I could tell yesterday that you weren’t totally blown away by the celebrities I’ve rubbed elbows with, and early this morning, I realized why. I forgot to add the most important ones, the ones I was actually filmed with. And in Meryl’s case, the one that I actually ran into accidentally. So here are the additions to my List of All the Famous People I Can Remember Having Seen Whilst Living in NYC for you to ooh and ahh at:

Meryl Streep, who I filmed scenes with as an extra in the movie Julie and Julia.

Brooke Shields, who I stood 2 centimeters away from while filming scenes as an extra in “Lipstick Jungle“, where I also stood 2 centimeters away from

Andrew McCarthy

and Rosie Perez

and Kim Raver

and Lindsay Price.

Please note that I reserve the right to keeping posting this sort of jazz whenever I remember another one, because nothing else in my life has any meaning.

My friend Sonya, my doctor boyfriend, Kamran, and I took a bus from Kamran’s office in Rockefeller Center to Union Square last Thursday night and then cut down a side street to get to the East Village for dinner. As we were passing by the movie theatre on Broadway, we saw some fancy black cars across the street and flashbulbs going off as someone stepped out of one of them. We continued walking like New Yorkers do but kept our eyes trained on the area in case something was going on that we’d need to brag about to our friends later.

When the person being photographed turned to face us, Sonya said, “Hey, it’s the guy with the big mouth who used to have dreads!” I, of course, had no idea who it was, but Kamran is pretty much an original gangsta and recognized him right away as Busta Rhymes. We crossed the street to get a better look, because while we don’t have any interest in movie stars, we understand that it’s important for our families in Orlando (Sonya), Orange County (Kamran), and OHIO (me) to hear about these sorts of sightings, since they can’t imagine any other advantage to living here.

Out of the next car came Guy Pearce, whose name we couldn’t remember but whom we all knew as “that guy from Memento“. And out of the next car came, most importantly, Don Cheadle, who I totally had a crush on after Crash and totally had a bigger crush on after Hotel Rwanda. So naturally I took out my camera and captured:

Blurry Don Cheadle, who very well might be looking right at me here but we’ll never know for sure so I’ll say he definitely is!

Don Cheadle’s leg beside some lady with a cast!

Don Cheadle in profile!

There were boards with Traitor posters all over them propped behind where the stars were having their photos taken, so they must have been there to premiere the movie, but of course I can’t look it up and have Google start showing “celeb” gossip in my gmail ads. So you should do it for me.

And while I have you here, here’s a List of All the Famous People I Can Remember Having Seen Whilst Living in NYC, complete with highly personal stories, which can now also be found in my sidebar, in case you want to reference it many times in the future.

This delightful bit of graffiti was on the wall of the L platform at 1st Street:

It’s funny that I didn’t, you know, notice that the Unicef logo on the truck was obscured by the overhead lighting, but I don’t get paid to pay attention, yo.

So I pretty much live in the hippest neighborhood in all of New York City–and certainly in Brooklyn–yet I never actually do anything there, because I’m too busy hanging out with Kamran the Boyfriend in his richie-rich when-you-look-out-my-bedroom-window-you-see-the-Chrysler-Building neighborhood. But on Sunday, that all changed on July 27th when I finally went to see the band MGMT at

I was pretty pumped, because my friend Sonya had been forcing MGMT on me for weeks before that to get me ready for the show, and to see them for free seemed like such a I-am-poor-and-I-live-in-Brooklyn-and-I’m-seeing-a-Brooklyn-band rad thing to do on a Sunday afternoon when I’d usually be watching Kamran do laundry. Plus, what beats watching a concert from inside a drained pool?

The gate was set to open at 2, but knowing that a line would form before noon, we decided to show up late with the hope that we’d be able to walk right in. We leisurely ate some faux-chicken buffalo wings and strawberry/peanut butter/cookie “milk”shakes at my favourite vegan restaurant, Foodswings, near Bedford Avenue while some mean stormclouds formed overhead, and then at 3:30, we approached the park.

