For reasons unclear to myself, I signed up last year for that Bumble and Bumble hair model thing and never committed to any appointments until this week when I responded to an email for a razor bob session next Thursday. I can afford a real haircut, and one that I would have control over (you'll get some form of a bob, no way around it) and won't take up 2+ hours of my day (these are students so it's not about efficiency but learning) so I'm not sure how wise this is or why I am doing it.
It is not that I'm attached to my hair like those women I like to make fun of (because I'm heartless) who bawl if half-an-inch gets snipped off their blech tresses, though I think my hair might currently be the longest it has ever been in 39 years (layered, but the longest part reaches just below the bottom of my shoulder blades) so I could be gaining insight into what causes haircut-induced tears. It's not like I'm going to that Crops for Girls guy who only gives super short 'dos to women under 25, which I did once ten years ago and didn't care so much that I had man hair, um mostly because it was free. Now, I see he charges $45-$50 and there is no age mention, which I know got him into trouble. Also, my sister recently mentioned (maybe she will chime in?) that she cut all her hair off and it's short and gray like either a lesbian or a German, but I can only picture Carol from Walking Dead (sorry about your dead zombie daughter).
I guess some of us needlessly penny-pinch while others are three-percenters who have to rough it. There seems to be an awful lot of poor rich people stories lately: this guy has to drive to the nicest multipurpose supermarket, considered gourmet by many, in my neighborhood because he can't afford full-priced salmon, and well, the UrbanBaby I'm poverty-stricken-on-$600k-a-year threads are legendary.
One thing I'll agree with is that you can't afford the typical entry-level $1.5 million brownstone Brooklyn fixer-upper described in the Bloomberg article on a $350,000 salary. Painful and true. People buying at that level and beyond aren't saving their monthly paychecks for down payments; they have chunks of cash either through investments, bonuses or family, plain and simple. (Without blabbing about finances that aren't my own, any property-buying that would occur in this household would be made possible by stock options that were granted from a job started over a decade ago that are now usable.)
And these homebuyers have a lot of cash. So much so, that just getting the heck away from the good school districts, i.e. the cleanest, safest neighborhoods closest to Manhattan, seems to be the only rational option in my world. I'm all for Queens, I mean geographically; the tasteful gut-reno rampage (I should start counting the number of construction dumpsters outside of brownstones in this area) has yet to hit there and it's very hard to see past the statuary and chintz.
Sunday we looked a Clinton Hill co op (which we had written off previously in lieu of condos and houses because I find the idea of a board opressive) that was spacious, well-designed, with a yard and a non-granite kitchen (it was totally full of those red, glossy Ikea cabinets, though) but on a block next to projects, which isn't necessarily a huge issue (well, I say that, then there's this Brandon Holley story in Glamour about a Red Hook home invasion that oddly no one's talking about–it's ripe for a real estate blog post–I only heard about it from the media perspective that it's unusual for a big name at one magazine to write for another) but not at $1.35 million and not on the G train. Oh, and they were only taking all-cash-offers and they already had four and the deadline was the 5pm the next day and they were closing the open house that very second so we needed to leave. Uh..fuck you. And I'm not even sure who I'm saying that to. The brokers? The bidders? The sellers? Myself, for being deluded into thinking this is a worthy endeavor?
The only safe haven may be the suburbs, which is a weird place for a single, childless person to be.