In Which Miss Jill Decorates Her Apartment from Broken Hopes and Dreams

One of my favorite things about New York is that it is a city full of transients. Although that makes it more difficult to develop lifelong friendships, it makes it much easier to obtain mass quantities of free stuff as people flee the city.

Moving Sale
10:00 a.m.
Couch: $100.00
Pots and Pans: $40.00
Assorted Columbia textbooks about human sexuality: $10 each

8:00 p.m.
Everything: Free! Please take as much as you can! I'm leaving for China in 8 hours. And everything in the fridge is yours too.

I'm grateful that we understood this principle when we moved into a new apartment, because my interior decorating style is very strongly influenced by the free/cheap section on craigslist. One morning prior to our move, my roommate and I went to a woman's house to look at a dresser. Little did we know, we had stumbled into a treasure trove. As we carried away half of the furniture and the air conditioner from the bedroom she said, "I wasn't going to get rid of any of this stuff, but I can't take it with me and my ex-boyfriend is still going to be living here." And that, my friends, is the New York version of punishing a cheater by messing up his ride.

However, the difficult part is hauling your spoils to your apartment. My friend helped me transport a coffee table, a large lamp and some other random stuff that I bought from a departing student. We traveled to my house in taxi, laboriously removed our booty from the trunk and stared at it, daunted. Then my friend ingeniously turned to some homies chilling on the street corner and asked, "Hey guys, are you busy right now? Do you want to help us move some furniture?" "Sure," they replied sportingly. Although I now suspect that one of them is a nocturnal elevator urinator/barfer, we were grateful for the assistance.