The sign outside that boasted a TimeOut award gave every indication that this is the place I was looking for to spend my quiet afternoon researching summer internships. (During RA training we were programmed to recite TimeOut top-10 bars and clubs under any circumstances – fire, torture and Prada Bitches.)

From the outside it’s modest, and easily overlooked on tourist-cluttered Ganton Street. The inside is full of Indian bohemian earth tones, squishy leather couches, buddah statues and candles. With two levels it can generously accommodate even those annoying twentysomethings who stick around for hours on their laptops (which reminds me, if you are anything like me there’s a Boots around the corner where you can buy a cheap power converter when you forget yours). Nobody pressures you with faster turnover except for the table customers jealously eyeing the spot on the couch for which you waited patiently.

The staff is friendly and some might come and sit with you during their break and offer you crisps. Probably because you look like your eyes are going to pop out, fall in your lap and scare the customers away as you finish your tenth cover letter. But then, it’s always nice to know someone feels for you.

If you make it to Soho and are tired of emptying your wallet at Soccer Scene and Liberty, try out Sacred and its wondrous brie, cranberry and chicken baguette with a latte and some free wireless. They have a bathroom too, and if you’re anywhere near my position earlier today you’ll be no less thankful for that.

1. Damn, he’s one FINE specimen of British manliness. Actually, no: he’s neither attractive NOR interesting and his teeth jut out in different directions like a political cartoon of any British government official. But alcohol says he is!

2. Other drugs suck. They really do. Nothing makes you so lively and social as booze without sniffing 5 jillion germs and some powder off a toilet seat or searching out those hard-to-reach veins in your eyeballs.

3. The food after. There is a reason food theft is so rampant in BU housing with our communal refrigerators. Someone else’s cold leftover lasagna with Pringles and a bar of Cadbury’s? MINE!

4. South Kensington Station’s 3 bottles of wine for £10 deal. If there’s any class to staining your teeth, you know that a tube station is where you’ll find it.

5. When I go back to the States, I’ll still be 20. And the checkout folks at Albertson’s won’t take pity on the poor little girl who spent the last semester living it up in Kensington and just wants her Foster’s. That means I’ll be sorry if I don’t drink enough for six months worth of sobriety and mean bouncers pocketing my fake IDs when I reach San Diego in May.

Slainte, BU!

(edit: This post was not meant to be related to Valentine’s Day. Must have been an unconscious association. My bad.)

Another quick rant: I was down at Fitness First today, and I can firmly say there is no cultural difference when it comes to feeling like an awkward, voluptuous tub beside a peppy, gleaming muscled, smooth-talking Australian twenty-something. That £208 flew out of my bank account faster than that time I had to top-up my UNESCO Travel Fund last weekend in Amsterdam.

That is all. I’ll be here all weekend – within a careful15 minute walk of South Kensington, courtesy of that sexy ball chained to my ankle as an RA. Let’s see that sucker turn some heads on the treadmill at Fitness First.

Happy Valentine’s weekend!

One of the best things about being an American visiting in Amsterdam is that we’re too rare to be the most hated brand of tourist. Each coffeeshop and club is heavily weighed down by Brits on weekend holidays with at least 30 days to spare before their next mandatory drug test at work. Café menus offer traditional English breakfasts and it’s clear that the waitresses are used to everything from the nasty, incomprehensible northern England accents to the posh, smooth Londoners holding up the cues with their “quite”s and “thus”es. Don’t expect to meet many native Dutch folk at the clubs, museums, or red light district – but I suppose that’s mostly true of any foreign country.

The red light district really proves the absence of authority – or at least that image. In fact the window displays undergo regular heath checks and have even formed their own political party and frequently lobby the government. But you’d never know that based on the live, overly-practiced sex shows, dominating hoards of gawking men crowding the street and street creepers offering to sell you “jokes,” whatever frightening substances those might be, on each corner.

I can’t imagine Amsterdam ever being a hotspot for business meetings or corporate home bases. Nothing would ever get done and at 5 p.m. anyone who claimed that they had a longer day than a hibernating bear would fry most of their newly acquired brain cells in the local coffeeshop shortly thereafter. Hence the reason I should have visited after finals, but live and learn.

It was a fantastic visit. Anything longer than a week might have you permanently desensitized, but I would certainly recommend taking a few days to wander the spirally brick streets along those canals so warmly lit by lampposts and coffeeshop signs, get into a little trouble, and head back with a great story that you’re bound by word never to repeat to your friends at home.

