Today at noon, I leave for three days in Ohio and then two days in Kentucky to see my baby sister GET MARRIED. Seeing as how we agreed long ago to never, ever wed, I obviously feel very betrayed by this. She and her fiancé have been together for more than three years and already own a house together, so this marriage is totally unnecessary and clearly just a way of hurting me.
However, I’m going to look awesome in my dark red bridesmaid’s dress that she picked out, so I forgive her.
But just in case this wedding is only a means of making it more socially acceptable when Joanie and Josh start having millions of babies (in Kentucky, no less), I just want to remind her of this picture of her holding our cousin’s son during Thanksgiving dinner:
Take the feeling you felt here and multiply it by ten thousand, Joanie.
And then imagine feeling it every moment of every day.
This is what it’s like to have a baby.
(Thank you and goodnight to all of my baby-owning friends out there.)
Saturday night began innocently enough, with five friends meeting for dinner at Mexico Lindo in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan to celebrate an impending birthday.
The friends, in order, are me (managing to look extra-crazed because I specifically tried to look normal), Sonya (in her authentic American Indian headdress), Jack (who is not as perverted as he appears), Beth (the birthday girl and owner of many granny sweaters), and Emily (who arrived twenty minutes late due to hair-straightening needs, which was generally deemed very worthwhile).
Not pictured: Bridgette, who stopped by for twenty minutes before returning to her GMAT studying and who DID sit beside me, lest you judge me uncool for having an empty seat next to me in the photo above.
Dinner, which was scheduled to last two hours to lead up to a showing of The Reader at the theatre across the street, actually lasted four hours due to extensive talk of how best to hide your tampon on your way to the public restroom at work (up the sleeve was eventually decided upon), whether it’s okay or not to pile trash on your friend when he falls asleep during karaoke (perfectly okay), and why Emily’s sister-in-law would buy her a shirt with a scoopneck that shows off ¾ of her boobs (because those things deserve to be enjoyed by all). The waitress brought out a giant bowl full of flambéed pears with a candle on top for Beth to blow out, but the pears were actually the dessert I ordered, because of course restaurants in New York City don’t give you anything complimentary on your birthday. Beth drank her coffee in silence as I licked every last flaming inch of the bowl myself.
After Sonya took it upon herself to explain what Two Girls One Cup is to me and we debated the feces’ similarity to chocolate softserve, the four of us girls piled into the back seat of a cab
and made Jack sit up front while we unabashedly discussed how you have to consciously remind yourself to look at the penises instead of the faces at Naked Boys Singing because you’re trained to be a good girl, and how totally hilarious it would be to hand over a tampon right out of your vagina when your friend asks to borrow one. “It’s only been in there an hour; it should be good as new!” Sonya said.
Having missed the movie, we got a private room at our favourite karaoke spot instead and spent the hours leading up until 3 a.m. enduring Sonya’s renditions of O-Town and the Spice Girls, Jack pretending like he was badass enough to know the lyrics to KISS’s Love Gun, and sadly realizing that only listening to male-fronted bands all my life means that I don’t actually know any songs in my vocal range as I really let Weezer down with my Say It Ain’t So.
Luckily, Emily and Sonya more than made up for it with some super-sexy Melissa-Etheridge-inspired lesbian dealings that would’ve been much sexier had they been in focus
and Beth–literally the whitest person I know–sang not one not two but THREE rap songs. One of which involved saying the word nigger over and over again, causing crowds of people to peek in the window into our room to see whose ass they should kick.
This is a video of Kamran personifying a coconut while we were at the grocery store one Sunday afternoon. (I hate it when people say simply grocery instead of grocery store.) This coconut act was super-hilarious at the time to me, as evidenced by all of the snorting I’m doing behind the camera to hold in my laughter. Now I mostly just like it because Kamran looks amazingly cute at the end.
