Monthly Archives: August 2009

And That’s Why I Hate Old People

Posted by plumpdumpling on August 20, 2009 – 1:55 pm
Filed under my uber-confrontational personality
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So I’m walking up 43rd Street after work to Kamran’s apartment the other day. I usually walk up 41st, but I’m feeling lazy, and the incline on 43rd is much smaller. There’s an old woman on the sidewalk twenty feet ahead of me, and I’m thinking about how sad it is that her body has really lost all signs that it was ever attractive. I realize that a simple underwire bra would make all the difference in the world in keeping her boobs from making a slope down to and then blending in with her protruding belly underneath her grey t-shirt, but I suppose you get to an age where even having your Victoria’s Secret shipped to your home in an unmarked box seems like too much to bother with.

I’m feeling a little sorry for her, because you know her husband ran off with some Russian hussy years ago, and she’s really let herself go with only the dog at home to judge her. But then, just as I’m two feet behind her, she turns on her wooden cane and begins walking up the sidewalk. I swear this happens to me all of the time. The slowest-moving people–the gimpy, the elderly, the crippled–they all suddenly decide they have somewhere to be as soon as I’m about to pass them. A man who’s been wheelchair-bound for fifty-three years will without warning gain feeling in his legs the moment he sees the whites of my eyes simply to block me from walking by him. It’s incredible.

So I’m slugging along behind ol’ Droopy Boobies, thinking that I don’t really have anywhere to be and won’t bother her to move aside for me, when she starts talking to this guy ahead of her on the sidewalk. He’s perched on one of the low fences that surrounds all of the trees in Kamran’s well-manicured neighborhood, tapping something on his cellphone. He’s fit and in his late 30s, dressed in a clean t-shirt and jeans, with nicely styled hair that’s tossing in the breeze. I figure they must know each other.

Until I hear that the old hag is saying to him, “These goddamned illegal aliens. They move here and steal our jobs and then sit around on their fat asses talking on their phones all day.”

I’m . . . surprised. This man is very much white, very not fat, and entirely American-looking. And it’s nearly 6:30 p.m., so I’m not exactly sure why she’s upset about him not working. Although I suppose that when your life revolves entirely around the administering of your daily suppository, you lose track of time.

Just as she steps beside him, she says, “Illegal aliens think they can sit on their fat asses and we won’t notice,” but he doesn’t even look up. I take that moment to pass by her and hold my BlackBerry–which I happen to have in my hand, because I’m obsessed with it–up in the air so she can see it and press a bunch of buttons to spite her.

I’m walking fast enough to be a few feet in front of her at this point, so she hollers, “Fatass!”

Sody Pop

Posted by plumpdumpling on August 18, 2009 – 12:41 pm
Filed under living in new york sucks so hard, no i really do love ohio
Tagged as ,

I never want to be one of those people who thinks she’s better than the place she came from. I want to always think Columbus and the village (seriously, village) where I was raised in Ohio are unbeatable.

For the longest time, I fought the word soda. I was raised on pop, and soda sounded funny to me every time I heard it used. No matter how many times people told me I gave myself away as a Midwesterner, I refused to switch. Why should I feel bad about where I’m from?

But after about a year of living here, I found myself saying soda automatically. And when I went home to visit and my best friend said pop to me, I accidentally made fun of her without even realizing what it meant for my heritage.

Seriously, though, this picture from my last trip home still cracks me up:

Not only does it say pop, but it only costs 35¢! How adorable, right?

I’m still not buying into other NYCisms like stand ON line (instead of IN line) or call OUT sick (instead of IN sick), though. I still have some standards.

(Also.)

nobody likes me everybody hates me guess i’ll go eat worms

Posted by plumpdumpling on August 17, 2009 – 1:22 pm
Filed under creepy boyfriend obsession
Tagged as

I love Kelly and her adventures in independence over at Bachelor Girl, but I’ve always thought people who live alone are crazy. Whereas I seem to go home to Ohio once a month these days, Kamran only gets to visit his family in California about twice a year because of work and law school, so I’m not used to being here without him. When he scheduled a trip home for this past weekend, this whole week, AND next weekend, I wasn’t sure I’d last ’til this morning. And then my best New York friend, Beth, announced that she was leaving for vacation, too. And then my best best friend, Tracey, announced that she and her husband were going to visit their in-laws and wouldn’t be available to chat. THE HORROR.

Kam and I took a cab to the airport on Saturday morning, where we enjoyed hot dogs wrapped in soft pretzel material, and then I creepily watched him go through the security line and waved to him and blew kisses every time he dared to look out of the corner of his eye to see if I was still there. And then I rode the bus and the subway back into Manhattan (because I’m cheap), decided I might as well cook for myself without someone there to take me out to dinner, and actually bought groceries for the first time in . . . so many months I can’t count. It felt terrible.

Other Things I Did Without Kamran Here to Entertain Me

1) Went to the gym on both Saturday and Sunday, allowing me to watch a whole lotta “Lost” season 5 on my iPod, and allowing me to grow to hate Ilana even more.

2) Whipped up some vanilla pudding, decided it was too plain, and swirled powdered Nesquik in for flavor. Don’t tell Kamran.

3) Watched the episode of “Degrassi: The Next Generation” where Alli decides to give it up to Johnny in the back of a van down by the ravine, only to discover that she totally wasn’t ready. When she confides in Johnny that she’s not going to DO IT again for a long time, he admits that he was a virgin, too. SWOON!

4) Cooked pasta, made pasta sauce, seasoned sausage to put in it and DID NOT HATE IT.

