Last night, I cried when my portion of our karaoke bill came to $48.
This morning, I cried while watching an insurance commercial:
I’m about to leave to get my hair trimmed, and I really hope to cry during that, too.
With any luck, I’ll make a sobby scene during dinner tonight and get us kicked out of the restaurant.
Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, HORMONES!
Today, Gmail chat, 3:15 p.m.:
In case you need a reminder:
Now, I should mention that Kamran has been working out every single morning for months and that this picture was taken well before he got ripped, but you get the idea.
Kamran: What makes you so interested in abandoned food?
me: I don’t know. I really like food, and I always wonder why someone would just leave it there. I would pick that shit up and dust that shit off.
Kamran: I would do that, too.
me: Really?
Kamran: Yeah, I mean pick it up. And then throw it away.
me: Oh, no, I’d totally be willing to eat it.
Kamran: What about a pepper dropped in the subway?
me: Sure.
Kamran: You’d just pick that up and bite into it?
me: Yeah, absolutely, ’cause you can wash that.
Kamran: You can’t wash off the subway. You can’t wash off New York City. New York City gets under the skin.
This was the very first, some lonesome transportation vegetation spotted on the F train.
Spotted outside Halloween Adventure along Broadway, this one is especially sad for me,
because dropping something after one delicious bite seems so much worse than after not tasting it at all.
My boyfriend and I saw this right outside his apartment building, but everyone there is rich,
so I suppose a lost bagel isn’t a big deal to them. There was a trash can approximately
6 inches from the bagel, it should be noted.
Please find my newly created page for showcasing my abandoned food finds in my sidebar and expect many more to come.
I could tell yesterday that you weren’t totally blown away by the celebrities I’ve rubbed elbows with, and early this morning, I realized why. I forgot to add the most important ones, the ones I was actually filmed with. And in Meryl’s case, the one that I actually ran into accidentally. So here are the additions to my List of All the Famous People I Can Remember Having Seen Whilst Living in NYC for you to ooh and ahh at:
Meryl Streep, who I filmed scenes with as an extra in the movie Julie and Julia.
Brooke Shields, who I stood 2 centimeters away from while filming scenes as an extra in “Lipstick Jungle“, where I also stood 2 centimeters away from
and Rosie Perez
and Kim Raver
and Lindsay Price.
Please note that I reserve the right to keeping posting this sort of jazz whenever I remember another one, because nothing else in my life has any meaning.
My friend Sonya, my doctor boyfriend, Kamran, and I took a bus from Kamran’s office in Rockefeller Center to Union Square last Thursday night and then cut down a side street to get to the East Village for dinner. As we were passing by the movie theatre on Broadway, we saw some fancy black cars across the street and flashbulbs going off as someone stepped out of one of them. We continued walking like New Yorkers do but kept our eyes trained on the area in case something was going on that we’d need to brag about to our friends later.
When the person being photographed turned to face us, Sonya said, “Hey, it’s the guy with the big mouth who used to have dreads!” I, of course, had no idea who it was, but Kamran is pretty much an original gangsta and recognized him right away as Busta Rhymes. We crossed the street to get a better look, because while we don’t have any interest in movie stars, we understand that it’s important for our families in Orlando (Sonya), Orange County (Kamran), and OHIO (me) to hear about these sorts of sightings, since they can’t imagine any other advantage to living here.
Out of the next car came Guy Pearce, whose name we couldn’t remember but whom we all knew as “that guy from Memento“. And out of the next car came, most importantly, Don Cheadle, who I totally had a crush on after Crash and totally had a bigger crush on after Hotel Rwanda. So naturally I took out my camera and captured:
Don Cheadle’s leg beside some lady with a cast!
Don Cheadle in profile!
There were boards with Traitor posters all over them propped behind where the stars were having their photos taken, so they must have been there to premiere the movie, but of course I can’t look it up and have Google start showing “celeb” gossip in my gmail ads. So you should do it for me.
And while I have you here, here’s a List of All the Famous People I Can Remember Having Seen Whilst Living in NYC, complete with highly personal stories, which can now also be found in my sidebar, in case you want to reference it many times in the future.
This delightful bit of graffiti was on the wall of the L platform at 1st Street:
It’s funny that I didn’t, you know, notice that the Unicef logo on the truck was obscured by the overhead lighting, but I don’t get paid to pay attention, yo.
