One of my office pet peeves is when people call me and end the conversation with, “What did you say your name was again?”
It’s always after I’ve been super-unhelpful and/or snarky with the person, because he’s always a telemarketer. I’ll say, “Oh, we don’t have an IT department in this office,” and he’ll say, “Well, where is it?”, and I’ll say, “At your mom’s house.”
And then he’ll say, “What did you say your name was again?”, and of course I haven’t given my name, so I’ll say, “The. Office. Manager.” And I’ll pronounce the like thuh to make him feel stupid.
He actually probably thinks I’m retarded, but I’m okay with that.
I do not run for things. Like, physically. This is perhaps the reason why the gym doesn’t work out for me. I would much, much rather be late to something than to hurry myself, to rush across the street on a flashing Don’t Walk sign to catch a fleeting bus or to plow down some station stairs to catch a train sitting with its doors open for an extra second. I think people who run for things look stupid. I hate people who are too eager. I hate people who care about things too much when they’re things I don’t care about.
Yet last Friday morning, I found myself turning the corner onto 42nd Street, seeing the bus waiting at the stop, noticing there was still a long line of people waiting to get on, and actually breaking out in a run. I have no idea why. I was running late, but why would I care about running late? Maybe it’s that I knew I would be getting to the stop just as the bus was pulling away and that everyone on the bus would know I had meant to get on it and that that would be more embarrassing that bothering myself to run for it. I’m irrational like that.
So I took off in the fastest jog I could in a pair of really rubbery flip-flops, and things were going pretty well. I probably could’ve walked just as fast if I really wanted to put in the effort of swinging my arms and rolling my hips and all, so I figured I was still looking fairly nonchalant to anyone who might be judging my eagerness, yet I hopefully looked like I cared enough about making it onto the bus that the driver would take pity and wait on me if everyone else loaded quickly.
But then, halfway down the block, the toe part of one of my flip-flops suddenly somehow doubled under itself and messed up my rhythm, and I had to stop to straighten things out. Just then, this beautiful brown-skinned woman went gliding past me in a summery black dress, her natural hair highlighted with a white faux flower. Her long, slender legs, fitted with soft black ballerina flats, flitted in front of her one at a time like those of a more-graceful gazelle. I somehow expected that she’d stop, that we’d laugh about me trying to run in my stupid shoes, and that we’d walk arm in arm to the bus. Instead, she probably laughed as my shorter, stouter legs, bound in too-tight, too-hot jeans pounded the pavement in comparison, and while she boarded the bus nimbly with a bounce, I hoisted myself up, out of breath and windblown with the entire bus glowering at me for making them wait.
I had to be at work early this morning for a meeting, and I expected that the public transportation would be less crowded, so I was annoyed when I decided to be lazy and take the bus to Grand Central and found that the usual load of people was still waiting at the stop after mine. There was one woman in particular who I just didn’t like from the moment I saw her. I couldn’t exactly pinpoint what it was that made me want to ensure somehow that she lead an unhappy life–maybe her dour all-brown outfit, maybe her sloppy ponytail, maybe her chubby cheeks–but I was especially upset to look down from my throne at the back of the bus and see that she’d grabbed the last of the much-coveted single-person seats.
And then she started picking her nose.
(I’m sorry, but click here to read the rest. I hate to do this sort of thing to you, but one of my friends told me last night it’s the only way to do it, and I was just looking for an excuse. Looooove yooooou.)
I was surprised to learn, upon reading them, that though the writing is as awful as I would’ve imagined, the plot of the Twilight series is actually pretty clever. Unlike, say, “Lost”, all of the loose ends eventually tie up, and the things you never thought would matter suddenly do. There are no red herrings nor MacGuffins in them.
Yet they still totally annoy me simply because their author, Stephenie Meyer, has to thank the band Muse in each of them. In all of the novels’ afterwords, right alongside appreciation of her editor and agent, she’ll say things like, “And thanks also to my favourite band, the very aptly named Muse, for providing a saga’s worth of inspiration.” And then I will claw her eyes out.
It’s not even that I don’t like Muse. I actually really liked them in NINETEEN-NINETY-NINE when I was listening to them. But I just can’t handle some kids’-book-writin’, middle-aged Mormon thinking she’s all cool for liking one pop-alt band. It’s like moviestars thinking anyone cares about their political activism. And you know she’s just doing it in some used-to-be-unpopular girl’s attempt to befriend the band she loves.
