6 Crucial Things You Learn After Moving Into an Apartment

But as Uncle Ben told Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility.” We get all this cool adult stuff, but in exchange we're forced to deal with boring adult responsibilities: Interacting with a boss at work, discovering what a 401k is, and, most annoying thing of all, living in an apartment.

That's right. These tiny pieces of cramped real estate are the biggest pain in the butthole that being an adult has to offer. Sure, having a place of your own without parents or siblings is cool, but literally everything else about property ownership sucks all the dicks in Delaware. Don’t believe me? When is the last time you heard someone say, “Dude, you GOTTA try living without a meal card in a place where you have to provide your own toilet paper. IT IS AMAZING”?

There are a bazillion things that suck about owning an apartment which no one ever tells you. Here's the top six:

1. Cereal is Unreasonably Expensive

I have no idea when the supply/demand economics of cereal became so goddamn screwed up, but cereal is a lot more expensive than you realize. At $6-$7 a box and another $3 for the milk, cereal is less of a midnight snack and more of a late night food investment. (A “foovestment,” if you will.) There is a way to get around this hefty price tag: Buy generic brand cereal. Shoprite's “Crunchy O’s” are just as good as Cheerios, Kirkland's “Fruity Tooties” are just as good as Fruity Pebbles, and Malt-O-Meal's “Suga’ Chunk AK47 Flavo Blasted Chippy Dippies” (or whatever the hell Malt-o-Meal calls their stuff) is just as good as Frosted Flakes.

Also, unrelated note: never step foot into a Whole Foods. That place is strictly for people who own Google Glass and say things like, “I knew Shiner Bock was coming to New York before most other people did.”

2. Your Rent is Expensive, your Room is Tiny and the Next Door Neighbors are a Mariachi Band

You will live in a thimble, pay $900 a month in rent and have neighbors who insist that 2 a.m. on the clock doesn’t mean it isn’t 10:30pm in their dance shoes. Welcome to city living.

3. Bills are Annoying and Show Up At the Worst Times

Where do I even begin with these little monthly gifts from Con-Ed and Time Warner. Imagine for a second that you were going out with a supermodel but the catch was that once a month she would non-fatally stab you. That is how bills feel. Bills let you do super-cool things like turning on lights and not freezing to death in the winter, but they also do some not super-cool things like drain your bank account and make you have to chose between cereal OR milk at Duane Reade. (Expert advice: choose the milk. Cheerios are dry little Mothers Effers).

Checking your mail at the end of the month when you know a bill is coming gives you a similar heart-sinking feeling that the wives of soldiers fighting overseas in WWII felt anytime their doorbell would ring. My tip to you: figure out how much utilities are early on and make sure to save at least $20 extra a month to cover these bills. Be smart. Be cool. Be kosher.

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4. Stuff Gets Dirty All the Fucking Time

Owning apartment stuff is like having a child who drinks ipecac lattes (feel free to google ipecac and also feel free to remember that lattes turn your butt into a fire hose. Those two pieces of information are crucial to understanding that gem of a joke). Dust, dirt, mud and bugs all sneak up on you unless you make sure to give your apartment a fairly frequent scrub-down. Kitchens and bathrooms tend to also get mucked up fairly bad, so it might even pay to get a cleaning lady if you have the spare cash (or if your last name is “Romney”! #2012TopicalJokes).

5. You Need to Buy Toilet Paper Early and Often

This, for some reason, came as a bit of a shock to me. Toilet paper was always kinda just “there” wherever I was living. Remember in Harry Potter's book seven when they were in the forest in and Harry has that bottomless bag? That is kind of what toilet paper was like to me. It was always there in my house growing up, it was always there in my dorm in college and I almost kind of expected it to just BE there in my apartment when I moved in. This was not the case. I can’t stress this enough: you poop more than you think, and you use more TP than you think. Buy toilet paper early and often, or I guarantee you will be sorry.

6. Moving is the Most Stressful thing in the World

I’m convinced that hell is a place bad people go after they die, where Satan forces them to move to a new apartment every two weeks. The first thing to remember about moving is that every friend you've ever made has a “family thing” on the day you have to move out. Another thing you have to remember is that everything you own is approximately a BAZILLION pounds and does not fit through the door it came in through. One last thing you should know is that everything you bought at Ikea is incredibly sturdy until you have to move it. Once you move your Ikea desk it goes from being made of strong pieces of composite wood to a glorified cardboard cutout of a desk, held together by pieces of string cheese microwaved for 45 seconds.

Moving sucks. Friends suck. Ikea sucks. String cheese is amazing but should not be used to hold together furniture.

Eitan Levine is a New York City based comic. Follow him on Twitter at @Eitanthegoalie and Tumblr at TheLevineMachine.Tumblr.com.

[Moving couple image via Shutterstock]