Author Archives: plumpdumpling

Become My Fan on Facebook! (If you want to. I won’t hate you if you don’t.)

Posted by plumpdumpling on May 26, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under administrative
Tagged as

I have a Facebook page for this here blog.

I started it because one of my friends said I should, and I do everything my friends tell me to, but I quickly realized there was no point to it, since I link to all of my blog posts on my personal Facebook page already. But then Bachelor Girl, amazing BBFF she is, made all of her friends fan the Unapologetically Mundane Facebook page.

I felt fine about myself when I only had 6 fans, because I thought it was clear that I wasn’t trying very hard. But now that I have 60+ fans, it’s clear that I’m trying and not doing all that well. Not that 60 isn’t great! It’s actually amazing! But apparently Facebook doesn’t consider you a real entity until you get 100 fans, and they only give you certain privileges at that point, so now I kind of need 40 more people to like me.

I could send out an invite to my bazillions of Facebook friends, but I’d rather coerce people who I know already read my blog. So . . .


Click meeeeeeeeeee!

No pressure, but if you feel like becoming a fan/friend of my page by Like-ing it, I won’t stop you. I realized this morning that it’d be a good place for us to talk about all of the things I’m too embarrassed to bring up here, like how I don’t understand how to use toilet seat covers, how I wonder if I can go on being friends with Edward people when I love Jacob so much, and who’s going to win “American Idol”.

That doesn’t really make anyone want to Like me, does it?

Ohio Weekend Photodump!

Posted by plumpdumpling on May 25, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, everyone's married but katie, no i really do love ohio, super furry animals
Tagged as , , ,


My second-cousin Keith got an elbow to the stomach from his new bride, Rachael. Their wedding photographer only seemed to be taking super-serious photos, so I felt self-righteous about this one.


But then Keith made the photographer let the groomsmen pose for this picture, and all was right with the world again.


My cousin, Bethany, and my sister, Joanie, were in attendance and looking as stunning/ridiculous as ever.


I attempted to teach my 85-year-old great-uncle to use the laptop I bought him while my best friend, Tracey explained the Internet to my great-aunt:

Tracey: You can use Google to search for anything!
Crazy Aunt Dorothy: Oh, we don’t want that.
Tracey: It’s just a website you go to if you want to look something up.
Crazy Aunt Dorothy: We don’t really need the Internet. Just take us to that Circleville Pumpkin Show website.
Tracey: Uhh . . .


Tracey took me to a movie at the indie theatre in Columbus, the Drexel, and the ceiling fan vent looked like giant-sized art to us. But maybe that’s because it was midnight and we were running on five hours of sleep.


Tracey’s cat is a wild animal. I go home to visit pets as much as people these days because I like her cats so much. Except when I wake up on her couch in the middle of the night to see one of them flying over my head with his claws outstretched as he jumps from armrest to armrest.

I also went to an 80s dance party, ate the Splenda cheesecake at Cheesecake Factory for the first time, visited my friend Katie and was forced to hold her six-day-old baby (Evelyn) but did not drop her, went to visit my cousin Ethan and his six-day-old baby (Kaydence) and used my newfound not-dropping-baby skills to also hold her, celebrated my sister’s birthday with our parents and her husband, and explained to my parents that the smoke monster in “Lost” makes the same sound that a taxicab’s meter does.

I really, really love going home.

New York City is Supposed to be Devoid of Nature, and That’s Why I Moved Here

Posted by plumpdumpling on May 21, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under living in new york is neat, stuff i hate, super furry animals
Tagged as , , ,

I spent my entire morning commute yesterday thinking that something was crawling on me. Now, my morning commute is only five stops on the train, but rush hour trains are always held up at the stations by passengers trying to cram themselves in, so five stops can take a half an hour. So picture me feeling itchy all over for a half an hour, adjusting the tags on my shirt and jacket in case that was the problem, furiously scratching the places I felt it most.

At first I thought it might be my imagination, because I do drop acid before going to work every morning, after all. But at one point, I actually felt like something was crawling on my ear. And I felt like the guy across from me on the train was watching it happen. I tried to distract myself with my Kindle, but I kept having to reach up every two minutes to brush existent or non-existent things off of my face. I wanted to get out a mirror and have a look, but I thought it was better to not know for sure, considering what my reaction might be.

I had it in my mind that it might be a spider, and I am totally scared of spiders. Like, scared in the way that if someone put a fake one in my lunch or on my pillow, I would never talk to that person again. Growing up on a farm, I was running downstairs nightly to wake my dad up and make him kill one I had or had maybe spotted on the wall beside my bed. Even now when I go to Ohio to visit, I’m on a constant look-out for spiders all over the house, and last time I was home and made my sister kill one for me that was dropping from the ceiling, she asked me, “How did you manage to survive twenty-some years in the country?” In that same trip, I made my best friend, Tracey, reach across me while we were in the Taco Bell drive-thru to pluck one of those little hairy spiders off of the armrest attached to my door. I really think I’m more equipped to deal with cockroaches somehow.

