Unapologetically Mundane » all of my friends are prettier than i am

Bethany, Tracey, the Chocolate Dentures, and the Little Nubbin

katie ett — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:00:07 +0000

My cousin Bethany and I were born 47 minutes apart. Same day, month, and year.

My uncle called my grandpa from the hospital: “You have a granddaughter!”

And then my dad called 47 minutes later: “You have a granddaughter!”

“I know,” my grandpa said.

“No, another one!”

Growing up, Bethany and I got along–very well, I’d say–but there were little things that separated us. She was really into the outdoors, and I was really into my hair. She was really into Jesus, and I was really into shock humor that she found appalling. She was really into being a smartypants knowitall first-grade-skipper, and I was really into being a bratty tattletale who didn’t care about anyone else. But we both liked New Kids on the Block and Pass the Pigs and Mastermind, and we could play in her basement for hours when she devised “pool tests” for my sister and me to challenge our skills (comma “lack of”) on her family’s billiards table, and she once helped me learn all of the books of the Old Testament during her church service so I could impress her Sunday School class afterward.

I decided to go to OSU as a high school senior after visiting Bethany there her freshman year, requested to live on her dorm floor the next year, and had a group of movie-watching, trivia-playing, Chinese-buffet-eating friends already waiting for me because she let me hang out with her. We lived together for a year in college in what basically amounts to a slum house with a broken stair we would’ve fallen through several times if the carpet covering it hadn’t been there to save us, a random working kitchen in one of the bedrooms, exposed power lines on the fire escape, neighbors who lit our dumpster on fire, and a parking lot where our cars were spraypainted. Soon after, Bethany moved to Russia for two years, figured out she wanted to be a veterinarian, and came home to go to vet school at OSU.

And . . . something was different. Maybe we had just grown up. Or maybe the distance had made us subconsciously realize how important family is. But where I used to see this smartypants knowitall dork kid, I saw a genuinely warm and caring person who could constantly make me laugh and knew everything about me because she’d been there for all of it. Now I look forward to seeing her on holidays and try to spend extra time with her and her mom before big family dinners, making their famous cloverleaf rolls and pumpkin rolls and exchanging gifts that only we would be amused by.

So when I only had time to see Bethany on Christmas and New Year’s Eve during the first week of my last visit home, I talked my best friend, Tracey, into driving us to see her in Portsmouth, Ohio, which is the halfway point between our hometown and Bethany’s new vet job in Kentucky. We were using some pretty crappy directions we’d printed out, got ourselves lost in downtown Portsmouth, and found ourselves driving across the Ohio River into Kentucky accidentally. U-turns are illegal in Ohio, but when we got to the end of the bridge, we decided we were technically in Kentucky, and Tracey swung her car around right there in the middle of the intersection. We cheered and high-fived and congratulated ourselves for being total badasses.

We had dinner with Bethany at a BBQ joint called Scioto Ribber (See what they did there? It’s a play on the Scioto River! Which I challenge any non-Ohioan to pronounce.) and then went for dessert at DQ (even though there was a cute local place right across the street), which is really the whole point of this post.

Bethany’s ridiculous faces as she enjoyed her Blizzard:

And Tracey’s ridiculous faces as she tongued the little nubbin on the top of her sundae and then found a dentures-shaped piece of chocolate in the cup:

Good times.

(nubbin!)

Noel. No-EL. Knoll. NO-uhl.

katie ett — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:00:39 +0000

I’ve met my blogfriend and yours Noel five or six times now. We found each other through a girl I went to high school with, and I was immediately drawn to the way she can write soulfully about seriously provocative issues without turning hippie-dippy or New-Age-y. Noel’s husband was a few years behind me in school, so I was aware of his brother, and he was aware of my cousin, and Noel had been to all of my favourite places in Ohio. Like my hometown. And the one and only pizzeria in it. And the Circleville Pumpkin Show.

Noel gets mad that I sometimes mention our dates here but never show any pictures of us together, so I’m continuing the trend (mostly because I didn’t actually take any pictures of us this time around). Here’s a picture of my best friend, Tracey, holding Noel and Ryan’s son, Silas:

Did you just feel your reproductive system cry out a little? No? Mine, neither, but let me tell you that Silas is twice as cute in person as in pictures, and this was in the rain when he was in need of a nap and had just watched us gnaw on burgers at Max & Erma’s for an hour while he had, like, peas or something.

Later in the week, Tracey and I met Noel again for dinner at The Cheesecake Factory while Ryan watched the kid, and we talked about families and teaching and boys and blogs and boobs. Then we went to see My Week with Marilyn, in which Michelle Williams had my hair, and in which Hermione Granger didn’t get naked, and in which I snorted so loud when Marilyn Monroe announced that Abe Lincoln was her dad.

And thus concludes the December meeting of blogfriends who pronounce their names weirdly.

Blogfriends in The ‘Burgh

katie ett — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:00:49 +0000

I have to admit that the first time I read Cassie‘s blog, I didn’t know quite what to think. Well, actually, I did know quite what to think, and what I thought was that she was some mostly-unemployed teen mom who wasn’t sure who her dad is. I wasn’t totally unjustified:

1) She and her husband decided to start having kids right away, so even though they look really young, they’re well out of the age range where old ladies might faint and townsfolk might try to stone Cassie when she runs by with her triple-wide jogging stroller.

2) She only works one day a week because she spends the rest of her time raising her beautiful children to not judge others by the first page of posts on their blogs.

3) Her URL may include the words “whosmydaddy”, but that’s just because she has several father figures. Not because her mom was a lady of the night with an undetermined number of partners.

Anyway. After months of being like, “Who do all of my other blogfriends like Cassie so much?”, I checked her out again and realized that for some reason, I’m really interested in this person who blogs about children, cooking, and exercise.

I know. I have no idea why, either.

So while I was in Ohio for two weeks, Cassie and I made a plan to somehow coerce my best friend, Tracey, to drive me the three hours to Pittsburgh so the three of us could, you know, stuff our faces, taunt some geese, and generally align our menstrual cycles, as women are wont to do.

We met as Cassie’s house just outside of the city and said a quick hello to the kids before thrusting them at her wonderful husband, Matt, and driving downtown to enjoy the Christmas decorations

and dinosaur decorations,

to eat some saucy Mexican food at Las Velas,

and to walk along the shore of the Allegheny. Or the Monongahela. I’m not sure.

As we were coming up from the riverfront, Cassie warned us to watch our step and to not excite the geese, who frequently attack her with their great, stabby beaks while she’s out running. She began quietly herding them using her best mama duck walk,

but of course Tracey couldn’t help but antagonize them:

Cassie drove us in her fancy rich people SUV to the neighborhood of Mount Washington, which is perched high on a cliff that overlooks the entire city and takes advantage of it with these balconies that hang out over the edge:

It was a cloudy, rainy, gross day, but the view was nonetheless amazing and had us regretting that Columbus and NYC are both totally flat:

view larger

I tried to take some glamour shots of Cassie and pretty much failed,

but I was a teeny bit more successful with Tracey, probably because she’s more used to my shenanigans. And is also kind of slutty. (Just kidding! She’s totally respectable!)

We took in all of the sights:

and then Cassie drove us from neighborhood to neighborhood, pointing out all of Pittsburgh’s landmarks, until we go to the most important one of all, Oakmont Bakery:

This place was extensive. Just cases and cases of pies, donuts, truffles, macarons, cupcakes, chocolate-dipped everything, cake pops, cinnamon buns–you name it. And all of it was astoundingly cheap. When the cashier charged me less than $6 for my mini peanut butter pie, lemon French macaron, buckeye, and black and white cookie (covered with icing on both sides!), I told her she must have mischarged me. But no.

