Author Archives: katie ett

Happy End of 2012!

Posted by katie ett on December 20, 2012 – 1:30 pm
Filed under holidays don't suck for me, no i really do love ohio
Tagged as ,

Sort of forgot to mention that I left for Ohio on Tuesday night. They were offering FIVE HUNDRED DOLLAR vouchers at the airport for all of the oversold flights. I was going to ditch my family so hard and stay in NYC for as long as I needed to to get that voucher. And then of course my flight had zillions of extra seats. Because no one’s flying to Ohio except me.

But here I am! Until January 2nd! Which means I probably won’t blog again until January 3rd.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and don’t you forget about me. (Follow me on Facebook to see all of my Instagrammed Ohio pictures.) Loooooooooove yoooooooooou.

An Otherwise Exceptional Existence

Posted by katie ett on December 17, 2012 – 2:15 pm
Filed under funner times on the bus, living in new york sucks so hard, why i'm better than everyone else
Tagged as , ,

I’m flying out of JFK for Christmas, which is a convenient $2.25 subway ride away from my apartment, so I needed to transport a duffel bag of clothes (read: beloved underwear) from Kamran’s apartment to mine this morning. In the normal world, this would involve tossing it in the back of my car along amidst the Big Mac wrappers and used Kleenex and forgetting about it until I got there. But in my world, this involves:

1) carrying it to the bus, which is only an avenue block away but is very slow and could force me to stand holding the bag for 45 minutes, because I’m not putting my gorgeous white duffel with the light brown suede bottom on the bus floor, or

2) carrying it to the subway, which is three avenue blocks away and will involve navigating heavy foot traffic but will get me there much faster.

I could also take a cab, but it’s $30 from Kamran’s apartment to mine and sort of defeats the whole purpose of being able to fly out of the airport that’s a convenient $2.25 subway ride away from my apartment.

So I stressed about this all weekend. I thought about bringing the bag to my place tonight after work to avoid the crowds. I thought about leaving home at 7 a.m. to miss rush hour. I thought about how I just need to suck it up and become one of those people who pulls a collapsible grocery cart behind her wherever she goes. But instead, I left at the normal hour and hoped some kindly man would feel unnecessarily guilty about depriving a woman of a seat.

And of course the best happened. A couple of buses passed as I was walking toward the stop, which pretty much guarantees a ten-minute wait until the next one, but a third one miraculously pulled up mere moments after I arrived. It hadn’t been long enough for a new crowd to gather, so the only other passenger waiting to board was a woman I gave bus fare to out of the goodness of my heart when her card was expired last week, and she gave a friendly hello. The bus was almost entirely empty, so I took a seat at the front and gave my bag a seat of its own. Barely anyone got on at the next stop and the next stop and so on for my entire ride to work, so I never had to worry about piling my duffel and my purse and my lunch bag all on my lap. It couldn’t have been a better situation.

When we’d passed all of the stops where a lot of people usually board and rush to steal the empty seats from each other in ways that I think should embarrass them, I looked over lovingly at my duffel, so comfortably nestled next to me, and thought, “Everything always works out in my favor! Boy, the bus sure is great.”

And then I reflected on my own self lovingly and how I manage to have such a sunny outlook. Of course I’ve had many a trip on the bus where I got shuffled to the center where there are no seats and was forced to hold a heavy bag the entire way, but that’s not what leaves an impact on me. I tend to think of the great things in my life as the norm and the worst things as momentary riffles in an otherwise exceptional existence. I don’t think about the time I requested a window seat at Per Se and they didn’t oblige; I think about how comfortable the banquette they did give us was. I can’t recall a single gift I asked for as a kid and didn’t receive–although I’m sure there were hundreds over my eighteen years of childhood greed–but I can remember how special the presents I did get were. I really don’t even dwell on my dead mom but instead think of how great it is that her absence made me closer to my dad.

As Kamran would say, I AM THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO.

You?

Only You Can Prevent Romantic Comedies

Posted by katie ett on December 11, 2012 – 12:00 pm
Filed under there's a difference between films and movies, why i'm better than everyone else
Tagged as ,

Last Thursday night, I went out with Kim for Shake Shack (burgers, cheese fries, and sweet potato and marshmallow custard with marshmallow creme topping and shortbread)

and Anna Karenina at one of the big Times Square theatres. The movie was so artful it’s kind of hard to describe how it was done: it has sets, like a play, so that characters can walk from one place to another just by going through doors, but it’s not bare and janky like most plays are. The costumes are as elaborate as the sets are, space and time are messed with in exciting ways, and there’s morphine!

But the point of this story is that as Kim and I were approaching the theatre, there was a huuuuu-uuuuu-uuuuuge line stretching to the end of the block. Figuring it probably wasn’t for the movie based on a novel about nineteenth-century Russia, we bypassed it and headed on into the theatre, turning back to read the sign that said it was for . . . Playing for Keeps, the Gerard Butler/Jessica Biel romantic comedy about a soccer dad.

Which has . . . 2% freshness on Rotten Tomatoes.

We are too good for this world.

