of my India Ink and ink-like materials into another; and all of my screenprinting inks, emulsions, and other art supplies fit into the cardboard box into which the aforementioned tins were placed. The organization and packing of that box may be the most surprising and greatest accomplishment of my life.

As I was sorting out the crap I no longer need, the little glimmer of hoarder mentality that lives inside each and every one of us kicked in and said, "Dang, Chase. Someone could probably use some of this. Maybe you and I shouldn't throw it all out." So I posted this lovely image on Facebook and labeled every single item in it:

Dibs were called on a lot of the most significant stuff and the rest is in, or on its way to, the dumpster. And a couple things went or are going to Goodwill, because who couldn't use a beat-up-ass skateboard or a bag of black feathers?

I went ahead and took apart my big metal studio shelves and the work table that Karl and I built too. My parents, who live across town, have been kind enough to let me store a bunch of my crap in their basement until I move, so the things I've packed are slowly making their way out of the apartment too.

I've worked on a few other things around the apartment too in a manic coffee-frenzy. I'm slowly scrubbing the HELL out of every room in the place, I've ripped out all of the screenprinting plastic from my upstairs bathroom with NO ink stains at all in the tub (hell yes!), and packed up all of the video games on my media shelves.

This is another example of a box that I'm completely fucked if I lose, but in a whole different way. Almost all of the non-PC video games of my life live in this box. I plan to protect it with my life. I'd also like to take this moment to thank Past Chase for keeping all of my cables and wires in one place. I wrapped them all up and am now more wire-organized than I have ever been. EVER.

That about covers the packing side of things. I'm working through more stuff every day, although I'm still resisting packing up my bookshelves because I like to look at them.

No promises, but I'll see about updating the blog a couple times a day in the next week to catch up and also force myself to keep trucking at 110% efficiency. This will be extra difficult because it defies physics, but if NASA can do it, I can do it!

"We are about to break the surly bonds of gravity and punch the face of God." -Homer Simpson

Break It Down

It's a quick NYC moving update tonight! I had to photomerge a ton of raw photos today that I took of a restaurant and, since the images are hella full of datums, it took my computer quite a long time to crunch through everything. So during the waiting periods, and after about 7pm, I spent every spare hour I had sorting through and cleaning out my studio area of my apartment (the back bedroom). I now have two big trash bags full of garbage, a stack of old plastic and boxes bound for the dumpster, and a pile in the middle of the studio floor of all of the stuff that I plan to give/throw away. I've still got at least another half day of sorting to do before it's all done, but that'll probably end up happening tomorrow.

My plan for the stuff I'm giving away is, as I mentioned yesterday, beer-related. Instead of someone coming over and paying me for things, or even giving me beers, however, the idea behind my plan is a Shared Beers Requirement. The main idea is that if, for instance, an object is rated at 2 Beers, the interested party must come over and have two beers with me before they pick up their new item and split. And that's two beers each, mind you. If they cannot provide their own beers, beers will be provided for them. So if everybody comes over to collect things in one day, I'll probably be dead at the end of that day. But I've got a pretty good assortment of stuff for anyone interested, including big sheets of styrofoam, a lighter in the shape of a pig (the fire comes out its nostrils), an odd bejeweled monkey thing, somewhat jilapidated 4.1 Klipsch speakers and subwoofer that may be better off in the trash (unless you know how to fix a wire), big sheets of nice paper, a giant wooden fork and spoon, a container of gel medium, and a host of other treasures ripe for the picking. I'll have a note up on Facebook tomorrow with the complete List Of Crap You Might Want.

In other news there was a huge lightning storm that I stood at the open window (and outside for a little while) and watched for a pretty long time. It was gorgeous and almost completely silent. I plan to hop back into the monster in the doorway thing tomorrow, but now the sleep happens.

"Every end is a new beginning."

Everything Just Got Bigger And Better

I mentioned a couple posts ago that I'd finally started on a View Full Size button on my portfolio site. I've wanted to do this for a number of months and assumed that once I actually got started on it, the update would take at least a couple of weeks. My site updates tend to take an order of magnitude more time than I originally plan and I've finally accepted that. But it turns out that this update took an order of magnitude LESS time than I thought it would, which is really kind of throwing me off a bit. I mustn't let myself get used to this sort of thing because there's no way it'll happen on any regular basis.

The update to the site took three coding sessions total, with a good start early in the week, about a half hour of work yesterday evening, and tonight's late-night coffee-fueled stretch. The framework is now in place to edit a simple boolean (true/false) tag into the image database's XML that will let the site know that a full-size image exists for a particular item in the gallery. The site then spawns a "View Full Size" button and links it to the appropriate external full-size image in the database, which opens in a new tab.

The code for the button was based heavily on the code I'd written for the "Link to Site" button on the items in the web section of the design gallery, but with some pretty heavy alterations (like the library location of click listeners, the passing-along of file paths, etc). I actually started this project by having the site look for an entire URL in the XML for each image, but realized in a facepalm moment that I already knew the exact place I was looking in my database structure, so all I had to do was drop a "fullsize" folder into each section with the normal portfolio images and thumbnails folder and just have the code look for the correspondingly-numbered image each time. So if it knows image 03.jpeg has a full-sized image available, it simply looks for 03.jpeg in the /fullsize folder and links to it. Therefore, all I need in the XML is a true or a false to indicate that the code should look for the fullsize image, versus grabbing an entire unique URL for each image. Wewt.

So I'm going to pat myself on the back by letting myself go to bed and read until I burn off the rest of this caffeine. If you want to check out tonight's handywork, it's all uploaded and working smoothly in the first two subsections of the Design section of my site at http://chase.brokenjpeg.com (the Compositions squares). Look for the button on the bottom of some of the enlarged images that reads, "View Full Size." I plan to fill out the full-sized images for the rest of the site (when available and necessary) over the remainder of the week. Luckily I happened to code it so that a completely missing <fullSizeExists> tag just causes the code to assume there's no full image (rather than completely crashing). Thanks, XML and the Actionscript 3 libraries that read you!

In other quick NYC-related news, I finally videoed my apartment today and took some pretty nice photos in order to document its End State. It was sad times because I've got hella memories in this place, but as they say, every ending is a new beginning. So we'll see what fresh adventures this brings. After the documentation, I began the official teardown of the place, starting with the removal of the plastic I'd taped all over my upstairs tub to prevent screenprinting inks and emulsion from staining the tub. A little of said materials had gotten through, but they cleaned up perfectly and the tub looks like it just came out of the Tub Worm's fiberglass spinnerets (I assume this is where tubs come from). I sorted through some of my studio stuff too (art supplies, etc.) in preparation for giving some of it the hell away and throwing the rest in the garbage. Oh, and I threw some old clothes away and put the remaining undesired clothes in a bag to take to Goodwill. So progress is being made and you should see some postings on Facebook soon about the supplies I'll be offering up to anyone interested. I'll throw some of the details on here too, including the Beers Cost plan for each item (it's not what you'd expect).

So I'm going to burn that caffeine off now with some reading.

"Choose the quickest way between two points,
Don't waste your energy on bullshit interaction,
Don't be scared of anything except letting yourself down,
Outdo yourself, work harder than anyone else,
Now make very clear distinctions between parasites and creators,
Be a creator instead of a second-hand artificial flavor,
Do not concern yourself with anyone's opinions on your methods, save your own,
Be three steps ahead of everyone and I promise you'll make it home"
-MaxNormal.TV, Love Is...