Monthly Archives: November 2010

They Changed the Name from Stuffing to Dressing to Make It Sound Less Dirty

Posted by plumpdumpling on November 24, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under holidays don't suck for me, it's fun to be fat, no i really do love ohio
Tagged as , , ,

I’m in Ohio for Thanksgiving!

While there, I plan to:

• sleep in my own bed and actually spend time with my family now that my best friend, Tracey, finished grad school, got a job, and can’t stay up until 4 a.m. with me every night.

• have Thanksgiving meals with my stepmom’s family, my mom’s side of the family, and my dad’s side of the family within a span of 6 hours. All of them will involve entirely different menus that are traditional to each family, meaning that I’ll be forced to eat pecan pie, pumpkin roll, and old-fashioned cream pie just so I don’t appear rude. Oh, the hardships of the dedicated gourmand.

• try to think of awesome things to put on my Christmas list for my dad’s side of the family but ultimately just write

• eat dinner with Noel Cordle at The Cheesecake Factory, WHERE SHE HAS NEVER EATEN BEFORE.

• not shop on Friday, except possibly online, where I’ll be earning double cash back by using Ebates. (See what I did there?)

Oh, friends, it’s going to be a great time. Until I have to be at the airport at 4:30 a.m. on Monday.

Becoming a Millionaire, One Stolen Lightbulb at a Time

Posted by plumpdumpling on November 23, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under wtf
Tagged as

I moved from Williamsburg, Brooklyn to Downtown Brooklyn this weekend and hired a couple of strongmen to haul my things for me in their cargo van. I found them through a site where movers bid on your job based on how much stuff you have and chose them because their user reviews were all perfect. They did an amazing job of packing all of my things into their van and were nice, friendly guys to boot.

My new landlord/roommate/co-worker/superfriend, Jack, and I spent a few minutes rearranging furniture after they left, and then we decided to take a trip to the Brooklyn IKEA just because there’s a free shuttle bus that stops right up the street from our new place. And also because they have Swedish meatballs and lingonberry juice. When Jack went to lock the door, the locking mechanism malfunctioned, so we stopped at the front desk on the way out to ask the super to fix it.

When we got back to the apartment a few hours later, the lock was fixed, and our separate bathrooms were begging to be christened. We’re still kind of unsure how much of our restroom dealings are audible to each other, so I decided to set some things up in my bedroom to keep Jack from having stage fright. I grabbed my lamp from the living room, plugged it in in my bedroom, and flipped the switch, but it didn’t work. I moved it to another outlet and tried again, but it still didn’t turn on. I called to Jack, “I don’t think there’s any electricity in my bedroom!” I reached down inside the lampshade to tighten the lightbulb, but there was no bulb in it.

Now, that lamp sat unused in my old bedroom for many months. I’m not even entirely sure it had a lightbulb when it left my apartment. But I’m positive that when one of the movers handed it to me from the van, he’d taken the shade and the base and screwed them together using a fluorescent bulb, which is what my old roommate and I used. I’d taken the lamp upstairs to the new apartment, left it in the living room, and didn’t touch it again until after we got back from IKEA.

Immediately, Jack blamed the super. He said, “Think about it. You’d notice if something big like a TV was missing, but you’d never suspect him of stealing something small like a lightbulb. I’ll bet he does this all over the building.”

But I, usually the one so quick to assume the worst of people, said, “No way. Obviously the most logical explanation is that the movers . . . happen to carry a stray bulb around with them . . . because people are always moving lamps without bulbs in them . . . and . . . this was the easiest way to ensure those people’s shades wouldn’t fall off the bases and break.”

No?

Either way, WTF?!

If You’re Sick of Hearing About My New Apartment Now, Just Wait

Posted by plumpdumpling on November 22, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under living in new york is neat
Tagged as

My friend Jack (of infamous snarky comment fame) bought a shiny, new, two-bedroom condo in Downtown Brooklyn on Friday, and after four holy-crap-how-did-I-end-up-here? years in Williamsburg, I’m going to take his second bedroom until he finds a wife or buys a human-sized dog and kicks me out.


You cannot decorate your condo in tree wallpaper and expect me to resist.

The perks are numerous:

• I’ll be a short walk from THIRTEEN subway lines. I’m pretty sure that’s the most you can find anywhere, even in Manhattan. In the station of the one I’ll use the most, the black paint on the ceiling is peeling off and looks like blackbirds swirling above the trains. I will no doubt die of asbestos poisoning before the year is out.

• I’ll be one stop away from work, which is here.

• I won’t have to transfer anywhere to get to Kamran, who’s here.

• I’ll have MY OWN BATHROOM. Which will be marked with the women sign I found buried in my closet while I was packing. Jack doesn’t know this yet.

• Our appliances won’t be mustard yellow, and they’ll include a dishwasher, which I haven’t seen since 2005. Jack already has a system planned for telling whether the dishes in it are dirty or clean that is slightly more reasonable than my usual system of licking them and seeing if any flavor comes off.

