Author Archives: plumpdumpling

Everyone Can See You with Your Finger Up Your Nose

Posted by plumpdumpling on July 8, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under funner times on the bus, living in new york sucks so hard, why i'm better than everyone else
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I had to be at work early this morning for a meeting, and I expected that the public transportation would be less crowded, so I was annoyed when I decided to be lazy and take the bus to Grand Central and found that the usual load of people was still waiting at the stop after mine. There was one woman in particular who I just didn’t like from the moment I saw her. I couldn’t exactly pinpoint what it was that made me want to ensure somehow that she lead an unhappy life–maybe her dour all-brown outfit, maybe her sloppy ponytail, maybe her chubby cheeks–but I was especially upset to look down from my throne at the back of the bus and see that she’d grabbed the last of the much-coveted single-person seats.

And then she started picking her nose.

(I’m sorry, but click here to read the rest. I hate to do this sort of thing to you, but one of my friends told me last night it’s the only way to do it, and I was just looking for an excuse. Looooove yooooou.)

I’m Sorry If I Gave You AIDS

Posted by plumpdumpling on July 6, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under jobby jobby job job, potty mouth
Tagged as ,

I know it’s neither polite nor sanitary, but I got an unexpected nosebleed in my office’s bathroom last week, and a drop of blood hit the blue-tiled floor before I could do anything about it. I lifted my hand to catch the drops that followed, but the blood kept somehow escaping me, and after a few seconds, I stopped trying and just let the floor become littered with my DNA. It felt so good to do something I wasn’t supposed to and to not care.

The Best Thing About “Eclipse” (and the Most Annoying)

Posted by plumpdumpling on July 2, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under good times at everyone else's expense, i used to be so cool, my uber-confrontational personality, readin' and writin', there's a difference between films and movies, why i'm better than everyone else
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I was surprised to learn, upon reading them, that though the writing is as awful as I would’ve imagined, the plot of the Twilight series is actually pretty clever. Unlike, say, “Lost”, all of the loose ends eventually tie up, and the things you never thought would matter suddenly do. There are no red herrings nor MacGuffins in them.

Yet they still totally annoy me simply because their author, Stephenie Meyer, has to thank the band Muse in each of them. In all of the novels’ afterwords, right alongside appreciation of her editor and agent, she’ll say things like, “And thanks also to my favourite band, the very aptly named Muse, for providing a saga’s worth of inspiration.” And then I will claw her eyes out.

It’s not even that I don’t like Muse. I actually really liked them in NINETEEN-NINETY-NINE when I was listening to them. But I just can’t handle some kids’-book-writin’, middle-aged Mormon thinking she’s all cool for liking one pop-alt band. It’s like moviestars thinking anyone cares about their political activism. And you know she’s just doing it in some used-to-be-unpopular girl’s attempt to befriend the band she loves.

I went to see Eclipse last night with my friend Ash, though, and aside from a couple of actually-hilarious moments, what I was surprised by most was the soundtrack. It does not suck. In fact, it includes The Bravery, the amazing Ohio band The Black Keys, and my favourite band right now, Band of Horses. And the music is used really well. The first time you see, Jacob, for instance, the camera moves in on his face as a grinding bluesy song starts, and it’s this total moment. How annoying is that?

I can console myself with the fact that I know it wasn’t Stephenie Meyer choosing the music and how it’s used, but I can still continue to hate her for all of her Muse-suck-upping. Mostly because I know I’d do exactly the same thing if I was in her shoes.

Except with a better band.

My Most Brooklynest Night

Posted by plumpdumpling on June 30, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under living in new york is neat, living in new york sucks so hard
Tagged as , ,

Anyone who’s lived in NYC for five minutes can tell you that the electric company, ConEd, sucks. Now that I’m nearly halfway to becoming a “real New Yorker” (they say it takes 10 years, and if how New York you are is based on how much you despise all other New Yorkers, I believe them), I have a few horror stories of my own. But Monday night’s takes the cake.

