By Amanda DeLuise

I really don’t know how I didn’t discover Amazon.com sooner than I did.  Especially in New York City, where people somehow get away with charging way too much money for everything.  Now it’s my best friend and you could say I’m a little obsessed with it.

I was first introduced to it, really introduced to it, when my roommate told me she ordered all of her books there and saved a few hundred dollars.  So I checked it out.  And I saved quite a few hundred dollars.  I ordered a copy of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” for ONE PENNY.  Apparently Amazon does this quite often, they have certain titles on sale for just a penny.  My friend Dann, who also needed the book, was a little wary of what kind of condition it would be in and how many pages would be missing from it.  I assured him it would probably be fine and he said he would be really angry if it was in perfect condition like the one he had just paid $12.95 for at the bookstore.  Well, it came in perfect condition and Dann was angry and said he would be doing all of his book shopping there from now on.

Not only is Amazon.com good for “academic” needs, it’s perfect for things I really want to buy but would cost a ridiculous amount of money at a store in New York.

Example 1: I’ve been looking all over for a flask (…as a gift for my dad).  I found a nice, simple one of the Container Store website for only $7.95.  So I went to the Container Store and they said they didn’t sell those anymore, they never updated the website.  So I walked a lot of blocks to wind up empty handed.  I ended up finding a similar one (actually, it was bigger) for $2.99! It came in a few days in perfect condition, wrapped in plastic and everything.

Example 2: I’ve been looking into getting a fisheye lens for my digital camera for quite some time now.  I walked all the way to B&H (a pretty nice camera accessory store) and found they were selling them for $250.  I thought, well maybe I could save up my work money for a while.  Checked on Amazon.com and found a compatible fisheye lens for $29.95!!!!! Really, I almost had a heart attack.  It shipped in a few days, again in mint condition.

So instead of doing homework, I sang Amazon.com praises while taking fishy fotos.

By Amanda DeLuise

I hate winter.  I’ve always hated winter.  Probably because I was born in the middle of July and have basically lived at the beach each summer since before I was even born. I associate summer with all good things: cut off jeans, ocean hair, no school, iced tea lemonade.

Winter, on the other hand, is not associated with anything good.  Snow, runny noses, black ice, uncomfortable boots, hypothermia. I was made fully aware of the pains of winter in sixth grade, when our Valentine’s Day dance was cancelled.  I prayed (I went to Catholic school) all night for school NOT to be cancelled and it was and I didn’t get to dance with Jimmy Fisher (my #1 crush from second grade on).

This winter especially has not been good.  It’s snowed more times than I can count. We had a huge blizzard and while every other school and institution in New York City was closed (the U.N., every public school, almost every other college/university, New York Life), NYU remained open to brave the snowpocalypse.  Bad idea, NYU, especially when you decide not to run the buses and I have to walk 20 blocks to my 8 AM lab on icy sidewalks.  I had five classes that day and managed to go to three of them before NYU decided that it needed to close (alerting us five minutes before the start of 12:30 classes that all classes 12:30 and later were cancelled).

So what did my roommate and I do to combat the winter/not-a-real-snow-day-because-we-still-had-to-wake-up-at-7AM blues?  We went to Serendipity, ate our feelings in the form of a $15 ice cream sundae, stole a menu, went sledding on said menu, got really cold, found shelter in the lobby of the Plaza hotel (got a lot of strange looks in the mean time), came home, took shots (…of cold medicine…), watched Funny Games (SO CREEPY) and baked more desserts (”diet cake”–using a can of diet soda in lieu of the eggs/water/oil in a cake recipe) until 2 in the morning AND skipped our classes the next day in protest (okay, so my class ended up being cancelled anyway, but it was the thought that counted).

My camera was brave enough to come out with us, so for once I could prove to everyone that I actually went out and enjoyed (sort of) the snow:

Peanut Butter Sundae from Serendipity (omg).

Frozen tundra a.k.a. Central Park a.k.a. where everyone goes when it snows.

...because this is what snow looks like everywhere else. Gross.

New York City's version of sledding: using a stolen plastic covered menu to navigate your way down a snow-covered rock face.

By Amanda DeLuise

I don’t know how I could have forgotten to write about getting a job.  This little unemployment problem has been the chip on my shoulder since first semester last year.  Almost every day one of my parents would call and ask how the job hunt was going, and every day I had to admit that it wasn’t going at all.  This just made them angry.

So I worked over winter and summer breaks (at FYE, where I’ve been since I was 16 and there was also a brief stint at Bath & Body Works in the mall) but that wasn’t cutting it (which is true, I blew all that money pretty quick).

This year, I promised myself I would find a job.  Well, I have a job but I wasn’t the one that found it.  My best friend Dann (I don’t know what I would do without him) got offered a babysitting job, but he couldn’t take it because he had already gotten another job (some people have all the luck, I guess).. so he passed the information along to me.

I e-mailed the woman my resume, went in for an interview and got the job.  I’m pretty sure it was the happiest and most relieved I’ve felt since getting into college. So I started a few weeks ago and I must say I never thought babysitting could be so cool.

Not only is the woman I work for really awesome (she works at the New Yorker and sometimes I get to actually step foot inside the Conde Nast building), her son is probably the most intelligent nine year old I’ve ever met.  We talk about sports, movies, books, politics (he knows a lot more than I do) and go play soccer in the park.  I pick him up from his school in TriBeCa and walk him to sports practice at Pier 40 (possibly the coolest place to play a sport in the entire world.. on the roof of a pier on the Hudson River overlooking New Jersey).  Now that sports are over, we usually just go back to his house and make videos on his Macbook or play with his cat, Jose.

I never envisioned this being the job my parents wanted me to get. If I knew that, I would have started working a long, long time ago.