• I’ll be in the middle of chain restaurant heaven–including an Applebee’s–so I won’t need to pretend to visit my family in Ohio just to get access to boneless buffalo wings. They’re also building a new Shake Shack on our walk from the subway to the apartment, which means I will literally never use the kitchen in this place.

• If I would need to eat real food for any reason, my local grocery stores will include a Trader Joe’s and a market with a Michelin-starred restaurant inside (what?).

• I’ll be in a building with roof access, a garden with a sunroom, a gym, and a laundry room. Which means I’ll have no excuse to be pale, fat, and smelly anymore. On second thought, I’m not moving.

Even if you discount all of that, I’m just excited to live with someone whose actions I can anticipate. My roommate of four years is the best when it comes to being quiet while I sleep, not having a live-in girlfriend, and buying toilet paper, but if you’re looking for someone who answers texts, goes out to dinner with you, or doesn’t actively avoid leaving his bedroom for days when your best friend visits from Ohio, he’s not your guy.

There’s a good chance Jack will play StarCraft with our other friends every night until 3 a.m., but that’s a risk I’m willing to take.

Brokelyn

Posted by plumpdumpling on November 18, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under a taste for tv, why i'm better than everyone else
Tagged as ,

I know it’s reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeal cool and all for Manhattanites to never leave the island, but on the “Millionaire Matchmaker” where the Cute Indie Gay Dude says to the Old Boring Gay Dude in Shorts (OBGDIS), “I live in Greenpoint; do you know where that is?” and it turns out the OBGDIS has never left Chelsea, I want to punch him in his old Botoxed face.

It’s like saying you don’t know where Montana is. It’s like, as Kamran always says, the way people talk about being bad at math like it’s cute or something. But OBGDIS had also never seen “Antiques Roadshow”, so screw ‘im.

I’m Outta Here! Er, There.

Posted by plumpdumpling on November 17, 2010 – 3:00 pm
Filed under living in new york sucks so hard
Tagged as

So, I’m moving. I don’t want to talk specifics, because there’s still a chance my future apartment could fall through up until Friday afternoon at 3, and I’m allowed to be superstitious when it suits me. But the point is that I told my landlord I’m moving out, and she’s already showing the place to other people, so whether the new place happens or not, I won’t be living in my current apartment come December 1st.

I could be living in a storage unit. Or in your apartment! Luckyyyyyyyyyyy.

My decision to move came about pretty weirdly and accidentally. One of my co-workers was interested in buying a place but was constantly out of town to visit clients, so another friend and I went to see a fancypants condo for him. And then I went to see another fancypants condo with him just for fun. He wanted a roommate to take his second bedroom, and it was assumed that another of our co-workers would move in with him, but then that guy decided he didn’t want to be tied to a lease, and I found myself casually mentioning that I was interested.

With NYC condos and banks and lawyers being what they are, it was unclear for a couple of months whether or not he’d actually get the place, but I started informally packing some things up just in case. I questioned my friends about proper techniques in breaking the news to my current roommate, and they seemed to think that living for four years with a boy you’re not dating is freaky and that he should take the news like an adult even if I did it by peeing a note on his bed. But, you know, finding an apartment in NYC is way more annoying than finding an apartment anywhere else, so I felt bad about leaving him to fend for himself, even with 30 days notice. Especially since he’d been quietly living with his parents in Queens before I convinced him to move out and shack up with me lest I have to move in with a stranger when my college boyfriend moved back to Ohio.

In the end, I went to Ohio myself at the end of October and wanted to make sure to give him that 30 days, so I took the coward’s way out and wrote him an e-mail. (I’m rarely home, and he never responds to calls or texts, so I wanted to make sure he got the message.) He wrote back very civilly and said he’d decide by the 31st if he was going to stay or go himself.

In a perfect world, he would’ve stayed. Even at $1800 per month, we have a deal on our 2-bedroom, 900-square-foot apartment, and it would’ve been totally easy for him to find someone to take my place. Our neighborhood is arguably the trendiest in NYC, so people pay crazy prices for apartments that don’t have necessary things like living rooms. We have a living room, a kitchen that fits a 10-person dining table, and bedrooms that aren’t the exact same size as our beds. Plus, then I could leave my unwanted stuff behind and not worry about having to paint over the navy-blue-with-gold-trim paint in our kitchen.

But he texted me on the 30th and said, “Let’s get out of this dump.” So I started coming home to pack and have probably spent more time with him in the past two weeks than I have in the past two years. He, of course, has packed absolutely nothing and still has no idea where he’s going to live. One night I asked him, “Are you sad to be leaving this place?”, and he said, “Actually, I am.”

Which is funny, because he’s been complaining about our apartment SINCE THE DAY WE MOVED IN. It doesn’t have enough windows in the living room, his bedroom isn’t perfectly square, he wishes we lived in Greenpoint instead, the restaurant across the street has bulletholes in the window, our own kitchen has a bullethole in it. NO BIG DEAL, right?

The moral of the story is: I’m a dreamboat of a roommate and have great taste in apartments, so quit pretending like you wanna move out.