I went to see Eclipse last night with my friend Ash, though, and aside from a couple of actually-hilarious moments, what I was surprised by most was the soundtrack. It does not suck. In fact, it includes The Bravery, the amazing Ohio band The Black Keys, and my favourite band right now, Band of Horses. And the music is used really well. The first time you see, Jacob, for instance, the camera moves in on his face as a grinding bluesy song starts, and it’s this total moment. How annoying is that?
I can console myself with the fact that I know it wasn’t Stephenie Meyer choosing the music and how it’s used, but I can still continue to hate her for all of her Muse-suck-upping. Mostly because I know I’d do exactly the same thing if I was in her shoes.
I swear I don’t usually judge people for their clothing choices, but a woman on the bus this morning was pretty clearly wearing a shirt made of fabric showcasing teddy bears in various positions of merrymaking at the beach:
As someone who can’t handle Disney-related clothes on adults and can barely stomach ironic hipster t-shirts covered in nature scenes such as wolves howling at the moon, I’m sort of appalled by this. I wanted to believe it was scrubs, but then I noticed she was wearing really expensive-looking pants with them. Not that having to wear scrubs is an excuse to dress like a baby.
As a side note, the woman in the black dress walking past her shows off way too much leg for an old lady every day when she sits down. Sorry, I needed to get that off my chest.
If your business is on a high-traffic area of 14th Street, at what point after you realize your sign says saloon instead of salon do you have it remade?
Oh, wait, the sign also says “walk-in’s welcome” and “we specialize in heena tattoos”?
No, no, wait, I’m sorry, it actually says “heena tattooes“?
You probably know by now that I hate people who don’t conform to the sorts of etiquette rules that keep society running smoothly, such as waiting for me to leave the train before you enter and giving a friendly wave when I let you turn ahead of me in heavy traffic lest I ram my front end into your brand new BMW.
My big pet peeve as of late are people who walk on the wrong side of the sidewalk. I used to assume, to keep myself sane, that all of the people doing it were from countries where they foolishly drive on the wrong side of the road, but I eventually realized that it’s just a product of living in a city where there way too many people who think they’re too important to follow the crowd and leave space beside them for people to pass.
Kamran thinks I should give couples more leeway when it comes to taking up the entire sidewalk on some of NYC’s teeny streets, but he and I always make a single-file line when we see someone coming so as to not rub it in their face how happy we are holding hands as we walk to the grocery store and how pathetic and meaningless they are as unattached folk. But no. I do not give them more leeway. And I actually hate them more than single people on the wrong side of the sidewalk, because between the two of them, one should have the decency to move aside.
Anyway, I’ve begun implementation of a new method to combat the sidewalk-hogger. I call it The Heedless Gape. When I see someone coming at me on the wrong side of the sidewalk, I simply keep walking at my desired pace and look off into the distance as if I see something so fantastical and all-consuming that other passersby don’t even register with me. Eventually, and usually with an angry huff, the offender will move aside so I can continue on in gawking glee.
I’ve considered what will happen if ever someone refuses to get over, and I’ve decided I’ll just patiently stand my ground until the other person gives up. And you know he’ll give up before I do, because the one advantage to being a very unimportant person in a city full of important people is that I have nowhere to go.
I like to judge people for fairly irrational things like:
1) not liking something as small as onions, while I myself hate everything that comes from the sea except possibly crab, and I only eat that when forced,
2) not putting their dirty dishes in the dishwasher at work, while I myself leave dishes in the sink at Kamran’s for days, and
3) using abbreviations like “lol” in chat, while I myself say “brb” all of the time, though I usually follow it up with “~@~”, which in Google chat looks like a pile of poo with flies circling around it, and the awesomeness of that cancels out my “brb”.
There’s one thing I judge people for that I don’t think is irrational, though, and that’s not washing their hands after using the bathroom. I know that ingesting someone else’s urine likely isn’t going to kill me, but I still feel so superior as I take an extra-long time to wash my hands in the bathroom and call innocently to anyone who leaves without stopping at the sink, “Oh, excuse me, but I think you accidentally-and-not-at-all-because-you’re-a-lazy-respectless-heathen forgot to wash your hands!” With the hugest, fakest smile on my face.
As I was rinsing today at work, though, I wondered, what do people who don’t wash their hands think about me? Are they judging me for being too clean?
The Awesome Part About Working in Downtown NYC on Yankees World Series Parade Day: My office building overlooks the parade, so I can watch it from our balcony without having to actually stand amongst the stinking masses.