My friend Emily wanted to celebrate her birthday by forcing us to hang out with her allllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll day the Saturday before last, so my boyfriend Kamran and I picked up three vats of rainbow sherbet and a pack of rainbow Twizzlers and took the bus down to Tompkins Square Park for a noontime picnic. When we found the party, it consisted of Emily, who was in a birthday tiara, lest you forget who to pay all your attention to
and a handful of our other friends lounging on a blanket with an open jar of peanut butter in the middle of the circle. Kamran and I had come hungry, expecting a potluck, so I immediately thought, “Oh, shit, this is going to be the worst picnic ever,” and proceeded to eat all the paper party favors I could get my hands on.
Luckily, though, Emily’s sister-in-law, Lauren, came back from the dog run with the cutest puppy in the entire world, Penny,
and loads of food came out of hiding, including the beaniest bean salad, two whole chickens, pounds of lunch meat and mayonnaise, an entire German chocolate cake from Magnolia Bakery, and chopped fruits galore.
Emily had asked me to bring ice cream specifically to go with the cake and was a little upset at first that I’d forgotten and gone with sherbet instead, but then her brother, Nathan, thought to put the sherbet in the gallons of spiked lemonade that had gotten warm in the sun, and so we all drank it cold through rainbow Twizzler straws.
Which led to Emily’s mom getting drunk and hilarious and walking through the park with a party hat on
and everyone else generally having a great time, including me
but not including Kamran.
Naw, I’m just kidding. Kamran was a party animal
and didn’t even cut me when this happened:
Here’s a bad picture of Adam and Sonya just to prove they were there for posterity:
The only thing that sucked was all the poor people who felt like it was cool to step on our blankets and ask for our food in the midst of our being rich and merry. Now, I’m generally a pretty giving person, and I genuinely feel for people who have to sleep on the streets (although I firmly believe that if you can sit on a sidewalk with a pathetic give-me-money sign all day, you can stand behind a retail counter making money, too), but the first guy who approached us actually had the nerve to be MEAN about it. Here, I’ll recreate the conversation for you:
Asshole Poor Guy in Cargo Shorts with Backpack Who was Likely Totally Privileged and Had Annoying Well-Groomed Hair: Hey, can I have some of that food?
(Everyone shifts uncomfortably.)
Emily’s Sister-in-Law, Lauren: Sure, let me make a heaping plate for you, because I care about you, even though you’re an asshole and don’t deserve it.
(Lauren piles a paper plate high with bean salad, the most nutritious, delicious, and filling thing we have.)
Asshole Poor Guy: How ’bout some of that bread? I shouldn’t even have to ask, you know.
Me: Beggars can’t be choosers!
(The crowd falls silent, except for Chris, who says, “Ohhhhhhh, shit!” and wins my favor.)
Lauren: Absolutely no problem, sir. Here, take two slices.
The other ten thousand people who approached us were much cooler and much more appreciative, but they sure are lucky Emily’s family was there to be kind, ’cause I would’ve sent their asses packing had it been my birthday. And that concludes my right-wing conservative rant.
From the Products That Shouldn’t Exist and the Too Good to Be True files, my boyfriend Kamran brings us
the sweet licorice-flavored expectorant throat lozenge from the folks who brought you
There’s absolutely no mention of the name being racially-tied at all, but COME ON. And it’s totally not an antiquated product like you’d think; there are several websites offering them for purchase. Don’t you just love the idea of pulling your tin of breath mints from your pocket in public and asking your friends, “Anyone care for a Nigroid?”
Kamran says that their slogan should be “Nigroid Please”, but even with a catchy jingle, it’d be a hard sell once people find out about the major side effect,
My mom died of brain cancer my senior year of high school, and since she was a teacher at my school, the principal gave me a sorry-your-life-is-ruined gift of a senior photo package worth some hundreds of dollars. It was a pretty cool present, I thought, since I’m generally narcissistic and loved the idea of having my picture taken over and over again in several different outfits by a willing photographer rather than my not-easily-coerced, annoyed-by-my-pestering-whenever-we-went-anywhere friends.