Our diabetes satiated, we drove back to Cassie’s house to let the kids entertain us for a couple of hours. I find children really intimidating and, you know, generally annoying, but hers are both friendly and angelic, quick to smile for the camera and slow to pee on the carpet.

Claire tried on all of her costumes for us:

Luca played with everything and everyone in the house:

and Mae proved that no picture can adequately capture her cuteness (but I sure tried):

They were the

most adorable

family ever:

Even while this was happening:

Cassie did such a great job of tour guiding us that I left feeling like Pittsburgh is place not just for headsick sports fans but for real people who like amazing views, dirt roads just miles from downtown, and lots and lots of baked goods.

Thanks for the awesome time, Cassie! And get ready for our next visit, because I accidentally threw out my macaron and peanut butter pie on the way home with our Burger King trash and the wrapper for the cookie dough we ate that morning on the way to see you (what?), and you know that will not stand.

A Spontaneous Christmas Photoshoot

katie ett — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:00:18 +0000

While I was at home in Ohio, my best friend, Tracey, wanted me to take pictures of her and her husband, Dan, with their Christmas tree. Well, he was wearing his Duder shirt,

and they found it pretty awkward that I was like, “Just be natural! Don’t pose!”,

and the cats wouldn’t cooperate,

and the only light we had was from their ceiling fixture,

and they kind of just wanted to fight

and torture one another

and eat each other’s heads,

but other than that, I think it went pretty well!

Aren’t they adorable?

It was so fun to do this spontaneously, but next time, I want to have proper lighting and to make them dress up in matching crushed velvet Christmas outfits and to have tranquilizers ready for the cats.

Happy Bigtime Birthday, Tracey!

katie ett — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:30:52 +0000

I know presents are the reason for the season and all, but I was really back home in Ohio for the past two and a half weeks to celebrate my best friend, Tracey‘s, 30th birthday. While I celebrated my last birthday quietly and with fingers crossed that no one would remember it was my 30th, Tracey celebrated hers with karaoke, gigantic 3-0 candles, and Justin Bieber cupcakes all around:

Tracey pretending that she’s not really into this whole party thing.

Guess who ate these in abundance and wore the Bieber rings without irony. This guy!

This is a hilarious picture until you remember that the noisemakers Tracey bought actually turned out not to make noise.

Only a party at Tracey’s house would include a bowl of just pepperoni.

Tracey totally made this for her husband’s last birthday and not for herself. Just so you know.

Tracey’s husband, Dan, presents Tracey with her cupcakes while Erin serenades her.

Graham is mesmerized by the non-noisemaking noisemakers.

Happy 30th birthday, my best best friend!

You are my life partner, my lab partner, my partner in crime, the wind beneath my wings, my baby bumblebee, the demon seed and the factor!

And I love you.

The Time I Had a Couple of Freaks from the Internet Come Stay with Me

katie ett — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 18:00:05 +0000

My longtime blogfriend Ellie found me because my old LiveJournal icon was a still from the movie Grey Gardens. My longtime blogfriend Kinard found me because we both had an unnatural-yet-totally-not-fangirl-ish love of the band Jump, Little Children, and she sat next to me at a concert without introducing herself. They found each other when Ellie moved from Oregon to South Carolina, and I told her to look Kinard up. They became fast friends and left me in the dust.

Until Ellie’s birthday approached, and they decided that the perfect way to celebrate would be to spend a few nights not doing touristy things in NYC with me. We planned extensively and then totally changed our plans. We watched the TKTS discount ticket listings and tried to convince Kinard she didn’t really want to see Mandy Patinkin and Patti LuPone on Broadway. I woke up the Saturday after Thanksgiving in Ohio and clicked repeatedly and extensively on the Momofuku Ko reservations website until I secured us a dinner spot after mentioning to Ellie and Kinard that it’s the most interesting restaurant in NYC and finding out that they knew of it and wanted to go but never thought we’d be able to get in. We tried to figure out a way to eat both truffles and caviar while they were here. I didn’t tell them our living room still doesn’t have blinds after a year and that they’d be sleeping in full view of our nosy neighbors.

My roommate/landlord/co-worker seemed totally fine with their visit until he realized halfway through our workday on Friday that:

1) I had never actually met either of them, and
2) they were alone in his condo.

But they didn’t steal anything that we know of (not that my candy wrapper clutch is interesting to anyone but me), and I met them and my other blogfriend-turned-real-life-friend Kim at Tocqueville for dinner. It’s one of my favourite restaurants ever, despite what our chef at Momofuku Ko said about it being stodgy. HE HAS NEVER ACTUALLY BEEN THERE. HE DOESN’T KNOW.

We ate hearty squash soups and roasted Brussels sprouts over succulent chicken breasts and truffled grits with dunky eggs and were plied with bowls and bowls of ice creams and sorbets on the house until 7:59 p.m., at which time we decided it was time to leave for our 8 p.m. Broadway show, which was Seminar starring Alan Rickman of Harry Potter and Love Actually fame. It was basically what I wanted every one of my college writing seminars to be and made me nostalgic for a time when people thought I had potential and I wrote on actual paper.

via seminaronbroadway.com

Afterward, we unintentionally walked out into Times Square, and while Kinard and Ellie acted like they didn’t care about it, I definitely caught them doing this:

And also this:

And this:

Even Kurmudgeon Kim was having a good time:

But then Pedophile Mickey Mouse showed up

and we had to go.

The next day, we rode the train into Madison Square Park

and ate sloppy Shake Shack burgers

and cheese fries with little wooden forks:

An evil squirrel came within inches of Kinard’s candy cane/hot fudge/marshmallow shake

but there wasn’t a chance that thing was wrestling a bite away from a girl enjoying her dessert this much:

Ellie, meanwhile, was trying to play it cool and succeeding wildly:

We spent the afternoon at MoMA, which I’ll have to recap in a post of its own, and then stopped at a nearby coffee shop to refuel for that evening’s big dinner at Ko. There was nowhere to sit in the coffee shop, so I had the brilliant idea of leading us down a few more blocks to Rockefeller Center, where there are sprawling plazas full of unoccupied benches.

EXCEPT DURING CHRISTMASTIME, OF COURSE. The streets were brimming with families leaving the Rockettes show at Radio City Music Hall. There were barricades at every corner meant to corral traffic that only succeeded in making the sidewalks unpassable. We finally did make it to 30 Rock, only to discover that the “sprawling plaza” was packed with strollers and women yelling, “Someone’s going to get HURT!” It was, to say the least, a mistake.

So we took the train down to the East Village, made a couple of laps from 1st Avenue to 2nd Avenue and back again until it was time to meet Kamran at Momofuku Ko for the girls’ first Michelin-starred-restaurant experience. Dinner was phenomenal: cheese-flavored broth with bone marrow over brioche, snail and chicken sausage on top of hand-torn pasta, the famous frozen shaved foie gras over fresh lychee and Riesling gelee, just to name a few. Plus that first taste of caviar Ellie was looking for, served in a heap next to a smoked egg. Ellie and Kinard were pros; they ate everything without question and said that some things they hadn’t liked so much in the past were made to taste delicious at Ko.