It’s Restaurant Week Winter 2009! A time for all of NYC’s top executive assistants and other underpaid mongrels to make their boyfriends take them to uber-expensive celebrity-chef-staffed venues to live out their wildest foodie fantasies at a fraction of the normal cost! A time for those boyfriends to say things like, “It’s not like I couldn’t afford to go there any day I wanted to,” and to get slapped in the face! A time to consume all the carbs I’ve been depriving myself of since Restaurant Week Fall 2008!
Said boyfriend took me to Quality Meats in the fall for Restaurant Week after I saw an article about the place somewhere deep in the interwebs and thought it sounded dreamy: dark woods, exposed dim lightbulbs, and MEATS. It wasn’t the most well-known or critically-acclaimed of our Restaurant Week ventures, but it was certainly the best.
The funny thing is that afterward, we had to think pretty hard to remember much about our actual meal; all we cared about was getting our hands on more of the bread they serve while you wait. It came in a deep white dish, soaked in butter and sprinkled in salt and an undisclosed spice that Kamran the Boyfriend thinks may be rosemary. And thinking about it had me so excited this morning that I didn’t eat any of the leftover cornbread in my office’s refrigerator for fear of sullying my palate with lesser breads.
Well, the dish it was served in had changed when we went back today, but the bread was still the same. We made up our minds to ask for seconds no matter how full we got, and boy, did we. We tried it first without any butter to savor it in its purest form, but when we both put some spread on our slabs, we looked at each other at the same time with the twinkle of oh-crap-butter-is-awesome in our eyes.
Oh, yeah, and we had some real food, too. The choices were:
Appetizers
Roasted Butternut Squash Soup with Gingerbread Croutons
Seared Diver Scallops with Candied Walnuts and Grapes
Traditional Steak Tartare
Caesar Salad
Entrees
Hanger Steak with Cherry Sauce
Open-Faced Shrimp Salad Sandwich
Baby Back Ribs with Spicy Apricots
Some Sort of Salad Something-or-Other with Seared Tuna
Dessert
A dressed up scoop of:
Pomegranate Pear
Chocolate Rum Raisin
Orange Creamsicle
Double Fudge Mint
Vanilla
I would never have admitted it to Kamran at the time, but compared to the fall menu, I was a little disappointed. Where was my charcuterie plate with the fruit spreads and the array of cheeses? Where was my giant pork chop? And a scoop of some ice cream out of a cardboard box? Not interested.
I really only wanted the soup for the gingerbread croutons, so I went way out on a limb and ordered the scallops, even though I don’t do seafood. And they turned out to be great! Mostly because they were swimming in butter. But also because they weren’t the gelatinous globs I expected but were thinly sliced and browned on the edges. The walnuts were perfect and perished any lingering scared-of-fish thoughts I might have had.
Kamran, of course, ordered the tartare, which arrived plain in a bowl with an egg on top but had a sidebar of sea salt, mustard, onions, Worcestershire, and Tabasco. Here’s a pretty disgusting video of him mixing it all together with complete disregard for his taste buds:
It’s so gross and squishy that my camera couldn’t even bear to focus on it properly.
We both ordered the steak, ’cause it’s a steak restaurant. The waiter warned me that a hanger steak cooked through would be tough, but I told him, “I like it tough,” and you know I do. But no! Apparently the chef was not having it, because my steak came out totally pink. And strangely in two pieces, while Kamran’s was just one.
It was awesome, of course, charred on the edges and dripping with cherry. As was our Corn Crème Brûlée. (Awesome, I mean. Not dripping with cherry.)
That’s right–Corn Crème Brûlée. My two reasons for living, baked into the same dish.
The dessert course didn’t disappoint, and we should have known it wouldn’t. We evidently underestimated the phrase “dressed up” on the menu, because for Kamran’s scoop of pear sorbet, it meant pomegranate seeds on top and stewed cherries and pears on the bottom,
and for me, it meant a chocolate chocolate chip cookie on top and a brownie bowl on the bottom. Plus, this wasn’t one of those spoon-shaped two-bite scoops you’re seeing all over town: this was a bowl full.
