Blog 8

In New York, there are three basic kinds of nanny’s. The weekday nanny, the night nanny, and the weekend nanny. Some families have one, and some have all three. Its fairly easy to guess when each nanny works. You start as the weekday nanny and work your way up. The reason the weekend nanny is so desired is because on weekends, parents who are rich and bored and have nothing better to do than spend their money on three nanny’s for their children start to feel guilty about neglecting their children all week they schedule “family time”. So they pack up the Range Rover (never without the weekend nanny) and head for their house in the Hampton's. 

Now, as the weekend nanny, the car ride down is one of the more demanding times for me. I have to put the DVD’s into the entertainment system and give the kids their snacks and juice when they get hungry. Who knew Barbie’s Fairytopia DVD had so much foreshadowing and juxtaposition? Once we get to the 10,000 square foot beach front monstrosity its time to get settled in and explore the house. Oh wait, theres no unpacking to do because you buy doubles of all your items so you have one for your apartment in Manhattan and one for your house in the Hampton’s? Great thinking ahead guys, thats economical. Guess that takes care of the unpacking... 

Now is typically when guilt trip induced family bonding outing number one occurs. I is not required to tag along for these because they want to spend time with their children and “there’s really nothing for me to do”. Some of you may be asking why you bring the weekend nanny along if your going to spend time together as a family. I asked this question, and my response “Well you just never know.” Okay, so whatever am I to do all afternoon while I’m in a strange house and this very strange family is “bonding”. As luck would have it, the family keeps a second Range Rover at the house just in case situations like these arise and the help has nothing to do. They can take the $80,000 car into town to shop!

When I got home that night though, that’s when the really difficult work begins. First, the parents put their children to bed (The parents must do it because they’re not comfortable with anyone but the night nanny. Seriously.) Then it is my job to sit with the baby monitor (which is equipped with an HD camera) and make sure no one dies while the parents are out... While I watch Netflix and eat junk food. 

Writing this has really made me question why I’m in college. That was quite possibly my dream job. 

Blog 7

       As I noticed my bank account dwindling and no foreseeable income in the near future, I decided to take on an after-school job. The trip on the subway was costing more than the two dollar dumplings on the Lower East Side and there is only so many ways to eat Ramen. (Milligan) I figured with so many restaurants and stores all around my apartment it would be a breeze to get hired somewhere that payed decently. Think again. Everyone in New York is looking for a job and they all have more education, experience, connections, availability, and work ethic than you do. Did you know that to apply as a hostess in a restaurant in Manhattan you need a modeling headshot submitted with your application? Because that can’t be discrimination or anything.... 

After applying at every place within a 30 block radius of my apartment and getting several very creepy responses from Craigslist job postings I was beginning to give up hope. Then I discovered the secret way all college girls in Manhattan come up with massive amounts of money in a very short time by doing little to nothing. I became a nanny!

I am a firm believer that some things are too good to be true. Becoming a nanny shook this belief to its core. How many jobs do you get paid $15-$20 an hour to play with small children until they fall asleep and then watch TV and eat their parents food while you continue to get paid this obscene hourly rate to do virtually nothing?! This job requires no education, a few solid references, and basic people skills. Anyone could do it. Some have even turned it into a six-figure career. (Covert)

Naturally I hopped right on this free money train and began my adventures in nannying. I got to hangout in nice apartments, eat food I wasn’t able to afford, and play with all sorts of really expensive toys, all the time! Not only did I actually like this job, but the pay was definitely improving my quality of life. I could actually afford to go out with my friends, and take a cab home! Then, as if my job wasn’t great enough. I got a promotion (Nanny style)! I became, the coveted weekend nanny. To be continued...

Milligan, Laura. "100 AWESOME RAMEN RECIPES FOR STARVING COLLEGE STUDENTS." Online Colleges, 12 01 2009. Web. Web. 26 Sep. 2012.

Covert, Bryce. "Nannies Making Six-figures? What Childcare Workers Really Take Home." Forbes. 02 04 2012: n. page. Web. 26 Sep. 2012. <http://www.forbes.com/sites/brycecovert/2012/04/02/nannies-making-six-figures-what-childcare-workers-really-take-home/>.

Blog 6

      This blog is about one thing, and one thing only. My absolute favorite thing in 

New York. The Met is a world-renowned museum of art. It is located on Manhattan’s Upper East Side on the edge of Central Park. It is one of the worlds largest art galleries, with over two million works. But the Met is not my favorite thing, Cake and Shake is. It is a little blue food truck parked right in front of the Met. It is possibly the greatest thing ever invented, it’s like God smiled upon this specific place and put one purely perfect thing in this world. They sell all-organic cupcakes and have eight different flavors of shakes. Most people set off to the Met in anticipation of the culture and history they are about to immerse themselves in. I, on the other hand, immerse myself in a delicious yellow cupcake with Tahitian vanilla pastry cream and Valhrona chocolate butter creme. Otherwise known as a Moon Pie. 