Kamran said I was being a snobby show-off at dinner, and it’s true that I complained to our James-Franco-look-alike chef that when we were in two weeks prior, the guys beside us had an embarrassing lack of knowledge about food, and yes, even James Franco told me to stop being a snob, but he hadn’t even eaten at Tocqueville, so I think my snobbery is deserved. No? Really? Okay, fine. Ellie and Kinard took it in stride, though, because I imagine they expected me to be a total braggart, anyway.

BFFs!

We spent the rest of the night visiting dive bars and pretending like we’re the kinds of girls who do shots. There was, for some reason, a surprising lack of people out anywhere, so I think NYC came off as this nice, serene place where you can just walk into a bar and actually get a seat and/or service from a bartender. Must have been the cold.

The next day, we went to Artichoke for pizza, because:

1) it is delicious.
2) it’s unlike any other NYC pizza.
3) normal NYC pizza is bland and dumb.
4) some people call it the best pizza in NYC (maybe me, too).
4) I wanted them to have an awesome insider pizza-eating experience.

So of course they were naturally like, “This pizza is okay, but we were really looking forward to getting the bland and dumb pizza Ellie’s boss recommended.” And then I died.

Look at that! So cheesy and creamy and thick-crusted! How could they not love it?!

But we followed it up with karaoke, which they were awesome at despite Ellie’s poor choice of Neil Diamond and my even poorer choice of Cat Stevens, and fries from Pommes Frites in the courtyard of St. Mark’s Church and a quarter-ton of frozen yogurt topped with mochi cubes and peanut butter cups and gummy bears from 16 Handles.

And then instead of walking across the Brooklyn Bridge like we had planned, we went back to my apartment and watched Jackass 3 and “The Virgin Diaries“. Like not-tourists.

And then they left the next day without having seen any New York friends other than me. I win I win I win!

Happy birthday, Ellie, and happy four-days-since-meeting-me anniversary, Kinard!

The Practice Thanksgiving

katie ett — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:00:55 +0000

One of the things about living in NYC that I’ve found hardest to adjust to is not hanging out at people’s apartments. We all either live in places too small to hold more than two people at a time or places too out of the way for anyone to want to travel to. If it’s not one, it’s the other.

But this year, my friend Ash was determined to have a practice Thanksgiving at her apartment and went all-out with impressive invitations, a massive menu, and promises that she would hunt us down and stuff us if we didn’t make it worth her while to take up her entire refrigerator with a brining turkey for two days. So we took cabs or spent three hours navigating weekend subway construction to make it to her and her husband, Michael’s, Queens apartment last Saturday night for a pre-Thanksgiving feast our families will have a hard time topping tomorrow.

Michael and Ash got rid of about half of the furniture in their place to make room for this new dining table they bought especially for the occasion. Well worth it, I say.

Ash carved a turkey for the first time and looked smokin’ doing it.

The turkey was about the moistest meat I’ve ever had in my life. The stuffing was fruity, the sweet potatoes spicy, the twice-baked potatoes bacony, the cauliflower casserole creamy, the green beans smoky, the apple pie belly-warming, the lemon cheesecake rich.

There was gravy, too, but I never eat gravy. Am I the only one who thinks it’s tooooooootally weird stuff?

Michael was in high spirits,

Ash was being Betty Sue Homemaker,

Jack was his usual pleasant self,

Jeff was complaining that the ice cream was regular vanilla and not vanilla bean,

Gizmo was pretending to innocently play with a ball under the table while secretly waiting for dropped turkey,

and Penny, the cat we found in the Hamptons, was acting like all of us would be about two minutes after dinner:

Success!

Circleville Pumpkin Show 2011!

katie ett — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:00:36 +0000

Kamran’s been bugging me to post pictures of our trip to Ohio for the Circleville Pumpkin Show (mostly to see himself, I imagine), and I guess pumpkins are still in fashion for another week or two before the holiday sales start and my favourite Christmas song begins to wear on me after only a few days, so here’s a recap of our fun:

My best friend, Tracey, has a long-standing tradition with some of her freshman-year college friends of gathering at her house a few towns over on the Friday night of Pumpkin Show and driving down together. We always park in Ted Lewis Park and then walk up the hill to Court Street, which begins the blocks and blocks of closed streets full of vendors selling pumpkin-related everything. On the way, though, we always pass a house that sells pumpkins (on the honor system! adorably quaint!) and has this pumpkin farmer sitting outside:

Tracey, Dayna the ice skater, and Justin-who-convinced-me-to-buy-my-first-Apple-iBook

Before we had even made it one block into the thing, Tracey was already double-fisting a corndog and a bloomin’ potato that we all shared

and then we quickly moved on to calzones that my dad introduced me to a couple of years ago. I recognized the booth because the same wildly-stereotypical white trash woman was working in it, but she’s very nice and slathers the things in butter sauce before giving them to you, so I’m not judging.

We met up with my dad at the church booth where my cousins were selling hot chicken sandwiches (an Ohio phenomenon that involves cooking chicken in its broth, shredding it, and mixing it with, I don’t know, lots of black pepper and weird thickening stuff that gives the broth this kind of gelatinous texture; it’s awesome despite this disgusting characterization) and said embarrassing citypeople things to remind my dad how long I’ve been away from home.

And then he left, and we ate some more.

• deep-fried pickles
• pumpkin whoopie pies
• fried cheese on a stick
• homemade ice cream
• cotton candy
• deep-fried s’more
• deep-fried buckeyes
• apple cider slushes

and plenty more that I’ve forgotten, no doubt.

We visited the six-foot-wide pie and posed in front of the year’s biggest pumpkin (1436 pounds!)

before sidling up to the stretch of tables, where you can buy every kind of gourd imaginable, for the obligatory sexy pumpkin shot:

And then the HOLY CRAP, IS THAT A FACE ON A PUMPKIN? shot:

We could only guess that these things were grown inside of a face mold. They had the texture of the outside of a pumpkin, so they must not have been carved later, but whatever they were, they were creepy as can be.

When we got to the usual pile of various decorative gourds, Kamran picked up one that was especially weirdly-shaped and made a freaky face for me to take a picture of. Well, right at that moment, some big dumb Circlevillian stepped away from whatever meth he was smoking and yelled,

“HEY!!”

Now, if it had been me holding the gourd, I would’ve thrown it smack-dab in the middle of his big empty head and said, “I FLEW HERE FROM NEW YORK CITY FOR THIS THING!! IF ANYONE LOVES THE PUMPKIN SHOW, IT’S ME!! YOU’D BE MORE LIKELY TO BRUSH YOUR TEETH THAN I WOULD BE TO STEAL THIS GOURD, YOU SLOBBERING BEEF-WITTED CANKER-BLOSSOM!!

But it was Kamran holding the gourd, so he quickly put it back down and apologized, and I caught this picture of him halfway between making the funny face and whipping his head around to see his accuser:

The only thing I could do to get revenge on the guy was to continue hanging around the table and taking pictures so he and his redneck cronies were forced to watch us not stealing anything. I never got this sort of treatment before I owned a pleather jacket.

(I really hope I was making this face to be funny and not because I ever really look like that.)

I enjoyed that this picture harkened back to the days of yore when I had prize-winning potatoes as my blog header image but would love to know how anyone can judge what makes a good pie pumpkin without actually using it in a pie:

Tracey and I modeled our pumpkin earrings by Handmade by Sandi maybe slightly too creepily

and then humped Justin for good measure:

At the end of the night, well past the supposed closing time, we made our way back to the cars and couldn’t resist stopping for one last hurrah as we passed the farthest cotton candy/soda stand on the strip. As we stood waiting for Kamran to get his soda, someone noticed one of these wooden cane/stick things that I would say I associate with the Pumpkin Show even more than pumpkin burgers and pumpkin cream puffs and all of those things.