The Awful Part About Working in Downtown NYC on Yankees World Series Parade Day: I don’t actually care about the Yankees or even baseball in general, yet I had to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with all of the cheerful fans this morning on the train. Grand Central was flooded with people in jerseys who had apparently taken the day off for the parade, which makes me a little sick to my stomach.
The Idiot Thing I Did in NYC on Yankees World Series Parade Day: I wore baby blue pants with a baby blue shirt and a navy blue track jacket. If one more person says something Yankees-positive to me on the train today despite the fact that I’m wearing headphones and reading a magazine, there will be blood.
On the subway, the law of supply and demand is fully in effect: the fewer seats available, the more desirable they are.
I get on the 4/5 after work at Bowling Green, which is the first uptown stop in Manhattan. There are always a few stragglers from lower Brooklyn on it, but most of the seats are empty. Some people still rush into the train, of course, but the majority of us take our time. I usually nonchalantly nab a seat if I’m planning to read, but if I’m going to play my Nintendo DS and don’t want anyone looking over my shoulder to see how terrible I am at Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, I stay standing.
Plenty of other people stay standing at that stop, too, but at Wall Street, the train fills up a little more, and you start to see riders get a little anxious about their lack of choices. They want to sit, but they don’t want to try to squeeze in between the oversize lady with her five bags and the guy with his legs unnecessarily spread three feet apart. People try to look casual, but they’re secretly sneaking looks up and down the entire train to see if there’s anything worth making a move on.
At Fulton Street, there’s no time for pretending. Women rush into the train and plunk down with no regard for how huge their assets are and how small the seat space is. Men who would normally open doors for little old ladies practically push them out of the way. Pregnant women are left clutching their stomachs and fanning themselves with their hands as everyone looks at each other, hoping someone else will volunteer to give up his or her seat first.
I feel very smug about getting to choose whether or not I’ll sit, and I’ll admit that I like to mess with the people who have to stand. I’ve found that if I take off my headphones and turn off my iPod right as we enter Grand Central, the woman standing in front of me will breathe a sigh of relief and grab my seat as soon as I stand. I hate that. So when I want to have a little fun, I’ll take my headphones off as we enter the station before Grand Central, which is Union Square. And Union Square is a full 28 blocks away from Grand Central. Which means that after I take my headphones off and the woman in front of me prepares herself mentally for the joy of sitting down on the crowded train, I’ll make her stand waiting for another five minutes until I actually get off. And if there’s a lot of train traffic or a track fire or anything to slow us down, that five minutes can turn into ten or fifteen. You can imagine how this delights me.
Nearly every single restaurant in NYC delivers for free, which means that on Saturdays and Sundays, Dr. Boyfriend and I pretty much refuse to leave his apartment and secretly have disdain for friends who attempt to coax us out. So last weekend, we were heading downstairs to pick up our delivered Thai food in his building’s lobby when the elevator stopped at a lower floor. Just as the doors opened, the young Asian man waiting outside let out a very audible burp.
He didn’t excuse himself or anything, so I said, “We heard that!” Because, you know, it’s not like I could pretend it didn’t happen. He just continued to stare at the door and didn’t acknowledge me in any way.
When he rushed out at the ground floor, Kamran held me back for a moment and asked me incredulously, “How could you embarrass me like that?!” I was shocked. Embarrass him? He wasn’t the one to hardcore burp and then just casually slip into the elevator like the reeking fumes of his body gas weren’t surrounding us all.
I thought that acknowledging the burp would actually lighten the mood. When someone calls you out on something, it gives you a chance to turn the joke back around on yourself, right? And it’s not like we caught him raping a cat or something here. It was a burp!
When my company decided about a month ago that my boss–the president until we were acquired by a larger company–wasn’t needed any longer, I offered my immense catalog of services to our marketing department. Mostly so I could attend marketing seminars and steal all of the SEO info for my blog but also because I’m a supremely motivated individual. Who didn’t want to lose her job because no one could figure out what she did anymore without the president around.
In this time, the marketing department has allowed me to use my writing skillz to send out a couple of branded e-mails to our customers, inviting them to events and reminding them that the best place to spend money in this time of economic disaster is on luxury software. And in this time, I’ve also found out that bigtime executives who don’t care about my invites and reminders do this fun little thing called unsubscribing.