Making Up for a Really Serious Previous Post with Dog Photos

Posted by katie ett on December 7, 2012 – 12:00 pm
Filed under super furry animals
Tagged as

While I was home in Ohio for Thanksgiving, I went to my aunt’s house to make pumpkin rolls with my cousin, Bethany. For the longest time, I thought her mother had invented pumpkin rolls. And by “for the longest time”, I mean “up until last year, when I went to her house to learn to make them for the first time and was horrified to see her bring out a COOKBOOK with a RECIPE for them”. There’s an art to making these things (wet towels, powdered sugar, rolling them up using the cookbook itself) that no cookbook could ever explain, though, so I’m still half-illusioned.

Anyway, my cousin is a vet down in Virginia and ended up rescuing a dog from certain death and giving her what I assume is a loving-to-the-point-of-smothering home. Her name, Honey, belongs to strippers and other unloved women, but I somehow love her despite that and think she’s super-photographable. So now I’m going to subject you to a hundred pictures of her doing basically the same thing over and over just to be able to try out my new Elembee-designed watermark. Which she appears to be looking at in half the pictures. Which I’m sure you know delights me to no end.

And my favourite one:

Different, Nay, Special

Posted by katie ett on December 4, 2012 – 12:00 pm
Filed under everyone's married but katie, living in new york sucks so hard
Tagged as ,

I’m under the impression that everyone thinks the way they live their lives is superior to the way everyone else lives theirs. I’ll tell you all day long that I don’t begrudge anyone for wanting to live a quiet life full of children and pets in Hell, Michigan, but the truth is that I’ve made the decisions I’ve made BECAUSE THEY ARE THE BEST DECISIONS. And I’m guessing that everyone else feels that way, too. (Except for women who had abortions in college, because everyone knows that all women regret that.)

But I sometimes forget that everyone’s walking around in a bubble of life-choices-related superiority, and thank god I have my dear great-aunt to remind me. When I was home last month, my sister and I went to visit Crazy Aunt Dorothy (or CAD™) between our three family Thanksgivings. My sister is clearly the favourite with her, a fact that I didn’t realize until recently. I live a 10-hour drive away from home and visit anywhere from six to nine times a year, depending on how often Cassie clicks on my blog ads and earns me money for plane tickets. My sister lives a mere three hours away in Kentucky and visits half as much. I assumed that this made me the most beloved great-niece, but I guess it’s true that absence makes the heart grow fonder, because my great-aunt couldn’t get enough Joanie.

And Joanie is great. She also has a husband, a house, a cat and a dog, future plans for children, classic fashion sense, shiny hair, and a job at the university. A SMALL-TOWN GREAT-AUNT’S DREAM. But I’m the one who does all the work! I’m the one who comes home for a week at a time and sees her multiple times and goes shopping with her and eats her German chocolate cake when I don’t even like German chocolate cake. Our great-aunt and -uncle talk nonstop about how wonderful Joanie’s husband is, how he’s “such a character” and “such a catch” when–and I’m not exaggerating–he spends 95% of his visits with them messing with his iPhone and hoping they’ll leave him alone. Meanwhile, the one time Kamran came home with me, he let them teach him how to play The Official Card Game of the Great State of Ohio™, Euchre, and then played all afternoon with them.

JUST SAYING.

Anyway, on this visit, Crazy Aunt Dort announced that she had bought something so cute and went to the back of the house to retrieve it. She emerged from the room where they keep her scrapbook collection and his pocketknife(!) and rifle(!) collection with a plastic bag and announced to me, “I’m going to give this to Joanie, because she has a house.” And I was like, “EXCUSE ME? I don’t have a house? I have a house that we pay $3000 a month for! I have a house in the most important city in the world! My house is better than Joanie’s! It has a doorman and a gym built right into it! What do you mean I don’t have a house?!”

And then we all sat awkwardly silent for a second before I laughed and said, “Juuuuuuuuust kidding.” And I kind of was kidding, because I’m not going to fight my darling sister over a ceramic turkey napkin holder, but as I sat watching her and CAD talk about it, I did feel sort of lonely about my life choices. I told myself, “I don’t need to define my success by my great-aunt’s approval of me,” but of course I want recognition that I’m doing okay. I want her to be like, “You are making different choices than most Ohio-bred women do, but they are the correct choices for you. You have always been different, nay, special.”

When I talked to my BFF, Tracey, about it later that night, she said, “Aunt Dorothy just doesn’t even understand what your life in New York is like.” And it’s true. She can’t imagine what it’s like to live in an apartment instead of a house and to have a boyfriend of six+ years but feel no need to get married and to love a job that might not guarantee me a billion dollars. I mean, this is a woman who once told me that Kamran’s easier to love because he makes money. She later told me that she hopes I meet a nice boy like my sister did, and then clearly remembered Kamran’s existence again and had to assure me that he’s a nice boy. She never asks about my job, because she doesn’t understand what I do. She doesn’t care which movies I’ve been in, because she doesn’t have a DVD player. She doesn’t care about the amazing restaurant I went to or how lucky I am to have an awesome roommate or which magazine did an article on me. Ugh.

I don’t need anyone to think I’m doing it better than they are, but I wouldn’t mind if they just didn’t think I was doing it wrong.