Growing up, we would spend hours at the game where you won these things. For $5, you’d get 50 rings that you’d try to toss onto one of the sticks, which were standing up in holes cut through a long table. There’d be 30 kids standing around the table, trying to ring one of the sticks or hook the crook of one of the canes, which were hanging above the table even more out of reach.

It was such a status symbol when we were teenagers to walk around the Pumpkin Show with a handful of these things, tapping the ground to remind people of how many you had. And also to pretend to be blind. Naturally Kamran wanted one after hearing about how cool having them used to make us, and he finally had his chance in the last moments of the evening:

But of course he actually left it there, because we’re adults who don’t need status symbols to feel good about ourselves. Except for our phones and laptops and vacations and clothes and cars and dinner reservations.

The next night, we came back with my dad, and my sister and her husband drove up from Kentucky, and we did it all over again. And we’ll do it again next year and every year for the rest of our lives.

Love is Patient. Love is Kind. Love Does Not Steal Your Robot Cookie.

katie ett — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 19:30:42 +0000

After a bazillion years of dating, my former co-worker, Eric, and his girlfriend, Christine, finally decided to stop living together in sin and started planning their wedding in her hometown of Miami. She whispered the date to me one night at my office dinner club and asked if I could come, and I said I probably couldn’t swing a plane ticket for the wedding and Thanksgiving in Ohio in the same month. And then I of course bought the ticket to Miami, like, the next day. My roommate/landlord/co-worker/friend, Jack, was also representing the not-Eric’s-friend-from-college contingent, so we flew down one night a couple of weeks ago after work for a whirlwind weekend filled with not wearing sandals, one of the best weddings ever, and so many stolen robot cookies.

Jack and I had just the morning and afternoon before the wedding to explore Miami, so naturally we didn’t leave our hotel until noon, and then it took $40 and a ridiculous amount of time to get from our hotel to South Beach, ten miles away. That was the weird thing about Miami: everything looks super-close on the map but never actually is. Since we’re used to walking everywhere in NYC, we thought it’d be no problem to walk across the bridge to South Beach, and then Google told us it would take three hours. So we ended up taking taxis everywhere, which was a different experience in that you call independent companies to come pick you up instead of just walking out your front door and hailing one of a thousand passing cabs, and some guy shows up in what might be his personal car with a backseat full of fast food wrappers. In a way, it’s cool, because you can’t call yellow cabs here and are sometimes left waiting for ten minutes at the side of the road on Saturday nights or when it rains, but in another way, I like the big divider that separates me from my cab driver here and makes him seem more like someone I’ve hired to do my bidding and less like my dad driving me home from the mall in his ’92 Toyota Camry or whatever.

Anyway, once we got to South Beach, we beelined for this restaurant Jack had picked out on Yelp. You know, despite the fact that I have an acclaimed palate and have been professionally critiquing food for the past three years. (Just kidding.) But seriously, I had bookmarked three or four restaurants that had four and five stars and would serve us an authentic Cuban sandwich, but Jack felt like he needed brunch. Brunch. In South Beach. But it was fine (three donuts and no more, if I was reviewing it for donuts4dinner.com), and then we had the rest of the afternoon to walk along the boardwalk separating the beach from the fancy hotels that seem to be having boozy pool parties all day long.

The beach was cuh-RAZY beautiful and totally put our beloved Hamptons to shame, but of course we were idiot Northerners wearing jeans and sneakers and absolutely no sunblock, so I basically ran out onto the beach to take these shots and then ran back in under the shade of the palm trees. We passed all sorts of adorable restaurants blowing mist from fans onto patios full of people sipping giant frozen drinks and then caught a taxi back to the hotel to get ready for the wedding. And by “get ready”, I mean “put some pretty clothes on over our sweat”.

Jack looking swank

The wedding took place at a hotel on a tiny island surrounded by palm trees

with a great view of the mainland

and was casual enough that we could talk to the groom on the hotel’s generous veranda beforehand but formal enough that we were not allowed to wear flip-flops, the wedding website proclaimed. We were served champagne before Christine walked down the aisle in order to make the ceremony bearable, but it was short and sweet and needed no such bribery.

this guy with all of the shoulder would NOT get out of my picture

I do notice that I totally Photoshopped this picture below way more yellow than the picture above, but I’m still stinging from the fact that Eric and Christine didn’t hire me as their totally-unpaid-wedding-photographer, so I’m not going to fix it.

This isn’t the kiss picture, but I just love how happy both Eric and the minister look. She thought Eric and Christine were destined for a long and happy marriage because they were both so attentive at their pre-wedding meetings with her, but little did she know that they’re just a couple of do-gooding nerds who were programmed to pay attention in school.

I can’t tell if Eric is pumping his fist and saying, “MARRIED! YUSS!” or if he’s thumb-pointing to himself and saying, “Who’s married? THIS GUY!”, but I like it either way.

Are those . . . blue flip-flops . . . peeking out from under Christine’s dress? DESPITE HER SPECIFICALLY TELLING ME I COULDN’T WEAR FLIP-FLOPS?

The table settings included diskettes with our names on them (but nothing actually stored in the memory–Jack asked)

and robot cookies that Jack requested to eat repeatedly throughout the evening and that I told him not to eat over and over. Well, at one point, we left the table, and when we came back, my cookie was gone. And then, after a billion years of dancing, we went outside to cool off in the less-cool-than-inside outdoors, and when we returned, Jack’s cookie was also gone. AND I KNOW WHO DID IT.

So tell your middle brother we hope he enjoyed the cookies, Eric, because he is dead to us now.

(j/k, j/k)

The reception started off with Eric and Christine’s first dance and ended with some robot cake

but in the middle was one of the most awesomely-planned weddings ever. They had a live band that legitimately did not suck, and right after Eric and Christine’s first dance, the band brought us all to the floor to dance. And then they sent us back to our tables to eat our crabcakes while Christine and her dad danced and Eric and his mom danced. And then they brought us all back out to dance. And then they sent us back to our tables to eat our salads while Christine’s dad gave this incredibly involved speech about how wonderful every single member of his family, including himself, is. (And I only say that a little bit mockingly, because I would want my dad to give the same speech at my wedding.) And then the band brought us back out again.

It went on like this until 11 p.m., when the band’s time was up. By this time, they had played “Livin’ on a Prayer”, “Don’t Stop Believin’” (can you believe both of those songs have dropped Gs?), and my very favourite ironic song of the moment, Enrique Iglesias’s “I Like It“. And we danced to every single one of them. With very little alcohol needed.

And then the next day we went to Christine’s parents’ house and ate all of their bagels to make up for not getting any robot cookies. We win.

Congratulations, Eric and Christine! We love you and promise to actually buy you a wedding gift someday!

I Hate All Kids. Except for This One and This One and This One and That One and That One.

katie ett — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 17:00:46 +0000

I guess the rule with me is that I don’t like kids unless I know them. Or know their parents. Or have seen pictures of them on a blog. Before I visit my friend Katie, as I do every time I’m home, I secretly start thinking things like, “I don’t feel like seeing kids right now,” and “You know we’re going to start talking about dumb kid stuff the entire time I’m there.” And then I get there and am reminded that I actually love seeing these kids and somehow love talking about dumb kid stuff, too. Weird.