Which is something I’ve never even considered in my many years of Interneting. I buy all sorts of things online and inadvertently get signed up for every mailing list in existence, but I’ve always figured that’s what junk e-mail addresses are for. The other day, though, I signed into my junk mail address and unsubscribed from all of the mass mailings I get. All of the offers on my favourite underwear from American Eagle, all of the daily temptations from Amazon.com, all of the NRA propaganda my dad signed me up for and laughed about later.
And it feels amazing. I like unsubscribing so much that I’ve started unsubscribing on my work e-mail, too. I’m starting to become one of those super-indignant people who’s like, “Bitch, did I not send you an unsubscribe request yesterday?! GET ME OFF YOUR LIST!” My former life with a spam-filled inbox just seems so childish. I really feel now as if I have the power.
And now I’m off to tell FreshDirect to take their 10% off e-mails and shove them.
I bought an iBook G4 back in the golden years of undergrad, when THE Ohio State University was paying for me to go to school, and I was rolling in cash. My Mac-enthusiast friend told me, “Katie, Macs are beautiful and smart and wonderful, just like you,” so naturally I had to have one THAT MOMENT.
I marched right down to the Apple store with my best friend–and by marched, I of course mean drove forty-five minutes, because we lived in the country–and bought my iBook right off the shelf. I knew it didn’t come packaged with enough RAM, but I figured one of my genius friends could buy it cheap and install it for me.
Fast forward to 2009, when my Mac is four+ years old and still has the 128MB of RAM it came with. It frequently attempts to commit suicide if I try to start GIMP while running Firefox, and it leaves red marks on my legs from all of its overheating when I’m wearing one of my many leather miniskirts around the house.
But I love it, ’cause it’s white, it has a pink gel keyboard cover, and its icons are so much prettier than Windows icons. That’s right–I love it solely for superficial reasons, and I’m not embarrassed. Everyone tells you that they love their Macs for the video-editing capabilities, for photo manipulation and other bullshit. The truth is that they just look good next to your latté on a table at Starbucks.
When I left for Ohio two weeks ago for my sister’s wedding, I left my iBook on and open at Kamran’s apartment to finish downloading some television. I didn’t think to tell Kam to put it to sleep after a couple of hours or anything, because I was too busy NOT THINKING ABOUT NEW YORK. And then I came back five days later, and it refused to accept my login password.
I politely shut it down by ripping out its power cord, and it in return politely sat at its startup screen for an entire day, its pretty grey apple icon staring me down as it refused to switch over to the login screen. I calmly Googled the hell out of the problem and seriously thought I could solve it myself by booting from an external drive, so I searched eBay for a retail copy of OS X–because apparently the copy that comes with your computer is only good on your computer, and my copy is in a barn on my family’s farm in Ohio along with all the rest of pre-NYC Katie–found out that they cost more than $3, and started asking all the Mac-owning rich people I know if they’d bought the newest version retail and would FedEx it to me from Chicago or Munich.
Finding plenty of evidence that even a boot disc was impossible to make, I ferociously attacked every single person at my software company to ask for help. My dear friend–and obviously favourite co-worker–Jack was all up on having his way with my hard drive to uncover all the things about me that even Kamran doesn’t know, claiming that he could fire up some magic Linux disc that can cure world hunger along with reading burnt hard drives. He even bought a miniature hard drive enclosure just so he could extract my drive and hook it up to another computer if needed. He was nearly foaming at the mouth in anticipation of the geekery, and I was all for it, ’cause four years of writing and photos were at stake.
So I brought the iBook into work this morning, and Jack hauled it back to his desk in his greasy paws, expecting a huge ordeal that would end in one of us sobbing. But a few minutes later, he IMed me and asked for my password. Pardon?
He brought it back to my desk and restarted it, and after two seconds of the grey apple screen, the login screen popped up, and everything was completely normal. Only a day earlier, I’d been pricing Dells and consoling myself with the idea of a pink Inspiron Mini 9, but as soon as my iBook was up and working again, all I could think about was how wonderfully elite I am for owning one.
So I guess that sure, not knowing a damned thing about how your computer works means that you don’t know a bit about fixing it, but spending an extra $1,000 is totally worth it to be able to use the phrase mount a disk image. And speaking of mounting, I asked my friend Aaron to send me some amazing photos that demonstrate his love for his Mac. And boy, did he deliver:
Aaron calls this The I-Woke-Up-And-Didn’t-Put-Makeup-On-To-Show-My-Love-For-You-And-Oh-Look-I’m-Wearing-An-iPhone-Shirt.
And this is The Come-To-Bed-Baby-I’m-Not-Wearing-Any-Pants, or as I like to call it, My ARMS Are Fatter Than This.
