I don’t mean to jab at anyone’s sense of style, because I live in granny sweaters, but I spent a lot of my time in NYC thinking, “It is so sad that she spent so much time and effort to look like that.”
Most interesting designs, I think, look wonderful in theory and terrible in practice.
But even I surprise myself sometimes with the things I like these days. Like t-straps and saddle shoes, which my mom used to force me into against my will when I was kid.
Even lately, I’ve found myself not totally hating the idea of things like harem pants, which appeared in jumpsuit form in this season of “Project Runway”, looked pretty amazing, and won a challenge to end up on a Time Square billboard:
The day before I left for vacation, my co-worker Steve came to my desk and said, “Type ghetto bed intruder into YouTube.” Obviously you can’t go wrong searching for videos with those keywords, so I wasn’t surprised to laugh out loud while watching this interview (which I’m sure you all saw weeks ago, because I’m 100 years behind everyone else when it comes to the Internet):
Then Steve showed me the Auto-Tuned remix of the footage, which was so ingenious I found myself basically putting it on repeat:
I made Kamran pause his 17th viewing of an “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” episode that night so he could watch the videos, and even though he was skeptical at first, because I never find the right things funny, he actually laughed out loud, too. And we sang bits of the song to each other over the next couple of hours as we did laundry and packed for California, but I kind of figured that was it.
It happened, though, that the song would become the focal point of our entire 10-day trip. We were whispering quotes from it on the plane. We were watching it on Kamran’s iPod under the table while out for lunch with his parents. We were pretending to show it to his friends just to have an excuse to watch it again ourselves. One night, I woke up to it and thought I was going crazy until I realized Kamran was listening to it in the bathroom while pooing. And last night, a full 11 days since I first saw the thing, I couldn’t sleep because “hide your kids, hide your wife, and hide your husband, ’cause they’re rapin’ everybody out here” kept running through my head.
My friend Jeff pointed me to Engadget’s article on the new Kindle today, and it got me thinking about how my Kindle has been so life-changing and will only be more life-changing for other people now that it’s available in different colors, has an even faster refresh rate, and is selling for $139.
Have you looked at my Shelfari shelf recently? It’s exploding. Now that I’m never without a book, I’m flying through them like never before. Even crappy books like the Sarah Silverman one. Even books I thought would be crappy but turned out to be engrossing, like Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures. If I get 20 pages into a book and don’t care about it yet, I don’t have to wait until I’m home or at the library to get something else; I just click over to my home screen and choose another one. There’s literally nothing I miss about real books.
I assume you’ll all run out and buy the new version when it’s released on August 27th, but in case you decide to buy the Kindle 2 on eBay for even cheaper, let me recommend the cover that I have. I shopped around for days and finally decided on the TrendyDigital MaxGuard Leather Cover in purple. It’s so sleek and feels so good in my hands with its leather shell and soft suede-like interior. The Kindle slides into its pocket and fits so snugly that it doesn’t need any elastic bands or metal prongs to hold it in. The magnetic closure makes this great little snapping sound when you flip it closed that sounds so smart I can’t help but feel as if everyone on the train has heard it and is envious of me.
I’ll tell you who I’m envious of, though: these people who carry their Kindles without any case at all. I see them on the train with their 1/3rd-inch-thick readers, and I think, How rich must you be to not care about scratching that thing up? I’ll bet they’re all reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, too.
Now that the iPad has been released, several people have asked me if I wish I would’ve waited another week to buy my Kindle.
And my answer is always, “Are you kidding?” The iPad is great-looking and probably fun to use, but it’s not an e-reader. The Kindle is actually everything I hoped it’d be and more, for half the price of even the cheapest iPad (and almost $600 cheaper than the most expensive one). I feel like I didn’t know half of what it was capable of before I bought it, and I wouldn’t have hesitated as long as I did had I known what I was in store for.
• Built-In Dictionary: A small button on the front acts as a mouse that allows you to scroll around pages. When you rest the cursor beside any word, a text bubble pops up at the bottom of the page with the definition. I always thought I was a smartypants who was soooo good at figuring out words from their context clues, but it turns out that no, no, I am not.
