Here’s the thing: It ain’t easy being a broke college intern in New York City. So when my girlfriend Jenny’s sublet flaked out on her via email mere hours before she arrived in Manhattan for a summer internship, she threw herself back into Craigslist with a vengeance, scouring the site for affordable housing.

Naturally, when a $650 East Village sublet came up, two pairs of misshapen eyebrows raised in suspicion. (That would be hers and mine.) After all, I’m paying $900 for a room just a couple blocks away that’s smaller than my mother’s closet back in California — and already I considered that a steal.

The listing warned that there was a situation a potential subletter would have to be open-minded about. And open-minded we are; everyone knows that there’s always a catch when it comes to apartments in New York. You know, like, “I don’t have windows or a microwave,” or “there is no A/C and it’s hot as balls here in the summer.”

Turns out this was the catch: “We would like to maintain access to the bedroom in question. We lead an ‘alternative’ lifestyle and use the room to host gatherings and have photo/video shoots.” Read More »

So, I did it. I bit the bullet and posted a Missed Connection.

I couldn’t help myself. I had seen a cute boy on the subway. Adorable, actually. This kid was everything I had been hoping New York would have tucked away in one of its dirty, graffiti covered apartments. Everything I had dreamed I’d softly bump into one of these sultry nights on 2nd Avenue.

He wasn’t a skinny, nauseatingly dressed Hipster. He wasn’t a gelled Wallstreeter secretly hiding a yellowed wife-beater under a polished polo. He wasn’t a moody artist wearing eyeliner and hunching over a notebook covered in scrawling of his pain. He was adorably normal. Sweetly natural. Still un-New York-ified. Just like me.

I saw him on the R train heading uptown. The moment I sat down and spied him I became consumed with sneaking looks at his tired, boyish face. He was dressed like he worked in some kind of uptown office, black pants a little too short for his lanky legs, old school headphones perched atop endearingly tousled brown hair. For 15 minutes I looked at him whenever he looked somewhere else.

All too soon he got off. I tried to watch him leave, but my vision was blocked by a marvelously fat guy and his incredibly giant lunch bag. 15 minutes was hardly long enough. I wanted more time with this specimen of cuteness. Read More »