When I checked to make sure I could use the photos for my evil-doing, he said, “Those legs need to be SEEN to be BELIEVED.” And how.
Now if that doesn’t make you want to buy a Mac, I don’t know what will.
This morning, one of the blog writers I just started to follow wrote the following:
I’d love to write about parties and dates and where I went to eat. Impress you with the cutting-edge emo playlists on my iPod and casually mention that I caught such-and-such eyeliner-and-irony-clad band at a hole in the wall bar the other night.
At this point in my life, those stories would include a lot of Hot Wheels, mad dashes to the early movie, and tales of Ruby Tuesdays. My iPod playlists are full of songs to keep toddlers quiet while I’m on conference calls in the car.
Sweet, right? Snore.
And I was like, “OMG, please never let me grow up.” I get that women’s feelings apparently change hardcore after they have children, and I’m told that even I may devolve into something nurturing and selfless was I ever to give birth, but not being encumbered by adult stuff feels so good. As Dr. Boyfriend said after spending time with his married/babied friends over the holiday break, “I really appreciate the little life we’ve made for ourselves.” That little life being one that involves never eating dinner at home, dancing on Friday nights, and non-stop caring only for ourselves.
So in celebration of my perpetual youth, I offer you:
My (unexpected) teenage celebrity crush, which is not really a crush but an example
of how I’d like to conduct myself if I was to become famous. Look how cool his wave is.
My overly-emo song of the moment.
My really amazing birthday dessert sampler at Max Brenner that included POP ROCKS covered in liquid chocolate.
And my best friend and me, looking soooooo badass
on New Year’s Eve at our friends’ house party. (No?)
Sure, most of that party was spent taking pictures of their baby eating the husband’s nose
but I was wearing my homemade Bulletproof necklace while photographing, so they cancel each other out and leave nothing but my natural hardcoreness and me.
Dr. Boyfriend and I were walking down Broadway on a hunt for rainbow-flavored shaved ice one weekend afternoon this summer when we spotted a store window full of the chintziest figurines imaginable. I thought the sign was pretty lame, actually, but I really wanted to give fame to the Last Supper sculpture below it:
Sadly, blog owner Bethany evidently didn’t think Jesus made the grade and just posted the sign itself.
I just want to mention that this movie Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist is based on a teen novel that I used to flip through about eight times a week back when I worked in the kids section of Barnes & Noble. Because as a mix tape lover, the word playlist calls to me, and because it’s based in NYC.
But I won’t let your Michael Cera suck me in! I won’t buy your typical teen storylines! And I will not be so easily convinced by your indie film lighting and your characters in hoodies!
Clearly I don’t brag about myself enough here, because I never told you that I totally won an extremely important and incredibly lucrative writing contest earlier this year. The contest was sponsored by the Gotham Writers’ Workshop here in NYC, and the idea of it was to submit a memoir made up of only six words.
Their example was a famous one by Hemingway that says,
“For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
Ohhhhhhh, it tugs on your heartstrings, doesn’t it? My boyfriend Kamran’s friend Mike told us about the contest and offered up,
“I should have asked her age,”
to which Kamran replied,
“And then I got crabs again,”
and while I thought those were both brilliant, I went a much more serious route and submitted,
“I’ll never know mom’s meatloaf recipe.”
I didn’t actually expect to be chosen, of course, because I thought it was only meaningful to me. This is sort of embarrassing, but I’d been having a deep hankerin’ for meatloaf around that time, and my mom’s was so much better than any I’ve had since, and I’d kill to make it just like she did. But of course she’s been dead eight years now, and of course I can’t remember exactly what she put in it, and of course my dad isn’t any help in the matter. And thinking about the empty hole in my stomach where that meatloaf should be made me think about all the empty holes in me that parts of her should be filling, and so I entered the contest.
Weeks later, I received an e-mail from the Writers’ Workshop that said,
Thank you so much for taking the time to enter our Six-Word Memoir Writing Contest. You guys crafted some amazing submissions, and choosing a winner was extremely tough (when we compiled Not Quite What I Was Planning, a least we got to choose 832!)
But, this time around, the winner is….
I’ll never know mom’s meatloaf recipe.
by Kathleen Ett of Brooklyn, NY
———————————–
The “but, this time around” dashed my hopes, but then I realized that this was a mass e-mail and that the but was intended for everyone BUT me! So evidently the judges got the implicit meaning, even if the explicit words themselves were sorta lame.
