KIS & TELL

Tonight my roommate and I curled up with some iced tea and watched Accused at 17 about a high school prank gone fatally wrong. It was cheesy, predictable and incredibly satisfying. I mean we ate it up. DVRing William & Kate for sure. Enjoy the trailer below.

Apartment hunting is a lot like starting a relationship. The excitement, thinking of all the possibilities, the solid feeling that you’re going to make a good investment and the unshakable positive outlook.

Apartment hunting in NYC is like starting a relationship when you’re Brad Womack. For those of you who don’t know who that is (and no one will ever judge you for that), Womack is ABC’s last Bachelor, who was the Bachelor seasons ago and ended up not choosing a girl at the end. Think indecisive-turned-desperate. So your mission is to marry someone, a seemingly standard goal; you’ve seen your friends and family do it, and it’s turned out alright for them. But you’re on The Bachelor, and courting someone on a reality TV dating show is not the traditional way of getting to know and commit to a person, much less come to fall in love with someone…it’s a GAME.

You start out with the whole sea of fish on a silver platter, at least a nicely curated selection of the ones with your basic requirements (price range, number of bedrooms), and you start to narrow down from there based on your specific wants and needs (neighborhoods, a common area, closeness to a subway, closeness to a park, pet policy). But you’ve got all these women (agents and brokers with their attractive listings) luring you into their lives, trying to convince you that what they have to offer is the best deal you’ll ever find, the complete package, and to forget the other ones because they’re in this for all the right reasons. You kiss all of them, blinded by how good they look, investing time and energy on dates (not to mention giving up work, your social life, etc.) thinking that you’re really getting to know them when in reality your conversations are surface level or good for ratings at best. You can’t stop singing their praises.

You get easily attached and quickly fall in love with everything about them to the point of confusing yourself silly, and here comes the endless weighing of the pros and cons and justifying compromises, and you even get sick of hearing yourself talk about it. Sometimes Often there’s drama (you can have the keys tomorrow but now they actually want 4x the rent upfront), disappointment (you go from 2 total roommates to 3 roommates to 4 to 3 and back to 2 again) and manipulation (you find out that one you really loved and almost committed to was going for $400 less with another agent; that lease they wanted you to sign the next day before the other applicants can get to it—yeah, there were no other applicants), and it burns you out when you realize time after time that many of your options are just too good to be true.

It’s not lost on you that you’ve got to impress them too—usually a nice ripped physique will do, but also with your morals and character (landlord references, a steady job, good credit, proof of income in the form of bank account statements, savings, stocks, bonds, 401(k), W-2s) to ensure that they stay in the game.

By now you’ve gotten rid of the obvious bad eggs, but the pressure to commit is on and the clock is ticking, and even if someone is less than what you wanted (or thought you wanted at this point), you force yourself to keep them around and see where the relationship takes you. Sometimes Chris Harrison (parents, good friends) will come in as a voice of reason, but ultimately it’s on you to decide, and you’ve gotta make moves (fantasy suite? hometown dates?). And with another exhausting rose ceremony down comes the renewed hope that the perfect one is still out there.

I’m a little late on this, but it’s still really neat. This weekend my friend showed me the video for Arcade Fire’s song ‘The Wilderness Downtown’ (Chris Milk) and how you enter the address of your childhood neighborhood, and that’s where the video takes place.

PRETTY COOL: thewildernessdowntown.com

1. I usually follow the don’t-go-grocery-shopping-when-you’re-hungry rule, but due to having no time for anything this week, it had to be done tonight. So I went, and I came home with:

• stuff for omelets for the weekend as intended
• fruit (intended)
• a carton of almond milk (intended)
• a carton of vanilla coconut milk (not intended)
• a bag of salt n vinegar chips (not intended)
• a bag of “Molten Hot Wings”-flavored Ruffles (definitely not intended)

Sweet grocery list, eh? I am way too curious for my own good.

2. NYC apartment searching is panning out to be one of the most annoying, time-consuming and scary things I’ve had to do in my adult life.

3. Going to sleep to the sound of rain is a really comforting and cozy thing. I wouldn’t mind if it happened on the regular.