duck-shaped pain

Greetings, all and sundry. Due to Your Reporter's (henceforth referred to as YR, not least on account of her unimpeachable indie-rockitude) trip, I will be here for the next 4 days as Your Substitute Reporter. I am not certain why I was chosen, but I assume it was to make YR look good in comparison.

Some background information:

1. I graduated from college in 1994, and have since been either partially or (currently) fully employed as a test prep tutor, mainly of the LSAT and SAT. People pay ungodly amounts of money for my services, of which I see very, very little.

2. I live in Manhattan, on the Upper West Side, in a 15' by 20' dorm-room-style apartment, with a lot of books and comics and records and CDs and assorted other things. I have five hallmates, with whom a share a communal kitchen and two bathrooms. I actively like one of them, actively dislike one of them, and feel benign neutrality toward the rest. Although my room is certainly bigger and more comfortable than any dorm-room I had in college, I have lived here for almost 3 straight years now, and it's starting to get on my nerves. Or , more accurate, it's started to feel more and more surreal, in a manner analogous to the mental vertigo induced by being continually awake for a couple of days in a row. But other people in my hall have smaller rooms that they've lived in for considerably longer, so I guess it's just Manhattan. I like Manhattan, but I have a sort of bunker mentality; my goal is to save up as much money as I can by the time I'm 30 and then get the hell out and open a alterna-comic store or something.

3. I have a girlfriend, J., whom I have been seeing on a regular basis for about two and a half months now. We met in college, and didn't keep in touch for the next six years, until a reunion-nostalgia-induced impulse caused me to, in the space of about 10 minutes, wonder what happened to her, find out she lived in Brooklyn, find out her phone number, and call her up and ask her out for lunch. God Bless the Internet, for it has made armchair stalkers of us all.