It may have been that I was overwhelmed by the joy I was feeling just from being in Ohio, but the following two things made me cry for no good reason last week:
1) The scene in “Glee” when the kids from the deaf school perform John Lennon’s “Imagine”. I generally find the show cheesy and overproduced, but I was unexpectedly emotional about the unconventional solo and the sappy joining together of the two rival choirs.
This is where my video clip would be if Fox wasn’t overly protective of their stupid show, didn’t hate free publicity, and hadn’t ratted me out to YouTube. You are dead to me, “Glee”.
2) At a screening of Fantastic Mr. Fox, my best friend and I saw the trailer for the upcoming movie Babies. I don’t even LIKE babies, but everything about this is wonderful. Especially the part that says, “THE BABIES ARE COMING.”
Every Thanksgiving, my stepmother-who-I’ve-known-my-whole-life-and-think-is-the-best-possible-stand-in-for-my-actual-mother-who-died-of-brain-cancer-in-2000 puts pieces of dried corn next to each person’s plate at the dinner table and tells us we have to give thanks for one thing for every piece of corn we have. Her kids, who are adults and not 14-year-olds as you might expect, seem to think this is a real challenge, even though there’s usually only two pieces of corn at their plates. Every year, I want to scream, “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, JUST SAY YOU’RE THANKFUL FOR JESUS AND REGULAR BOWEL MOVEMENTS!!” But their grandfather is always there, and you know how hard it is to get geriatrics off the topic of bowels once it comes up.
Anyway, to prove how totally easy it is for me to come up with things I’m thankful for, here’s a short list:
1) My dad, who I look forward to seeing at every holiday gathering both because he always eats more pie than I do to keep me from looking like a fatty and because he’s totally fine with discussing right in front of everyone what a disappointment I am for not bombing abortion clinics every chance I get.
2) My best friend, Tracey, who pretends with an uncanny level of believability that she misses me when I’m not in Ohio with her and who doesn’t mind if I steal all of her Vanilla Coke Zero when I’m in Ohio with her. And also who doesn’t have sex with her husband for entire weeks at a time when I visit because I’m latched on to her at all hours of the day.
3) Kamran.
4) My best New York friend, Beth, who wears Prada shoes but totally doesn’t mind my Chucks, who drinks artisan cocktails but will totally buy me a Woodchuck or a Magners, and who only listens to Madonna but will totally go see Sufjan with me. If I buy her ticket.
5) Bachelor Girl, who posts things like this without any consideration for the fact that I’m building a stalker case against her publicly in case anything bad happens to me. You are my BBFF, baby.
7) The part of Band of Horses’s “Ode to the LRC” where he says, “The world is such a wonderful place.” Because it really feels that way at that moment.
9) Everyone who reads this thing, including the people who find it by using Google search terms such as “never thought i’d be a homewrecker” and “i scraped off a mole with my fingernail”.
which is a five-day street fair in a town ten minutes away from where I grew up, beloved by the world and chock full of country charm such as
the belief that pumpkin-related foods are entertainment,
so many effin’ pumpkin displays it makes the pie center of your brain kick into triple overdrive,
inappropriate signage,
and so much food that you start to force feed it to your family pets just to get rid of all the treats you bring home with you.
All of our eatin’ is cataloged here at donuts4dinner.com, because you non-food-loving types don’t deserve to get to see photos of deep-fried peanut butter.
The view down a lonely Williamsburg street at the last rooftop party of the summer.
Emily brings her hypoallergenic Yorkiepoo to work, and I convince Jack to stick him in the fridge. Emily is not amused.
Steve receives an Amazon gift card from Michael Jackson with the following note: I’m really happy for you, Elvis, and I’mma let you finish, but Steve is one of the best kings of all time. Of all time.
An accidental snapshot confirms that I’m a robot with lifeless doll eyes.
