Watching “American Idol” last night, Kamran and I couldn’t stop talking about how much Scotty McCreery is totally Alfred E. Neuman from Mad.
Right?
Author Archives: plumpdumpling
“American Idol” is the Only Drama Left in My Life
Filed under a taste for tv, living in new york is neat, music is my boyfriend
Tagged as a taste for tv, living in new york is neat, music is my boyfriend
Tagged as a taste for tv, living in new york is neat, music is my boyfriend
I kinda don’t have anything to say right now. Kamran’s finished with law school and the bar exam, so we’ve been doing crazy things like
1) going to the 3-Michelin-starred restaurant Kamran swore he wouldn’t take me to until I agreed to eat their signature oysters-and-caviar dish (and I did! (and liked it!!)),
2) driving to see our friend Anthony’s in Long Island with a bunch of other friends so he could make us a real home-cooked Italian meal in a house with a kitchen that’s its own separate room and not just a counter on one side of the living room, and
3) going for weekend walks in secret parts of the city and finding a 100-square-foot (i.e. normal-sized for Manhattan) wine store that happened to carry our favourite wine, the J.J. Prüm Riesling Kabinett Graacher Himmelreich 2008. We’re totally drinking with our preservative-free, microwaveable FreshDirect vegetarian meals now. One of us is drinking out of an actual wine glass that came with Kamran’s apartment (I was under the impression he had purchased wine glasses himself when I first met him and was impressed with how grown up it seemed, despite not actually liking wine), but the other glass broke at some point, so one of us is drinking out of a mug. Classy.
Anyway, life is good, and about the only thing stressing me out right now is deciding if I’m going to watch this season of “American Idol” or not. Obviously I watched all of the auditions, because that’s the only time you actually get to see people with singing talent. By the time you get around to the live show, the judges have weeded out anyone who doesn’t add Christina-Aguilera-ish runs to the end of every song.
I think the only reason I’m even remotely interested in watching this season is to see all the hacks and jerks get kicked off. A handful of the contestants are actually bad: Thia Megia, Tatynisa Wilson, Rachel Zevita, Kendra Chantelle, and Julie Zorrilla. A couple of the contestants are just unlikeable: Clint Jun Gamboa and Jordan Dorsey. There’s the one guy who’s an Adam Lambert ripoff: James Durbin. And most everyone else is just generic.
Here are the only four I care about:
• Brett because he’s a total freak with a voice to match.
• Casey because he scats in a not-annoying way and because he’s what Kamran calls a slobthrob, which is of course a slob who also happens to be a heartthrob.
• Paul because he may legitimately be Rod Stewart.
• Scotty because his voice suits him so little it’s almost cartoonish. He could put out a country album tomorrow and have it sound better than anything out there right now.
I don’t think any of them can actually win, of course, because they’re all too good. Kamran promises me we’ll make it through the season with the help of the trusty fast-forward option on the DVR, but maybe I should make a pact with myself to stop watching once the four of them get kicked off to avoid the pain of having to watch someone like Lee DeWyze win again.
HOW DID WE SURVIVE BEFORE COMPUTERS?
On the night Kamran finished the two-day New York state bar exam, he played me this video by The Pastels:
It’s a seriously great song, and I’ve been playing it over and over again for the past two days, so I decided I should just up and download the whole album this morning. So I go to my favourite BitTorrent site, and I find a copy of the 1987 single for that very song, “Crawl Babies”.
I also find this:
Isn’t that SO FUNNY? It reminds of one of the early Chuck Klosterman books and the way he talked about how sad it is that music videos aren’t being preserved. At the time I read it, YouTube was already in existence, and I kind of wanted to write to him and be like, “Did you ever think life would be this great in the 2000s, Chuck?” But then I remembered that I don’t have his e-mail address, because he never wrote to me to thank me for the completely awesome movie I bought for him.
And now this music video that was being called “very rare” has been viewed 168,000+ times on YouTube, 1,000 of them by me. The Internet is so great.
The Private Lives of City Dwellers
Filed under creepy boyfriend obsession, too much information
Tagged as creepy boyfriend obsession, too much information
Tagged as creepy boyfriend obsession, too much information
Kamran is officially finished with law school and the bar exam! Now he has great plans for his free time:
I’m not sure you want to know the story behind that.
But obviously I’m going to tell the first person who asks in the comments.
My Boyfriend or My Butt: A Conundrum
Filed under creepy boyfriend obsession, living in new york is neat, potty mouth
Tagged as creepy boyfriend obsession, freshdirect review, living in new york is neat, potty mouth, soap.com
Tagged as creepy boyfriend obsession, freshdirect review, living in new york is neat, potty mouth, soap.com
I hate to admit that advertisements sometimes work on me. I used to have a roommate who would mute the TV every time the commercials came on so she could avoid being sold to, and I always loved her for that. The advent of the DVR has obviously made it easier to live commercial-freer, but I’m still met with ads I can’t ignore on the streets and subways.
And it’s not always a bad thing. After seeing FreshDirect trucks all over town, I finally convinced the ever-reluctant Kamran to try it, and it turned out to be kind of life-changing for us. Not only is it much less expensive than Manhattan-based grocery stores because they don’t have to pay Manhattan rent, but they also offer the kind of selection you could never find at small Manhattan retailers. We used to have to make a choice every weekend to walk in one direction to the health food store or in the other direction to the traditional grocery store, but FreshDirect has both your traditional (meaning terrible) items like sugar-free Jell-o and your local, organic, pastured, antibiotic-free stuff. And they deliver it right to your door. Swoon.
I have a problem, though. Last night, I saw an ad on the subway for Soap.com, and when I checked it this morning, I found that they have my lotion, my powder foundation, and my shampoo at Ohio prices. (Yes, I kind of feel bad about not supporting my local economy, but I feel worse about paying $9 for a $5 bottle of mostly water.) So obviously I want to order from them, but here’s my dilemma: they have the toilet paper Kamran likes but that none of our local stores carry. I don’t like it because of the way dust-like miniscule paper particles fly all over the place every time I rip a sheet off, but I think he really misses the stuff.
Do I order from them, save a bunch of money, get my bathroom essentials delivered for free, and risk having a dusty bum again? Or do I go to a retail store, pay Manhattan prices, and continue to ruin Kamran’s life with my super-soft, non-shreddy toilet paper?