Let me tell you about my very first time experiencing this life changing cupcake. One crisp fall day last fall I got into a taxi, on a mission with several classmates to get extra credit for Western Civ by going to this stupid exhibit at the Met. All I could think of (other than the fact that 8:30a.m. is an ungodly time for a museum to open) was that I should have hit up the McDonald’s next to my apartment building for an Egg McMuffin... or four. My friends, who have experienced tired and hungry Amanda, promised to feed me as soon as we got out of the cab, before my wrath was fully unleashed. 

As we reached the Met, I bolted from the cab in search of food, and a flash of blue caught my eye. I distinctly remember noticing the cart because it was the exact shade of blue as a Tiffany’s box, which all girls so greatly adore. This cart looked much cuter than the typical halal truck I saw on the street everyday. I got in line and peered over shoulders to view the menu. What I saw on that menu almost made me pass out from sheer ecstasy.  A truck devoted solely to cupcakes and milkshakes! God was obviously smiling upon me when he placed this mecca right in my path on my way to Met. 

After literally a half hour of playing eenie-meenie-minie-moe on the menu (because all the cupcake descriptions looked so delicious I couldn’t possibly choose), I had made a decision. I gave my order to the lady in the truck and waited impatiently.  She reached into the glass and gently picked up a magnificent work of art, with its creamy chocolate frosting swirled on top and biodegradable wrapper, and handed it to me. 

Artists spend their lives making something beautiful that can be shared with the world. The great artisans of Cake and Shake did the same thing for me that day. Most people come to the Met to be enlightened by what is inside, but I was deeply  touched by what sits outside. It wasn’t The Birth of Venus by Botticelli, or Starry Night by Van Gogh, or The Love Letter by Vermeer, but it was the Moon Pie by Cake and Shake.

Blog 5

I’ve gotten a lot of comments asking how I afforded to live in Manhattan. Things are really expensive there. The price of living in New York is well above the rest of the country. Last year the great people of New York spent 7 billion dollars just on entertainment expenditures. (Discover America.) Here are some of my contributions, let’s go go through some of the ridiculously overpriced items I decided I couldn’t live without. Take the dollar menu at McDonald’s.... oh wait, there isn’t one. Everything at McDonald’s is literally double the price which really defeats the point of going there because, lets be honest, they aren’t exactly known for their gourmet quality. (And don’t even get me started on the seven dollar foot long, I’m still not over that one). 

 

So I set my fast food efforts on a new endeavor, Chipotle. But wait, guacamole is $3.75? I can’t even get a burrito bowl for less than eleven dollars now! So I went to a place I knew I could never go hungry, Olive Garden. Even if everything was two dollars more on the menu, I still got unlimited soup and salad! (Plus all of my friends thought it was really entertaining to go to the Times Square Olive Garden and talk in British accents and pretend we were tourists) 

....I’m sorry, I don’t think I heard you right. YOU CHARGE FOR EACH EXTRA SALAD AND BREADSTICKS?! That is un-American. 

After that unfortunate experience I decided to go on a strict diet of Marlboro lights and Coke Zero because I obviously could not afford food. I’m really not sure why so many people in New York smoke. Sure, its a stressful place and nicotine does help to take the edge off, but cigarettes are roughly thirteen dollars a pack. That’s almost three times as much as what they cost in Virginia. I was ready to stock up while I was home and set up a cigarette and lemonade stand outside of NYU as my after-school job. That could easily become a six figure salary if what I was learning in Economics about price competition was correct. Since my luck was going oh so well, Mayor Bloomberg also decided to ban extra large sodas around this time in an effort to curb obesity.  

“NEW YORKERS, YOU HAVE TO WALK EVERYWHERE YOU GO AND FOOD IS UNGODLY EXPENSIVE, WHY ARE YOU OBESE?!”

So at this point I had no food, cigarettes, or large caffeinated beverages. And you all wonder why I came home.




"NYC Go." Discover America. NYC & Company, Inc., 2012. Web. 19 Sep 2012. http://www.nycgo.com/articles/nyc-statistics-page

Blog 4

New York was surprisingly easy to get used too. Things that seemed so weird at first, like being able to walk everywhere you wanted to go, the dollar pizza on every corner becoming a primary food group, and celebrity stalking after classes quickly became part of the regular routine. Many things were really just variations of the things I went through everyday living in Northern Virginia, like riding in a car versus riding on the subway.

