Category Archives: i used to be so cool

I’ve Never Even Had Sideswept Hair

Posted by plumpdumpling on February 24, 2010 – 10:15 am
Filed under i used to be so cool, music is my boyfriend
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Remember when Modest Mouse was so cool? When they were really emo, and no one you would consider “normal” listened to them, and not even your friends knew who they were?

And you had all of their albums and also all of their pins and also all of these homemade pins you bought off eBay, which you dutifully stuck to your messenger bag so everyone would know how emo you were wherever you went?

“Polar Opposites” came on my Pandora station yesterday, and I about died, so I immediately had to go to YouTube and find the best made-by-a-16-year-old music video for the song I could:

The lyrics are “I’m trying, I’m trying to/Drink away the part of the day/That I cannot sleep away,” and I remember being like, “Oh, my god, Modest Mouse, you totally get me.” Even though I had the easiest life and the strongest thing I was drinking back in 1999 in Ohio was Carnation Instant Breakfast.

An Education, and Why I’m Sad to Be a Grownup

Posted by plumpdumpling on January 5, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under i used to be so cool, there's a difference between films and movies
Tagged as ,

Maybe it’s inappropriate to start off the new year with ruminations on pedophilia, but while I was in Ohio for Christmas, my best friend, Tracey, and her friend Kim were in the midst of seeing all of this year’s potentially-Oscar-nominated films, and I tagged along to see An Education with them almost as an afterthought. It’s mostly plotless–a sheltered 17-year-old girl loses more than her virginity to an older man when she’s dazzled by his worldliness–and it’s not for everyone, but it was entirely for me.

It was a great story and all, but for days afterward, it was still consuming my thoughts in a way that I didn’t think it should have. I found myself feeling detached from everything I did, because all I wanted to be doing was watching that film again. I finally decided it was because the girl in the film, Jenny, reminded me so much of myself. Growing up in smalltown Ohio, I wasn’t at all interested in most of the boys I went to school with, because I was way too smart for them, and I don’t mean that to sound narcissistic. Even the ones who could hold a conversation with me didn’t seem to appreciate me in the way I thought my awesomeness merited. I didn’t find things much different in college, so I “dated” first a 35-year-old and then a 41-year-old and just didn’t think anything wrong with it. Brains and humor have always made people more attractive to me than classic good looks alone, and men twice my age seemed so thoughtful and funny. They got why I was so interested in literature, and they listened to the right kinds of music, only they knew bands and read books I’d only heard of. They were so serious about politics, unlike the boys at school who were only Republicans because their parents were. And they both lived somewhere other than Ohio, which was really the most important thing.

The sad thing I realized after watching An Education is that the main reason I wanted to date older men no longer applies. Somewhere between 18 and now, I figured out that the guys I thought were so wise back then had really just accumulated the sort of life experience you do when you’ve had a job, had a wife, had some birthdays. They knew bands I’d only heard of because they’d been my age when those bands were making music, just like I know more bands than someone half my age does. My best friends now are just as literate, just as politically-conscious, and just as funny as any of those guys were. In fact, my current boyfriend, who’s only a couple of years older than I am, is smarter and funnier than probably anyone I know. It wasn’t that boys my age were necessarily not good enough for me but just that I hadn’t met the right one. Not that I regret any of it.

My even sadder realization is that I probably already ended my tenure as pedophile bait without even realizing it, and despite being wise enough now to recognize that older isn’t always better, I’m still going to miss the attention. Sure, I can date 80-year-old men for their money in my late 20s, but no one’s going to question that guy’s morals or mental health. If I’m not attractive simply for my ability to get someone arrested for touching me, what do I have to live for? What’s the point of being seen with an old codger if it doesn’t garner him disapproving glares and me worried glances? What’s the point if I’m not being taken advantage of?

Geocities is Dead! Long Live WordPress!