The line was still huuuuuuuuge. Like, down three blocks and wrapped around the park with eight people across on the sidewalk. Sonya and her boyfriend, Adam, had been waiting since 12:30 and had barely moved. So naturally we cut in front of them, and then two seconds later, Jesus punished us for it by making it pour. Seriously POUR. For, like, an hour. The line looked like this:

and at the end of it, we looked like this:

Almost too horrific to share, right? But I can’t help myself. Plus, we didn’t look nearly as bad as the huge group of girls (+ 1 pimply boy) behind us who had brought the bags from inside boxes of wine and were drinking the stuff out of the spigot. And screaming. Incessantly. This kid near them said, “You girls are drinking wine from bags, and that is fuckin’ badass.” And then they all had a big screamy orgy. They were approximately 16 years old but already had the haggard faces of their mothers, and that pleases me.

The Ting-Tings had played while we were still in line, which was a real shame, because they sounded great. Instead we had to endure Black Moth Super Rainbow, who I will not link, oh no I won’t, because they were that uninteresting. To endure their set, we bought some fruity beer and checked out the intense dodgeball game that was taking place off to one side of the pool:

This picture is cool because a guy is getting hit in the face with a ball in it, but you can’t really tell that at this size.

And then MGMT came on.

They opened with a really slow song, and I was like, “This is a weird way to start a dance party,” but I expected that they were just working up to the awesome stuff. And then they played another slow song. And another. But, like, people were cheering and clapping, and Sonya was smiling her head off, and everyone seemed to be having such a good time. It didn’t make any sense to me. Sonya asked me how I was liking it, and I couldn’t help myself; I blurted out, “This is BORING!” And then I felt bad.

It’s just that I was expecting this and this, and I wasn’t getting it. I had specifically not brought a purse just to be able to dance like a wild woman, and this was not wild woman music. Not liking it made me feel like one of those shallow teenybopper who comes to a show and only knows the words to the single.

With the lame music and the crappy weather, the day felt like this:

But then! They played this, and it was great! And then they played “Kids”, and then they played “Time to Pretend”, and it was glorious! Look at how happy we are, with our wrinkly foreheads:

So in the end, I totally loved the show, and I’m glad we stuck it out. Especially because we got to have Korean BBQ at Dokebi afterward:

And just because I can’t help thinking this is the awesomest thing ever, check out this amateur music video of MGMT’s “Kids”. Soooo good, right?

The weekend before last, Boyfriend Kamran and I decided to explore the new Brooklyn Ikea and buy a tiny dresser for me to overflow with the zillions of polka-dot shirts that I’m currently storing folded on a chair in the corner of his apartment. We’ve always had access to the Ikea in Elizabeth, New Jersey, via a free shuttle bus from Port Authority, but the new Brooklyn Ikea is located in an up-and-coming neighborhood that we want to explore, anyway, AND it’s accessible via a free water ferry from lower Manhattan.

But of course we took the free shuttle bus outside of the Borough Hall subway station. (Which, if you’re oddly here for informational purposes, is on Joralemon Street near the northeast corner of Court Street.) And instead of buying a dresser, we:

We ended up buying a set of plastic containers for me to haul salad fixins to work in (which will never actually happen) and a wooden artist’s model, which Kamran named Chip and kept petting while murmuring, “You’re my only friend.” We are truly a pathetic lot. But we have a good time.

These are the sorts of things we do on weekends to amuse ourselves:

Zig.

Zig zag.

Zig zag ZOOM!

Kamran’s flailing arms aside, my favourite part of the video is the beginning where I have to tell that woman she can walk in front of the camera. I swear New Yorkers are only polite when they’re being filmed.

Also, I should mention that this is from months ago, just in case you get freaked out by my short hair and the fact that we’re wearing coats in the midst of summer. Because I know our every move affects your emotional health.

My boyfriend, Kamran, recently moved from a regular, old associate office into a partner office at the law firm where he does patent whatnot, and late Saturday afternoon, he took me to work to show me how far he’s come.

The glory! The majesty! Looking out upon the Empire State Building as you write patents and litigate the hell out of anyone who so much as coughs in your direction–that’s how you know you’ve made it!