• Free Wireless 3G Internet Access: Why is this not the main point they’re using to sell the Kindle other than, you know, the whole being-able-to-read-books-on-it thing? The Amazon store is of course built right in, but Google and Wikipedia searches are, too, and I was even able to view this very blog on it. It was the text version, like you might see on a BlackBerry, but still. Dedicated wireless!
• Highlighting and Notes: I used to carry around miniature sticky notes to plop down all over my book pages, but the Kindle not only lets you highlight the text itself, it also lets you type notes on the page you’re reading. It collects your highlights and notes in a file that lists them and includes a small excerpt from each one so you can find what you’re looking for at a glance. When you plug your Kindle into your computer’s USB port, you can copy the file from your Kindle to your computer and edit it from there. GENIUS.
• Text-to-Speech: Yeah, it reads to you. I’m not talking about playing audiobooks on it. I’m talking about a male or female voice (that’s not too robotic) that recites the text for you while you eat a sandwich with one hand and wipe your butt with the other. I will never use this, but I’m pleased with its existence nonetheless.
• MP3s: It plays them. While you read, on the subway, with the gangster-looking guy next to you listening to some sappy Beyoncé that you can be so thankful you don’t have to hear.
I don’t need a free hand on the train to flip the page, I don’t have to lug five paperbacks on the plane with me every time I visit my family, and I can catch up on (for free!) all of the classics I should’ve read in college but was too busy being a band groupie to take time for.
There’s one negative: the Kindle can read PDFs, but it can’t read them as well as the ebooks you buy from Amazon.com. Meaning that you can’t highlight or write notes in them. NOT A FAN. Luckily, there’s a free program called MobiPocket Creator that lets you convert your PDFs into a format the Kindle likes and can highlight/notate.
Of course, maybe I just wasn’t paying attention, and all of these things were clear to everyone else. Anyway, are you convinced yet?
You know when you get gifts from people that prove they really, really know you? And not only know you but actually get you and possibly even don’t mind you? Here are a few that I received at the end of the year that made me go, “Oh, crap, you actually pay attention to me when I talk to you, don’t you?”
In order of appearance in my life:
1) From Tracey, a pirated copy of The Peanut Butter Solution, which is probably my favourite childhood movie aside from Labyrinth. I don’t know why my mom would’ve taped it off of TV, but she did, and I must have watched that thing 700 times as a kid. It scared me to death, but it likely also cultivated my extreme taste for peanut butter as an adult. Having it back in my life feels like regaining a lost limb.
2) Also from Tracey, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds Barbie. I don’t, like, collect Barbies or anything, I need you to know, but I do love the film, and I love that someone at Mattel is weird enough to suggest they make a doll WHO IS BEING ATTACKED BY PLASTIC BIRDS. I think she’s crazy-beautiful.
3) An owl locket ring from Kamran. Not two days before this arrived in the mail, we were discussing the steampunk movement on the way to work, and I told him that steampunk isn’t really my style. What I meant was that I like the aesthetics of it but that I’m too lazy to outfit my computer keyboard with typewriter keys and too conservative to wear goggles ‘round my neck every day. Having searched Etsy for the word steampunk to find the ring, he was worried I wouldn’t like it, but umm . . . it’s an owl on a locket with scrollwork on the band. There is nothing about this that is not me.
4) OMG, a vintage mink stole. Like, for real. It was fate, too, because mere hours before it arrived in the mail, Kamran and I saw this girl in the elevator wearing a fur, and I was like, “Why does she have that and I don’t?” And he totally goaded me into talking for ten minutes about why I love fur so much with absolutely no regard to animal life, knowing that I’d be getting one from him later in the day. It has a giant minky button in the front over the closure, and it’s so soft I no longer care to think about–let alone touch–kittens and bunnies.
My dad also got me a copy of Glenn Beck’s Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government for Christmas, but I prefer not to discuss that.
It may have been that I was overwhelmed by the joy I was feeling just from being in Ohio, but the following two things made me cry for no good reason last week:
1) The scene in “Glee” when the kids from the deaf school perform John Lennon’s “Imagine”. I generally find the show cheesy and overproduced, but I was unexpectedly emotional about the unconventional solo and the sappy joining together of the two rival choirs.