And my prize? Well, absolutely nothing. But it looks like I’ll be published in the sequel to the original six-word memoir book, and that’s pret-ty rad. Plus, my name is all up in lights on the results page at the Gotham website. Neat, huh?
Last night, Boyfriend Kamran and I had a leisurely yakitori dinner complete with watermelon sorbet in his neighborhood to celebrate a law school A that he didn’t expect but wholly deserved. As we walked back up the hill to his apartment, I looked expectantly at my feet like I do every time I wear flip-flops in NYC, waiting for a cockroach to crawl over my bare toes. I told Kam that I saw a cockroach in our gym that morning, and he wondered aloud when cockroach season is. I said it seems to be at the start of summer and the start of winter and concluded that cockroaches must be adverse to extreme weather changes, but he sarcastically derided me and said that surely they’ve evolved enough to handle a little temperature fluxuation what with their ability to withstand nuclear attacks and all. We started talking about how ridiculous it is that instead of adapting, humans just do things like move to Florida when the going gets too rough, and I argued that things would be so much better if we were pigs; our pores wouldn’t leak, so we’d just have to recognise when we were overheating and find a way to cool ourselves down. We talked about redesigning the human body to have an internal coolant system with a refrigeration pump and selling our upgraded version of man at a steep price.
While we were having this discussion, we passed one of the hand-carved Italian stone buildings next to his, where four women were leaning against a low wall and chatting. They were all in their 30s and wore their long, highlighted hair down despite the heat. They had on atrocious heels and clingy dresses, and they sipped from martini glasses in between laughs. They were the exact opposite of us. When our conversation finished, I asked Kamran, “Did you see that?”, and he said, “What, those women trying to reenact ‘Sex and the City’?” And we laughed and laughed about how superior we are.
The thing is–I’m pretty sure this sort of business is going on every night in Manhattan. Kamran and I know that we’re weird, but isn’t everyone else weirded out by how normal they are?
The morning of the start of my 24-hourculture marathon, Kamran asked me the names of the other two winners of the Time Out New York contest and the reporter who would accompany us on our outing and then kept singing “white people having a good time” to describe the events involving a group of people called Katie, Colin, Brian, and Meghan. My friends had encouraged me to “wear something cute that’s comfortable but also formal enough to fit in at a club, just in case” but I had rejected all of their advice and gone for Chucks, dark jeans, a very apropos baby blue t-shirt of Kamran’s with a drawing of a writer at a desk with his head in his hands, a black cardigan, and my dogbed-looking cape. I wanted to make sure that at all costs, it didn’t look like I was trying.
I rode the bus down to 7th St. in the East Village to Abraço, which is literally a coffee bar: there’s a counter for ordering on one side, and another counter for standing and drinking along the window that makes up the storefront. Wanting to keep my public restroom use to a minimum, I opted out of a drink and just stood at the window, replying to excited well-wishing texts my friends had left me the night before. A steady stream of people stopped in with their dogs and made familiar conversation with the owner, who had the greatest curly gray hair that flopped in his eyes as he brewed each cup individually from fresh ground beans. Had I been a coffee drinker, I would’ve been in heaven.
A little after 8:30, a tall blond guy with the sort of look that immediately strikes you as that of someone who’d never tell you a lie came in and boomed, “Are any of you here with Time Out?” The girl standing against the wall behind me and I both turned and introduced ourselves to him. He was Colin, the reporter, and she was Meghan, the other female winner. I had kind of expected her to be like me–a little less mainstream, a little more geeky–but she was a normal girl. Like, with regular girl straight long hair and regular girl make-up and regular girl boots and a pretty navy blue coat that any regular girl would own. I usually find these girls uninteresting, and they usually find me weird, but I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, since we were about to spend 24 hours together. But then the first words out of her mouth were, “We’d better not be going to the Panty Party, ’cause I’m not wearing any panties!” And you can imagine how hard my eyes rolled.
Luckily, the guys were great. Colin had the best room-filling laugh and was one of those people who makes friends with everyone he meets, and Brian–who turned out to be Asian, completely wrecking the “white people having a good time” theme–was wearing a homemade shirt to advertise his blog (which I will also advertise here–peasandnuts.com–despite the fact that he refers to me as “another girl” in the sidebar) and planned to Twitter all of our activities for his friends. Our photographer, Jeff, had gone to school at the University of Michigan, which has the biggest and best rivalry in college football history with my school, THE Ohio State University, and had typical twentysomething good looks but was super-nerdy about how much he loved taking pictures and was therefore likeable.
