Tag: new-york

Experts Only Music Festival

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A couple of months ago, my mother called me up and asked me if I wanted to go to this “music thing” that she heard about in her neighborhood that weekend. I said yes, unaware that this “music thing” was the New York City music event of that weekend. 

It was the inaugural Experts Only festival, a music festival hosted by DJ John Summit on Randall’s Island. The DJ played house music the entire afternoon. 

Experts Only was the whole nine yards: food stalls, merch stands, beach balls bouncing off the top of the crowd, a woman dancing on stage at all times, and someone who was clearly on ecstasy and therefore not dancing at all to the beat. The whole thing was like a big high school football game, only instead of tailgating you’re eating from a food truck in the middle of a field surrounded by 300 strangers and instead of showing off your school spirit you’re showing off every inch of your body that you’re legally allowed to show.

I was entirely unprepared for the music festival that I walked into, wearing a long sleeve black shirt and jacket. I was the most fully clothed person there, aside from my mom. I looked like a narc.

Everywhere I looked, there were sheer body suits and crop tops. Ass crack and butterfly tattoos were also very much in, as were pashminas and chainmail waistbands. Influencers and wannabe influencers posed for pictures in their outfits. The event was in full swing.

We danced our way to the front of the crowd, squeezing through the mesh of bodies, and when we needed a break from the dancing, we sat in a field drinking vodka lemonades and eating street tacos. 

My mother nodded along to the music. I jumped up and down like a lunatic.

We got there in the early afternoon and then stayed late into the night, technically morning. At the end of the night, we caught the ferry, with me limping from how hard I danced. I ended up pulling a muscle in my leg and then freaking out that I had a varicose vein, because of how it was bulging out of my calf, but it was worth it to experience such an awesome music festival.

It’s not often that I get to be pleasantly surprised when an impromptu weekend hanging out with my mother turns into a wild night of drinking and dancing at a New York City music festival. My mother, despite having a good time, has decided not to join me next year.

This was my first time at a music festival, but I am determined for it not to be my last. This year, I will be sure to return to Expert’s Only in a crop top with my friends, ready to have more vodka lemonades and street tacos, like the twentysomething that I am. 

The Tragic Queen,

Raquel

The One Where I Got A Job– Look Out Corporate America

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After much deliberation, I have decided that I am not meant to work for a living. 

I respect the lifestyle, but it’s just not for me. 

A glamorous headshot of me, taken at work

School’s back in session, so I can finally tell you all about the joys of my New York City job, how I was every inch the slick professional in chic pumps, ready to “shake up the game” or something like that. 

A few weeks ago, I completed my summer gig of working as a receptionist at a zillenial fin-tech place, having found the job through a temp agency.

Photographic evidence of me working for a living

My parents told me to apply at a temp agency, something that I believed to be a thing from their New York City days that no longer existed, like subway tokens and paying a buck 85 for your coffee. As it turns out, temp agencies are still alive and well, unlike the other facets of their New York City days, when they could afford a walk-up on practically no budget with a job that they got by checking the want-ads one afternoon.

My mother requested pics of my work clothes everyday. Here they are

Through Taylor Hodson, I got a job as a receptionist at a company that, like most people, doesn’t even have a landline. My job was primarily to greet people and to shred meaningless documents, something that they trusted a 23 year old to do perfectly. 

This was one of my first ever big girl jobs, not a part time internship that paid me minimum wage, gave me one day off a week, and let me roll in at 10 AM. Working a full forty hour work week for above minimum wage felt like graduating past that point in your school career where you get to have naptime.

A hardworking professional, as you can see

Unlike my previous part-time employment, I actually got off work feeling like I’d earned the right to a Friday afternoon happy hour drink as well as the right to yell at tourists walking three abreast on the sidewalk while I hurtled my body into my subway stop in the morning. 

I filled out an I-9, a W-2, and an NDA, before completing a sexual harassment lecture and quiz that asked real head scratchers like, “is commenting on your coworkers breasts while she’s lactating sexual harassment?”

I practiced my route to work the day before in order to ensure that I could get there in a New York Minute. Then, I did some of new-job-pregaming-rituals the night before, like watching Anne Hathaway play a plucky career woman in one of her films (The Devil Wears Prada, The Intern, etc.). She is every woman… but she is a little bit more me than the rest of you. I’m sorry, it’s the big brown eyes and the long brown hair.

I’d wake up every morning and listen to Megan Thee Stallion rap about “holding a glock in her birkin,” two things that I don’t own, before manning a desk for eight hours. 

I’d gotten a taste of rush hour traffic at my old job, but would now get to enjoy a long commute during rush hour in the middle of a heat wave. Every subway car was sardined with people, except for the one half-full car that has no air conditioning, making New Yorkers choose between personal space and heat stroke. We’re all hot and angry, trauma bonded from being jostled into each other’s half-naked bodies while sweat drips down our ass cracks. Nothing quite beats inhaling a wide range of body odors while trying to get to work on time.

This is being presided over by a conductor who was usually just as mad about it as we were and made that apparent by shouting at us to not only “STAND CLEAR OF THE CLOSING DOORS” but to “USE MORE THAN ONE OF THE DOORS” and “WAIT UNTIL THE NEXT TRAIN IF YOU DON’T FIT,” with the same energy as a TSA agent at LaGuardia who will yell at you to stand back if you approach them to ask a question that has already been answered.

I’m not sure whose fault this is, but I’m just going to blame Eric Adams. You can always blame the mayor of New York and then a decade after they’re out of office, they’ll get a couple of buildings named after them. 

Commuting home at the end of the day, unreasonably exhausted from not doing much of anything, and then being responsible for making my own dinner seems cruel and unusual.

I now have a new respect for the people who work all day, come home to kids to raise, make dinner, and then sleep poorly, only to make a paltry sum of money the next day at work. 

Like I said, I have decided that I am not meant to work for a living. 

I’ve just started another year of school, so I won’t have to rejoin the workforce for another year. Corporate America will have to wait with bated breath for my return. 

The Tragic Queen,

Raquel