Anyway, I finally got to work and ran to the bathroom to check out my face. I didn’t see anything, so I officially chalked it up to my wild imagination and did my business. As I was washing my hands, though, this cute little spider came down on his web right in front of my face FROM MY HAIR. It was then that I remembered walking underneath a tree and noticing a spider hanging from it at the very last moment that morning, but never did I consider that it might have jumped on me. I tried to scream, but only air came out, and even though the last thing I want to do in the world is purposely touch a spider, I reached up and smacked it away.

And then I frantically checked the floor for it, but it was nowhere to be seen. And then I spent the rest of the day itching myself and being completely miserable.

I Can’t Love a Band Who Won’t Love Me Back

Posted by plumpdumpling on May 19, 2010 – 1:00 pm
Filed under music is my boyfriend
Tagged as , ,

Back in the early 2000s, I was in love with the band Jump, Little Children and felt for them a passion unlike any I’d felt before. I fell in love with them slowly and accidentally but so fiercely that I followed them all over the country, sometimes driving 14 hours straight to make a show, and saw them well over 50 times. I joined their listserv and exchanged e-mails with their other fans for years, some of whom I became great friends with, and one of whom became my still-to-this-day arch-nemesis. We analyzed their lyrics, analyzed their personal lives, and analyzed our many meetings with them. This was a band who read and responded to your e-mails, knew you by name when you approached them after shows, and hosted heavy metal karaoke nights in Southern towns you’d fall in love with simply because you saw them play there.

(Here’s their most famous song, and here’s my favourite song. (OMG, isn’t Jay’s voice especially dreamy live?))

When they broke up in 2006, I didn’t die like I thought I would, because I had moved to NYC and was preoccupied with my new life. In fact, it was almost better that they were breaking up, because I had sold my car and wouldn’t be able to road trip to see them in five different cities on five different days anymore. I didn’t find a new favorite band to replace them, but I didn’t think I needed one.

And then I created a Pandora radio station based on The Shins and heard Band of Horses’ “The Funeral“. I fucking loved it. I listened to it 100 times at work and at home in one day and still wasn’t tired of it. Then Pandora played another of their songs the next day, and I loved it, too. And then it seemed like every time I was clicking over to my Pandora Firefox tab to see who the band was, it was Band of Horses.

I realized that I heard them before living in Ohio but hadn’t cared about them. I realized my best friend Tracey had turned off “Is There a Ghost?” one time while I was visiting her in Ohio because she was sick of it. I downloaded their albums. Then I got their songs stuck in my head. Then I started sharing them on my blog and on my old LiveJournal, hoping that someone would say something about how much she loved them, too. I watched their live performances on YouTube. I found the best cover possible of one of their songs and thought about hiring the singer, Chris Dodgen, to play in my living room if I couldn’t hire the band itself. I listened to all of the other bands the members have been in and Wikipediaed anything I could think of related to them. I stopped caring about anything else.

The problem is that the Internet is a bit of a different place than it used to be for fangirls. I remember becoming a silverchair follower in 1995 and finding entire webrings of fan sites dedicated to them, and that was true for every band at that time. There were communities with chat rooms built right into the pages, forums for sharing band gossip, and photo galleries compiling every live and promo picture the band ever had taken. The Band of Horses website, meanwhile, doesn’t even have a Contact link, and their fan community consists of individual people writing blog posts, apparently, though I have no idea how to actually view other people’s posts.

And when they tweet a new concert date and I tweet back a legitimate question about it, they don’t respond. I can’t help taking it personally after so many years of direct contact with my last favorite band, and I know that’s stupid, but I paid for the solo album from Jump’s lead singer, Jay Clifford, last night on iTunes, and you can bet I won’t be paying for the Band of Horses album that came out yesterday.

Is It Racist?

Posted by plumpdumpling on May 18, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under fun times on the subway, living in new york sucks so hard
Tagged as , ,

Yesterday morning, I got to Grand Central fairly late, so the morning rush had mostly passed, and I got a comfortable spot on the train. It was held at the station for a few minutes, though, so my comfortable spot soon became cramped as more and more people came down to the platform and tried to pack themselves into the train. Just before the doors closed, a large black man crammed himself in as far as he could, but it wasn’t enough. The doors kept trying to close and then opening back up again, and the man kept thrusting his belly farther and farther into people’s backs to make room, hoping he would finally fit.

A white lady near me got annoyed finally and said, “Get out! There’s not enough room for you.” The man said, “There would be enough room if people would move in.” I disagreed with this, as I was crushed against the person next to me to the point that I couldn’t retrieve my Kindle from my bag, and I was at the point in my book where a vampire baby was about to be born to a human, so you know I would’ve done anything I could to get to it. The woman also disagreed and said, “Where am I supposed to go?! The huge empty space over there?” She was being sarcastic. The guy said, “All of the hot air coming out of you sure is taking up a lot of room.” The woman said, “Oh, great. Another one of them with an attitude.”

The black woman next to me whipped her head around to look at the white lady so fast that I could hear the wind she created whooshing by me, but . . . surely that’s not what she meant, right?