This weekend, instead of properly paying attention to me, Kamran combed YouTube for all of the songs listed in New York magazine’s Brooklyn Top 40, the top 40 songs coming out of Brooklyn and defining what it means to be indie right now. He made a playlist of them, which you can enjoy here:
I feel so close to all of these artists somehow. Both physically, because I live down the street from them, but also . . . not spiritually, because that’s lame, but somehow like spiritually, because this sound is so distinctly Brooklyn to me, and I feel so distinctly Brooklyn myself.
While we sat on Kamran’s loveseat, him reading cases for law school and me scanning blogs as we listened to the playlist for the second time, he looked over and said, “We should be doing this!” I said, “Oh, um, I don’t know if we could do this.” He said, “Well, not THIS. This is good.”
This is the song he was talking about:
We decided that when we need to feel better about ourselves and how easy making music is, we’ll listen to this:
I forget sometimes that I’m so freakin’ lucky to live in a city where this stuff is being made and is readily available to me. I saw Crystal Stilts open for Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, saw Amazing Baby open for Cold War Kids, saw MGMT play in an abandoned pool, saw The Dirty Projectors play on the Williamsburg waterfront. Remind me of this when I say I can’t be out at a show until 2 on a weeknight.
Yesterday, as Kamran was doing his Body Test on our Wii Fit, the little Wii Fit Board icon thing with the unexplainable baby voice decided to take a detour and asked him how I was doing. Then, it asked him to select whether I looked lighter, heavier, or the same after my recent sessions of hardcore Wii hula-hooping and Wii bowling.
Kamran looked at me as I sat eating chocolate fudge brownie Ben & Jerry’s and politely chose “the same”. The Wii Fit told him that perhaps he should pay more attention to me. We laughed, since I’m always doing dances around his apartment on the weekends to get him to pay attention to me instead of his law school books.
The Wii Fit then told him that in studies, dogs that are paid more attention by their owners are more motivated. Hmph.
Last week’s New York magazine had the most interesting article about a co-housing community trying to plant roots in Brooklyn. The idea is that they’ll buy an abandoned factory or warehouse, fit it with something like 30 apartments, and include huge common areas where people can gather. They’ll make all decisions as a community, eat dinner together, keep their apartment doors open, and basically be family to each other in a city where people pride themselves on anonymity.
I love the idea. I’m now dying to be a part of it and would be in a second if I had the $500k for one of their apartments. I talk daily about how much I miss the way people say hello to everyone they pass in my hometown in Ohio, the way you have to respect and care for each other when you know each other’s fathers and brothers and were taught by each other’s grandmothers in elementary school. When you pass different people every day and your neighbor literally runs into his apartment to avoid having to exchange pleasantries with you, it’s much easier to feel separate and to be selfish and rude. Imagine how many fewer people I’d have to kick in the balls on the subway if we all knew each other personally and didn’t assume our problems were worse and ourselves more deserving of a comfortable spot on the train. It’d be like living in a college dorm room all over again, except with children and puppies.
Yet everyone else I’ve talked to seems to think this is a terrible idea. You?
I like to judge people for fairly irrational things like:
1) not liking something as small as onions, while I myself hate everything that comes from the sea except possibly crab, and I only eat that when forced,
2) not putting their dirty dishes in the dishwasher at work, while I myself leave dishes in the sink at Kamran’s for days, and
3) using abbreviations like “lol” in chat, while I myself say “brb” all of the time, though I usually follow it up with “~@~”, which in Google chat looks like a pile of poo with flies circling around it, and the awesomeness of that cancels out my “brb”.
There’s one thing I judge people for that I don’t think is irrational, though, and that’s not washing their hands after using the bathroom. I know that ingesting someone else’s urine likely isn’t going to kill me, but I still feel so superior as I take an extra-long time to wash my hands in the bathroom and call innocently to anyone who leaves without stopping at the sink, “Oh, excuse me, but I think you accidentally-and-not-at-all-because-you’re-a-lazy-respectless-heathen forgot to wash your hands!” With the hugest, fakest smile on my face.
As I was rinsing today at work, though, I wondered, what do people who don’t wash their hands think about me? Are they judging me for being too clean?
