E-mail me at katie at unapologeticallymundane.com.

“It’s loaded with mayonnaise, just the way you like it!” – Lolita (1962)

“Every time I remember you have siblings, I’m surprised. Actually, every time I remember you have parents, I’m surprised; it’s like you were brought to us, just as you are, by the Spaghedeity Himself.” – Elise

I grew up on a farm in the middle of Ohio, where I spent the neverending summers of my youth dragging bales of hay across barn floors, sharing water straight from the hose with the 4-H pigs I took to the county fair, and making Slip ‘N Slides out of garbage bags in the backyard with my little sister. I graduated from THE Ohio State University with a degree in English and creative writing but spent most of my college years roadtripping with my friends to see our favourite band and picking up boys at the children’s science museum where I worked.

I moved to Manhattan in July of 2005 with a suitcase and a single box full of books to live in this gigantic New-York-University-subsidized apartment in the West Village with Todd, the boyfriend I met my junior year of college. He came here a year before I did to get his graduate degree in film studies from NYU and spent most of his time watching Japanese horror movies while I hid my eyes. We moved to a tiny studio on 8th Avenue in Chelsea two weeks into my time here and bragged about the fact that we were spending $1800 per month for one room, because laughing about it made it hurt less. Everything we earned went toward frozen hot chocolate at Serendipity 3, all of the indie movies we could handle at the Angelika, and The Greatest Turkeyburgers in the Entire World™ at the famous Cozy Soup’n’Burger. And then he decided that he hated it here and went back to Ohio. I stayed behind basically because the guy I had a crush on told me to and am accidentally working at a software company in Battery Park where I started as a temp when I needed to make some money before moving home. But then I didn’t move, and now I can’t leave the company because I love my co-workers too much. And because my boss doesn’t seem to mind that I sit around blogging all day.

I lived with a friend in Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights for a couple of weeks after Todd went home until I found a Park Slope sublet with a girl named Magali and a pitbull named Balthazar. I literally had the biggest bedroom in all of the state of New York, I’m convinced. It was on the lower level and was as big as the bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bathroom of the main floor, and all I had to deal with was a staircase leading down to it with no walls on the sides so my roommate could see me down there dancing to the Electric Six album I was obsessed with for the entire three months I lived there. Our landlord soon decided that he only wanted investment bankers and their yogamom wives living in his building, though, so I was thrust out and moved myself into a two-bedroom in Williamsburg with my hipster friend Wen in 2006, and if I forgot for a moment that the L train sort of only ran when it felt like it, I couldn’t have be happier in my ultra-cool neighborhood.

I started dating Kamran during that time, a Princeton physics PhD who went on to get his law degree while we dated and worked as an intellectual property lawyer. We fell in love so easily and so hard that after three weeks, I was practically living in his apartment, a 275-square-foot studio in Manhattan’s Tudor City that was never meant to be shared by two people but that felt so homey at the time. Our six and a half years together completely changed my life, most notably in that Kamran had grown up eating adventurously and wanted try all of NYC’s best restaurants with me, which led to my starting a food blog that he named donuts4dinner. What began as simple point-and-shoot food photography eventually turned into hardcore DSLRing and then became a business that he generously funded. He moved to California in May of 2013 to be near his family, and our very tragic breakup is chronicled here,here, and here.

In 2011, my co-worker Jack decided to buy a two-bedroom condo in Downtown Brooklyn and wasn’t opposed to the idea of my helping him pay for it. Now I have my own bathroom, easy access to pretty much every subway line, and all the time in the world to pursue my side business, Ettible Photography. In October of 2013, Jack and I realized that we kinda sorta liked each other after eight years of being friends, spending all day every day talking to each other at work, and going on vacations to the Hamptons and Miami and the Jersey shore and Puerto Rico together. We started dating, and I became even happier than I’ve ever been. This blog is a mix of my photographs and my not-so-flashy but not-so-uninteresting New York City life. If I had thought long and hard about moving here, I probably never would have, but I sure am glad I did.