Because everyone loves a little stress

First of all, BIG NEWS!

I bought a domain! Booyah! The address of this blog is now www.iamnotthemermaid.com

Wonderful, right? I have always secretly hated the name "More Than A Mermaid." I thought it sucked and don't know why I picked it. Not the Mermaid is 100 times better. And now it matches my Twitter.

Second piece of BIG NEWS:

I'm moving.

"Arielle, didn't you just move?"

"Yes, yes I did."

My roommates and I have decided to move into the apartment directly above ours. It just got redone so it is nice and shiny and new. The price is the same and it gets way more light. Amazing.

The downside of this is that we decided on this move a few days ago. And we have another few days to complete it. Naturally, the Jewish holidays fell last weekend and this weekend, taking out the bulk of time that I could have used to transport my stuff upstairs. And of course I have plans every night this week (yes, I'm sitting here blogging when I could be moving but it's 11:30pm so...I don't feel like lugging crap right now).

Oh and also, I'm getting the flu. You know when you wake up one day feeling a little bit icky and you just know that in a day or 2 it's going to be a full blown sickfest? I'm right there. All day today I thought I was hungover (I was, at least in the morning, oops) until I realized that my body ached not because of the shots I had yesterday, but because my immune system is about to shut down.

NICE. Good job, life. Way to keep it together.

An intro to Brooklyn

If you're like me, you know very little about Brooklyn. One of the things I'm most looking forward to in living here is the fact that I will one day be far more familiar with the BK than I am now. Since I've only been here for about a week, I thought I'd take this handy map of Brooklyn neighborhoods (thanks, Wikipedia) and give you my current impression of the borough now, at my most ignorant. Enjoy! Sorry I can't get the map to show up larger. Stupid Blogger.

1. DUMBO - Best. Neighborhood Name. Ever. This is an acronym for "Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass." I love it.

2. Williamsburg - HIPSTERS

3. Park Slope/Sunset Park - MEEEEEEE

4. Red Hook - IKEA

5. Gravesend - delicious pizza

6. Coney Island - freaks and hot dogs

7. Brighton Beach - Russia

8. Manhattan Beach - clearly NOT Manhattan. Nice try, though.

9. Barren Island - oh, hello most depressing name ever. Sounds lovely, can't imagine why I've never been.

10. Crown Heights - my cousin lives here. She is fabulous.

11. Cypress Hills - insane in the membrane, INSANE IN THE BRAIN

12. East Flatbush - why is East Flatbush about 500% larger than regular Flatbush?

13. BoCoCa - I know New Yorkers hate this term, but I think it's fun and catchy - Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens.

14. Brooklyn Heights - one of my bestest sorority sisters lives here. She rules.


Well, that ends today's lesson. Hope you all learned something. One day I might even have more to contribute to this.

Home sweet new home!

This is a brief post brought to you by my brand new home in Brooklyn. I am totally not done unpacking but at least I've unearthed all the essentials. The first few things I managed to find were my boxing gloves and my lace leggings, and while I'm not exactly a well-dressed person, even I know better than to leave the house in an outfit like that. So...I'm glad I now have work appropriate clothes.

Moving day on Saturday was preceded by the long-awaited Lady Gaga day. And by long-awaited I mean my friend Lauren and I bought these concert tickets 7 months ago. So of course we had to go all out, hence the picture above. And these.

Wham.
Bam.

Yes, moustache necklaces were, for some reason, highly necessary. My friend had gone to Lady Gaga a few months earlier, and she was all, "Dude, don't dress up when you go because everyone is going to be so intense and you won't be able to compete." You know what? We were hands down the best dressed girls there. Outdone only by the gays. EAT IT.

And if dressing up for Gaga wasn't enough, the weekend prior, Lauren and I had gangsta night, where we made our own crunk cups and Nintendo-themed wifebeaters, dressed like rappers, drank 40s, and played Rapstar on the Wii. DON'T PRETEND YOU DON'T WANT TO BE US BECAUSE WE ARE SO MATURE AND COOL.


Okay. Awesomeness over.

Day 50

I can't believe I'm still doing this. Bikram yoga owns my life. To the point where today I even considered signing up for workstudy shifts at the studio (you do fun things like launder sweaty towels or check people in at registration) in exchange for free classes. I would actually do it except for, you know, the issue of having NO TIME. TIME, WHERE ART THOU? Okay.

One great thing I've noticed is that there have been 4 occasions in the last 2 weeks where someone has complained about a room being warm (in a non-yoga situation, let's clarify). In none of those situations did I actually feel warm in the slightest. I'm thinking this means that spending almost 2 hours a day in 105 degree heat and sometimes 50% humidity means I am more tolerant of heat the rest of the time. This is glorious news because summer will soon be upon us and I really hate summer. Sorry, I know some of you are offended now but really, why does it have to be so damn hot all the time? I pretty much never want it to be above 75 degrees.

So, New York City gross awful summer, BRING IT ON.

In other exciting news, I am moving to Brooklyn on SATURDAY.

This weekend, I painted my future bedroom. It went from this:


To this:
It looked even better once I got the second coat on there. Less splotchy. I am very proud of myself for painting because even though painting a room isn't exactly rocket science, I consider myself pretty not-at-all-handy. So this was a big step for me. I really didn't feel like painting at all but..you know what they say about orange bedrooms?

THEY SHOULDN'T EXIST BECAUSE THEY ARE HEINOUS. No one should live in a room like that.

Home sweet Brooklyn

Awhile ago I wrote about whether or not I thought I could ever be one of those people that lived...somewhere other than Manhattan. Brooklyn, specifically.

I've been spending a lot of time in Brooklyn lately. Not for any special reason mind you, but mostly because more and more of my potential fun weekend plans have involved the BK. Bootie NYC in Williamsburg, Brooklyn's best wings competition in Greenpoint, amazing pizza at Spumoni Gardens in Gravesend, game night in Clinton Hill, dinner at applewood and mini Texas state fair in Park Slope.

I'm happy to have fun reasons to get to explore a borough of NYC that's sort of new, or at the very least unfamiliar, to me.

In May, I will have even more opportunities to explore the territory because I WILL BE MOVING THERE.

The apartment I mentioned on here months ago, one where I'd be moving in with 2 good friends from high school and will probably have insane amounts of fun in the process, came to fruition. I visited the apartment on Friday to confirm.

I am PUMPED. It is high time I moved out of the house and back into NYC. Shit is about to get real.