Colin informed us that our outing was actually a contest to see who could go all 24 hours and that there were plenty of activities planned that were intended to tire us out and get us eliminated, so I got all nervous that we were going to swim the Hudson or participate in a 5k run. But it turned out that our first activity was very much the opposite of that–a sit in the sauna at the Russian & Turkish Baths in the East Village, where hairy old European men in tiny swimsuits barked at us to stop taking pictures and close the door so the heat wouldn’t escape.
I wasn’t totally down with being beaten with oak leaf brushes and starting the day all sweaty, so I kept my sweater on and stayed in the sauna for just a moment, which I’m sure resulted in odd photos, but a girl has to have her priorities, you know, and mine was assuring that my hair didn’t get frizzy. Plus, the place was a little shady-looking
and there was a sign that read, “YOU MUST SHOWER BEFORE ENTERING POOL! Persons with sore of inflamed eyes, a cold, nasal drip, discharges, cuts, boils, or any other evident skin or bodily infections may not enter! No urination, discharge of fecal matter, or blowing nose in the pool!” I didn’t want to take my chances on the discharge of fecal matter part. Colin couldn’t handle the heat, and Jeff didn’t want to wreck his camera equipment, so we sat around the café area talking about music and reading articles hanging on the wall about how upset the men were when women started being allowed into the baths a few years ago and they could no longer walk around naked.
Next we went for dim sum at Jing Fong, which was one of my picks. It’s a huge banquet hall with outrageously flamboyant decor that you can only get to after what seems like a two-mile escalator ride upstairs, and there are stages along every wall filled with high-backed chairs that look like they’re meant to be used when the king is visiting. I’m used to pointing and grabbing when the food carts roll around, but as luck would have it, Brian spoke Cantonese to the waitresses and got us all sorts of weird treats like shark fin dumplings, chicken wings in rice rolls, and almond “pudding” that had the consistency of Jell-o but was strangely delicious.
Colin, Meghan, and Brian, for your reference
We tried our hand at ping-pong next at the New York Table Tennis Foundation, which was in the basement of an ordinary office building and was impossible to find if you weren’t looking for it. Three-quarters of the room was filled with kids getting lessons from really intense teachers, so we stuck to our one table and batted the ball back and forth for an hour,
the guys keeping their skillz in check so we girls could keep up. Because while I was ping-pong champion of my 4th grade 4-H camp, I haven’t really kept up my game since then. And Brian made sure I remembered that with this super-intimidating look:
Meghan was wearing this ultra low-cut shirt that wholly exposed her cleavage, and although she kept it covered with a long scarf for most of the day, she took it off for ping-pong and showed everyone that her bra just couldn’t keep those things wrangled. They were hanging down and falling out, and every time she lunged for the ball, all you could hear was the click-click-click of the photographer’s camera down her shirt. I felt a little embarrassed for her, but she seemed to be fully aware of what was going on, so I assumed that she’s one of those “all press is good press” types and applauded her lack of shame.
Next we went uptown to the Morgan Library, where Colin used all of his journalistic savvy to get us access to a closed event with Ian McEwan, who wasn’t talking about how Atonement the book is way better than Atonement the movie but was having a conversation about conversation with a Harvard professor in which they argued that so much of what we say in the English language is insinuated rather than explicitly spoken. Everyone thought it was cool except Meghan, who also accused me of falling asleep during it.
We took the subway fourteen million stops to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for the Sakura Matsuri, or Cherry Blossom Festival, which was also one of my picks and was more beautiful than I could have imagined.
Trees were literally falling onto the pathway with blooms, and petals floated down from every direction, especially when helped along by children with environment-hating parents.
Lots of Japanese girls were dressed in slutty Harajuku costumes, but my favourite girl was dressed as what reminded me of Little Bo Peep.
And now, to complain more about Meghan–she and I had walked together to the ping-pong place, and I learned that she’s from Laguna Beach, where Kamran’s from. I was telling her that he’s Persian and says that Orange County is full of these really slick, greasy Persians who are very much not like him, and she said that she’s also dating a Persian guy from the area. Even though I assumed that he was one of the greasy ones because she struck me as sort of a greaseball herself, I let it go without a word. She and Colin and I had talked about the dynamics of our respective relationships on the subway to the Garden, and I felt like we had a little more in common than I’d originally imagined, but by the time we were leaving the festival, I was done with her. I’m one of those people who generally thinks it’s polite to make conversation when you’re alone with an acquaintance, but she evidently viewed any time when the guys weren’t around as an opportunity to look at her BlackBerry. And while I’m one of those people who at least offers a smile–maybe even a gurgle of a response–when someone says something to me, she’s one of those people who’ll pretend as if you don’t exist. She paid plenty of attention to the reporter and photographer, though, so I expected the article to be entirely about her. But then it wasn’t. Which makes me think that Colin saw right through her.
