Pretty cool reading up on some of you. The whole bumming money from grandparents to buy dunks joke was lost on me, but other than that I've enjoyed reading.
I work in Manhattan doing number crunching. It's a 7-day a week job, sometimes it sucks more than others. I don't work 8 hours Sat/Sun, but I almost always have to put in at least 30 minutes every single weekend day. I thought I had too little time to skate while completing my degree, in hindsight, those were the glory days.
These days I'd be lying if I said I skate as much as possible. Some times I get home from work and a beer sounds better than skating by myself. I always thought living in NYC would be a dream for skating, but sometimes I just wish I had a skatepark near me that wasn't overrun at 6:30 PM on a weekday. I got a flatground spot right near me, which is indeed a blessing, but all these fair-weather fans are out when the weather is nice, which blows, the flatty spot is full of middle aged goons playing softball, oh well.
The upside of living here and being increasingly anti-social is it's helping me transition into becoming a morning person. I go to the skatepark early, sometimes as early as sunrise, just to roll around w/o dealing with other people. On the up side, it's kinda a fight-club type thing to skate early early morning and see someone else there. "The nod" is heavy at skateparks in the morning. Not like I'm against chit-chat, but I go there to skate, do my thing, and leave, and it's somehow social to share that w/ another human. As an aside, my biggest skating pet-peeve is when people "want to skate" and talk my fucking ear off instead of actually skating. You can skate w/ your mouth shut, give it a try.
All in all, it's becoming increasingly apparent that the window is closing, and I'm trying to get it in while I can while still improving my future outlook.
Pardon the soul baring