I think it helps that Maria and Baby Evelyn are overwhelmingly outgoing. They were napping when we arrived, and when Katie went to check on them, Maria asked, “Who’s here?” Katie said, “Katie, Tracey, and Kamran,” and Maria said, “I’m scared of Kamran.”

Which is hilarious, because

1) she’s never met Kamran, and
2) approximately three minutes later, they were best friends.

Here are some pictures of them that in no way capture their cuteness:

Maria put on her Halloween costume for us. When you press a button in the crotch of the skirt, it plays classical music. It looks very inappropriate until you figure out what’s going on.

I also had to include the uncropped version of the picture so you can see Evelyn swinging off the side of the piano bench in a short-lived suicide attempt.

I know this is kind of cheesy and unlike me, but I guess even I like to be reassured that babies like me:

No, really, they like the game where their dad, Nick, forces them into a box and puts the lid on, I swear!:

I love Nick’s expression in this one; he seems to be confused by one of his children quietly strangling his other one, as if this doesn’t happen on a daily basis:

For real, you can’t help but love them, right?

Noel. No-EL. Knoll. NO-uhl. (8)
Happy Bigtime Birthday, Tracey! (13)
Circleville Pumpkin Show 2011! (16)
Five Days and Fifty Photos from Ohio (26)
The Best NYC Tour Guide EVER (18)
There is Nothing Hellish About Ohio (29)
Living the Ohio Life at Three Times the Rent (17)
Circleville Pumpkin Show 2010! (21)
Ohio Weekend Photodump! (6)
Fetuses are Still Freaky (4)

Photo Excursion: Battery Park

plumpdumpling — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 16:00:36 +0000

A few of my friends and I have big, fancy cameras and no idea what to do with them, so we decided to start a photo excursion club and take periodic jaunts in photogenic locations to improve our skillz.

Well, Anthony,

Jeff,

and I have big, fancy cameras. Jack has an iPhone. But he’s really serious with that iPhone:

We started out in Battery Park, which is just in front of our office building and has the most incredible views of Brooklyn, New Jersey, Ellis Island, and of course, the Statue of Liberty:

Look! Look! She’s in the foreground and background! See how clever I am?

We took about a zillion photos of flowers and bees landing on them (Anthony even tried to demonstrate to us that you can grab a bee and let it go before it realizes what’s going on, but after a few attempts, I think I convinced him he was going to lose a hand), but naturally I didn’t have my shutter speed set fast enough and didn’t capture a single good-looking shot.

Jack did manage to find some slower-moving wildlife, though:

We creepily watched other people’s kids play in the Battery Park fountain,

and saw a woman who may or may not have been Sinead O’Connor wearing a superhero costume play a concert inside Castle Clinton until the sun began to set:

We had been planning to walk up the East side of Manhattan, but the promise of the smoggy Jersey City moonlight drew us West to Battery Park City and the lovely promenade that spans its length. We stopped to watch a blues concert on the water, and I thought about how wonderful it is to live in a city where something like that is going on every second of the day.

Of course, it’s also the kind of city that commissions poop-shaped sculptures for its parks, so maybe it’s a trade-off:

Passing a group of chess tables, we jeered Anthony into planking (or “lying down game”, as Wikipedia calls it):

and then hilariously looked not ten feet away to see another dude copying him.

After that, Jack lost to himself in a sad game of imaginary chess, which I took a picture of:

and Anthony took a picture of:

and Jeff took a picture of (while accidentally using his color picker function, rendering about half of the photos he took black, white, and blue):

To show that he was more important than we are, Anthony pretended to assume professional photo-taking postures but was really just using them as an excuse to air out his crotch:

The sky went from blue

to black before we knew it

and we apropos-ly ended our photo expedition at the in-progress 9/11 memorial. Freedom Tower, as it was known. Or One World Trade, as we fondly call it:

We passed finance types lounging drunkenly at crowded outdoor cafes, collars unbuttoned and sleeves rolled up, and headed somewhere a little more our style:

Because as Jeff’s photos show, clearly we don’t know how to handle ourselves in public:

Padded Seats and Warmed Hearts

plumpdumpling — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 16:00:23 +0000

Jack, Nik, and me as photographed by Kamran on the Long Island Rail Road (or Railroad, in my opinion) on the way to our friend Anthony’s house two weekends ago with our friends Eric and Christine for cheeses, habanero vodka, and fun times in the schoolyard pretending to be cast members from The Breakfast Club:

I’m not sure I remember the scene where Anthony Michael Hall gets a titty-twister from Judd Nelson, but I’m sure it happened.

The Difference Between Good Friends and Great Friends

plumpdumpling — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 16:00:11 +0000

Good friends stand back and mock you while you take vanity shots of yourself.

Great friends photobomb you.

Cape Cod: Only Half as Elitist as You Thought!

plumpdumpling — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 16:00:06 +0000

Someday, when I’m old and famous and dying of an exploded stomach, they’ll ask me what the most important thing I learned in my immense life was, and I’ll say, “Make friends who not only fulfill you emotionally but also have nice cars, big pools, central air, and pets.” Several years ago, I made the very wise decision to become friends with my co-worker Ash, who later married Michael, who had already made the wise decision to be born into a family that owns a house in Cape Cod.

Kamran wasn’t feeling well, so I left alone for their apartment on a Thursday night a couple of weeks ago, and then we picked up our friend Jeff and drove the four hours to the cutest little cottage in the Cape:

my bedroom!

We woke up early Friday morning to hit Keltic Kitchen before the crowds. Michael had been talking about this place for months and telling me it was the best breakfast I’d ever have, but I just couldn’t believe him because of the kitschy name.

But OMG. It was all that he described and more. I had creme brulee French toast with an orange-flavored custard sauce. They had French toast samplers and home fries. We left so stuffed we were unsure we’d ever eat again.

After playing around in the restaurant’s Irish store,

we went to a grocery store to stock up on mostly sweets,

and a surf shop that strangely sold hermit crabs

to stock up on flip-flops and weaponry to protect us on the mean streets of Hyannis:

We headed straight for the beach but found the water cold and the skies overcast,

so we spent the whole time goofing around on a jetty full of fishermen:

Afterward, ankles still covered in sand, we went to Captain Parker’s for breadbowls full of clam chowder, and then spent the night . . . at the arcade in the mall . . . driving around and singing along to “Kiss from a Rose” . . . and seeing X-Men: First Class. Weird, right?

But it was vacation, and we’ll do what we want! We also had ice cream at Four Seas on Kim’s recommendation, and after watching Ash get ogled outside by a maybe-racist/maybe-just-too-smalltown-to-have-ever-seen-someone-not-white girl, I had some crazy concoction of peanut butter ice cream with peanut butter sauce and peanut-butter-infused baby limbs or something, because nothing that doesn’t involve human sacrifice can taste that good.

Unable to resist the call of Irish foodstuffs, we went again to Keltic Kitchen the next morning, and I got something EVEN BETTER than creme brulee French toast, if you can imagine that. It was the 2×4: two eggs (over hard), two Irish sausages, two slices of cinnamon French toast, and two bangers, or thinly-sliced pork belly marbled with fat that melts in your mouth and is a lot less scary than its name would suggest.

We went to a different beach that afternoon and left off the sunscreen this time, having learned our lesson from the day before. So of course it was bright and beautiful and we all burned.

I swear, though, Cape beaches are freaky. The first one was covered in so many shells you had to wear your sandals on the sand, and the second one was full of seagulls plucking crabs out of the sand mere feet from shore.