This is where my video clip would be if Fox wasn’t overly protective of their stupid show, didn’t hate free publicity, and hadn’t ratted me out to YouTube. You are dead to me, “Glee”.
2) At a screening of Fantastic Mr. Fox, my best friend and I saw the trailer for the upcoming movie Babies. I don’t even LIKE babies, but everything about this is wonderful. Especially the part that says, “THE BABIES ARE COMING.”
Every Thanksgiving, my stepmother-who-I’ve-known-my-whole-life-and-think-is-the-best-possible-stand-in-for-my-actual-mother-who-died-of-brain-cancer-in-2000 puts pieces of dried corn next to each person’s plate at the dinner table and tells us we have to give thanks for one thing for every piece of corn we have. Her kids, who are adults and not 14-year-olds as you might expect, seem to think this is a real challenge, even though there’s usually only two pieces of corn at their plates. Every year, I want to scream, “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, JUST SAY YOU’RE THANKFUL FOR JESUS AND REGULAR BOWEL MOVEMENTS!!” But their grandfather is always there, and you know how hard it is to get geriatrics off the topic of bowels once it comes up.
Anyway, to prove how totally easy it is for me to come up with things I’m thankful for, here’s a short list:
1) My dad, who I look forward to seeing at every holiday gathering both because he always eats more pie than I do to keep me from looking like a fatty and because he’s totally fine with discussing right in front of everyone what a disappointment I am for not bombing abortion clinics every chance I get.
2) My best friend, Tracey, who pretends with an uncanny level of believability that she misses me when I’m not in Ohio with her and who doesn’t mind if I steal all of her Vanilla Coke Zero when I’m in Ohio with her. And also who doesn’t have sex with her husband for entire weeks at a time when I visit because I’m latched on to her at all hours of the day.
3) Kamran.
4) My best New York friend, Beth, who wears Prada shoes but totally doesn’t mind my Chucks, who drinks artisan cocktails but will totally buy me a Woodchuck or a Magners, and who only listens to Madonna but will totally go see Sufjan with me. If I buy her ticket.
5) Bachelor Girl, who posts things like this without any consideration for the fact that I’m building a stalker case against her publicly in case anything bad happens to me. You are my BBFF, baby.
7) The part of Band of Horses’s “Ode to the LRC” where he says, “The world is such a wonderful place.” Because it really feels that way at that moment.
9) Everyone who reads this thing, including the people who find it by using Google search terms such as “never thought i’d be a homewrecker” and “i scraped off a mole with my fingernail”.
If you don’t work with me and don’t receive a daily instant messenger reminder from me to listen to it, you may be surprised to know that my favourite song at the moment is Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the U.S.A.”.
I first heard it months ago in the background of the Max Azria/Miley Cyrus Wal-Mart collection commercial and could only make out the words “the butterflies fly away”. Naturally, I ran to Google and typed that in but kept coming up with a song called “Butterfly Fly Away”, which was decidedly not it. Not having heard a lick of Miley before that, I had no idea that this was apparently some hit from her Hannah Montana movie.
I later found the right song, listened to it on repeat all day every day, and dreamed of the day they would make an official video for it where Miley would be wearing short-shorts and cowboy boots and would be singing into a corded microphone out in the middle of a field where there’s obviously nowhere to plug that thing in. And then they did:
SO HOT! Then, yesterday, I hired a painter to re-do the lobby of my company’s office, and he randomly started telling me that he’s also currently painting the home of the guy who wrote the new Kelly Clarkson song. I was like, “Oh, I don’t really listen to popular music,” but he assured me I would’ve heard this song, and when we pulled it up on YouTube, it turns out he was right. After enjoying that, he said practically as an aside, “This guy also wrote the new Miley Cyrus song, if you know it.” I was like
IF I KNOW IT?! So what I’m saying is–there’s three degrees of separation between Miley Cyrus and me, which practically makes me one of those friends in her video. Probably the Asian one in the red bikini top.