But even now that he’s sittin’ pretty on top, Kamran will always be a physics-experiments-in-the-lab-lovin’ kind of nerd:

Congratulations, hotstuff.

Last night, Boyfriend Kamran and I were indecisive about where to go for dinner as usual, and it was annoying me to the point that I just wanted to forget the whole thing and eat spaghetti on his couch. When our bus from his work neared the Dos Caminos on 3rd Ave., though, he asked if I felt like stopping there. Of course I did; I suggested it for dinner sometime last week and was still craving it, but I’d already mentioned another Mexican place, and he hadn’t jumped at the chance, so I figured he wasn’t in the mood for salsa. But at the last minute, he said, “Let’s go!”, and it turned out to be THE BEST DECISION EVER.

We’re masochists, so we requested a table on the patio, where the jalapeños could be sure to push our internal juices from tepid to boiling. The host led us along the side of the restaurant and seated us at the greatest booth–facing the street and all the other patrons for our voyeuristic pleasure–with burnt orange cushions to sit on and pillows to lounge with. We settled in, he handed us our menus, and we discovered that it’s the start of Restaurant Week Summer 2008! It’s the two weeks each season where all of the restaurants that usually charge $35+ just for their entrees charge $35 altogether for an appetizer, an entree, and a dessert. It’s great for people like me who aren’t quite sure they’re ready to spend an entire paycheck for some almond-crusted mahi mahi that they may end up hating and a great way to find out if that chef everyone exclaims about is really any better than the guy microwaving the chicken fingers in the kitchen of your local Applebee’s.

We should’ve known, of course, because we spent an entire day at the beginning of the month choosing our restaurants, but our first reservation isn’t until Friday. And we would’ve never chosen this particular place, because it’s somewhere we can go any time, but the Dos Caminos Restaurant Week menu blew me away.

To start, Kamran ordered the Tomatillo, Pineapple, & Mint Gazpacho with spanish chorizo and pickled cucumber, which was cool and refreshing with the sweetest cucumber and little chunks of chorizo that looked like cat treats but tasted smoky and spicy and had the pleasantest chew to them. He had chosen the soup over the pork flautas simply because it looked more interesting, and we’re positive it was the right choice.

I, of course, went with the Croquetas de Queso, which the menu described as “crispy potato croquettes stuffed with cotija cheese” and Kamran described as “gourmet mozzarella sticks”. The cheese and potato oozed from their sides, the orangey-red romesco salsa was a totally new taste for me, and the greens in the center of the plate created a compliment that I didn’t know was possible as far as lettuce goes.

Kamran chose the Hanger Steak Tampiquena (grilled hanger steak, mole negro enchilada, black beans, avocado) for his entree and was really impressed. He’d ordered a steak once before at Dos Caminos and hadn’t cared for it, so I’d dissuaded him from the hanger, but I’m glad he ignored me, because this thing was fla-vor-FUL. The corn tortillas were brimming with cheese and smothered in mole, and the beans were, you know, bean-y and in a big bowl on the side.

My dish was even more phenomenal. It’s like this thing was meant for me, made with all of my favourites: chorizo-stuffed chicken breast, pickled golden raisins, toasted almond rice, and mole de xico. Bliss, bliss, and heaven!

I know I’m supposed to be embarrassed to be a chicken fanatic, but this chicken dish was THE BEST. The poultry was crispy on the outside and moist on the inside, the chorizo wasn’t overpoweringly spicy, and the almond rice was fantastic on its own but even better when mixed with the mole. Just LOOK at it!

Kamran had originally decided on the Mexican Chocolate & Cherry Semifreddo with fresh bing cherry salsita, and I on the Pastel de Elote with mango-blackberry salsita and sweet corn ice cream (because I’m a corn ice cream freak), but when it came time to order, I just went with the first one on the list–the chocolate–to make it easier. We decided to split them 50-50, but when they arrived and we tasted our own and then each other’s, we found that we’d each ended up with the right dessert for us.