IS THAT WHAT I’M STANDING ON WHEN I’M IN THE OCEAN? I don’t think I’m enough of a grownup to know these things.

Afterward, we went to the Christmas Tree Shops, to which I can only say, “What a bunch of horse crap! There wasn’t a Christmas tree in sight.” But really, why would I want there to be in the middle of June? Rename your store, you East Coast pinko hippie holiday-loving scum.

Then we stopped for more chowder at Seaside Pub, also on Kim’s recommendation, and everyone agreed it was pretty tasteless, as Kimerly told us it was going to be, so I’m not sure who you want to trust here. For dessert, we went to Katie’s Homemade Ice Cream simply for the name and despite its three out of five stars on Yelp, so of course it turned out to be truly delicious and to have important flavors like cake batter.

That night, we went to Pirate’s Cove for “adventure golf” that included so many testicle jokes,

dancing to entertain people waiting in line at other holes,

holes in one by Ash and me,

and a shark bursting through a wall that I think has very little to do with pirates but was still cool:

Sunday morning, we left the house at 8 a.m. and weren’t allowed any Keltic Kitchen due to time constraints, but even despite that severe oversight, it was a relaxing trip that let me see a whole new part of the U.S. Too bad my beach cravings are only 100 times worse now.

Thanks, Mike and Ash!

Five Days and Fifty Photos from Ohio

plumpdumpling — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 16:00:30 +0000

Remember how I went to Ohio on June 8th for my cousin Bethany’s graduation from vet school? No? Me neither. But here are some pictures that prove I was there or am at least really good at Photoshop!

My best friend, Tracey, was teaching a papercrafting class at the Columbus Museum of Art’s Craftacular Spectacular event, so we arrived early to take lewd pictures of her

in the “Don’t Eat the Art” exhibit

before giving in to our basest desires and dipping our hands into the rhinestone, glitter, and button bucket:

Apparently all of the students at the nearby Columbus College of Art and Design hated this sign when it went in outside the art museum (I believe it’s referred to as the “FART sign”), but I love it:

That night, we were supposed to go dancing at Skully’s as always, but I realized I’d only brought flip-flops and heels home. You can never have too many Chucks, so I was naturally pleased for an excuse to buy some new ones to leave at Tracey’s house. She was naturally pleased to be given an opportunity to step all over them with her own beer-drenched Chucks as we danced, because nothing looks so disgustingly new as new Chucks:

The next afternoon, I went to the HISTORIC Marcy Diner near my childhood home–which amazingly has a website that includes mention of the “pop” they sell–with my dad to eat $1 coney dogs. AND SOMEHOW DID NOT TAKE A SINGLE PICTURE OF THE EVENT. But you can bet it was a better hot-dog-eating experience than any I’ve had in fancypants New York City.

That night, I went to a big swanky vet school soiree with my cousin, Bethany, that Ohio State president E. Gordon Gee seemed to randomly happen upon, like he was taking a shortcut through the ballroom in the student union without realizing there was anything going on in there. Everyone was taking pictures with him, and I was all, “Wait, why?”, but this is for Bethany:

The next night, I went to dinner with Bethany and her family, and we spotted this gem in the Barnes & Noble parking lot:

Afterward, we went to her Doctor of Veterinary Medicine hooding ceremony. I guess this is a hooding:

I call it a choking.

She was simultaneously totally annoyed by all of the pictures I took and secretly thinking she was Wonder Woman:

Then we went to Applebee’s (!) for drinks (!), and Bethany’s brother paid for the whole shebang but not before complaining about Bethany’s $6.50 cocktail. I was confused until they informed me that $6.50 is actually expensive for a drink, and the $16 I’m now used to paying in NYC is offensive.

The next day, my dad and I skipped church (!) and went to Rooster’s for lunch instead of our usual Bob Evans. Adventurous! Then we came back to the house and watched my stepsister, Jenny, shave her girls’ 4-H pigs, which are being kept in my dad’s and stepmom’s back yard. Appaaaaaaaaaarently, 4-H judges think they look better when they’re hairless:

I think they’re the cutest things ever no matter what:

But especially when they’re being fed marshmallows:

Before I’d come home, a giant storm took out trees and power lines all over Ohio, and my family’s compound suffered some wild damage. Not only did a tree fall over onto the front porch, but the limb of another blew off onto the garage, revealing that it was hollow inside! And full of bees!:

That night, Tracey and I went to visit our longtime other best friend, Katie, her daughters Maria

and Evelyn (who looks like Toby from Labyrinth, Tracey decided this week),

and her husband-whom-I-introduced-her-to-because-I’m-the-best-matchmaker-ever-but-only-because-I-tried-to-date-him-first-and-he-totally-rejected-me-but-I-still-love-him, Nick:

After being served dinner by Katie, we all went to the backyard so I could take wildly adorable family pictures of them:

and then we watered Katie’s garden.

Well, Katie watered her garden.

The rest of us played in the water.

Well, some of us played in the water while some of us licked the water from the watering can:

Then we went back inside to enjoy the Cheesecake Factory desserts Tracey had brought (the only Cheesecake Factory I had on the entire trip!) and to watch Katie play with her new toy:

Until Tracey got too jealous and needed to see how much she remembered from her one quarter of string instrument training while getting her music education degree at OSU:

And that was it! Tracey and I spent the next day chowing on pizza and Graeter’s ice cream at the mall, and then she dropped me off at the airport so I could return to my babyless, pigless, expensive-drink world.

The Best NYC Tour Guide EVER

plumpdumpling — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 16:00:21 +0000

I got sick again! I’m guessing this is to spite me for all the “I’m a farmgirl; my germ defenses are country strong” bragging I do and all of the “let your kids play in the dirt so they won’t end up with pansyass immune systems like yours” advice I give.

The worst part is that it just so happened to be during the four days my cousin Will came in from Ohio with a couple of his ladyfriends for his first time touring the city as an adult. So the things I did with them included:

• dinner in my neighborhood at Lobo, followed by dessert at VanLeeuwen, neither of which I could taste

• dinner at “Top Chef” contestant Angelo Sosa’s Social Eatz with Kamran, my roommate, Jack, and our friend Nik, where I could taste even less

• five minutes on our rooftop deck before we all chickened out from the heat

Aaaaaaand . . . that’s it. On the bright side, Will and his friends totally learned how to use the subway on their own! And anyway, they probably didn’t want me along on their big city adventures, trying to convince them not to spend $300 on shoes. Although I probably could’ve prevented that pesky two-hour separation that occurred when Will decided to hop onto a train without his friends just as the doors were closing.

But where’s the fun in that.

If Ever There Was a Time to Use the Word “Vacay”: Hamptons 2011

plumpdumpling — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 16:00:07 +0000

I’ve had a week of work and a trip to Ohio since my weekend in the Hamptons, but I WILL NOT BE DETERRED from writing about a memorable event for once, because man, this thing was memorable. Eleven friends and I booked the same Southampton beach house we enjoyed for a weekend last year and were fortunate enough to get a $200-a-night discount on it thanks to some springtime water damage that left us without kitchen cabinets. ($200 off per night just because we had to store our groceries on the kitchen window seat instead of the cabinets. Talk about richpeopleproblems.)