When I first moved to NYC, I was dating this great guy named Todd who had this terrible friend named Sarah. On my first night in the city, she took us to eat at the Sea in Williamsburg, which would later become the neighborhood I’d move to and live in for three years and counting, even though I’m not even sure I knew we were in Brooklyn at the time. I thought Sarah was a little bit bitchy and a little bit glamourous, which is exactly what I look for in friends, and I assumed we’d be likethis soon enough.
But then Todd came home from hanging out with her one night and told me that Sarah said my taste in music was not indie but singer-songwriter. As I’d prided myself up until then on knowing all the music my friends didn’t, I was super-offended that this Goldfrapp-loving rich girl was calling me “not indie”. When I thought of singer-songwriters, I thought of John Mayer and Jack Johnson, who I just don’t consider my guys.
The other day, though, I realized that actually, yeah, I’m totally not embarrassed to like certain singer-songwriters:
But I hate all the others, and I’m totally indie, so there.
My office building is built to be flexible so that it doesn’t topple over in the wind gusts that roar over the tip of the island in Battery Park. On bad days, the building groans as it sways back and forth, and I know to have my lunch delivered so as to not mess up my hair. On really bad days, the door in our 25th floor lobby won’t lock because the two walls around it are so far from where they’re supposed to be.
It’s funny to find myself nostalgic and grossly sentimental for the city I currently live in. I saw this ring from Henri Bendel in Time Out New York on the train the other morning and had a moment of heart palpitations.
I guess I have a special attachment to the Chrysler Building since dating Kamran, who goes to bed every night with it shining in his window, and since we took this photo in front of it two whole years ago. When I asked my brother-in-law to design a sticker for me and he sent a drawing with a skyline, I specifically asked if he could change one of the buildings to the Chrysler.
I don’t know if I love it enough to special order a $720 gold (gold?!) ring modeled after it, but it makes me sad to imagine not seeing it every day.
I’m interested–are there things in your city you feel this way about?
1) I assume that everyone has seen this at this point, but I just want to point out that:
a) this is the local news station I watch (don’t ask me why) when I’m at my apartment, and
b) Kamran and I have used it in so many aspects of our daily conversation at this point that it’s only getting funnier.
2) Elena Kalis, who my co-worker Anthony introduced me to.
3) Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring, a James Ensor painting from . . . 1891?! How messed up was this guy to be creating this craziness more than 100 years ago?
“More to Love” is my favourite/most hated show on television right now. I was torn between it and “NYC Prep” on the first Tuesday night it aired, but after watching 20 fat women cry nonstop for an hour, I knew I made the right choice, and I’ve been making it every week since.
I’m not a person who believes weight has anything to do with love. I’m not thin, and I’ve loved and been loved in return by all sorts of men, thin and not-thin themselves. (But mostly thin, because fat people are gross. (Kidding.)) These big-boned ladies all truly believe, though, that their one shot at love is this 26-year-old spike-haired real estate developer who likes to eat and doesn’t want a woman who watches her weight.
And they all cry about it throughout every episode. Their skinny friends get hit on at bars. They’ve never had serious boyfriends. They’ve never been on a single date. And there’s a reason for that.
If you’re single–if you’re perpetually single–and you don’t want to be, there’s something wrong with you. There, I said it. Don’t blame it on men being superficial. Blame it on you being a crappy date. Unless you live in the middle of smalltown Iowa, in which case I’m a little more sympathetic, but seriously, it’s probably still your fault, especially if you’re one of those assholes who scorns Internet dating. Whenever I hear some fat chick say, “I have no idea why I’m alone!”, I want to go through a laundry list for her, because it’s always so obvious. Even the guys who are willing to look past your weight can’t deal with your jacked-up face, your total lack of humor, your junior high vocabulary, and your skank clothes.
For instance, not a single one of the women in the two episodes of “More to Love” I’ve watched has said something funny. In fact, when Luke asks each of them in turn if they’ll wear the ring that signifies their staying on the show another week, each of them in turn says, “Of course.” I’ve been waiting for even just one of them to say “bitch, please” or fake like they don’t want it only to throw their arms around him and snatch it out of his hands a second later, but they’re all so worried about losing their “one” chance for “true” love that all behave like robots. Whiny, sobbing robots.
