Annette/Ravi: Crowded House

You'd think that I would be finding more time to blog about all this, but it's harder than I expected.

Part of it is just time - I'm not just doing Ravi's job, but learning it. I've spent a fair amount of his money on "____ for Dummies" books, which has gotten me through about 85% of the cases people bring into "Buy More" (check out me sort of hiding where I actually work and making a pop culture reference that marks you as cool for getting it!). By and large, people aren't asking you to set up a major network or something, they just want to connect to the internet, and I've done that for Mom and myself a time or two. And you can fix a lot of phones by taking off the back plate, removing the battery for a minute, and restarting it.

The other time factor is - I live in New York now! There are something like four thousand places with live music every night, and since I look about seven or eight years older than I am, none of them card me. I think I've tried a dozen different beers in the past couple weeks, and that can have me sleeping in the next morning, cutting into my time to study. That's on two fronts - the woman living my life and I send a lot of emails back and forth, and I'm kind of shadowing the assignments she's receiving at school and writing papers, some for her to turn in and some so that when I get my life back and go go to class, I won't be hopelessly behind in terms of what I've actually done. It's a lot, but I can't see how Jordan can just stay in the apartment all the time with all this right outside his door.

And, yeah, then there's Jordan.

I gather from texting with Ravi-slash-Gary that even before all of this, Jordan was sometimes kind of a difficult guy to live with. Paid his part of the rent every month, eventually held up his end of the bargain keeping the place tidy enough not to get kicked out, but spending a couple of weeks on vacation together was a major aberration. This is my first apartment, so I don't know if it's always like this, but it's not like there's really my room, Jordan's room, and the common area - he/she has sort of colonized the living room and kitchen area, with perrennial first dibs on the TV, always shoving my food to the back of the fridge, and setting up his home office on the kitchen table. So Benny and I are kind of crammed into the smaller bedroom, and as much as I like the guy, it's not comfortable, and the one time Benny tried to sleep on the couch, Jordan decided he needed to play Xbox at seven the next morning.

It's been building for the past couple of weeks, but even if I'd had time to blog in general since arriving here, I wasn't going to. I just got out of high school without quite having avoided that sort of petty bullshit sniping as much as I wanted to, and I did not want to start a thing where I come and write on the blog about something rather than talking to Jordan directly, and then he does the same rather than confront me or Benny, and so on. Fortunately, we kind of had this out a couple of days ago when one of Ravi's friends from work went to a show near this place with me, and while we were going to have some Chinese take-out beforehand, there was no place to sit and my co-worker couldn't understand why "Jordan's girlfriend" (the easiest explanation for who the new girl is) was bossing me around so much and leaving me no place to eat in my own place.

So now this fight isn't all immature and bratty, and he's at least acknowledging our presence a little, although I suspect that this sort of thing is going to be short-lived.