5) Saw District 9 with Jack, Eric, Eric’s girlfriend Christine, Nik, Jack’s friend Chris, Chris’s sister Vanessa, and Jack’s friend Andrew. Jizzed in my pants a little the first time we saw the aliens up in the ship.

6) Didn’t leave Kamran’s apartment building a single time on Sunday, but did leave the apartment itself to get a bag of Doritos (Cool Ranch, of course) from the convenience store downstairs. Planned to finish them all myself just to spite Kamran but sadly couldn’t hang.

7) Began watching season 2 of “Mad Men” without ever watching season 1. Felt like I may have missed out on some important stuff–Joan being a bitch, Peggy giving her baby up, a whole lot of women cheating on their husbands–but enjoyed it nonetheless.

8.) Caught up on “Big Brother 11”, which is not embarrassing, and I refuse to feel guilty about it.

9) Realized that watching so much television is a little bit sad without Kamran there to make me feel like I’m being social.

10) Slept diagonally across the bed and found myself waking up with a smile on my face. (Sorry, Kam.)

So all in all, it wasn’t the worst weekend of my life. However, in less than 48 hours, I must have texted Kamran 15 times to tell him I missed him, so it’s probably safe to say I couldn’t make a lifelong go of this. And here’s the great thing about being alone for a week versus being alone for life:

When a nerdy-yet-pompous grad student across from me on the train in Queens started telling his nerdy-yet-pompous friend about a dream he had where he was making out with some chick (who was no doubt too hot for him) at some party (that he’d never actually be invited to), I got to put on my headphones and let Hot Hot Heat block them out instead of hanging onto their every word while trying to decide if giving up all of my self-worth was worth it for a date with one of them.

The New JCPenney, the Yankees, and Your Stench: Things I’m Uninterested in at 8 a.m.

Posted by plumpdumpling on August 14, 2009 – 10:05 am
Filed under funner times on the bus
Tagged as

I’ve only seen this guy a few times before on the bus, but I’ve felt sorry for whoever was next to him every time. He’s The Talker, the stranger who doesn’t shut up and doesn’t realize that everyone’s secretly plotting his demise. The first time I saw him chatting some lady’s ear off in the front seat while she sat flipping through a magazine, I thought, “What a jerk! How could she just ignore him like that?!”

But then he came and sat by me on Tuesday. I didn’t recognize him at first and didn’t think anything about it when it took him an abnormally long time to board the bus because he was talking to the driver. People ask the driver questions all the time. But then I watched as he talked to apparently no one all the way back the aisle to the seat right next to me. I quickly considered my options and decided that moving away was ruder than simply pretending I didn’t hear him, so I stared straight ahead until he was silent.

A minute later, he looked over at me and said perfectly-sanely, “Excuse me, I hate to bother you, but do you know how many stops it is to 6th Avenue?” Thinking I had misjudged him and that it was safe, I answered, “About five.” And then the floodgates opened.

Read the rest here.

It’s Me and My DVR Against the World

Posted by plumpdumpling on August 13, 2009 – 10:02 am
Filed under a taste for tv
Tagged as

Kamran’s about to start his third year of law school, and I’m ten seconds from breaking up with his ass every weekday when I find myself alone at his apartment, eagerly awaiting his arrival instead of going out with my friends or spending time with my roommate, because I’m so pathetically in love with him. So after two years of begging him to get a DVR so I’ll have something to hold me between the hours of 6 p.m. and 9 p.m., he finally went and did it two weekends ago.

My best friend’s husband said, “Welcome to 2002!”, but I’m going to ignore the naysayers and maintain my amazement at how new and different life is when I don’t have to plan it around TV. It used to be that if I wanted to spend time at my own apartment, where there’s neither cable nor Internet because my roommate is such a cheapskate, godlovehim, I had to go on a night when there wasn’t anything on cable. And there’s always something on cable, you know? So I basically never spent any time at my own apartment.

But NOW . . . well, I’m still not going to spend any time at my apartment, but now it’s because there’s always something on the DVR. Of course, up until last night when we realized that only one episode of “Colbert” was being saved, I apparently didn’t know how to use the thing, but that’s not the point. I still have enough “Mad Men”, and Kamran enough “Sopranos” to last a lifetime. I would have probably never seen the last episode of “The Sopranos” without the DVR, actually. And now I realize why everyone was so up in arms about it.

And the pausing live TV! Kamran and I do laundry every Sunday night, and we always end up putting it off too long, so by the time we really have to do it or sleep on dirty sheets, we’re smackdab in the middle of some show we love and have to race down to the basement of his building to the laundry room during commercials. But two weekends ago, in the midst of the “Next Food Network Star” finale, we simply paused the show and carried the laundry down at our leisure.


Look! He’s paused!

It’s weird how the lack of commercials really changes TV-watching, though. There’s no painful anticipation of what’s to come now that segments are mere seconds apart, much like watching entire seasons of “Lost” in one sitting. And shows like “Project Runway” that feel the need to repeat whatever was said right before the commercial break when they return suddenly seem extra-ridiculous. However, I’m really pleased at how my fast-forwarding timing skills are progressing.

The one unexpected negative side effect is that now Kamran knows he can have my undivided attention when he comes home from work. It used to be that when he told me he was leaving the office at 6:30 but actually left at 7:45, I could shush him when he walked in the door due to the important nature of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey”. But now that he knows I can pause, he spends hours telling me whatever patent-related nonsense he feels like. Oh, the horror.