Tag: features | yr an adult

On being held hostage by the highest rent in the country

by Henry Goldman • April 3, 2012

A couple weeks ago, news stories started to come out around a report that announced that San Francisco, the fair city where I’ve live for the past four years, has the highest rent in the country. No one I know was shocked or even surprised. First of all, San Francisco is (arguably) one of the most livable cities in North America. Our fair burg boasts beautiful architecture/streets/landscapes, dense neighborhoods with great restaurants/bars/things to do, public transport good enough that you don’t need a car and weather that, while it isn’t as great as LA, is never oppressively bad. Secondly, while the rest of the country has been trying to get out from under the not-so-Great-Recession, San Francisco’s economy has been booming. Seriously. Every tech company here has been hiring constantly since ’09, often offering people who do tech things HUGE salaries (not to mention other perks, like free shuttles to work and free lunches). This means there’s a ton of people in the city will to pay exorbitant rent to live in the city.

All in all, this means, I’m terrified to ever give up my (relatively) decently priced apartment in an awesome part of town, because I’m scared I’ll never get anything like it again.

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I'm living my life wrong

How to be an asshole at the artisan coffee bar

by Henry Goldman • March 26, 2012

Let me preface this post by saying on the scale between coffee slobs and coffee snobs, I probably land closer on the snob side of the spectrum. I live in San Francisco, home to, like, half a dozen different obnoxiously hip, artisan coffee roasters, and so I’ve been conditioned to enjoy a machiatto with a neat little design in it and to prefer an individually prepared cup of coffee over a large breaw. Even the pretentiousness of baristas, who refuse to, say, use skim milk in a cappuccino I find amusing. And when I leave the city, and am iphone-searching to find a coffee house where I can get a nice coffee drink, I know to look for someplace that brews Stumptown (Portland) or Intelligentsia (LA) or Blue Bottle (SF), because I know the coffee will be delicious and the atmosphere will (probably) be appealing.

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cultural studies

A few things I thought about while watching the 21 Jump Street movie

by Henry Goldman • March 20, 2012

That’s right. Going to the Creators Project wasn’t my only cultural experience this weekend. I also went with a couple friends to go see Jonah Hill and Chan-Tate tear it up in the #1 MOVIE IN THE COUNTRY. I’m not going to review the film for you, because if you were interested, you’ve probably already checked in with your favorite aggregation site to find out if it’s got a good average qualitative score (for the record, I put it in the 76^th percentile of all movies I’ve ever seen, and probably in the high 80s for formulaic-high-concept-action-comedy-hybrid-reboots-of-old-cop-slash-high-school-tv-shows). But the movie DID make me think, so I thought I’d share a few of my in-theater thoughts.

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I'm living my life wrong

How to be an asshole at a mixology bar

by Henry Goldman • March 9, 2012

Last weekend, a group of friends and I were encouraged to check out a craft cocktail spot in Lower Manhattan (that will remain unnamed) by a friend who is into mixology and had read that the spot had good cocktails. There were a couple warning signs that this maybe wasn’t the place to bring 7 people who were already drunk, hungry and ready for Brooklyn – the bouncer who asked if we had a reservation, the white table cloths, the model hot waitresses. However, I remained optimistic, right up until the point when the spot in question turned me into a perfect asshole, and not in the way it’s supposed to.

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cultural studies

Why it might be time to start listening to political rap again

by Henry Goldman • March 7, 2012

I was drinking at a friends house last weekend, and, being millenials, instead of just putting on an album, someone pulled out the laptop-projector combo and we played my very well curated vhx.tv rap video playlist. We stood around drinking, sometimes paying attention to the screen and enjoying the antics of Azealia Banks and Odd Future and Fat Joe, et al. Then, Yasiin Bey’s (née Mos Def) remake of “N**gas in Paris”, “N**gas in Poorest” came on and everyone stopped in their tracks to watch it.

The video, embedded above, sent a message to us that, Oh yeah. All the songs we like now are about how great it would to be rich, and none of them are about how fucked up we are for thinking that. Once the next Rick Ross video came on, we went back to our prior positions, but the situation got me thinking that, even though I like fun, dumb music, I (and I think many of the people I know) wold also appreciate some music that reflects and affects reality.

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I'm living my life wrong

My earthquake/emergency kit needs an overhaul

by Henry Goldman • March 6, 2012

A few months after I moved into my latest apartment, I decided to succumb to the pressures of San Francisco’s department of emergency management and set aside a little space in the house for an earthquake kit. Well, the other night, after being awakened by a 4.0 on the Hayward fault line (it felt a little bit like a car had crashed into the floor below my bedroom), I decided it was time to re-assess what kinds of emergency provisions I had at my disposal, should I be in the apartment when the Big One (predicted to happen before 2030) hits. I opened up the cabinet where my girlfriend brews kombucha to see what we have in stock.

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cultural studies

Why it’s ok that my favorite new rapper is, like, half my age

by Henry Goldman • February 24, 2012

If you’re not familiar with the saga of Earl Sweatshirt, I’ll sum it up quickly. The best rapper in this massively hyped, angry young rap crew called Odd Future got sent to reform school in Samoa, cut off from the rest of the world, right as his friends we’re hitting youth culture hard as a sidewalk face-plant. There’s been too much breathless reporting on Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All’s significance to rap/music/hipster/punk culture. So, if you don’t know about them and are actually interested, I suggest you read their coverage in either the NY Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or one of those other countercultural media outlets the kids are so fond of.

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I'm living my life wrong

Your excuses for not stretching today are not very good.

by Henry Goldman • February 20, 2012

The first time I went to see a doctor about lower back-pain, I was about 26 and had been working in a sit-down job for about a year and a half. I’d noticed some tightening in my lower back, so I booked an appointment with a back specialist to see what was up. I said something to the effect of, “Well, I guess I’m getting older, so I need to start taking care of myself,” which made her laugh. “Sorry,” she said, “but you’re not old”. Technically true. I guess I was trying to verbalize the realization that many of us have had in our 20s, that our bodies will soon hit the point where they just slowly deteriorate and we should do something about that. Anyways, these days, I’m trying to take 10 minutes a day, to stretch my shit out, work on the core a little bit, and keep my back from hurting ALL the time. But sometimes I don’t, which you probably do, too. It’s just one day, right? So I thought I’d go over some of the excuses we tell ourselves for not stretching, and explain why they are all bullshit.

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I'm living my life wrong

The “Getting My Shit Together” Clock Is Winding Down

by Henry Goldman • February 6, 2012

Now that I’m 29, I’ve been coming back to the old (Hindu?) saying, “You spend your first 30 years making your habits. For the last 30 years, your habits make you.” Unhappily, I find this concept disturbing as I’ve spent the whole of my life embracing habits that were, at best, entirely unproductive and at worst, completely unsavory. If this random quote from the internet is to be believed, that means I have less than a year to come up with a completely new set of habits that will define the rest of my life.

Of course, you could say that what I do in my last 12 months before turning 30 wouldn’t be enough to counteract the other 29 years of less-than-successful living. And to that, I say, bullshit. This is America, not France. We gambled on a dream, stole a whole, very well-appointed continent from its native population and built the best damn country in the world on it. We’re doers. If I say I can turn my shortcomings, bad habits and compulsions around in the space of year, then god help me, I can do it.

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