The photographer was a lanky guy named Scott who was so typical of all the now-thirtysomethings who had graduated from my high school: black mullet, tapered black jeans, tucked-in cheap flannel shirt, black sneakers, giant aviator wire-framed glasses. You know, your basic child molester ensemble. He was nice enough and made polite conversation with the friends who came with me for my shoot, but I think he thought he was shooting for Playboy or something. I of course brought several sweaters to change into, because his props included things like wagon wheels and hay bales, which was fine with me, because I’m straight offa the farm. But he kept telling me to “change into something slinky”, as if I had brought along my littlest black dress to lounge around in on the unfinished wood floor. And then he kept telling me to not smile and to try to look sexy, which was pretty hilarious what with my wearing patterned sweaters and faded jeans and all. At one point, he positioned me in this fake doorway covered with stucco that was supposed to be reminiscent of Mexico (because every Ohio teenager dreams of being Mexican?) with one hand on one side of the arch and the other hand on the other side and told me to look “dark”. And by that, I’m pretty sure he meant “less-clothed”.
The great thing is that my good friend Sheena, who also had her senior photos taken by Scott, really did bring slinky dresses to her shoot. That tramp.
And the even greater thing is that in the set of photos that my dad loved most and wanted to have blown up to astronomical proportions for everyone in my family to display on their fireplace mantles, I had this stray curl sticking out on one side of my head very obviously. When we looked over the proofs with Scott, he told us he could alter the photo to make it look natural, and we agreed to it. Now, in these days of Photoshop whizzes, that would be an easy feat, but this was Ohio in the year 2000, when my family and Tracey’s were the only ones in the whole county to own computers.
So when the pictures came back, poster-sized to outdo all of my cousin’s photos in my grandmother’s living room, one side of my head looked normal and the other side had an extra inch of afro-like curls DRAWN IN with a black marker. It doesn’t in any way resemble the rest of my hair, and you can pick out each of the swirly marker lines very distinctly.
But hey, they were free.
The thing I loved most about LiveJournal versus other blogging sites is that it lets you reply to comments and e-mails you when someone replies to your comment, which encourages conversation and community. When I left LiveJournal and began hosting my own blog, I found a workaround in Brian’s Threaded Comments, which e-mails me when you comment and gives you the option to click a little checkbox on the comment entry form and receive an e-mail when I reply back to whatever brilliant thing you said.
Most people aren’t hosting their own blogs, though, so plugins like Brian’s won’t work. And for those instances, my best friend Tracey and I recommend subscribing to comments feeds. Because I don’t get e-mailed whenever Tracey replies to one of my comments, I check her comments feed via my Google Reader to see if she’s written back to me. If you have a blog and you want people to know when you’ve replied to their comments, I heartily suggest that you add a comments RSS feed link in an obvious place.
For WordPress, the link would look like: http://[yourusernamehere].wordpress.com/comments/feed/
For Blogger, it’d look like: http://[yourusernamehere].blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?alt=rss
I only tell you this because y’all have been so nice about commenting on my blog, and I want you to be able to share in the wealth. Let me know if you add one so I can add it to my Google Reader and keep up with you better.
Stella Zotis is totally my favourite designer on this season’s “Project Runway”.
Not because I’m into her aging rocker clothes or anything but because of this:
Of course she’s from Queens, right?
I’m too lazy to download, convert, and trim the clip myself, but I also highly recommend this video at 3 minutes, 13 seconds in:
I’m not sure I’ve liked a single thing she’s sewn so far, but I sure do hope she keeps getting passed through to the next rounds based on her personality alone.
Let’s not kid ourselves–chocolate cake that takes three minutes to bake in the microwave is only meant to be consumed out of desperation in the midst of a munchies crisis in the hours between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. Or by obese people at any time. And yet my dear friend Emily, who was experiencing neither of these, asked to make it in celebration of her birth.
She sent me a link to the recipe for Chocolate Cake in Five Minutes! Monday at work, and we went out before lunch and tried to procure all of the necessary supplies at one of the delis downtown, which is no small feat if you know New York City and its tiny stores. We knew we weren’t going to find the cake flour, so we went looking for cornstarch to add to regular flour like someone suggested in the comments, but they didn’t have that except in huge bags in the back, so one of the guys had to bring us a little takeout soup container full of it. They didn’t have the cocoa, either, so we bought some packets of pre-melted Nestle’s (what?). And then we gathered everything else and went back to the office to experiment.