We needed to catch a cab to Williamsburg, but there were too many people at the Garden and too few taxis on duty at 4 p.m. on a Saturday, so Colin made fun of Brooklyn and everyone else backed him up, since they all lived in Manhattan. It was so weird being with four people who weren’t at all impressed that I live in Williamsburg, which is a source of awe to pretty much everyone else I know. My location defines my personality, apparently.
Once we got to the bar where we were going to watch the Kentucky Derby–Pete’s Candy Store, where we play trivia on Wednesday nights–we found the place was overpacked with hipsters in wide-brimmed hats and southern-belle-type dresses, so we went instead to Rosemary’s Greenpoint Tavern, which only had a handful of old men inside. I put my fake money on Big Brown just because of his ridiculous name, but one of the guys had actually bet what was apparently a large sum of real money and was practically crying when his horse fell behind. Good times.
We headed back into the city to the Upright Citizens Brigade for an improv show, where we had some comfy velvet seats courtesy of Colin’s string-pulling, and where Colin laughed in my ear SO HARD.
I talked to Colin’s girlfriend all about being from the Midwest–she was from Michigan–and living in New York and how each of us reacts to going home for a week while we wasted time at a bar next door until a spot opened up at El Maguey y La Tuna, where I had what was either the best mole of my life or what tasted like it after a few margaritas, though it looks like chunky death in this photo:
Colin got into the Cinco de Mayo festivities with a sombrero,
but there was only a little cowgirl hat left by the time the waitress got to Brian, and he refused. The staff at the place kept emphasizing to Colin that they were the best Mexican in the Lower East Side, and I sort of believe it, because I also had this crazy jalapeño popper that was the most delicious thing I could imagine (until I got to the shrimp hiding in one end of it, I mean). Kamran doesn’t know that we’re eating every single meal there from now on.
The first of the sleep-inducing activities was a midnight showing of Alien at the Sunshine, but I loaded up on Mountain Dew and two different types of chocolate, so coupled with the fact that I’d never seen the movie before, I had no problem staying awake. Meghan knocked herself out of the competition by leaving for a while for a friend’s birthday party, and Brian kept putting his head in his hands but shielding his eyes so none of us could see them, so I tell myself that he totally fell asleep and that I won the contest.
Next we went to Cake Shop for their 3rd anniversary party, and it was PACKED. I was pumped to listen to cool music, eat some cupcakes, and relax among all the pretty people, but it was so crowded upstairs and down that we ended up losing each other, and I couldn’t see the band, and no one was dancing, and it just felt lame. So I texted Colin with, “I’m not having fun,” and went outside to call Kamran in hopes that he’d tell me to leave early. But he encouraged me to stick it out, and I’m glad I did, because next was
KARAOKE!
at Sing Sing, which was also my pick. Colin had a bunch of the guys at the bar mancrushing on him for his boyband ballads and his 90s raps, and I got a round of applause for one of my renditions. Even Meghan-who-hated-me returned to the group from her party and stood beside me so she could put her ear to my vocal cords. Which made me like her just a little, but purely in a superior way. A bunch of my friends were at a club down the street and joined us for the last hour or so, which was so awesome, and I tried to convince them to join us for the rest of the marathon, but they had been awake since noon and thought that was a big deal.
I did manage to get my friend/former co-worker Beth to come to Veselka for blintzes and macaroni and cheese, but only because she was visiting from California for the weekend and didn’t want to waste any time sleeping. Just as we ordered, though, our friend who she was staying with called and said that she had locked her keys in her apartment and that Beth had the only extra set. With her gone and with Meghan having left even before breakfast, we decided to skip the morning church service and Staten Island Ferry ride that were supposed to have been enough to put even Brian with his “I stay awake for 24 hours every Saturday” touts to sleep and call it a day.
I took the bus back to Kamran’s and arrived just as the sun was starting to crawl up over Brooklyn and the East River
and then I enjoyed a much-deserved hour of sleep before heading off to brunch. Because I am invincible.And also famous.
.