The corn ice cream was surprisingly too intense for me (and almost nothing is too intense for me); the chocolate was too bitter for Kamran (even though it wasn’t actually bitter at all and tasted awesome to me). He described his as “corncake with corn ice cream”, and if the cake was a bit dry for my liking, the the little bits of syrupy mango here and there made up for it. The most interesting thing about it was that the ice cream was bordering savory; corn ice creams I’ve had in the past have always been balanced by either a whole lotta sugar or some sort of berry swirled in, but this was straight up CORN-flavored. It was strange and delicious, and like I said, really intense.

Kamran described my dessert as “gross sour chocolate mousse”, but when I called him on it, he said, “Okay, I acknowledge that I am a neophyte when it comes to serious chocolate. I am to chocolate as you are to everything but chocolate.” OUCH! But he’s right–I’m serious about chocolate. I can take it super-dark or I can take it milky light, and the pointed curved piece on my plate was dark with a hint of fruit. The mousse was creamy at first, but when I started working toward the middle of the mound, it became colder and almost frozen; I found out why when I got to the center and found a surprise frozen cherry.

I can’t say enough about how much I enjoyed the meal, especially when I’ve considered the restaurant only good and not exceptional in the past. It was the most pleasant start to Restaurant Week I can imagine, and now I’m even more pumped for our other ventures.

Last Friday night, a couple of my friends wanted to get together for happy hour, so we scoured drinkdeal.com and came up with Benny’s Burritos, because we pretty much want to drink giant margaritas all the time. And giant margaritas we had.

For $3, they’ll give you a tumbler of margarita. For $6, you get a Collins glass. And for $9? The biggest beer mug you can imagine. My friends Beth and Charles and I arrived early to take advantage of the deal, which is only offered at the bar, and by the time I finished my coconut-flavored margarita mug, I was giddy. Poor Boyfriend Kamran showed up all professional-like in his button-down and slacks to find me howling and slapping the table at everything Beth and Charles said.

Despite the fact that they live together, Adam has a hard time letting on that he actually likes Sonya.

This is Charles and Kamran’s attempt to look like badasses. SUCCESS!

Fake smile!

Everyone else really sucks at taking non-flash pictures on my camera. Why didn’t I become the steady-handed brain surgeon I planned to be?

And that concludes the Requisite Pictures of People Having Fun portion of this entry.

Not to make this a restaurant review or anything, but I have to mention that our food was pretty great. I’m on a corn kick right now and made Kamran share the corn fritters appetizer with me, which was a plate of little fried balls that resembled hush puppies. And the consistency of their filling was pretty hush-puppy-ish, too, only with CORN added. Best thing you can imagine? I thought so. The burritos were mission-style, so they were huge and full of the stuff you usually see as side dishes. I had the Grilled Mango Burrito, which came with enough mango salsa to douse the thing, and Kamran got the Chicken Chipotle Burrito, which was spice-AY.

Adam was in the mood for foosball, so we walked toward B-Side on surprise! Avenue B. Halfway there, Kamran brought up Luca Lounge, the bar he took me to on our first date lo those many months ago, where we admitted to the embarrassing bands we liked and I made a joke about his timing me while I went to the restroom before remembering that old cellphone commercial where the guy who asks the girl if she wants to time him on the toilet was supposedly a douchebag. Kamran described the red velvet Victorian couches, the backyard garden, the whoa-clean restrooms, and our friends were hooked. And then we got there and found THIS:

Sadly, no!

It was CLOSED! Like, for GOOD! Just then, my best friend Tracey called from Ohio, and when I told her about our bad luck, she reminded me that she and her last boyfriend went back to their first date restaurant on their fourth anniversary, found it had closed, and broke up soon after. NOOOOOOOOOOO! But she’s engaged to someone way awesomer now, so it’s cool. Kamran and I agreed that if this means the end of the line for us, it’s been a good run, and we’ll part without tears and bitterness. Plus, their menu was still lit up outside, and that has to mean something.