Today my boss and my boss’s boss had a forty minute conversation about this internet bandwidth problem among BU flats here. Six red-faced kids have been sucking up half of the school’s bandwidth streaming amateur porn off of limewire and as a result my brain melted out of my ears while they threw computer acronyms like horeshoes. Block VPN! Track IP addresses! My inner narrative schlooped into a puddle on the ground.

To their credit, the Brits are a fascinating species. They just get so excited about technology. Unfortunately, it cuts their productivity in half. On the flipside, it gave me time to recover my liver from Notting Hill Arts Club where I left it this morning.

Am off to Amsterdam at dawn! Computer geek or… sexy, mysterious foreigner? Time will tell!

I recently relocated to a little town in a faraway place where it’s acceptable to start boozing before 11 a.m. and the credit cards ingeniously have PIN numbers. I get paid below minimum (think, camp counselor) for a 24/7 job of making sure legal adults don’t give people the impression that the U.S. is chock-full of Quicksilver frat boys and girls all named Kimberly with identical aviators (though at this point I don’t believe it myself).

The busses are as large as buildings and take turns at frightening speeds, making it easy to envision one tipping over and making a fifty-foot crater where Parliament had once stood. The bricks in my building have seen over a thousand years of history take place on the street below. Very cool. 1,000 years of people tripping on that curb, and drunkies stumbling out of pubs and peeing in alleyways. (At least that’s what I see.)

Being a resident assistant in London for Boston University, despite the Prada bitches and meatheads, is pretty fantastic. More on that later. For now I just wanted to update my reader (yes, I believe that is correct – love you Katie!) and say I’m alive and flashing those aviators proudly in 8 inches of snow.

 

Barack, your campaign was built around the word “hope.” I hope you can figure this one out.

One snowy, miserable Boston morning last year, between coughing spells and nearly biting the nurse’s hand, I was tested for Strep Throat and a number of other various diseases which almost certainly had it in for my final exam grades. My insurance company, Aetna, covers me as a student. It always has, and as a healthy kid, I pay more than enough each month so it continues to do so.

However, as the notices and bill reminders began arriving, I worried it was time for a phone call. The workers at Aetna, as it turns out, didn’t feel like processing that claim as they rightfully should. They sent me the hefty bill from Quest Diagnostics instead.

Then, Aetna sent me to collections for not paying it.

I’m aware that accidents happen with large companies, but I always assumed that they were followed by apologies and attempts to rectify the situation with the valued customer. Companies are as decent as the people who work for them, and in my experience people are usually pretty decent. When somebody pulled my five-foot long pigtails on the playground in kindergarten, they would always give me a (granted, usually forced) “I’m sorry.” When a professor mismarked a grade last year, he changed it and apologized. The trend in people consists of admitting, changing and fixing. But the employees of Aetna did none of these.

The company must have some inhuman special status that allows it to treat others with total disrespect. I have yet to hear from them (or the collections agency) that the mistake was theirs, that they give their deepest sympathies, and that with my otherwise perfect credit score, I will surely be able to get a loan someday for a house or car. At the ripe age of 20, and with zero experience fighting massive corporations and their phone trees, I can’t even fathom how to take action on my behalf.

Insurance companies know best how difficult it is to change insurance companies, and that willing or not, I will be their devoted customer. Is this the root of the problem? Does a guaranteed customer base mean a company can do whatever is financially beneficial to them, no matter the consequences?

This guaranteed customer base keeps the Insurance Monster, in fact, a monster. Thus I turn to the newest ray of hope in our country to solve a problem that is beyond me. As I grow older I am learning that sometimes, we just have to turn for help.

Barack, I know you have met the Monster.  I know that it stole possibly years of your grandmother’s life. I also know that compared to that situation, mine is pretty minuscule. However, I can’t really afford five hundred dollars or the hit my credit score took. I know I’m just the little guy, but please, please dive in and fight the monster that ruins us. I leave the task to you.

Best,

Laura Wolf

As usual, when Christmas comes around I’m on eBay quite frequently. Over the past few years, I’ve had plenty of experiences, great and terrible, to report.

For one thing, I’ve learned that when I write the seller emails about his or her negligence, often it is just the threat of bad feedback that gets their ass in gear to ship the item, pay me, or refund my money.

