Monthly Archives: December 2010

How Not to Live in New York City

Posted by plumpdumpling on December 22, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under living in new york sucks so hard
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Obviously I could’ve (and hopefully someday will) written this better, but this How to Live in New York City blog post that’s being passed around did strike one chord with me:

Encounter a lot of people crying in public. Watch an NYU student cry in Think Coffee, a business woman in midtown sob into her cellphone, an old man whimper on a stoop in Greenpoint. At first, it will feel very jarring but, like everything else, it will become normal. Have your first public cry in front of a Bank of America. Cry so hard and don’t care if people are watching you. You pay good money to be able to cry in public.

I remember–when I first moved here and felt so alien and could only afford to fly home twice a year for comfort–crying everywhere. I remember breaking down in Union Square on my way home from a movie one night out of nowhere and realizing it was because I missed my dad so hard. I remember spending hours in the Olive Garden down the street from my Chelsea apartment sobbing to my then-boyfriend one afternoon, much to the bewilderment of our waiter, because the clothes designer I was working for had let me go due to my not showing enough cleavage and refusing to spend the weekend at his house. I remember crying so long and hard one night that we had to watch Napoleon Dynamite twice to cheer me up.

And I pay good money to live here and do that.

I’m Gettin’ Nuttin’ for Christmas

Posted by plumpdumpling on December 17, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under holidays don't suck for me, jobby jobby job job
Tagged as , ,

Earlier this week, I walked into work, and to my delight, one of the giant fake gifts under the giant fake Christmas tree in the lobby started skidding across the floor toward me, following me as I walked toward the elevators.

Clearly this is a sign that majorly awesome presents are coming my way in the next couple of weeks.

Or that it was really windy that day.

Hey, He Started It

Posted by plumpdumpling on December 16, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under living in new york sucks so hard, my uber-confrontational personality
Tagged as ,

Last night, I was at the drugstore in my new neighborhood. It has one of those queues that starts at one end of the store with a little “Enter” sign, and if you’re at the opposite end, you’re met with a little wall that tells you you’re not in the right place to join the line. So I entered at the end of the queue lane like a good little girl with my new toothbrush in hand, but just as I got to the line of cash registers, this dude cut in front of the wall, slipped ahead of me, and sidled up to the cashier who should’ve been helping me.

Now, I don’t blame anyone for not going to the end of the queue when there’s no one in line–I get a real kick out of going around unnecessarily long ones, actually–but you’d better be sure your rule-breaking isn’t going to end with you cutting in front of someone like this guy. And of course the cashier didn’t notice what he did or care to do anything about it, so I said, “I know you know what you just did.” But he either didn’t hear me or didn’t care to let on.

A second later, I heard him turn to the racially-similar guy next to him and ask him to “help a brother out” with some money to cover his purchase. The guy next to him said, “Don’t play me like that,” and the ditcher said, “I have kids to feed!” His cashier pulled his item away from him, and he said, “When you have kids, you’ll understand!” And then another lane freed up, and I paid for my toothbrush and assorted other entirely unnecessary trivialities with my loads of cash.

My Mom is Dead, and My Teeth are Dirty

Posted by plumpdumpling on December 15, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under single white female
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Kamran’s taking his LAST FINAL EXAMS OF LAW SCHOOL EVER this week, so he asked me to stay at my own apartment last night to give him the freedom to walk around his apartment in my pink slippers and recite his outlines to himself all night. My new roommate, Jack, had gone to the gym after work, so I sat watching girly things on his ginormous TV while sitting on a blanket to protect my butt from whatever might rub off from my couch.

See, my last boyfriend and I bought the couch from some dude off of craigslist five years ago when I moved here. It’s this Victorian-looking white silk-ish affair that’s abnormally long and comfortable to sleep on, which may explain why my last roommate chose to bed down on it for 6 months instead of buying himself a mattress when we moved in together. It didn’t exactly make it out of that situation looking its best–I’m talking unexplainable orange stains here, friends–so Jack and I have OxiCleaned it twice now, and while the OxiClean is totally annihilating those stains and actually making the couch whiter than it ever was, we evidently need to take some plain water to it now, because it’s leaving some weird white residue on whatever touches it. I paid all of $150 for it, so it’s definitely paid its dues, but it’s a one of a kind treasure with that grandma aesthetic I like so much.

Anyway, Jack came home around 9, and we went to Dallas BBQ for some touristy pulled pork and the “Lil'” onion loaf, which is the size and shape of the Pyramid at the Louvre. A roommate dinner is a real pleasure for me, because I’m pretty sure my last roommate and I went out to dinner together exactly once. (We went to plenty of other things together–concerts, movies, the grocery store–but dinner conversation is not something he could handle.) And then on the way back into the apartment building, we stopped to pick up a package from the lady at the front desk, and I decided that if we didn’t make friendly conversation with her right then, we were going to get stuck in that place where she says hi to us every day but nothing else because we never showed any interest in her otherwise. We ended up talking to her for a good half an hour, which is the amount of time I’ve talked to every single doorman in Kamran’s building combined over the past four years.

So by the time we made it back up to the apartment, I was feeling pretty great. And then I realized I had thrown out my toothbrush at my last apartment and not gotten a new one yet. Jack looked through his stolen hotel supplies for one, but I wound up rubbing some toothpaste on my teeth with my finger and telling Jack to never tell anyone what he’d seen. He went into his bathroom to get me a roll of toilet paper for my bathroom, and I said I didn’t need one yet, but he said, “Oh, I have plenty. My mom got them for me. It’s sooooooooo great having a mom.” And then he emerged brushing his teeth with one of those fancy high-powered wet-vac-type toothbrushes.

Meanest roommate ever.

The Battles of Hastings

Posted by plumpdumpling on December 14, 2010 – 3:30 pm
Filed under no i really do love ohio
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Comedian Drew Hastings moved from L.A. to Ohio to become a farmer and is making a documentary about his experiences. It’d almost be offensive if it wasn’t so funny:

Last year Drew sold five calves for $3500.

Raising those calves cost him $3000.

Once, while my dad and I were taking care of a dead calf, I asked him why he chooses to farm when it takes so much effort for so little payoff, and he said, “Well, because I like it.” Oh, farmers.