It was such a great second experience, and such a super way to start off Restaurant Week. Just look how happy we are!
I have never in my life owned a proper pair of jeans. I wear jeans to work literally every day, so my closet is full of them, but they’re all Levi’s, American Eagle, Old Navy, even K-Mart. About a year ago, I was in the Manhattan Mall (which I’m pretty sure most New Yorkers don’t know exists and which consists of approximately eight stores) and walked into a Steve & Barry’s store simply because Sarah Jessica Parker had pushed her Bitten line (“available exclusively at Steve & Barry’s”) so hard on the episode of “Project Runway” in which she was a judge. Not to, you know, buy anything but to gawk at all of the rhinestone-studded tank tops with the “Sex and the City” logo on them.
I ended up with three pairs of Bitten jeans in various cuts and have never looked back. I love the fit, I love the wash, and I love that laundering them doesn’t make them shrink or change color, even after all this time. At $8.98 per pair, if I only wore each 50 times, it’d cost me about 17¢ for each wear. And I’ve probably actually worn each pair more like 500 times, so they were essentially free. AND ALSO THE BEST JEANS EVER.
When Steve & Barry’s stores started closing across the nation, I was like, “Noooooooooo sweat. Nothing closes down in NYC.” But oh, the humanity! When I went into the Manhattan Mall recently, my store was being liquidated, and the only Bitten jeans left were the freaky zipper-at-the-ankle kind. And I’m not a zipper-at-the-ankle kind of girl.
So I got the next best thing. That’s right–jeans designed by this girl. Sure, it’s a little embarrassing that in a city full of sample sales where designer jeans are 80% off, I’m buying $8 jeans made somewhere like the Republic of Mozambique, but it’s better to be a cheapskate than pay someone hundreds of dollars to rip fashionable holes in my pants, right? R . . . ight?
And now I’m off to eBay to buy my $8.98 jeans for a hefty mark-up of 400%.
So I have food poisoning, right? Which is sort of a joy right now, because while I was home in Ohio this past weekend, I tried on my bridesmaid’s dress for my best friend, Tracey’s wedding in March, and it turns out that I’m about five inches of torso away from getting the thing zipped. (She found THE dress discontinued and on sale and thought she could guess my size but no doubt bought it too small in an attempt to not offend me.) So I vomited about eighteen times yesterday at work and stayed home today, which is sort of great because I managed to lose four pounds in 24 hours thanks to not being able to keep even water down but sort of sucks because the meal I was vomiting up was grilled chicken and steamed vegetables instead of something I felt guilty about and wanted to purge, like pecan pie and maple ice cream.
At 3:30 this afternoon, I finally got to a place where I thought I could successfully stand up, and the pepperoni and pepperjack cheese in Kamran’s refrigerator didn’t sound so delicious, so I walked down the street to his Gristedes to buy some Jell-o and soup. I had been in front of the Campbell’s for maybe ten minutes, trying to find something, anything, without starch and sugar and tomatoes, when this stylish Nordic guy on a mobile phone dropped his box of pasta while walking in front of me. I excused the fact that he hadn’t excused himself before blocking my view of the soup and said, “I got it,” though bending over in my state of sickliness seemed like the worst idea possible. The guy kept chatting in his foreign tongue as I placed the box on top of his other items, and then he simply walked away.
While he was well within earshot, I said in my most monotone voice, “No problem. Glad I could help. Say no more.” The woman beside me shot me the dirtiest look and obviously scolded me in some language I didn’t recognize, so I turned, puked the last of the contents of my stomach all over her droll little fur hat, and went home to enjoy my Jell-o.
This morning, one of the blog writers I just started to follow wrote the following:
I’d love to write about parties and dates and where I went to eat. Impress you with the cutting-edge emo playlists on my iPod and casually mention that I caught such-and-such eyeliner-and-irony-clad band at a hole in the wall bar the other night.