Posted by plumpdumpling on October 27, 2009 – 3:46 pm
Filed under i used to be so cool, narcissism
Tagged as ,

Sunday night around 7 p.m., Kamran just happened to be napping, and I just happened to be wasting time with my Google Reader when I happened upon this article from “Huffington Post” about Geocities shutting down on October 26th, the very next day.

Horrified, I went to the Geocities website and read the entire FAQ where they said something to the effect of if you don’t right-click on each of your individual pages and save them to your hard drive, your information will be lost FOREVER. Not for a second did I think about how annoying that was going to be or how a much better use of my time would be creating a new website, because my Geocities homepage was my LIFE from 1998 to 2002, and the Internet would be a sad, sad place without pages such as


the one in which I rate facewashes by how gross they taste,


the very first “blog” entry I ever wrote online in 1998,


and the one in which I have potential suitors fill out an application to marry me.

So I went through each of my maybe 100 pages, right-clicked, saved, and breathed a sigh of relief knowing that someday, I’d be able to go back and read the online diary that used to get me in so much trouble in high school whenever someone found out I’d called her a skank in it. Only when I got about 30 pages in, I started getting an error on every page telling me that it couldn’t load. I started flipping out again, searching the Geocities website for an apology about their overloaded servers and the promise that they’d keep the sites up for an extra day so everyone could have time to save their PRECIOUS MEMORIES. What I found was that Geocities had an hourly download rate, and that I’d surpassed it and had to wait to access more of my pages. I was prepared to sit in front of my computer until midnight on the dot, still downloading as the clock ticked from 59 seconds back to 0.

Hours later, I finally finished grabbing everything I could, including the pages that weren’t linked from anywhere and that maybe two people in the entire world had seen accidentally via a Dogpile or Metacrawler search back in the day. I started thinking that maybe it was a good thing the site was disappearing. Maybe I didn’t want the world knowing how I referred to myself as The Katie™ not infrequently or how I had an entire series of connected pages chronicling how perverted Mister Rogers is. Now that everything was safe within my hard drive, it didn’t matter that no one would ever fill out my Application for Husbandry again.

But then I woke up on October 26th, and the site was still there. I kept checking, and it kept being there. I almost got pissed off. That’s my private writing! Who does Geocities think they are, keeping that stuff around?! Ten minutes ago, in the midst of writing this, I checked again, and sure enough, there it was. I typed my address into the historical record of Geocities, and it was there, too.

But two minutes ago, I checked again, and now it seems to be officially dead. The historical record is showing the first page and then “Not in Archive” error messages when I try to click on anything from there.

I’m relieved. I’m saddened.

Shoes Like Papier-Mâché

Posted by plumpdumpling on October 23, 2009 – 11:45 am
Filed under i used to be so cool
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I bought my first pair of Converse Chuck Taylor low-tops my sophomore year of college and wore them for the next six years. They were probably two sizes too big for me, because I was somehow under the impression through high school and college that my feet were much, much bigger than they actually are. Had they been the correct size, the rubber reinforcement strip around the front of the shoe would have kept the canvas top from peeling away from the sole, but things being as they were, I developed holes on both sides of each shoe within weeks where they curved every time I bent down.

I wore them every single day. (Unless, of course, I was wearing something that went with my neon pink or teal blue Sauconys, but that was rare, as you can imagine.) When the sole lost all of its minimal padding after a couple of years, I bought padded inserts. When I found a giant hole in the back of the right one in a couple more years, I ignored it. When the balls of my feet actually wore holes in the rubber sole of each shoe, I replaced the padded inserts with waterproof gel inserts that kept the rain out (for the most part). The shoes got wet so many times that the canvas actually got hard, like papier-mâché.

My parents came to visit NYC two years ago and asked what they could buy me for my birthday while they were here. It hurt, but I decided to have them purchase my very first replacement pair of Chucks. Reminding myself that my feet are actually quite normally-sized, I went down a couple of sizes and enjoyed the freedom of not worrying about wet socks for the first times in years.