We returned to the original plan of B-Side, where we opted for the $5 PBR-and-a-shot-of-the-cheapest-most-painful-going-down-whiskey-you-can-imagine deal. We went to the back room, which was twelve to sixteen hundred degrees but made up for it by having a hugely huge wraparound couch with no apparent rat damage and concert posters for rad bands on the wall. We chugged our whiskey as a group (OR SO WE THOUGHT, UNTIL SOMEONE FOUND A FULL SHOT GLASS LOLLYGAGGING ON OUR TABLE LATER) and then played several thousand rounds of foosball, all of which resulted in outrageous wins for Adam, because he has a foosball table in his office and is a bastard. My camera battery had almost completely died at this point, so I kept turning the thing on for a second and snapping a picture as fast as I could, which resulted in a lot of shots like this:

Yes, Charles is indeed wearing an entire suit. And Beth looks like a mannequin.

Sonya and Adam knew I was starting to get a little sleepy and grumpy, so they dragged us to Le Royale for Robot Rock, ’cause I loooove dancing to some electronic indie whatnot. We ended up having to wait in line for 20 minutes or so, during which time the same guy walked by twice with his girlfriend and said mocking things to us like, “Did you get in yet?” and “I heard this place really sucks.” And when we got to the front of the line, they were trying to charge us $10 to get in. And even though Kamran was going to pay my $10 like the gentleman he is, I refused. WE DO NOT PAY TO GET INTO BARS!

Except when the bar is fat cat, which charges a mere $3 for hours and hours of entertainment. Sonya has tried to get me to go there a million times before, but I’ve always denied her because she’s way too excitable about these sorts of things, and I figured it’d turn out to be super-lame. But there’s pool! And ping-pong! And chess! And Scrabble! And live jazz! And a bunch of dorky hipsters everywhere! It’s a massive (at least by NYC standards) basement with a bunch of tables and chairs for drinkin’ and gamin’, individual netted rooms for ping-pong, and the sort of music that makes you feel like wearing a flapper dress and smoking from an obnoxiously long cigarette holder. It helps that I totally killed Kamran at ping-pong manymany times in a row, but that’s neither here nor there. So I started out my fat cat visit feeling miserable and wanting to leave immediately and ended it by being the last one to want to go.

A+!

After a long night of kicking boys’ butts at ping-pong and pool at a local bar, my friends Sonya and Beth and I met up for brunch at Essex around 2 p.m. with my boyfriend Kamran in tow. Well, actually, Kamran and I showed up first and had to wait a few minutes, and I only mention that because two hostesses came by separately to ask us if we were waiting to be seated, which is very rare in this city where people pretend to not notice each other. One of them had wild curly blonde hair cut short and was wearing a vintage-looking pink lace dress (that Beth later informed us was actually from Forever 21), and the other had dyed-platinum unwashed hair and cute thick-framed glasses, so they had every right to act too cool for school, but they didn’t.

The decor was very black/white/red and hip, but the clientele was the same as every other brunch place in Manhattan–a bunch of twentysomething girls in jersey dresses giggling about godknowswhat. (So naturally, we fit right in.) I was amused that they offer a Sunday evening brunch until 8 p.m. after my assertion here that brunch in NYC can last strangely into the evening. Maybe that’s when all of the hip people come in. Or maybe all the hip people got lost, since the entrance to the restaurant is actually on Rivington Street instead of Essex.

Sonya had originally suggested the place solely because they include three drinks with your meal and sell you additional ones for only $3, adding that the menu looked “okay”, too. But the Essex brunch menu turned out to be so full of deliciousness that all four of us had the worst time deciding what to get. Challah french toast with bananas foster sauce? Manchego macaroni and cheese with chicken apple sausage? Chocolate-blueberry pancakes? With mimosas or screwdrivers or bloody marys?

In the end, I ordered The Southern, a biscuit with a sausage patty, scrambled eggs, and sausage gravy. The biscuit would have been too dry on its own, but with the gravy, it was amazing; I couldn’t stop sharing it with Kamran just so I could wait for him to make yummy sounds. Kamran ordered the lobster benedict, which was chopped a bit too small for his liking but still tasted delicious. Sonya ordered the salmon eggs benedict, which arrived with very rare salmon; as someone who doesn’t care for smoked salmon, it would’ve been a pleasant surprise for me, and Sonya eats all manner of salmon, godloveher. Beth ordered poached eggs with chicken apple sausage that she said were “decent”, but Beth is super-picky and can therefore be completely ignored.