Surprisingly, what came out was actually very much cake. The moistest chocolate cake you’ve ever seen, at that. It wasn’t quite as sweet or as chocolatety as we would’ve liked it, but we more than made up for that by slathering it in Nutella, chocolate icing, and peanut butter. Even better than the taste, though, was watching it rise in the microwave. For the first minute, it seemed to do nothing. But at the start of the second minute, it lifted straight out of the mug like a tower and then kept on rising almost completely to the top of the microwave before it got too tall to hold itself upright and leaned off the side of the cup at an angle. As soon as we opened the microwave door, though, it sunk right back down to the top of the mug.
Pleased with our work, we then decided to microwave not just a mug but an entire mixing bowl of the stuff. And here’s the result, melted knife and all:
Clearly I don’t brag about myself enough here, because I never told you that I totally won an extremely important and incredibly lucrative writing contest earlier this year. The contest was sponsored by the Gotham Writers’ Workshop here in NYC, and the idea of it was to submit a memoir made up of only six words.
Their example was a famous one by Hemingway that says,
“For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
Ohhhhhhh, it tugs on your heartstrings, doesn’t it? My boyfriend Kamran’s friend Mike told us about the contest and offered up,
“I should have asked her age,”
to which Kamran replied,
“And then I got crabs again,”
and while I thought those were both brilliant, I went a much more serious route and submitted,
“I’ll never know mom’s meatloaf recipe.”
I didn’t actually expect to be chosen, of course, because I thought it was only meaningful to me. This is sort of embarrassing, but I’d been having a deep hankerin’ for meatloaf around that time, and my mom’s was so much better than any I’ve had since, and I’d kill to make it just like she did. But of course she’s been dead eight years now, and of course I can’t remember exactly what she put in it, and of course my dad isn’t any help in the matter. And thinking about the empty hole in my stomach where that meatloaf should be made me think about all the empty holes in me that parts of her should be filling, and so I entered the contest.
Weeks later, I received an e-mail from the Writers’ Workshop that said,
Here’s a writing contest update from the co-editors of the New York Times bestseller Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure
Thank you so much for taking the time to enter our Six-Word Memoir Writing Contest. You guys crafted some amazing submissions, and choosing a winner was extremely tough (when we compiled Not Quite What I Was Planning, a least we got to choose 832!)
But, this time around, the winner is….
I’ll never know mom’s meatloaf recipe.
by Kathleen Ett of Brooklyn, NY
———————————–
The “but, this time around” dashed my hopes, but then I realized that this was a mass e-mail and that the but was intended for everyone BUT me! So evidently the judges got the implicit meaning, even if the explicit words themselves were sorta lame.
And my prize? Well, absolutely nothing. But it looks like I’ll be published in the sequel to the original six-word memoir book, and that’s pret-ty rad. Plus, my name is all up in lights on the results page at the Gotham website. Neat, huh?
The interesting thing is that this was the same week I found out I was going to be in an issue of Time Out New York (and more on that here, for posterity) and that I’d gotten a part in an upcoming Meryl Streep/Amy Adams film. I guess good things really do come in threes.
So I pretty much live in the hippest neighborhood in all of New York City–and certainly in Brooklyn–yet I never actually do anything there, because I’m too busy hanging out with Kamran the Boyfriend in his richie-rich when-you-look-out-my-bedroom-window-you-see-the-Chrysler-Building neighborhood. But on Sunday, that all changed on July 27th when I finally went to see the band MGMT at
I was pretty pumped, because my friend Sonya had been forcing MGMT on me for weeks before that to get me ready for the show, and to see them for free seemed like such a I-am-poor-and-I-live-in-Brooklyn-and-I’m-seeing-a-Brooklyn-band rad thing to do on a Sunday afternoon when I’d usually be watching Kamran do laundry. Plus, what beats watching a concert from inside a drained pool?
The gate was set to open at 2, but knowing that a line would form before noon, we decided to show up late with the hope that we’d be able to walk right in. We leisurely ate some faux-chicken buffalo wings and strawberry/peanut butter/cookie “milk”shakes at my favourite vegan restaurant, Foodswings, near Bedford Avenue while some mean stormclouds formed overhead, and then at 3:30, we approached the park.
