When I moved to New York on August of 2002, I had no money to pay for food or rent, let alone the tuition for NYU graduate school I was about to begin. My LA friends kept me alive by sending me boxes of beef jerky and potato chips. This is all I ate for my first month in New York, in the 8×8 room I was renting in a 4th floor walk-up in Astoria.
There was one other thing, though, that my friend Cheol included in the care package. VHS tapes of Dawson’s Creek.
I was an addict. I lived and breathed Dawson’s Creek, to the chagrin of my GF at the time. My mood would either be up or down all week depending on what happened with Joey and Pacey and Potato Head and Jen.
But when I moved across the country, I no longer had a TV, not one that got any type of reception. There was only a tiny TV/VCR combo that my roommate kept in the living room. And I wasn’t about to walk into any bar in the city, order a whiskey, and start asking the bartenders to change the channel to the WB. I didn’t know the city like that yet.
So my friend recorded them in LA and mailed the tapes to me. And I kept up with it.
Until the final episode.