Ugh, you guys. The hurricane basically didn’t affect me at all, except that the area around my office got flooded and has no power, so I’ve been off work all week. Which is amazing, except that I feel like such a slug. I have a maternity session, an engagement session, and a wedding to edit, and I keep my Photoshop laptop at work. My grocery delivery service canceled my healthy, low-carb order this week, so I’ve been eating nothing but delivery food, and it’s not like I’m going to have a salad delivered when there are burgers and nachos. I’m as many as fifteen posts behind on some of your blogs. The Halloween candy is running out. I may have to clean a toilet or something to make up for having electricity when half of the city doesn’t. WOE, people. WOE.
Author Archives: plumpdumpling
NBD, Hurricane
Tagged as hurricane sandy, living in new york sucks so hard
The Formula for Style Blog Success
Tagged as fashion blog, my uber-confrontational personality, style blog
Something got me started on craft and style blogs late last year. Despite being a total androgyne and not having any access to/room for crafting supplies, I like looking at the pretty things other women are making, the pretty things they’re wearing, the pretty things they’re decorating their spacious out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere houses with.
But man, those things can tire me out pretty quickly. There seems to be a formula for them, and this is it:
1) Blog names involving animals: Kittenbear, Saturated Canary, Dainty Squid
2) Cutesy words for everything: “love this cardi”, “swooning over these sunnies” (that’s cardigan and sunglasses, for those of you who don’t read stylespeak)
3) Faux-awkward clothes-modeling poses that have obviously taken the “America’s Next Top Model” advice to “try to look like a broken-down doll” way too much to heart
4) Opening up a shop to sell handmade or thrifted items, usually on Etsy but more preferably at Renegade Craft Fair but even more preferably in a 1949 Airstream camper painted pink with white trim:
photo by Little Chief Honeybee, whom I actually really like despite my fun-making
5) Being very young or trying to act like it: dressing up their Blythe dolls, owning everything rainbow-colored, loving hearts and sparkles and baby pandas
6) Describing themselves as “awkward”. Or “wonderfully awkward”. Or “adorably awkward”. (I AM ACTUALLY AWKWARD! You have 15,000 Facebook subscribers who are trying to mold themselves into you!)
7) Closing every post with an image that says “love, [whatever cutesy name the blogger has, because they’re all cutesy]” in a signature font:
8) Having long lists of “likes” in their sidebars that include puppies, cuddling, and a dessert of some sort
9) Inserting their URLs at the end of every comment, making it clear that they’re only commenting to plug themselves:
10) Strategically moving nearest to the thrift store in town that always manages to have designer clothes with their tags still on, mismatched but perfectly coordinated vintage plates that will be glued together to make a cupcake tower, and an array of mason jars dating from 1885 to present, all bedbug-free
Of course there are plenty of really original craft and style blogs, including some awesome personal blogs that I read daily. And I know that people complain about the fact that blogging women apparently have nothing to talk about but the clothes they wear and the homes they make, but even the most militantly feminist among us is still pinning cake pops and salad-in-a-jar recipes on Pinterest.
Even I have a little Kittenbear inside of me trying to get out.
Best NYC Store Names #2
On my bus ride to work from Kamran’s apartment, I pass through the outer edge of Chinatown and see a store with the worst/best name ever: New BJ.
please excuse this crappy merged Google Maps image
Apparently it’s a 99¢ store, but the review I found on Yelp is just what I was hoping for:
There’s nothing worse than a used or distressed BJ, amiright?
Pinch Day!
My dad, always a little too quick to torture my sister and me when we were kids, probably invented Pinch Day one year when he realized he’d spoiled us with too many gifts yet again. It’s the day after your birthday, the day when everyone can make up for how nicely they treated you the day before by pinching the crap out of you.
Similarly always a little too quick to torture, I’m sure I introduced my best friend, Tracey, to Pinch Day quite soon after we became inseparable in 7th grade. And since she’s the perfect best friend, she had these flowers sent to me at work yesterday:
with this note:
How personal and sweet, right?
My roommate/landlord/co-worker, Jack, recently wrote me this little questionnaire while I was on the phone with Tracey one day:
And it’s true–TV, movies, and leading insanely interesting lives does fuel our conversations. But just plain loving each other for almost 30 years doesn’t hurt anything. Thanks for making my Pinch Day special, Tracey!
That Little Voice in Your Ear
For a short while, the recording that played when you called my company was of my voice. When our new phone system was installed, the woman who records the greetings company-wide was on vacation, so the IT department asked me to record the greeting.
Wait. Actually, they asked me to recommend someone with a good speaking voice to do it. And I was like, “Well, people have TOLD ME that I should be a voice actor. I wouldn’t want to, you know, toot my own horn or anything, but . . .” And they were like, “Oh, all right.” Embarrassing.
Naturally, during this time, I had extensive fantasies involving all of my exes finding out about this and then calling my workplace continuously, waiting anxiously for the part where I seductively said quality assurance. I later went on to do the voiceovers for two of our marketing videos, which I now assume they’ve favourited on YouTube and listen to quietly in the bathroom on their iPhones after dinner, the soothing words enterprise content management system the only thing keeping them from raising their hands to their nagging new girlfriends and wives some nights.
These are the kinds of thoughts that get me through repeated friend request rejections by them on Facebook.
