Enter The Bad Vibe Zone

Great news! My roommate of 15 months moved out on March 1st -- those are the last three posts on her Twitter feed, and I assure you that they are more or less representative of the person I lived with for over a year. Or representative of that minus the fact that she yelled at me for an hour because she was enraged that my Christmas vacation was shorter than I'd told her it would be (I had to come back and work, although she was able to figure out that I'd really done this to ruin her week off from her job), wouldn't make eye contact with me for two months, and then moved out today after giving me 12 hours notice, via email. An email in which she explains that she is moving out on less than a day's notice because, "a friend of mine has been going through a rough time and needs my help. Which means I will need to move out to help her... I guess it’s true what they say, things happen for a reason."

This is not so good, obviously, especially because my request that she kick in a third of a month's rent to make up for the ridiculously abrupt end to our co-habitancy went ignored (via email), then dismissed (in conversation, because she was "so busy") and finally unheeded. The advice I would give to anyone renting a room to someone via Craigslist is that they should ask for and check references, and also draw up a contract, and also maybe be wary of a grown-ass woman who has both a copy of Paul Reiser's autobiography and the Music From and Inspired By Mad About You CD in her collection, and finally and most importantly also not to ever under any circumstances ever rent a room to [redacted]. So, much of this happened because I was stupid enough to assume that this person could be dealt with reasonably, as I'd dealt with previous roommates. But because I am angry and also on multiple other deadlines even now at 12:30am and thus obviously do not have anything better to do, I wrote [Redacted] an email that my wife has advised me not to send. So I am not sending it, and am instead putting it here, until I decide to take it down. The key is to surf the vibes! That is my last bit of advice. Here is something I won't send.

Thanks again for doing the right thing in agreeing to pay me a small portion of this month's rent after moving out the way you did. It was clearly the right thing to do after giving me 12 hours notice and then moving out on the first of the month. For that reason, and because you have demonstrated again and again these last months the sort of insight, perspective and basic decency that you have, I knew that I'd find that smallish check from you when I returned home from my meeting. Thank you for not disappointing me, and for demonstrating what kind of person you are. Thanks, too, for not proffering some half-assed falsehood about why you had to move out as you did, and for being so adult and responsible and kind about the whole thing. Again, that is the [Redacted] I know.

Honestly, I believe that years from now, we'll laugh about all this together. "Remember when I moved out of your apartment, after 15 months of living there, and gave you roughly 12 hours of notice?" you'll say. "Remember how I, who would not so much as make eye contact with you or your wife for three months, somehow made it seem as if I -- I who was, as you recall, the person moving out of an apartment on less than a day's notice, without offering any financial consideration at all -- was somehow the victim in this whole scenario? And offered nothing like an apology, or thanks for over a year of living together? Remember all that? How demonstrably mentally ill was THAT?" And we'll laugh and laugh, because it is fucking hilarious.

Anyway, so my advice is to be careful. Also I have a room open if you're interested.

Order Up

Long before this humble website became the internet's formeost venue for long-form politically oriented pizza criticism, it was intended to be something of a professional (snirk) site for me. I'd link to things I wrote and talk about them and maybe if I ever got business cards printed up I would even put it on those business cards. "Here," I'd say, "go to my website and check out my work." And were someone to actually do that they would find My Work as opposed to My 1600-word Pseud-Opus on Donald Trump and Papa John Schnatter or a heartfelt essay on stuffed crust pizza and The Culture. Those things are "my work" as well, and I'm proud of them beyond reason, but they're also not necessarily the sort of thing that leads to more work. Unless and until The Journal of Rambling and Impressionistic Food Studies launches a For Kids version, they're just things on a writer's website. Which I'm cool with, honestly. But I feel the need to counterbalance them with things that are a bit more professional-ish than that. So, then: here is some of that.

I had a very busy week last week, which was satisfying and unsatisfying in the usual ways. I published a great many words, was paid a small amount for a few of them and no money at all for the rest, and spent the week oscillating between cruising my twitter and refreshing my email for the This Makes It All Worth It props and wondering why I am still writing so often for free. The answer, it turns out, was the same as it has been since I wrote this a longish time ago: I'm happiest writing the stuff I care about most, and I write that stuff best, and few of the places that run things that open-ended are willing to pay for it. (That I'm not getting paid by GQ is a different and more complicated story, but boils down to a similar thing) (And also the GQ situation relates to the other part of writing for free, which is that it allows me to get read by people who might want to pay me later on) Anyway, here's a selection of what I wrote last week. I'm not going to mention what paid and what didn't -- it was, as usual, all a lot of fun. And also I live very frugally so whatever on the money thing for the time being, I guess.

- Twitter Is The Instrument: Meet Baseball's First Tweeting, Crowdsourcing Organist, from Wired's Playbook blog. I really enjoyed this one: it's a great story, and while the piece itself isn't incandescently brilliant in its prose or content or whatever else, writing stories like this is always, always fun for me. And I like Wired, so this felt cooler for that reason.

- Yakkin' About Baseball Part IV, with David Raposa. Nothing much to add to these. They happen every two weeks and make me very happy.

- Profiles in Obscurity, for GQ's Balls Out blog. This is the NBA Playoffs blog I'm doing with Bethlehem Shoals and an increasingly astonishing list of guest-writers -- we've had Tom Scharpling and Carles from Hipster Runoff, and Lang Whitaker and a bunch of others are in the pipeline. The original role I was to have there, I think, was sort of as a chat-specific Joke Monkey, and while I've enjoyed doing that, the editor has also given me room to do some other fun stuff. Most recently, that meant the opportunity to spoof over-the-top glossy magazine profiles by writing two-graf leads for profiles of NBA end-of-benchers. I did one for Troy Murphy and one for Royal Ivey, and there are others coming this week and they were a total blast. They also proved strangely controversial -- after a great response on the day they went up (Royal Ivey even retweeted his, which is amazing), some troll-y blogger dude from Oklahoma City with 5,000-odd followers and a big red face that made him look like a smug char shiu pork roast encouraged his followers to bomb me on Twitter as an offensive anti-Oklahoma bigot because of a joke I made in the Ivey piece about Oklahoma City's restaurant scene. That is, for a joke in a joke piece that was clearly labeled as such. So for a day I had a bunch of Okies calling me a moron and a faggot and so forth on Twitter. Being from New Jersey, I know how it feels to have someone make fun of your home state with no actual knowledge of the place. (Alternately, people who have only seen the Turnpike shred New Jersey for its ugliness, which is kind of like making fun of someone's face based upon a glimpse of that person's colonoscopy) That said, whatever sympathy I felt for these dudes dissipated fairly quickly and I wound up just retweeting the most offensive slag tweets and thanking my lucky stars that there was no such thing as a Twitter when I was young. Because, man, neither 16-year-olds nor (apparently) your more thin-skinned Oklahoma adults are ready for that sort of connectivity.

- And one last one, from this week, is this piece for the very great baseball blog Pitchers and Poets, in which I ruminate on Rico Brogna's Mets tenure -- and, more to the point, on my parents' cluttered home and my own dusty memory attic -- as part of their terrific '90s First Baseman Week. (Paul Sorrento had already been taken, sadly)

And that's that for now. Look how professional of me! I'll see you sometime later this week with 1300 words on McDonald's' "Mr. Snuggles" Sweet Tea/Diabetes Cooler commercial, I'm sure.