The line was still huuuuuuuuge. Like, down three blocks and wrapped around the park with eight people across on the sidewalk. Sonya and her boyfriend, Adam, had been waiting since 12:30 and had barely moved. So naturally we cut in front of them, and then two seconds later, Jesus punished us for it by making it pour. Seriously POUR. For, like, an hour. The line looked like this:
and at the end of it, we looked like this:
Almost too horrific to share, right? But I can’t help myself. Plus, we didn’t look nearly as bad as the huge group of girls (+ 1 pimply boy) behind us who had brought the bags from inside boxes of wine and were drinking the stuff out of the spigot. And screaming. Incessantly. This kid near them said, “You girls are drinking wine from bags, and that is fuckin’ badass.” And then they all had a big screamy orgy. They were approximately 16 years old but already had the haggard faces of their mothers, and that pleases me.
The Ting-Tings had played while we were still in line, which was a real shame, because they sounded great. Instead we had to endure Black Moth Super Rainbow, who I will not link, oh no I won’t, because they were that uninteresting. To endure their set, we bought some fruity beer and checked out the intense dodgeball game that was taking place off to one side of the pool:
And then MGMT came on.
They opened with a really slow song, and I was like, “This is a weird way to start a dance party,” but I expected that they were just working up to the awesome stuff. And then they played another slow song. And another. But, like, people were cheering and clapping, and Sonya was smiling her head off, and everyone seemed to be having such a good time. It didn’t make any sense to me. Sonya asked me how I was liking it, and I couldn’t help myself; I blurted out, “This is BORING!” And then I felt bad.
It’s just that I was expecting this and this, and I wasn’t getting it. I had specifically not brought a purse just to be able to dance like a wild woman, and this was not wild woman music. Not liking it made me feel like one of those shallow teenybopper who comes to a show and only knows the words to the single.
With the lame music and the crappy weather, the day felt like this:
But then! They played this, and it was great! And then they played “Kids”, and then they played “Time to Pretend”, and it was glorious! Look at how happy we are, with our wrinkly foreheads:
So in the end, I totally loved the show, and I’m glad we stuck it out. Especially because we got to have Korean BBQ at Dokebi afterward:
And just because I can’t help thinking this is the awesomest thing ever, check out this amateur music video of MGMT’s “Kids”. Soooo good, right?
The weekend before last, Boyfriend Kamran and I decided to explore the new Brooklyn Ikea and buy a tiny dresser for me to overflow with the zillions of polka-dot shirts that I’m currently storing folded on a chair in the corner of his apartment. We’ve always had access to the Ikea in Elizabeth, New Jersey, via a free shuttle bus from Port Authority, but the new Brooklyn Ikea is located in an up-and-coming neighborhood that we want to explore, anyway, AND it’s accessible via a free water ferry from lower Manhattan.
But of course we took the free shuttle bus outside of the Borough Hall subway station. (Which, if you’re oddly here for informational purposes, is on Joralemon Street near the northeast corner of Court Street.) And instead of buying a dresser, we:
2) Imagined my future library when I can finally afford to buy books again
3) Defiled a sheepskin rug by pretending I was wearing nothing underneath it
4) Appreciated the old industrial Brooklyn while surrounded by the new-Brooklyn aging-hipster dads with their thirty-is-the-new-twenty mentality and their ANNOYING CHILDREN
5) Ate some really weird stuff in the cafeteria
6) Didn’t eat some other weird stuff in the grocery section, thankfully
7) Tried to figure out the difference between hand-blown and mouth-blown
We ended up buying a set of plastic containers for me to haul salad fixins to work in (which will never actually happen) and a wooden artist’s model, which Kamran named Chip and kept petting while murmuring, “You’re my only friend.” We are truly a pathetic lot. But we have a good time.
These are the sorts of things we do on weekends to amuse ourselves:
Zig.
Zig zag.
Zig zag ZOOM!
Kamran’s flailing arms aside, my favourite part of the video is the beginning where I have to tell that woman she can walk in front of the camera. I swear New Yorkers are only polite when they’re being filmed.
Also, I should mention that this is from months ago, just in case you get freaked out by my short hair and the fact that we’re wearing coats in the midst of summer. Because I know our every move affects your emotional health.
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