The NYU Bookstore accepts three types of payment. Cash, credit cards, and firstborn children.

It’s pretty expensive to maintain the illusion of actually doing work. Then again, it’s even more expensive to maintain the illusion of actually going to class. Eventually, NYU tuition becomes really, really expensive rent.

When I came back to New York after Christmas, everything was just as I left it, including my haunted bathroom. If we weren’t extremely likely to drunk dial them, my roommate and I would probably have the maintenance hotline on speed dial.  I pray for my toilet as if it were a chronically ill child. It’s overflowed and leaked so many times this year that I’ve considered making myself a little punch-card. For every ten times someone comes by to fix the toilet, we get one free visit where they promise not to curse profusely and obscenely. I mean, dredging up the used toilet paper of obliviously privileged children isn’t my dream job either, but still… how can plumbing conjure up such vulgar, vivid, sexual imagery?

The housing and maintenance listserv politely informed me the other day that all of our rooms are being inspected for fire hazards during the first two weeks of February. This means I have exactly two days to figure out how to hide my fake Christmas tree. If there were ceiling tiles, I could punch one out and lay the tree across the brackets. Could I put it behind the shower curtain and wait in the bathroom during the inspection, pretending to be sick? Could I find someone else whose room had already been inspected and stash it there until I knew it was safe? What bothers me the most is not that the tree might get taken away, but that I’m legitimately spending time trying to conserve and protect fake wildlife. There are innocent trees in Washington Square park being mercilessly uprooted, and yet, I fear for the loss of my out-of-season, forty-dollar KMart purchase.  Hmm. Priorities.

I suppose nature-related happenings in New York are few and far between, but my floormate’s younger brother spent most of Christmas break catching about thirty squirrels in New Jersey so that he could release them on Staten Island. I suppose there are crueler things one cold do with squirrles. I certainly don’t envy anyone traveling with forty five pounds of squirming, chattering, pooping, chewing live animals. My google search for  ”Staten Island wildlife report” didn’t bring up many results, so I’m left to wonder… will these be the first squirrels to grace its parks and ravage its trash cans?