The best part of the meal was something that we weren’t supposed to care about, though–the home fries. They were big, soft hunks of potato soaked in . . . I don’t know what. And Kamran, who has the most discerning palate of anyone I know, was just as befuddled. They were sort of orangey-red and spicy, and I could’ve eaten an entire plate of them. Kamran agreed that they were the best, but when I talked to Beth about them later, she said, “The potatoes were okay. I’ve had better.” I said, “Seriously?! Kamran and I loved those potatoes, though I have no idea what was in them,” and Beth said, “Yeah, they were dunked in so much stuff I had trouble finding the actual potato in all the onions and stuff. I like my potatoes a little more crispy and less mushy.” So I guess it all depends on how you take your potatoes, but once again, I vote that we ignore Beth.

The one thing we might have complained about was the drinks included in the meal. Our waitress brought them so quickly that the bartender might have had 50 of them pre-made and lined up on the bar, and going down, they tasted alcoholless. But then we stood up and tried to cross the street pretty unsuccessfully.

Needless to say, we’ll be back.

This is for you, Sonya and Beth, for always complaining that I post the worst pictures of you.

For the past two years I’ve been in New York City for the 4th of July instead of at home in Ohio watching my family burn off their fingers on sparklers like I’m supposed to, I’ve purposely avoided the fireworks and gone to dinner at Serendipity, first with then-boyfriend Todd, who hated crowds, and then with now-boyfriend Kamran, who appreciates a sugar coma as much as I do but still managed to get me back to his house in time to see the throngs of fireworks-viewers streaming off FDR Drive but not a lot of the show itself last year.

This year, though, Kamran was off visiting his family in California, so I let myself get talked into watching the ‘works with my friends Beth, Emily, Sonya, Adam, Christos, and Chad, and Emily’s friends Jeff and Carrie. Emily and Beth had bought us adult sippy cups on their way to my house, so we stopped off at my C-Town to buy Crystal Light and water to mix in with our vodka and rum like the high school girls we are. I was carrying Emily’s brother’s ridiculously adorable Yorkiepoo in a bag over my shoulder, and the checkout girls went crazy over how cute it was. I thought I was the new star of the grocery store until I came back the next day, and they were all like, “Where’s the dog?! . . . Oh, it wasn’t yours? SNUB.”

We spread out the blankets that Emily and Sonya were so kind to bring in the park between the Brooklyn

and Manhattan bridges

and set to sippin’

and piggin’ out.

Just as the show was about to start, it started to rain pretty heavily,

so everyone got out their umbrellas and totally blocked my view (but in kind of a pretty way).

I’ll admit that fireworks viewed through the Brooklyn Bridge are a bit of a novelty

but after they were over, I was like, “That’s IT?! The fireworks in Ohio are 100 times better!” Everyone just sort of shrugged me off, but I seriously think these people don’t understand how seriously Ohio takes its fireworks. Not only do they use the awesomely pun-y name Red, White, and BOOM!, but they have a whole mash-up of America-themed songs playing on a local radio station that the fireworks are timed to perfectly. Everyone brings their portable radios and sings along, the finale lasts at least 20 minutes, and only one or two people get stabbed every year. Honestly, what is the 4th of July without Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America” playing on a million boomboxes around you?!

Once the totally-crappy-and-in-every-way-disappointing-but-for-the-fact-that-Carrie-served-warm-apple-pie-and-vanilla-ice-cream-in-plastic-cups fireworks were over, we decided that the subway was going to be way too crazy and instead chose to take a quick walk down to the neighborhood of Carroll Gardens, where Chad promised us was a great bar. THIRTY-EIGHT MILES LATER (give or take thirty-seven), we were still walking. In the rain. At night. In uncomfortable shoes. I guess I wasn’t doing anything to hide how cranky I was, because Chad kept saying, “Who’s the biggest trouper here? Katie! She wins the trouper award!” and when I wouldn’t fold up my umbrella and enjoy the rain like everyone else, Emily and Beth started singing to Carly Simon’s tune, “Katie’s so vain/she probably thinks this song’s about her hair.”