My friend Nik and I met our friends Ash and Mike in Queens on Thursday morning so they could drive us in their car to a for-real grocery store with more than five aisles, the Cheesecake Factory in Long Island, and the pet hotel, where they left their dog, Gizmo, for the weekend:

Nik spent most of the trip doing this in the back seat to show off that dammit, he was on vacation, and he was going to wear his most comfortable and most inappropriate shorts:

We arrived at the house around 3 p.m., greeted by our friends Chantee, Brandon, and Gretchen, and took in the most wonderful sight in the world: the ocean mere steps away from our front door:

Our house is this crazy three-story behemoth with 12 beds, all of them in these charmingly-terrible themed rooms:

But we rarely ever see the house before 9 p.m., because there’s this

right across the street. It was unfortunately too early in the season for swimming, but just the feel of the water on my feet and the sand in my hands and in my hair and up my butt sends me into this blissful state of sedation that requires no actual paddling.

The boys went on a drive to look at the multi-million-dollar homes surrounding us, so we girls sat in the downstairs living room, talking about boys and gazing out into the bay behind the house:

We weren’t the only ones gazing, though:

Earlier in the car, Nik had been making fun of the superficiality of southern rappers, saying they only talked about cash and cars and girls. But when he’d left the house on his drive, he’d left his iPod hooked up to the living room speakers, and as we sat talking about our sordid dating pasts, a song came on with a chorus that went, “Ro-tating my tires. I’m just ro-tating my tires.” Rap is dumb.

We met the boys for dinner in town at a restaurant where women with shawls wrapped around their shoulders glared at us across the patio, and I took two pictures that I totally thought I could successfully make into a panorama later. And I did! Unless you look at Nik’s right shoulder, which is freakishly square and cut down the middle:

We spent that night playing Xbox Kinect, drinking Mike’s Hard everyflavor until we contracted diabetes, and just generally feeling superior to our friends who weren’t arriving until the next evening.

The next morning, Gretchen and I went on walk down the beach that was supposed to last only a few minutes and therefore didn’t involve me wearing any sunscreen. (Because I learned nothing from the sunburn last year that still has my back looking like it’s covered in tiger stripes.) Our section of the beach is basically just sand, but we found that farther east, there are piles of mermaid’s purses, a crab graveyard, a jetty, freakishly big seagulls, wildly green seaweed, and not a single shark that we could see, despite that week’s earlier sighting:

Gretchen, Ash, Chantee, and I went back to the beach that afternoon (this time with sunscreen!) and walked in the opposite direction to the end of the beach, where we found a shelterhouse full of ice cream treats and constantly-tan people who probably think they’re quite sophisticated living two hours from New York City.

That night, we all showered and started to pile into our cars to see the new X-Men movie before checking Brandon’s iPad and realizing the closest theatre was more than 30 miles away. So we sat considering our options

until the pool boy (for real) came and told us he’d found a kitten underneath the house. Having raised approximately 152 cats while growing up on the farm, I suggested that we leave it there for a while and check to see if the mother would return for it; mothers carry their young from location to location one at a time, I’m sure you know, so I figured there was a good chance she’d left it there on purpose. But Mike was apparently overcome with fatherly instincts and decided he needed to take the kitten to a vet, who confirmed that she had recently been fed.

But I guess you can’t dump a kitten back underneath a house once you pull her out, so Mike and Ash are now the proud owners of baby Penelope! Whom Ash tried to name Katniss after the character in The Hunger Games, which is the cleverest name ever! Because it’s a cat! Get it? But not everyone has read the book to understand the name. So she’s Penelope. But I’ll obviously still be calling her Katniss in secret.

Here she is sitting in Nik’s lap, right before she peed a pee that covered the entire front of his shirt:

Jack, Roxanne, Beth, Eric, and Christine all arrived late that night, and we spent the rest of the evening watching movies, playing Xbox, and making fun of Nik for getting so sunburned that day it was making him nauseated. Haha, skin cancer is funny.

We spent the entire next day at the beach, and then that night, Eric, Christine, Gretchen, and I went for a walk along the bay, which is the much more interesting/much more disgusting body of water behind our house. While the ocean side has clear water and little visible sealife, the bay is green and carpeted with breeding snails, dueling horseshoe crabs, and oozy sand you don’t want to stick your feet in.

Right off the bat, Eric spotted a horseshoe crab on its back way too far up on the beach and flipped it over with a stick to see if he could lead it back to water. Its tail was wrapped in a clump of seaweed, and half of its legs seemed to be nonfunctioning, but it sloooooooowly turned back toward the bay and inched its way along, traveling whole feet in the hour we spent exploring the beach:

The water in the bay had retreated hundreds and hundreds of feet so that we could walk on the squishy sand that only hours before had been covered over in murkiness. There was some concern that the sand wouldn’t hold up and we’d find ourselves ankle-deep in stinky snail sand at any minute, but we made it back to the house mostly un-gross and were greeted by Chantee for our family dinner:

Yes, that was an entire plate of Pizza Rolls in front of me. Some of which I actually shared with my friends. But most of which I did not.

The next morning, we went to the beach one last time, and I admired the elderly couples there sitting on lawn chairs in sweatshirts and ballcaps, too chicken to swim but still unable to resist the draw of the water. I think a lot of people use their Hamptons presence for economical braggarting, but it’s much more special than that to me. Most of my vacations are spent in Ohio, and while I obviously wouldn’t trade those for anything, I still feel a lot of anxiety around flight delays, trying to fit in all of the visits to relatives and old friends, and making sure I look presentable so no one thinks I’m falling apart out here. Traveling by car, listening to music, escaping all of the pressure of the city, not caring about my hair or my makeup or my clothes, not having any responsibility, being near the water . . . truly my idea of paradise, and it’s only two hours away.

There is Nothing Hellish About Ohio

plumpdumpling — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 16:00:45 +0000

My best friend, Tracey, picked me up at the airport Tuesday night, and we immediately went to [Giant Retailer That Goes Against Everything I Believe in but is Open at All Hours of the Night] for Cadbury Creme Eggs, Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs, and unmatched photo ops like this:

We sat around getting fat the next day and then drove the 20 minutes to our hometown to have dinner with my parents and dessert with our other best friend from high school, Katie, and her daughters. Well, the older one was already in bed, so we just fed Dairy Queen frozen hot chocolate (FHC for short, of course) to her baby:

On Thursday, we spent literally all day scrapbooking at Archiver’s and then had dinner at The Cheesecake Factory, where Tracey was less-than-pleased with the amount of whipped cream on her plate, which she foolishly considers filler:

(I gladly ate it for her, of course, and a bunch of whipped cream is way better than the PAPER–yes, I said PAPER–I found in my sandwich.)

Then we went to Skully’s for Ladies 80s and had THE BEST time. We got back to her house from dinner around 9:30, and I was hinting practically the entire way home that I didn’t really have the energy for dancing. We kind of hemmed and hawed for a while, and when Tracey’s other friend canceled on us, I was especially ready to sit down with a tub of cookie dough and call it a night. But Tracey was really pushing to go for some reason, and in the end, I knew I’d end up having a good time, but it turned out to be THE BEST time. There were enough people there that we didn’t feel exposed, but there weren’t so many people there that we couldn’t bust out our incredible dance moves, and they’ve started playing 90s music now, so we totally got to relive junior high with Blur and Nine Inch Nails.