At this point in my life, those stories would include a lot of Hot Wheels, mad dashes to the early movie, and tales of Ruby Tuesdays. My iPod playlists are full of songs to keep toddlers quiet while I’m on conference calls in the car.
Sweet, right? Snore.
And I was like, “OMG, please never let me grow up.” I get that women’s feelings apparently change hardcore after they have children, and I’m told that even I may devolve into something nurturing and selfless was I ever to give birth, but not being encumbered by adult stuff feels so good. As Dr. Boyfriend said after spending time with his married/babied friends over the holiday break, “I really appreciate the little life we’ve made for ourselves.” That little life being one that involves never eating dinner at home, dancing on Friday nights, and non-stop caring only for ourselves.
So in celebration of my perpetual youth, I offer you:
My (unexpected) teenage celebrity crush, which is not really a crush but an example
of how I’d like to conduct myself if I was to become famous. Look how cool his wave is.
My overly-emo song of the moment.
My really amazing birthday dessert sampler at Max Brenner that included POP ROCKS covered in liquid chocolate.
And my best friend and me, looking soooooo badass
on New Year’s Eve at our friends’ house party. (No?)
Sure, most of that party was spent taking pictures of their baby eating the husband’s nose
but I was wearing my homemade Bulletproof necklace while photographing, so they cancel each other out and leave nothing but my natural hardcoreness and me.
Happy birthday to my beautiful, successful, selfless, best-listener-ever of a best friend, Tracey, who has wrapped her naughty bits up in present form for your gift-giving convenience:
Although it wouldn’t make much sense for you to give her herself for her birthday.
But you get the idea.
I loooooooooove you, Trax, and I regret every minute we’re apart. Except when I know you’re making the squeaky eye noise in the morning.
Usually when I return to NYC after a holiday in the motherland of Ohio, I feel a huge sense of relief. All of my stuff is here: my apartment, my restaurants, my boyfriend. I don’t have to drive everywhere here, everything and everyone is cooler here (best friends not included, of course), and I don’t have to worry about having to make smalltalk with all the girls from high school who now work as grocery store cashiers in our hometown here.
This time, though, I made the huge mistake of spending my last night in Ohio with my best friend Tracey and my college friend James, who organizes unions for a living (OMG, best link ever, right?). He brought along two friends who used to hang out with us, one of whom is an Antarctic explorer, and one of whom is a boycott organizer. Naturally James’s first question to me was, “So when was the last time you shopped at Walmart?” And then we didn’t stop talking about labor, abortion, religion, and racism for the rest of the night.
It’s rough going back to the vacuousest city on Earth after that, you know? Suddenly the old man at the gym leaning back on his elliptical machine to stare at the ass of the girl next to me seems not just slightly annoying but actually detestable. And suddenly working at a $700 million software corporation seems a little bit more sell-out-y than I already knew it was. And suddenly all of my Democrat-because-they’re-young-but-just-waiting-to-turn-Republican-the-moment-they-make-their-first-million-dollars friends seem a little bit lamer.
But, you know, being surrounded by half-progressive friends is better than sitting in church next to fully-conservative gay-haters, and at least no pharmacist will ever deny me my daily Plan B here. Sigh.
At the gym this morning, I was listening to Morrissey’s You are the Quarry, and I was getting a little defensive over his song “America is Not the World“. Because while I agree with him, I’m American, and it’s therefore okay for me to spew hate about us, while he is a dirty Brit and would have never achieved the iconic status he has without the love of Americans, namely 20-year-old Hispanic boys living in California. But then I got to this line:
America, the land of the free, they said,
And of opportunity in a just and a truthful way,
But where the president is never black, female, or gay,
and until that day, you’ve got nothing to say to me to help me believe.
And I was like, “TAKE THAT, Morrissey! Sure there’s a bunch of death threats against our Prez-to-be, but we elected him all the same. IN YOUR FACE! (Looooooooove you.)”