Traffic is at its worst in the morning when people are going to work, and in the evening when people are coming home from work. The subways are also jammed with people at these times, and the trains run every four minutes instead of every 7 during peak times. You would think that it would be much easier to ride the subway during rush hour than sit on 95 for two hours every morning. Think again. You will never appreciate sitting in a nice air conditioned cars staring into the abyss of headlights in front of you until you ride the subway at 5pm every day and are crammed in the cars like sardines with your nose pressed into someone’s back. Not to mention, when you are in your car, the worst thing you have to smell is some leftover McDonald’s breakfast wraps or possibly a skunk. On the subway you get up close and personal with everyone whose deodorant wore off at some point during the day. I actually came home and was thankful to sit in traffic. It’s funny the things you come to appreciate.

Another similarity between riding in a car and riding on the subway is the creepers. You know, sometimes when you’re riding in your car and you stop at a light, you look over and a creepy guy is leering at you looking for an excuse to talk to you. When these things happen you just turn your music up, roll up the window, and keep your eyes straight ahead until the light changes and you can peel out. However, you do not have this luxury on the subway. When a creepy guy comes and sits next to you and tells you he came to America looking for a wife, you do not have the luxury of rolling up your window. This is where pepper spray comes in handy. So the next time you’re stuck in traffic and the guy in the car next to you is bordering on sexual harassment. Be thankful.

Blog 3

When applying for college I sort of felt like I was applying for two separate people. One person wanted to go to a huge university so that she could join a sorority and go to football games and participate in “the ultimate college experience.” The other person wanted to fulfill her childhood dream of going to New York City and living that shiny plastic life she had seen in magazines. When it all came down to it, the decision was incredibly clear. Now I’d like to tell you all that it was divine inspiration that sent me to New York, and that I was so sure that this was the place I was supposed to be. It was nothing like that, I faced the reality that all kids face when going to college, money.

Obviously, the living costs were much higher in Manhattan. But, because I was paying my school for housing and I received a half tuition scholarship based on my SAT scores, that $40,000 a year tuition quickly turned in $20,000. Because I am a genius and always think things through, going to New York ended up being significantly cheaper than all the private and out of state universities I had chosen because of the scholarship money even with the astronomical price of living. My apartment alone without the schools help would have been $3,300 a month so the way I saw it, I was essentially going to school for free! I’m not sure that’s exactly how my parents saw it though. They saw $20,000 a year spent funding my 9 month vacation to New York because the typical college student today spends less than 30 hours a week on academics. (“Economic Collapse”) LOLOLOL IF THAT!

So this is why I chose The King’s College. Not because of its outstanding academic credentials, or impressive list of academia, or because it was located in the greatest city in the world. But because it was cheap… and not even that cheap. Sure, New York has amazing internship opportunities, I interned at a PR firm for 6 months (but we’ll get to that). My school also had a fantastic media program and John Stossel even came in all the time to do guest lectures, but that wasn’t exactly my primary reason for going. Statistics show that 2/3 of all students graduate with student loans (“Economic Collapse”) and I was going to try my hardest to be in that 33.3% without student loans. So you see, I wasn’t this small town girl who left everything she knew to make it in the big city. I was just a broke college kid.

"Student Loan Debt Hell: 21 Statistics That Will Make You Think Twice About Going To College." The Economic Collapse. WordPress, 28 04 2011. Web. Web. 12 Sep. 2012. <http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/student-loan-debt-hell-21-statistics-that-will-make-you-think-twice-about-going-to-college>.

Blog 2

         I’m not sure how normal college freshman feel their first night away from home. No part of my college experience was shaping up to be anything typical, but I imagine the things going through my head were similar to others leaving home for the first time. I was euphoric to be out on my own, after the age of 12 I saw very little need for parental supervision. Six years later, it was looking like my parents thinking had finally caught up. Nevertheless, it was still weird to be sleeping in my own apartment (plus two new roommates I went to school with) after being the room down the hall from my parents the past 18 years. Besides, it was a very nice apartment. Granted, it cost more per month than my parent’s house in Virginia but for Manhattan real estate prices (and a subsidy from student housing) I wasn’t doing too bad.

I was attending The King’s College, located on multiple floors of the Empire State Building. Yeah, as in King Kong, Sleepless in Seattle, that Empire State Building. As all my friends were getting their picture taken for there JMU student ID’s, I was getting my ESB access pass. I had chosen New York because I was tired of having the same boring routine day in and day out.

Going to New York was like trading up for an entirely different life. Nothing was the same. I took the subway everywhere instead of hopping in my car and battling the traffic on 95. I had my groceries delivered because it was exhausting to walk 10 blocks with a gallon of milk and frozen peas. It’s a good thing my mom gave me a cookbook for graduation because my school had absolutely no meal plan. I was much more fortunate than most of my classmates who didn’t know how to make anything but EZ-mac and ramen. My roommates actually started calling me mini-Martha after awhile because I got in the habit of cooking when I was stressed. Let me tell you, living on your own in the middle of New York City is very stressful. All the practice made me quite the chef by the end of the semester.