The next night, I celebrated my stepbrother’s daughter’s second birthday with my very festive dad:

my spectacularly vested stepmom:

and this CRAZY PRINCESS CAKE that I probably deserve for my next birthday:

Saturday night, I convinced my cousin Ethan and his wife, Katherine, to hold a party so I could see his baby, Kaydence, and take sort of creepy photos of Bethany, my twin cousin (we were born 47 minutes apart!), resting her head on Kaydence’s butt:

Instead of the roadkill his mom promised, Ethan made us these awesome grilled burritos so he could use his MAN SPATULA (or, for my feminist friends, his larger-than-normal spatula that in no way makes it manlier than any other spatula):

We played tons of six-handed Euchre, and since my dad was on a different team, he made someone else cry instead of me. YES!:

even the baby knows Euchre is serious bizness

Now, my dad lives on what he lovingly refers to as The Compound. A couple of years after my mom died, he married my awesome stepmother, Lois, whom he went to high school with and whom I’ve known my whole life, and he moved into her house a few miles away from my childhood home. She lived right next door to her dad, and when he died last year, her daughter moved in there with her husband and twin daughters. Her eldest son, meanwhile, converted the barn in between the two houses into this beeeeautiful home for his wife and daughters, and my dad built another barn behind his and Lois’s house. So it’s basically three big, ol’ farmhouses in a row out in the middle of nowhere. The Compound.

Anyway, arriving home to The Compound on Saturday night, I noticed for the first time that my stepsister’s girls are keeping their 4-H pigs in a little hut out back with a heat lamp built in to keep them warm. My dad, the farmer, scorns them for this, of course, but I think it’s cute. The only problem is that when you look out the back door, it appears that the poor little piggies are being

SWALLOWED BY THE FIRES OF HELL.

I would make an Ohio/hell joke here, but I think it’s pretty clearly much more like heaven.

My Superfantastic Weekend and What I Ate

plumpdumpling — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 16:05:31 +0000

I had such a great weekend that I’m actually going to talk about what I did rather than write some abstract post about “American Idol” or whathaveyou. Ready for this?

On Friday night, I picked Kamran up from work, and we rode the subway to Astoria, which is a neighborhood in Queens that’s getting to be known as the new Williamsburg (my previous neighborhood in Brooklyn), because it’s cheap enough that artsy, non-trust-funded types can actually afford to live there and eat from the plethora of Greek restaurants. It’s still not quite as settled as Williamsburg was, though, because there was a point where the streetlights just sort of stopped existing, and we found ourselves thinking, “Why did we agree to come to this god-forsaken borough?!”

But then we remembered we were about to eat CHICKEN, stuffed with CHEDDAR, wrapped in BACON, covered in MOLE, topped with melted MONTERREY JACK, and smothered in crumbled FETA at Fatty’s Cafe. Obviously worth it.

Lorraine seductively models the Contraband Chicken,
as if it’s not seductive enough on its own.

There were much better photos of Ash, Mike, and Lorraine,
but the look on Ash’s face here is SO GREAT.

Please tell me why Kamran posed normally in this photo with Jeff
but threw a gang sign in the photo he took with me.

On Saturday night, Kamran and I went to dinner at the famed Serendipity 3 with my longtime blogfriend Kim of Good Hair, Kim Luck. We’ve seriously been reading each other’s LiveJournals and then blog for years now but failed to meet when we both lived here, realized we probably made a mistake once she moved away for a while, and decided not to butcher it this time when she moved back recently.

The lovely and talented Kim shows off her young chicken sandwich and the hair
she had dyed especially for me, or so I tell myself.

Kamran sips espresso instead of helping me eat our giant Can’t Say No Sundae,
which included peanut butter pie, vanilla ice cream, bananas, chocolate sauce, and whipped cream.

After Kim and I had been talking about “Gossip Girl” stars and handbags for 15 minutes, Kamran leaned over and whispered that Sarah Michelle Gellar was at the table next to ours with her family, which prompted us to try naming more than three things she’s been in. I failed ridiculously and didn’t slyly take a picture of Kim with Buffy in the background, but rest assured that she’ll be ceremoniously added to my list of famous people I’ve seen in NYC.

Even though Kim was in a dress and heels, we coerced her to ride the tram to Roosevelt Island with us, which is basically a 3-minute ride in the air to the tiny island next to Manhattan. We used those 3 minutes wisely, though, by loudly talking about how people from Roosevelt Island are pathetic if they think they’re part of Manhattan.

On Sunday morning, Kamran and I were treated to brunch at La Silhouette, which I think is just trying to get the word out that yes, they serve brunch, and yes, it is awesome. As if my cheesy, crusty, piled-high-with-ham croque madam wasn’t enough,

they also served us the entirety of the dessert menu. (And we secretly kind of liked their sundae better than Serendipity’s!) The full review will follow on donuts4dinner.com, obviously.

Super fun times!

I’m Certain All BFFs Are This Freaky

plumpdumpling — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 17:00:21 +0000

I was talking to my BFF, Tracey, the other day about the fact that neither of us has ever needed prescription drugs. I asked, “Should we be on drugs for something? Everyone else is!” She replied, “It’s weird enough of us to not be on drugs, but it might be weirder that we’ve never sought mental health treatment in the first place.”

And at first I was like, “Yeah! Weird!” But then I was like, “Wait, no, not weird.” And then I confessed to Tracey that despite pretty terrible things happening to me–like, say, my mom dying of brain cancer when I was a senior in high school–I think I’ve managed to stay awesome because I’ve had her to talk to since we were just wee little lasses. And then she confessed to me that despite pretty terrible things happening to her–like, say, her dad’s brain aneurism, brain tumors, and subsequent lifelong health issues–she thinks she’s managed to stay awesome because she’s had me to talk to, too.

I have a blogfriend whose best friend died a couple of years ago in a horrific and horrifically random shooting, and for a while, her online journal was almost solely about coping with this sudden death and the tremendous life changes it brought. Some of her friends were annoyed by her constantly talking about it and acted like she should move on with her life, but I totally got it. To have a best best friend–not just a good friend but a best friend who knows everything about you and doesn’t need to put you down to make herself feel better and doesn’t try to make you jealous and can handle you practically living with her for two weeks straight during your Christmas visits home–and then to lose that? The pain is almost unimaginable to me.

On the phone yesterday, I asked Tracey not to die, and she agreed to try, but we decided that if either of us does kick the bucket too soon, the other will keep her memory alive in the very best ways.

Tracey says she’ll build a roadside shrine to me (this may only be in the case of death by car crash, but I hope it’s no matter what) with a cross and flowers and all the fixin’s and that she’ll come every day to replenish it with–and I’m not sure what this means–baby doll limbs. Is that a common shrine element? I hope so.

I decided I’ll end every blog post with mention of her passing, but she said she’d actually prefer if I put it in my e-mail signature. So I said I’ll sign every letter, “3/9/11 – Never Forget,” a la all the 9/11 memorial crap. She thought it a little morbid for me to use yesterday’s actual date, but I’m nothing if not totally creepy.

Then we started talking about the “Hoarders” episode where the lady’s brother was a fireman who’d died trying to rescue people from the towers on 9/11, and the pain of losing him was so great that she was over-collecting anything related to 9/11 or NYC in general or patriotism or simply the colors red, white, and blue. We decided that my “Hoarders” episode about all of the Tracey-related paraphernalia I’ve saved over the years would be pretty embarrassing. But her episode about her Katie-related collection would be much, much worse.

Because she has my FINGERNAIL CLIPPINGS!!!

BFFs! BFFs! BFFs!

on the subway

pretending to smoke at Pete’s Candy Store and looking so awkward

feeding shaved ice to a gargoyle in the East Village

and then tasting his sweet ice breath

in the changing room at Dylan’s Candy Bar

Unapologetically Mundane » all of my friends are prettier than i am

Bethany, Tracey, the Chocolate Dentures, and the Little Nubbin

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