My boyfriend called the show depressing, but I really delight in watching these pathetic women mope around. None of them are actually the least bit interested in this guy specifically, as far as I can tell, and are only interested in him being interested in them. And he’s too pleased with the opportunity to grope 20 fatties to care. I mean, MAYBE the producers are hiding the parts where Luke and the ladies have deep, meaningful conversation about politics and religion, but it seems like the most intimate information the group has about Luke is the name of his dog.
I had a long-distance relationship like this once: the guy would want to talk about how interested he was in the sinking of the Titanic every single time he called me–I mean, he really, really loved the Titanic–and I just wanted to talk about how in love we were. But I realized I was using him, whereas these girls are planning their weddings.
And the worst part is that they make absolutely none of this secret to him. They tell him that they’d pursue their music careers if only they had better images. They tell him that they’re virgins. They tell him, “You’re my first second date.” And he uses these confidings as teachable moments where he gets to build their self-confidence by calling them sexy and telling them to believe in themselves. And they cry.
It’s pretty clear that in the end, Luke’s going to pick the thinnest/prettiest girl in the house regardless of her personality, and all the other girls who were using his choosing her as sole proof that there’s hope for fat girls are going to kill themselves.
I finally asked my boyfriend why I’ve been able to find love when these women haven’t, and he said, “Because you’re not psychotic.” Win.
The other day, Dr. Boyfriend innocently informed me that he’d been listening to Electric Six’s Switzerland album on his iPod, not realizing that I’d go crazy reminiscing about how much it meant to me three short years ago. See, I met my ex-boyfriend Todd during our senior year of college at THE Ohio State University in a German film class, and after we’d dated for six months, he moved here for grad school at NYU. I took an extra year to write an undergraduate thesis and then moved to NYC myself, thinking that we’d both loved karaoke and strawberry shortcake from Whole Foods and riding the subway equally.
It turned out that Todd only liked to sing one song at karaoke, that they built a Whole Foods in Ohio, and that the subway made his claustrophobia act up. So he planned to move back home, and I planned to move with him, because it’s hard here, you know? And it’s even harder when you don’t know anyone but five of your boyfriend’s friends. I started looking at apartments in Columbus, picked out my future dining room table one day while I was shopping on High Street with my best friend, Tracey, and even bought some candles to match the exposed brick wall I imagined my new place would have.
And then I just didn’t go. Todd still went, and my friends must have thought I was the biggest asshole for teasing them with my plans to go with him, but I stayed, and I left our beautiful 350-square-foot studio with its black and white checked bathroom tile in Chelsea and found a sublet in Brooklyn. The sublet was the ground level of a brownstone in Park Slope where the kitchen, living room, bathroom, and one bedroom were on the first floor, and the entire basement was a second bedroom with its own bathroom.
I was rather lonely during that time. I hadn’t really considered NYC my home and hadn’t bothered to accept any invitations to hang out with friendly co-workers, so the only person I had to rely on was a guy from my very first job in the city. He lived in Park Slope and had been the one to convince me to take a sublet there, so I naturally assumed he’d be my tour guide and makeshift boyfriend. We did super-romantic things like meet at midnight for walks in the park (because he didn’t go into work until 11 a.m. and didn’t care that I had to be up at 7), listen to hours and hours of Radiohead (because it’s the only band we had in common) in his one-bedroom apartment (I didn’t know anyone else who was able to afford to live alone in NYC, so it impressed me), and watch the sun set from the roof of the Met (and then go straight to our respective homes instead of continuing an actual date). He’d call me only once a week, and I’d call Tracey eight times a day to complain about it.
The lease was up for the girl I was subletting from at the end of August, and I just assumed that my friend Wen (who I met while working Barnes & Noble, which was my second job for the first year I lived here) and I could just slide right in to a new lease. But on August 29th, the landlord called to tell me he was raising the rent from $2100 to $2800 and that I could get the hell out if I wasn’t happy with it. I begged him for a month to find a new apartment, and Wen helped me move my stuff into the basement bedroom so I could enjoy four glorious weeks of sleeping in a room the size of other people’s entire apartments.