The bar, Moonshine, turned out to actually be worth the walk (though I’m not sure you could convince me to do it again). There was an empty couch for us to sit on along one wall with the couch across from us occupied by young men with side-parted hair, one of them in a complete seersucker suit. The jukebox played Bloc Party and then Cat Power and then Devo and then HEART. There was plenty of Big Buck Hunter and House of the Dead

Christos, the Joyous German Murder Machine

a thick dark wood table for playing board games on

Seen here: Jenga, with Truth or Dare challenges written on each piece by previous Moonshine patrons

and . . . shoes nailed to the wall?

Please note Beth’s enormous cleavage.

What more could you want?

Most people see the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade as an opportunity for frivolity in the sand, a chance to bare it all in the sun, the one time they can feel free to be themselves. I, on the other hand, see it as a chance to eat a hell of a lot of hot dogs and judge other girls’ spare tires.

And so I present to you . . .

I took these pictures in the span of about five minutes, because that’s how long we cared to watch the parade before deciding that we NEEDED Nathan’s hot dogs. The stand on the boardwalk had less of a line and more of a glob of people standing around it, the idea being that it was more efficient to push and shove your way to front any chance you got than to actually wait your turn like decent, rational human beings. Luckily, halfway through our 45-minute wait, I heard my name being said behind me with a question mark, and I turned around to see Leah, who was in a couple of my creative writing workshops at THE Ohio State University and could always be counted on for stories about maybe liking girls when the rest of the class was writing crap about trying yoga for the first time. We chatted about her MFA in creative writing and the fact that she’s actually using it to work for a food and travel magazine (swoon!) and how badly I want to go to Columbia for my Masters and my great boyfriend and her great girlfriend and so on and so on.

When my friends Sonya and Adam got to the order counter finally, I let these elderly ladies who had been sort of edging their way in front of me squeeze in behind them. Sonya turned back around to stand with me, and one of the ladies said to her, “You go ahead.” I said, “Oh, she’s with him,” and the other lady said, “Trust me, we know. We’ve been listening to you for the last half-hour. They’re together, your boyfriend’s on vacation in California, that girl has her Masters degree from Chicago, and you want your Masters degree from Columbia. Well, we live right by Columbia, and we could’ve had a kosher meal up there. For half the price.” Sonya and I laughed, but we secretly thought they were totally creepy.

An hour after first feeling the pangs of hunger, we found a grassy knoll on which to lunch and went about our munching

and slurping

and gnawing like the rabid beasts we are.

My chili cheese fries came with a tiny fork, which was a real shame, because I was ready to plunge my entire head into those things until I saw that they evidently expected me to be civil about it. And the corndog? THE BEST ONE OF MY LIFE.

So, yeah, it was a great time. It’s just kind of funny that we went to Coney Island on the crowdest day of the year just to eat some hot dogs that are there year-round.

On a walk around the city this weekend, my friends and I came across a store in the East Village with a friendly wide-open door, cute drawings of familiar characters hung on every inch of the front window, and inviting chairs corralled on the sidewalk outside. But upon closer inspection, the drawings turned out to be offensive, and the chairs had phrases like Jews Only graffitied on them. I wish I’d thought to look at the name of the place, but at least I have this memento:

New favourite picture of me ever?

My roommate, Wen, invited me to go see Cold War Kids play for $3 as part of Celebrate Brooklyn! on Friday night. The only song I’d ever bothered to listen to was “Hospital Beds“, and I didn’t loooooove it like everyone else I know seems to, but I figured a concert in the park would be nice. I listened to the songs on their MySpace that day in an attempt to form some sort of opinion of them, and I felt okay about their songs, but they didn’t move me or anything. I did come away thinking that their vocalist reminded me a bit of Jack White of The White Stripes, though, and that’s exciting.

My friend Beth accompanied me to the park, and we meandered along the tree-lined sidewalks of Park Slope and looked in the windows of brownstones filled with baby strollers and bookshelves that don’t have to move from apartment to apartment as the rent goes up and can therefore actually be filled with books instead of the Avenging Unicorn Playset and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figurines that mine are.

