Today’s is a double post: Thank You Cards 10 and 11. Once again, this is an audio post, and the song above is “Michelle” by The Beatles. So click play! ;)
One day in the summer between Sophomore and Junior year of college, I received a letter notifying me of the other three students who would be suitemates for my roommate Sandra and I at Third North. NYU has a billion students, so I didn’t recognize any of the names, but one was from Connecticut just like me, and I can’t recall why, but I was looking forward to meeting that person in particular. Yet, when move in day came, Other Connecticut Girl was nowhere to be found. I’ll never know what happened to her, but I don’t even care, I mention her only because had Other Connecticut Girl fulfilled the fate that the NYU housing department cast for her, I never would have met her replacement, Michele, who to this day is one of my best friends and someone who has brought nothing but goodness to my life during the decade in which I’ve known her.
I could write forever about how thankful I am to have Michele as a friend, and to be honest, one of the reasons this post has taken so long to complete is because of the various permutations of Michele’s awesomeness I’ve cycled through in an effort to be thorough. And then I snapped out of it and realized 1. Abby, you’re doing that thing where you think your writing has to be perfect, so you obsess over it and let it hang over your head and take way too long to finish it; and 2. Michele is so great in so many ways that you can’t possibly articulate them all in one blog post so don’t even try. I changed my game plan and made a prompt for myself as guidance for this post. (Yeah, I’ll leave academia one day soon, but things like creating writing prompts and personal syllabi are now self-motivational/ organizational tools that I rely on to get almost anything done, personal blogging being no exception.) The prompt is, quite simply, to briefly (haha) describe one memory of Michele that demonstrate some aspects of her amazing character, then write a sentence or two thanking her and her family for bringing you and Tom on a cruise to the Bahamas (the trigger for TYC10 and TYC11). And so:
One day after we had decided to move out of the dorms with our friend and roommate Sandra, Michele and I were walking along East 12th St. with some paint and various bug proofing supplies (ask me about boric acid and duct tape sometime) on the way to our new rental when we saw the black metal frame of a futon gleaming in the oppressive May sun in all its discarded glory. We’d all just signed the lease for a 3 BR apartment and in addition to each having our own room (or as I think of it now, our own walled-off “bedspace” — see photo below, taken while standing on my bed!), we had—luxury of luxuries—a “common room” that was about 3 feet by 5 feet.
Ah, Manhattan. Anyhow, we needed a futon for this space, and felt like some benevolent god of unfurnished apartments was gifting us with the very item our hearts so desired. Yeah, that futon was coming home with us. We tried to lift it; it was a lot heavier than it looked. We each took a side and carried it a block, where we found its handsome (re: nasty) velor cushions. We piled those on top of it and carried it, block by block, to the apartment. Every step of the way I thought, “To hell with it, this thing is too heavy/it’s too hot out/I’m going faint or die if I take one more step.” I wanted to put my end down and walk away. But instead, we just joked about how heavy it was, how hot out it was, and how we’d already carried it that far, so… We were exhausted when we got to the apartment and realized it didn’t quite fit through the door.
We spent 10 minutes figuring out how to angle it just right to get it into the building, and summoned every last ounce of strength to get it up to the fifth floor. And then, we had a futon.
No sooner did we have a futon when the apartment went to hell—heaters that wouldn’t turn off, upstairs neighbors raving at 4 am, windows falling off their tracking, construction literally outside my window (you do not want to wake up in the morning to see that three construction workers had been watching you sleep), and the gas leak in Michele’s room, among other things. Once we made the decision to break our lease, we entered into an EPIC BATTLE with the evil property management company in which, at various points, the owner dismissed our claims, lied to us, yelled at us, and threatened to call the cops after kicking us out of his office. To make a long story short (unlike the short story I made long above), we researched housing codes and tied those violations to documented problems we’d had with the apartment that had gone unfixed despite our many requests. We consulted lawyers, who told us, basically “Hey little girls, NYC property owners are ‘sharks’” and offered to help us “maybe get out of the lease” for a fee that was more money than we would stand to reclaim if they were successful. We passed on those offers and DIY’ed it. We simply faxed our 10-page magnum opus to the owner—which he already had, but most likely never read—and this time cc’ed a lawyer friend of my Dad’s. The ambiguous threat of a legal battle made the owner respond much differently this time, and he did things like refund us our full security deposit without penalty for breaking the lease, reimburse us for other costs, and apologize for his behavior. Hell yeah. Below is a picture of Michele and our friend Dennis celebrating, by destroying the futon (which was as difficult to get down the stairs as it was to get up them).
I have heard that one of the weirdo questions Microsoft throws its interviewees just to mess with them is this: How would you (presumed computer programmer geek) move Mt. Fuji? This is called a “puzzle question,” requiring interviewees to devise an on-the-spot answer to an impossible-to-answer question. Apparently, this question is hard for most people; for me, though, the answer is simple: I’d ask Michele for help. She is intelligent; she is tenacious; she is brave; and when she puts her mind to something, it’s as good as done. She’s an inspirational person in my life. (She was also the one person Tom and I thought of when we sat down to plan our wedding last year and wondered, “Who can marry us?” We were honored to have Michele as our minister, and of course, she did an excellent job. This, btw, could have been another post entirely. See now why this one took me so long to write?)
I didn’t write all this in the Thank You Card Tom and I gave to her. We gave her the card mostly to thank her profusely for bringing us along on a cruise with her, some of her and her sister’s friends, and her family this past May. We gave her parents Thank You Card #11 because it was their generosity that enabled this celebration of Michele’s completion of two graduate degrees at an ivy league, and her sister’s completion of her residency (smart family). Not only was the cruise was incredible, but its timing couldn’t have been better. I’d just turned in my dissertation proposal, and had an important meeting type thing I’ll talk about in another post here (TYC related!) so it may have been then first time I relaxed in…in…uhm… I dunno, but I chilled hard. (So did Tom.)
So, yeah, it’s funny how such little details can have such a huge impact on the shape of things to come. Other Connecticut Girl told NYU she wasn’t gonna live with us at Third North, and NYU just filled her spot with whomever was next on the list. I don’t know where Other Connecticut Girl ended up, but if I did, I’d send her a Thank You Card, too. I’m sure she’s cool and all, but there’s no way she’s as amazing as Michele.