I’d met Kamran (who is, of course, the current Dr. Boyfriend) on September 14th, but I wasn’t spending every waking moment at his apartment in front of a reality TV show yet. Every morning, I’d take a shower in the first-floor bathroom (because the downstairs one had seemed too scary to me after the flooding) and then try to find a corner of my room where I wasn’t visible to Wen on the first floor. The staircase was an open one with wooden bars where a wall should have been, so anyone standing in the kitchen could look down into the bedroom through the bars and see whatever wild thing I might be doing. I tried hanging sheets up with various sticking materials, but nothing ever took, so I resigned myself to hiding in my closet to put my underwear on for a month.
And I’d listen to Switzerland every single morning. I mean every single morning. Wen was always upstairs listening to cool stuff like The Blow from the crappy speakers attached to our TV (since we didn’t have a proper stereo), and I was always trying to drown him out with “I Buy the Drugs”. Which is totally a romantic song, right? “I am your man and I buy the drugs.”
I have no idea why the album hit me in just the right spot at that particular time. Maybe it’s because I was in such a state of oh-my-god-why-did-I-decide-to-stay-here? that I needed the tongue-in-cheek-ness of it to keep me focused on my yay-I-have-the-chance-to-do-whatever-I-want-to-with-my-life-in-NYC! thoughts and to keep my mind off my oh-crap-I-have-no-money-I-need-to-find-a-new-apartment-I’m-not-tough-enough-for-NYC thoughts. It was super-exciting to live in Brooklyn for the first time in this huge apartment and super-exciting to start looking for our next new place in my now-neighborhood of Williamsburg with Wen and super-exciting to be dating this person who felt different than everyone else from the moment I met him, and I really associate the album with those feelings and that time.
And now I have a boyfriend who loves it, too. Kamran and I agree that this is the best song on the album:
And now that I’ve told you my life story, tell me yours. What songs do you associate with certain times in your life? If you’re really motivated (and I hope you are), write your own blog/journal entry about it and let us know in the comments so everyone can enjoy.
While watching our favourite Canadian teen drama, Degrassi, from noon until 8 p.m. one day last week while I was visiting Ohio, Tracey and I luckily captured this Fruit by the Foot commercial on her DVR:
It’s sort of the worst recording ever, but the hilarity of the commercial cannot be diminished by screen lines or weird camera noises. Am I right?
I don’t know if I can fully express my love for beauty products. I’m, like, the least-girly of anyone I know–I have no idea how to apply foundation, and I couldn’t pluck my eyebrows if I tried–but there’s almost nothing I like more than buying lotion, lip gloss, and body wash. I like it to the point that I can try a product, totally hate it, break out in hives or contract HIV, and still buy it in another scent or flavor just in case.
Naturally, this means that I’m a sucker for anything new I see. Nevermind that being new likely means it’s not been tested on enough humans for everyone to find out that it causes cancer. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of the new Vaseline Cocoa Butter Vitalizing Gel Body Oil, but the thought of that gel inevitably hardening underneath my fingernails bothers me. But yesterday, while browsing the aisles of CVS, I found this, the CVS Continuous Spray Cocoa Butter Body Oil Dry-Touch:
I tried it for the first time this morning, and it’s amazing. It glides on as if it was hairspray, people. And it smells like cotton candy, according to Dr. Boyfriend. It is not, however, dry touch. Maybe I just used too much, but there’s still a wet ring of it around the base of my neck. Not that I’m complaining, because I keep messing with it and making everything on my desk smell like cotton candy.
Actually, come to think of it, this would be a great way to repel creepy men in the subway: the more I resemble an oil slick, the grosser it is to rub up against me.
Kevin Van Aelst is a New York/Pennsylvania/Connecticut artist who Kamran introduced me to last week. Kevin is a nerd, is not afraid to show it, and makes me very happy. To start your week off right, here are a few of my favourites:
One Heart Beat
Hawaii
Apple Globe
The Brain
And now you can go view the rest on your own and tell me your favourites.
