What do you think about my writing abilities?

You're better than most people on here. But I'm finding this style of narration quite annoying. The character comes off as an ordinary douchebag - the first thing he does is whinge at us then he disrespects his girlfriend, bores us with the state of his finances, and tells us he's basically got no reason to be so miserable. How do you expect us to care about this guy enough to read more about him? Also, you change tenses - from present to past and back again - and one minute you've got your character talking in a strong, believable (and very distinctive) young male voice, then he goes posh all of a sudden with 'a fairly bright fellow named Thoreau' and 'I heartily agree' - is that your voice slipping in there? Thoreau's pretty well known so unless you were trying to be funny with that line your character is going to sound ignorant acting as if nobody has heard of him. You also need to work on your grammar - 'it's' ALWAYS should mean 'it is', but 'its' means 'belonging to it', the same way 'whose' means 'belonging to whom' and 'who's' means 'who is'. There were some interesting descriptions like 'young sun' and I appreciated the humour of 'Slumlord'. But in fact, description is something you might want to pare back. I felt assaulted by too much information in the second line about the six dollar alarm clock Mara got for her birthday playing Macarena - it's okay to mention the music, and the source of the music, but forcing us to grapple with extra information just stirs up too many questions. (eg "Who's Mara? Wait, who's telling me this? Why did they get this woman a six-dollar alarm clock? Why is her alarm clock in this room? Does this person not care about Mara? Why? Or don't they have much money? Why? What self-respecting radio station plays the Macarena at 5.30 am? What year is this set in? How loud is 'max volume' - more like plain old obnoxious music or more like a jet taking off?" And so on, and so forth.) Anyway, this stuff (apart from the grammar) is completely subjective. Good luck with your dream.