Monthly Archives: October 2010

What Other People’s Lives Must Be Like Every Weekend

Posted by plumpdumpling on October 18, 2010 – 6:00 pm
Filed under creepy boyfriend obsession, it's fun to be fat, living in new york is neat
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It’s been two weeks since it happened, but it lives in my mind as if it was yesterday: the weekend Kamran decided he didn’t care about law school (his last semester!) and let me make a brunch reservation for us.

We dined in front of Lincoln Center at Bar Boulud, which was so completely boring as to render the name of this blog un-ironic, despite its cheese pastries that sparkle in the sun:

We made our way through Central Park to avoid 59th Street and the horse-drawn carriages that line it, but of course those itch-inducing allergybuckets follow us everywhere:

Walking down 5th Avenue, we passed by the all-glass Apple store and saw this man “coincidentally” standing outside:

And then stopped by FAO Schwarz, which oddly, neither of us had been to in our 5+ years here to:

1) take multiple pictures of ourselves with the LEGO Chewbacca while small children anxiously tried to crowd us out:


(that’s me and my cleavage between his legs!)

2) test our strength on a foam puzzle that’s the size of Kamran’s entire apartment:

3) and learn the true meaning of factory farming:

We talked about stopping by a Duane Reade to grab some candy to get our blood sugars primed for Halloween, but then we realized we were too close to Dylan’s Candy Bar to pass it up. What you have to understand about Dylan’s is that it’s a microcosm of New York City itself: it’s the most wonderful place on Earth and has everything you’d ever want in life, but you can’t even begin to afford it, and it’s full of all of the worst people imaginable. Dylan’s has every kind of candy ever made, but it costs $13.99 per pound. It has clear staircases filled with your favourite childhood treats, but they’re constantly crowded with dumb tourists. It’s wonderful. And awful.

So Kamran and I decided to get a single pound of candy to split, which we deemed a “reasonable” pre-Halloween snack. Then we got into the checkout line, which stretched literally to the door. As we stood there, a kind-of-friendly-but-kind-of-surly dad started talking to us out of nowhere about how he’s lived in NYC for 30 years and had never heard of Dylan’s up until then, and we just looked at him like, “Sucker.” Then he turned to his kid and said, “Should we try to make this last until Monday, or should we eat it all today?”, and I felt such love for humanity at that moment.

But then Kamran whispered, “There’s a lady over here on a Rascal who keeps eating the candy, and it’s really depressing me.” And indeed, this superfat middle-aged blobby thing came speeding over to our area a second later, gnawing on whatever she’d picked out of the bins with the “no sampling” signs on them and just smiling to beat the band. She couldn’t fit her scooter through the racks of candy blood we were standing near, so the guy and his son behind us offered to let her in front of them in line.

Outside, we passed a homeless person propped up against the side of a building, and not two feet in front of . . . it . . . I spotted an abandoned gummy bear that would’ve been soooooo perfect for Lost and Lonely Leftovers, so I stopped and took a step backward but then reconsidered and kept walking. Kamran asked what I was doing, and when I told him, he seemed to think this made me a bad person! But clearly this homeless person wasn’t hungry if it was letting a perfectly good gummy bear just sit there.

Moments later, the lady on the Rascal went speeding past us on the sidewalk, honking her horn and digging into her bag of candy as we went on to curse at old ladies.

Well, not “we”. Me.

Butt Clouds in Candyland

Posted by plumpdumpling on October 15, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under boobies, music is my boyfriend
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All summer long, all I heard was that Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” was THE song of the summer.

Now, THE song (and video, oh, the video) of the summer for me was The Knife’s “Pass This On” (oh, I’m tearing up at its amazingness even now), but I understand that my tastes don’t coincide with the rest of America’s except where that one Justin Bieber song is concerned.

So I didn’t hear the Katy Perry song until last week in the gym. And I was like, “THIS is the song everyone thinks is so catchy?” I’ve heard it three times at this point, and I couldn’t tell you how a bit of it goes literally to save my life.

But then at my bowling team’s match this weekend, the video played on one of the monitors while I was in the midst of bowling the best game of my life, and I was shocked to see how cute it is. In fact, if I ever made a music video, that’s almost exactly how I’d want it to look. That’s how I want my life to look.

Especially the part where I always have a little cloud on my butt.

You’ll Know That I Know That You Know I Know What Time It Is

Posted by plumpdumpling on October 14, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under creepy boyfriend obsession
Tagged as ,

Sometime last month, Kamran and I had this conversation:

And of course I thought nothing of it, because he always asks me really random, nearly-nonsensical questions all day long while he’s kneedeep in patents and hallucinating bunnies on carnival rides.

But of course he bought me a watch for my birthday! And it is the most wonderful, design-y, chunky watch from the NYC company Nooka:

So now when you read my blog posts, you’ll know that I know that you know I know what time it is.

He also got me a “Deadliest Catch” t-shirt with a picture of the Cornelia Marie on it, and a box of chocolates from Derry Church after reading a review of them. And the best dinner! Swoon! SWOON!

You’re going to be so horrified when you find out what I bought him for his birthday, which is TODAY.

Happy birthday to the last of the famous international playboys!

Can My Karma Withstand Altercations with Two Old Ladies in One Week?

Posted by plumpdumpling on October 13, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under fun times on the subway, funner times on the bus, living in new york sucks so hard, my uber-confrontational personality
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I was alone at the bus stop yesterday morning and standing at the far corner of the glass enclosure, which is where I always like to stand when it’s available, because it shields me from the wind coming off the river. A younger man approached, and rather than walk past me to also stand in the enclosure, he stood just on the outside, as if he was lining up beside me. A few more people walked up as we waited, and all of them also stood outside in line, and I was thinking, “What a civilized people we are.” I moved to the other side of the enclosure so all of them would feel free to move over and come inside, too.

When the bus pulled up moments later, it stopped directly in front of me, and I casually stepped forward to claim my rightful position as first on, when out of nowhere, this older lady rushed over from the right and attempted to intercept me. I have no idea how long she had been waiting there, because the right side of the bus stop enclosure is covered over with an ad for an opera singer who looks like Russell Crowe. All that was clear to me was that I had been the very first person at the bus stop, so no matter how long she’d been hiding, I’d been there longer.

Read the rest!

The Only Person to Apologize in All of NYC Still Gets Trash-Talked

Posted by plumpdumpling on October 11, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under funner times on the bus, living in new york sucks so hard, my uber-confrontational personality, why i'm better than everyone else
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A friend recently asked me how I managed the adjustment from smalltown Ohio to big city culture, and I told her I was prepared for everything but how truly out-for-themselves people are in NYC. I told her that in Ohio, there seems to be more of a collective conscious, a bit of an “if I do this horrible thing to this person, everyone’s going to find out” mindset, and a bit of an “if I do this nice thing for this person, both of us will benefit from my niceness, and the world will be a better place” mindset. She asked if I think NYC has changed me, and it just so happened that I had the perfect story to illustrate my very definite yes.

Last Saturday afternoon, my boyfriend and I took advantage of the end of Summer/start of Fall weather with brunch at Bar Boulud, a stroll through Central Park, wrestling with giant stuffed dogs at FAO Schwarz, and buying a pound of chocolate-covered everything at Dylan’s Candy Bar to start getting our blood sugar prepared for Halloween.

We hopped on the downtown M15 bus around 4:30 p.m., and it was packed, as usual, with elderly people, because only elderly people leave the house before 8 p.m. on weekends. We stood for a couple of stops, sat down for a couple of stops when two seats were freed up, and then stood back up when we saw a feeble-looking couple board the bus.

Read the rest.