We got seats toward the center, swigged from our $2 cans of Snapple, and set to judging everyone in sight. Our main target of ridicule was this girl right in of us with these really great maybe-vintage light brown sunglasses that took up her entire face. We mocked her mostly because we felt like she didn’t deserve them. Well, that and her half-hearted greasy female pompadour. And handgun earrings. Then we switched to deciding who I should sleep with while Boyfriend Kamran’s visiting home in Laguna Beach and no doubt ogling tons of blondes in bikinis: the guy with the excellent Bonnie Prince Billy beard or the really classicly-romantic-looking girl two rows ahead of us who might have very well been 15 years old. Wen’s arrival cut the conversation short, and I instead went about taking pictures of myself showcasing emotions ranging from shifty

to manic.

The first band up was Sam Champion, who were billed as “not local for long”, but we found them pretty much nondescript aside from the fact that their lead singer was hot, but even that was questioned once he took off his face-obscuring sunglasses. I think they thought they were kind of . . . The Doors-ish? . . . but we spent most of their hour caring more about the biracial lesbian couple next to us chasing their blonde-haired, blue-eyed toddler up and down the aisle.

The middle band was Elvis Perkins in Dearland, who we took to pretty kindly despite the singer’s all-white outfit and the inclusion of an organ in their instrumentation. I’ll admit that a lot of their music was drowned in our discussion about whether the P on the vocalist’s hat was for Princeton or the Pirates (I voted for the former, since I have a boyfriend who has a Ph.D. from Princeton and all and think I know what the Princeton P looks like), but we also genuinely liked the folksy guitar stuff they had going. If you’re checking out their MySpace, I think “While You Were Sleeping” is a really good representation of what we heard.

In between sets, we amused ourselves with the screen hanging from the back of the stage that showed messages and pictures people in the audience could text in to a special number. There were a lot of “hipsters go home” and “hi lux from axel and cooper :)”, but there were also some marriage proposals and one admittance to giving someone else in the crowd genital herpes.

When Cold War Kids came on, everyone stood up, the aisles filled with people, and the row behind us went crazy singing along (on key, thankfully) to every word of every song. And I found out that I actually liked the band quite a bit. Well, the singer, at least. In fact, I liked him so much that I wished he’d ditch his instrumentalists, get some better songs, and become the new Jeff Buckley. I got so mad that he kept wasting his voice on screaming, but now that I think about it, it provided a nice juxtaposition to his sweet crooning. I felt totally inspired by his singing and his stage presence and his completely soaked shirt. Listen to this, and you can imagine the effort that goes into it.

So yeah, it’s safe to say that I love him.

And the park at night.

And getting sauced at a Mexican restaurant that looked like an Aztec temple afterward with Beth.

A couple of Sundays ago, my ladyfriends and I wanted to meet for brunch–and it should be noted here that brunch in NYC can strangely fall anywhere between the hours of 10 a.m. and 8 p.m.–in my neighborhood of Williamsburg, which is uncharted territory for us as far as brunches go. We planned to check out Egg, which New York Magazine named Best Overall Breakfast this year, but their sign-in sheet was packed, and they stopped serving at 2, so we deliberated for a while

and then walked down to the Roebling Tea Room, which you will be incredibly interested to learn is named after the man who designed the Brooklyn Bridge. (And also the street that the restaurant sits on, but that’s better left unmentioned.)

My friend Emily had her brother’s Yorkiepoo (I know, right?) with her because she’d thought we’d be eating outside, and dogs on patios here are as numerous as taxicabs, but luckily Penny happens to be the cutest dog alive and won our waitress over with only a swish of her little hypoallergenic tail. It also helps that pretty much everyone who sees her mistakes her for a child’s plush toy at first, so Emily could just stuff Penny in her bag and let everyone believe she’s the kind of grown woman who’s unable to leave home without her playthings.

We were seated right away–despite the fact that we were a group of six and the place looked packed–in front of the nearly floor-to-ceiling windows that line the front wall and make it evident that the building was once a warehouse of some sort. They filled the room with light and ruined all of my pictures, but it was well worth it.