Tag: life | yr an adult

8 reasons why you shouldn’t bother buying a home

by Henry Goldman • June 8, 2012

Earlier this week, NPR had another bleak, the-world-is-sooooooo-fucked-up-for-young-people article about how millennials aren’t buying houses like previous generations (forwarded by Andrew Brown, yr an adult’s moral conscience). They explain this trend by rehashing all the other bad news millennials are faced with; there aren’t any jobs, credit is impossible, real estate is either prohibitively expensive or in regions with no economic prospects. Also, since millennials are sooooooo entitled and want the freedom to pick up and move whenever they feel like, they’re not even thinking about owning their own home. It’s depressing news, which is why I felt compelled to look on the bright side, to help you, dear reader, to consider it a blessing that you’ll probably never be able to afford you’re own home. Below is a list of reasons why you shouldn’t bother owning a home, because it mostly sucks. Don’t say I never made you feel better. .

1.) Owning a house is, like, a job in itself. Every Sunday is another trip to Loews for new fixtures or appliances. If you live in an apartment and you have a shitty kitchen, you just have a shitty kitchen. And your life is pretty much the same as it would be after you could have spent $50,0000 and 700 hours making your kitchen awesome. Think about it. What do you want to do this weekend? Watch Prometheus, go get drunk in the park, watch Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Final and play ‘Cards Against Humanity’? Or do you want to get in an argument with your girlfriend/boyfriend in the drapery section of Home Depot?

… KEEP READING!

cultural studies

Am I too old to get into the Beatles?

by Henry Goldman • May 14, 2012

As kids come of age, and get into music, there are all kinds of different paths they take to define their palette as music listeners. Some are influenced by their parents’ musical tastes, which provide the foundation for their nascent musical development. Others follow the lead a cool older sibling, who feed their musical appetites with cassette singles of whatever cool older siblings were listening to that week. Unfortunately, my parents only listened to NPR and my older brother had a pretty severe learning disability, so I was on my fucking own. And as such, I had a weird musical upbringing on my way to becoming a genuine music nerd.

I don’t know when or where it happened, but somehow it got into my head that cool kids didn’t listen to the music all the other kids listened to. I remember in second grade, when everyone my age was getting in MC Hammer and Kris Kross, I was getting into my Soul II Soul cassette, a band which I had learned about from their cover of The Little Mermaid’s “Kiss the Girl” on the Disney’s Simply Mad About the Mouse music video collection. “This shit is so underground,” I thought to myself. The impulse, thoughout my life, has led me to be incredibly insular and nerdy about music. I can’t honestly say if that’s a good or bad thing, but it’s the way it is.

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I'm living my life wrong

6 stickK.com commitments I’m thinking about making (but probably won’t)

by Henry Goldman • May 7, 2012

stickK is a website, founded a by a couple Yale professors, that helps people reach their goals, usually weight-loss or exercise related. Their method to motivate the unmotivated-able is as old the putting money in the swear-jar; you don’t stick to your commitment, you pay. You can set it up so that if, say, you don’t go to the gym three days out of the week, your credit card gets charged and the money goes to a charity. Smart, right? What I like even better is the twist that instead of making the money go to a charity you believe in, say, Habitat for Humanity, you can make the money go to a charity which you would NEVER support, say Sarah Palin’s political action committee. That way, if you’re like me, you can’t easily rationalize not going to the gym by saying “well, at least the money is going to a good cause.” It’s not. The money is going to a terrible cause, all because of your laziness.

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In the News

Why don’t you learn how to make something?

by Henry Goldman • April 19, 2012

I remember once, I was having lunch with fellow producer at Current TV, who remarked how if the world ever turns post-apocalypticdystopia , we’d be the first ones to die, because our skill-set was based entirely on making phone-calls and sending emails. And it’s true, at least for me, I’d be super dead, because I can’t do anything that involves physical knoweldge. I’d die like how Patton Oswalt prophesies his own post-apocalyptic death, starving to death in my house “waiting to see if the internet is back for the 800th time.”

Anyways, Wired magazine today posted a list of the best places to learn how to make things. It’s slide show style, sadly, but worth clicking through to figure out where you can learn to weld, or code or build something. Come on. Make yourself useful.

Photo credit: flickr user ClintJCL, used under CC license

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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