On Monday morning, I posted about tiny and therefore easily air-conditioned apartments being a good reason to never leave Manhattan, and Bachelor Girl said, “At least you live in a place where you will not DIE without air conditioning.” I should’ve known it was foreshadowing.

So, my friend Tessa was staying with me, as I mentioned, and after work that day, we met up with her-friend-who-I’ve-also-hung-out-with-once, Mark, and my friend Ash at Caravan of Dreams, a raw organic vegan restaurant that goes against everything I believe in but is delicious. Afterward, we went for a couple of hours of karaoke, which turned out to be amazing, because I somehow only make friends with people who have incredible voices.

Tessa and I got back to my apartment at around 11 p.m. and sort of started getting ready for bed but then ended up chatting for 45 minutes or so about how much better we are than everyone else, how people try to ruin our lives because we’re so great, the usual. And then all of the lights went out. Had I been awake alone and, say, in the bathroom, I would’ve freaked the hell out. As it was, we sat in shock for three seconds, and then I realized I was holding my BlackBerry and scrolled the trackwheel on it so the screen would give us a little light. The air conditioner was oddly still on, so I went over and switched it off to see if that would fix anything, and then we went to my bedroom window to see if the whole block was down, but the houses across the street were still lit. Tessa has some experience with fuse boxes, so she went to work on ours, flipping everything every which way, but nothing changed. I tried to turn the air conditioner back on, but of course it wouldn’t work anymore.

We slipped on our shoes and trudged out to the street, and while the houses across the street really were lit (with one smug asshole surfing on his computer right in front of his bay window), neighbors on my side of the street were all filing out of their houses in confusion. A ConEd emergency truck parked right in front of us and set about making some horrendous noise as it worked on the cables below the street, no doubt waking up anyone who had been sleeping peacefully and hadn’t noticed the power go out (my roommate).

We stood outside for perhaps 15 minutes, figuring 95 degrees and a slight breeze was better than 95 degrees and a non-functioning air conditioner, and then a girl from my building came out and announced that ConEd had called and left her a message about how it was a planned outage meant to last anywhere from two to six hours. WHO PLANS AN OUTAGE ON THE HOTTEST DAY OF THE YEAR THUS FAR? And who thought midnight, when there’s nowhere to be except your apartment, was a better idea than, say, noon, when most people are at work, anyway, and everyone else can just walk down the street to an air-conditioned coffee shop? Oh, ConEd.

The thing is–despite the fact that:

1) we had to sleep through the sweltering heat that night with no relief,
2) the two to six hours ConEd promised turned into twelve, and
3) Kamran’s Manhattan apartment has free and unlimited air conditioning,

I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything. All of us hanging out on our stoops, my landlord’s non-English-speaking Italian mother coming out of our building in her housecoat, an old lady who still had electricity yelling from her window for everyone to shut up and let her sleep . . .

It was so Brooklyn.

Reasons to Never Leave Manhattan

Posted by plumpdumpling on June 28, 2010 – 1:00 pm
Filed under living in new york sucks so hard
Tagged as ,

#1:

My long-time Internet friend Tessa of LiveJournal fame is in NYC for a couple of days and is giving me the immense pleasure of hosting her in my Brooklyn apartment. Which means I had to, you know, actually go home to my Brooklyn apartment for the first time since it got hot. I asked my roommate earlier in the summer if he’d help me install our ginormous window unit, and he informed me that air conditioning is not necessary and that all struggling artists go without it.

So I told him I’d see him in the fall.

But I went home yesterday afternoon to prepare for Tessa’s arrival, dragged the air conditioner out of one of our many closets (because you have many closets in Brooklyn, which is perhaps the only reason to live there next to cheap beer), politely coerced my roommate into helping me lift it into place, and learned that if I kept perfectly still and sat directly in front of it, I wouldn’t sweat.

I also learned that an air conditioner meant to cool a 350 square foot apartment doesn’t cool a 900 square foot apartment. And if I just lived in Manhattan, there’s no way I’d be able to afford a 900 square foot apartment.

Hence.