On the way back to Kamran’s apartment with lunch on a Sunday afternoon, the Chrysler Building still stops us after three+ years of living by it.
At a GRE study session before dinner, Bridgette tells us about the molestation case she just finished jury duty for that afternoon, and Chantee is incredulous. Either that, or this is where we were arguing over the definition of the word assail, and Chantee was really into it.
A view of the Yankees World Series ticker tape parade in downtown from my office building.
Crazy Aunt Dorothy™ bakes me her famous German chocolate cake when I visit Ohio for my birthday.
After a visit to the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Seduction exhibit, Beth and I appropriately pass the Museum of Sex and learn a new fun fact.
The Awesome Part About Working in Downtown NYC on Yankees World Series Parade Day: My office building overlooks the parade, so I can watch it from our balcony without having to actually stand amongst the stinking masses.
The Awful Part About Working in Downtown NYC on Yankees World Series Parade Day: I don’t actually care about the Yankees or even baseball in general, yet I had to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with all of the cheerful fans this morning on the train. Grand Central was flooded with people in jerseys who had apparently taken the day off for the parade, which makes me a little sick to my stomach.
The Idiot Thing I Did in NYC on Yankees World Series Parade Day: I wore baby blue pants with a baby blue shirt and a navy blue track jacket. If one more person says something Yankees-positive to me on the train today despite the fact that I’m wearing headphones and reading a magazine, there will be blood.
I received a notice from OkCupid’s QuickMatch function this morning that one of the following nine men gave me a high rating:
I looked through them, considering which is most likely to want to bang me, and decide that really, any of them would make a suitable replacement for Kamran if ever a Kamran replacement was needed.
The first guy is at a sporting event, which turns me off, but at least I know he’s likely not one of those house-bound fatties who needs to be lifted through his roof with a crane every time he needs to leave.
The seventh guy looks a little unwashed, but he’s wearing a shirt that appears to say “Iron Lung”, which means he either likes Radiohead or iron lungs in general, and either of those is fine with me.
The second guy reminds me of Randy Travis in profile, but he’s in a plane, and I appreciate a world traveler. And I’m assuming this guy is a world traveler and not an NYC-to-Ohio-and-back traveler like me.
The fourth guy isn’t even necessarily a guy, and that mask is exceedingly stupid, but it leads me to believe the person is into art, which is great, even if it’s dumb art.
And so on and so on. With all of the daydreaming I was doing about my potential relationships with the relatively normal-looking gentleman, it took me several minutes to actually process this guy:
I love the picture, because it’s one of those that keeps him from having to write a single word about himself in his profile. He has a mullet and a mustache and is CREEPILY PEERING AT YOU FROM BEHIND A BUSH. Or a tree. Whatever. The point is that you know all you need to know about him and his late night lady-watching habits from that photo alone.
This is all that’s left of Halloween, but it sure was good while it lasted. Kamran and I spent Friday night watching horror movies instead of, you know, piecing together a simple costume so as to not disrespect our friend Anthony’s party the next night.
To make us feel extra bad, Anthony seriously went all-out for this thing. As if we weren’t impressed enough to actually know someone who owns a house and can therefore have a legitimate house party (even if it was out on Long Island), he had the place covered in cobwebs and bathed in creepy lighting with awesome additions like strings of razorblades hanging in the doorway to the dining room. His friends all had elaborate costumes, and he went around the party in an H1N1 emergency response team uniform, drinking what he said was germ-ridden waste.
I ended up wearing a pink tank top with a black shirt covered in stars over it and said I was aurora borealis, while Kamran wore a striped sweater and said he was Freddie Kreuger had he gone straight, stopped murdering kids, and gotten his PhD. No one was impressed, but we brought a box of thirty assorted candy bars with us, so we didn’t get egged.
Of course, we ended up eating at least half of those thirty candy bars ourselves and stuffing more in our pockets for the long ride home on the Long Island Railroad, but no one was sober enough to notice.
