Cutting Corners in Style

This recession didn't change my life a whole lot. Even in those glory days when the Dow sat above 10,000, I was still recycling t-shirts I wore in the 6th grade (shirts my mom was saving for the grandchildren she hoped i'd give her someday). The recession just made cutting corners trendy.

So if you are someone who has just moved to NYC in hopes of living the dream, here's one way to get off on the right foot: spend as little on furniture as you can. Because there are so many other ways the city will suck money out of your pocket. (See post on The Scam)

How?

Keep your eyes on the calender. As the end of the month approaches, someone's lease is about to expire. No, I'm not suggesting you squat in their abandoned apartment (although do that at your own risk). As people move out, they inevitably leave perfectly good furniture behind rather than pay for a moving van. We furnished our entire apartment this way.

In the first three months we lived in Harlem we found, in no particular order, two televisions, two cushioned chairs as well as a full set of kitchen chairs, an end-table, two wardrobes, a bookcase and several storage bins. The trick here is to make sure the furniture hasn't been sitting outside too long. The best case scenario is you live in a large apartment complex and the furniture is left in the lobby..

If this doesn't work, also consider some useful websites like freecycle.org (whose noble mission statement is to encourage people to give away their stuff rather than throw it into a landfill) and of course don't forget to browse your local section of Craigslist.

The tricky part is finding a way to pull the room together and keep it from looking like a junkyard. We've found nothing disguises a haphazardly designed room like Christmas lights.

- Seth

Dr. Strangelove or: How An Aspiring Med School Student Learned to Stop Worrying and Donate Sperm

Warning: The following post is not meant for our 15-24 year old female readership. If you are in this demographic, be careful: you will probably think this one is creepy and weird.

Seeing as to my joblessness as of late, I decided to try a creative brainstorm with all of myselves. What would our dream job be. Anything: working at the zoo with many different types of animals, being in charge of puppies or something like that cause puppies are awesomely cute and make us want to take care of them. Or being some kind of hitman and getting paid shitloads for offing jackasses and lowering the jackass population at the same time, which by the way is ruining this semi-beautiful city of ours (and by ours i mean mine). Or having sex for money. Somehow the only option that seemed viable among everything I thought of was the last one. But since I didn't want to search for a good pimp, I decided that maybe the sex part could be left out. I could jerk off for money!

So that led me to the wondrous world of sperm donation. Cause come on, I make 'em anyways, why not get paid for 'em? All you need to do is serve 'em in a cup to some sperm acceptor or something, right? Well, kinda. So there are a couple of state certified laboratories in the city dealing with fertility matters and sperm. You could go to some other shady place that isn't "certified" if you really are into shadiness. Now, I live in the shade so in theory I was all for whomever would accept my sperm, but then my brain switched on. Sperm + egg ---> embryo ----> baby (most likely Homo Sapiens for me) ----> kid ----> adult dude/dudette.

Whoa. So wait a second, me putting sperm into this cup is gonna make a baby? YES. But you're not there yet. Anyways, suffice it to say I wanted to produce a child I would have no responsibility for or knowledge of in a slightly more responsible manner. Cause honestly, uncertified places could be exporting my babies to China, and really, we can't let them have any more people cause they're gonna overtake the world and I really don't want to have to learn Mandarin. So now I decided on a state certified lab and thought, hey I'll be jerking off in no time flat. But it wasn't that simple.

Apparently, the sperm donation world is pretty particular. From the very outset there were criteria written up to keep away the riffraff. For example, "We don't usually accept donations from those under 5'11"- this is because most women want someone tall to anonymously fuck for their tall babies. I signed up anyway and stayed up nights wondering if I would get a call back. I did. So I scheduled a meeting, preceding which I wasn't allowed to be active for 2-5 days. That sucked.

I was ready to explode by the time I got there. Oh yeah, it was in the Empire State building. I was ready to explode as soon as I saw the Empire State building. But I held it in, cause that's what a prime sperm donor would do. So as I sat there filling out the many many pages of forms, which collected all the personal characteristic information that anyone could possibly want to hear about me, and occassionally stared out the window at the tiny ants of people, I thought "Do I really want to do this?"

- Rishi