But recently I used that logic only to get it thrown back my face. Our email chain was getting long and going nowhere, so I decided to use my sternest voice and request a refund on an item that was sent to me in the wrong size. And I got this:

“I must say you do have a terrible attitude though! Please use a different seller in the future.”

Crap. What would my mom say?

I guess there are people out there who simply make mistakes, and more importantly, don’t deserve my online tongue-lashing. I would never be so cold in person. Actually I’m one of those people who can never think of the right thing to say in the heat of the moment anyway, so I end up saying nothing 95% of the time.

The internet really gives me that confidence to speak up. And now I have an attitude problem. What would you do?

Best,

Laura Wolf

The other day during my New Media & PR class over at BU, we were discussing the importance of blogging in times of crises. As temperamental, questionable, controversial and uncontrollable as the blogosphere can be, especially when it comes to PR, it has its moments. For corporations, blogging can be the fastest way to buy time and show that your company is listening. And for people, blogging in times of crisis can give the fastest, most updated information to the ones who need it the most.

I’ve been a little depressed lately. The job hunting is going nowhere, my cash is drying up, and I lost exactly half of my socks in the dryer last night. More relevant here, my blog also tends to pick out ethical fallacies in people and corporations of today’s world. Yesterday’s class was a little renewal of my faith in people, even in hard times. Hopefully it can do the same for you, my similarly confused and worried friends.

I’ve lived in several places now, but only San Diego is the one I call home. Last year while I was away at school studying for midterms, my home began to burn.

All I got from mom and dad were scattered calls at 4 a.m., the only time of day the cell phone towers weren’t dropping calls or preventing service altogether. I gathered through scattered messages when my neighborhood was evacuated via the reverse-911 system. I picked up broken stories about my neighbors watching their homes catching fire as they jumped into their swimming pools for safety, and others suffocating in their garages which they couldn’t open in the smoky darkness. The pictures in the newspaper were as orange and eerie as the fires four years previously.

Now the reason this class resurfaced these memories I so wish I’d forget was because of the way new media has changed the way we communicate in all crises, and that as scary and fritzy as I make this world out to be, humans morals in this case did not disappoint.

We were told to keep our cell phones off during peak hours, so this Millenial plugged straight into the internet. A quick google search yielded facebook groups with updated information and blogs with pictures of the damage. As citizens weren’t allowed in evacuated areas, real reporters couldn’t give accurate, updated reports. Citizen journalists, thus, were the ones who crossed the lines illegally and gave the most up-to-date information on the damage.

It was unbelievably reassuring to be updated on a situation that was so far away from me but so close to my heart. People I’d never even met were risking their lives to keep the rest of us in the know. As I studied furiously and held tears back, I surfed several blogs with pictures of the damage and lists of addresses of standing homes. I found out that my friend down the street who took me to the prom was now among the homeless. I even saw a picture posted on a facebook group that was taken from my front lawn and facing the house across the street, where a cop stood watching homes burn.

It was a surreal part of my life, that’s for sure. And it’s pretty amazing that people could be so kind, even in this day and age, and even after all my cynical blogging. I hope these strangers realize just how much they helped me. Here’s to you.

Special thanks to the operators of this blog.

And here is a link to that godawful song, if you didn’t already recognize it.

Best,
Laura Wolf

I used to be the fun one people came to play hide and seek with when they became bored of their adult conversations about corn futures and hedge funds. My only responsibility included caring for thirty-five cents to buy milk at lunch. Yet, I was always curious as to what I was missing. What were the mysterious Adult Table conversation words that emerged through the Mario Bros theme song? FICA, lo-cal, escrow, stock options? What was going on over there?

I wish they had told me how uninteresting FICA was earlier on. Unfortunately, far too late, I realized that the adult world and all of its adult words are completely boring. I’m job-hunting, networking, worrying about the economic crisis, and trying to finish my insane course schedule while waitressing to pay bills before my head goes kaboom. I’m an adult, using (mostly) adult words. Therefore, by my Thanksgiving table logic, I’m boring.

So, I am taking this opportunity to start a blog. I will do it to protect my sanity from my recent revelation, the Adult Table and the real world of responsibility. The cardinal rules we learned in kindergarten about sharing fingerpaint seem murky when the world turns upside down at the quarterlife crisis, and the only way to keep my head, I’ve found, is to narrarate my findings. Wish me luck.

 Best,
Laura Wolf