A few days later, I had developed blisters on the sides of my feet where the old Chucks hadn’t rubbed but the new Chucks did. I assumed my feet would get used to the smaller size eventually, but two years later, I was still having to rotate them out of my wardrobe every couple of days and actually wear dress shoes or something to give my feet a day off from the pinching.

The other day, though, I finally told myself, “THESE ARE $40 SHOES. Surely you can afford to buy new ones that don’t hurt.” And I did, one size between the originals and their next-of-kin. I’m wearing them now and working on dirtying them up so I’m not THAT GIRL with the new Chucks, and it’s a delight. And you know what? Moving on didn’t bother me one bit. Apparently I don’t get attached to things that hurt me.

Except men and ice cream.

What’s so hipster about being literate?

Posted by plumpdumpling on May 28, 2009 – 1:22 pm
Filed under i used to be so cool, narcissism
Tagged as ,

Look at this fucking hipster is basically photos of all my neighbors in Brooklyn wearing their stupid 80s clothes and not brushing their stupid unwashed hair. As much as I love being a voyeur of it, I’m usually glad that I’ll never be featured on it, because that involves looking like this:


So rough and tumble!

and I look more like this:


So sweet and innocent!

But yesterday, the site posted this, which is basically the tattoo I’d get if I ever got a tattoo. Except that mine would include way cooler books, of course.

Yeah, I took honors English, and I want the world to know. My senior year, my honors English teacher told the whole class that I’d be the only one of us to score a perfect 5 on the AP exam. Boo-yah!

And then I got a 4 just like everyone else. But still!

Nostalgia About the Early Days of the Internet

Posted by plumpdumpling on April 10, 2009 – 2:07 pm
Filed under i used to be so cool, super furry animals
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Remember how much more important the Internet seemed in its youth? How we didn’t rely on it for everything and didn’t entirely take it for granted?

I don’t remember how I knew what it was exactly, but I do remember the first time I ever used it. My best friend Tracey and I were going to a Men’s Glee Club concert at THE Ohio State University one day in our early years of high school, and we stopped by her older brother’s campus apartment beforehand to waste time and use his computer, which included what must have been the slowest modem ever made.

As I remember, it turned out that we’d left our tickets to the concert in her parents’ car, so we spent the entire afternoon looking up song lyrics and pictures of our favourite bands of the time: silverchair, Megadeth, Bush, and Nirvana. Recently, we had spent an entire Friday night at her house watching, pausing, watching, and pausing Bush’s performance of “Insect Kin” on “Saturday Night Live” that my mom had taped for us so we could figure out all of the lyrics. Which took hours. So yeah, the Internet and all of its tricks seemed AMAZING to us at the time.

I bring this up because my co-worker Nik was hovering over my desk this morning, swinging the laces on the hood of his hoodie back and forth over my monitor like windshield wipers, and somehow, it reminded me of the eSheep I had back in high school.

This little Sheepy would hang out above the taskbar at the bottom of your screen, walking, running, sleeping, and occasionally getting bug-eyed and dying. You could pick him up with your pointer and drop him, causing him to bounce, but that’s literally all he did. AND I THOUGHT IT WAS AWESOME.

Still do, to be honest. And thankfully, there’s a 4-minute+ video on YouTube to help me relive its glory.

So tell me: what did you love about Web 1.0?

Completely Normal Rednecks

Posted by plumpdumpling on May 8, 2008 – 3:45 pm
Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, i used to be so cool, no i really do love ohio
Tagged as , ,

People in New York always find it so weird that I talk about how into my own sister I’d be if I was a lesbian, but according to this note that my Best Friend 4-Eva + 4-Lyfe, Tracey, saved from our early days of high school, incest is something I’ve never been embarrassed to talk about:

I’m from Ohio, though, which makes this totally okay.

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