Author Archives: plumpdumpling

“Big Brother” and the Inability to Accept Compliments

Filed under a taste for tv, why i'm better than everyone else
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Like the other 99% of Americans who think “Big Brother” season 13’s Rachel is catty, fake, pathetic, and trainwrecky, I saw right through her ruse about Cassie being a threat and a liar. Cassie is pretty and sweet, and Rachel is pock-faced and bitchy. (When the Head of Household trivia competition revealed that America thinks Porsche’s more likely to steal a man than Rachel is, Kamran said it’s not because Rachel doesn’t want to be a homewrecker but because no other man would ever have her.) (Also, yes, there is a woman on “Big Brother” named after a car.) I was as disappointed as anyone when Cassie was voted off, but I was even more disappointed by her exchange with host Julie Chen in her “reaction” interview:

Cassie did such a great job of not saying, “I am pretty and therefore everyone hated me,” but twice she made fun of herself for not even trying to look good while on the show, and twice when Julie said, “But you still looked gorgeous,” Cassie ignored the compliment. I don’t know why, but that makes me so uncomfortable. I don’t think my parents taught me to duck compliments, but somewhere along the way, I started laughing off or denying most nice things people might say to me. And it seems like it’s that way with a lot of the really talented people I know, too. Kamran, for instance, told me he went to “grad school in New Jersey” on our first date instead of bragging that he got his Ph.D. from Princeton. And my best friend, Tracey, will never tell you that she’s an amazing writer/scrapbooker/singer.

It’s like we all think looking like we all have no self-esteem is favorable to just saying “thank you”. Or maybe we’re all so secretly full of ourselves that we know our answer to any compliment will accidentally be, “I know, right?”

You Know What This City Needs? Some Condos.

Filed under living in new york is neat, living in new york sucks so hard
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This is no New Yorky I almost can’t stand it: “A Final Look Inside The Legendary Mars Bar“.

It’s so absolutely awful that it couldn’t exist anywhere else.

And so absolutely cool that it couldn’t, too.

You Would Have Me Starve

Filed under administrative
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I was torn about whether to put today’s post in the personal files or the food files.

To appease those of you who don’t care what I eat (namely the person photobombing me below), I played it safe. So check out today’s donuts4dinner post for a fun food truck outing!

NYC Food Truck Rally

Controlling Your Seat Fate

Filed under funner times on the bus
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One of the greatest things about getting on the bus at an early stop after work is that I get a seat exactly always. And one of the greatest things about getting a seat exactly always is having a hand in deciding who gets it once I get off. Last night, there were probably four times as many people at my stop as usual, so it was clear a bus hadn’t come by in a while. If my stop is crowded, every other stop is likely to be crowded, so I steeled myself for thirty minutes of feeling awkward about sitting while so many people are standing yet being lazy enough to not want to give up my seat.

Our driver was apparently a fledgling stand-up comedian, because she was making comments at every stop over the bus’s loudspeaker, telling us to “step up, move in, get to know your neighbor” and calling out to the screaming baby in front, “You tell ’em, girl!” I especially appreciated it when a woman at the South Street Seaport stop made a big deal about how crowded the bus was, and the driver said, “Oh, here, let me ask some of these people to get off so you can be more comfortable,” and then left the woman standing on the curb with her mouth open.

Read the rest here!

Photo Excursion: Battery Park

Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, just pictures, living in new york is neat
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A few of my friends and I have big, fancy cameras and no idea what to do with them, so we decided to start a photo excursion club and take periodic jaunts in photogenic locations to improve our skillz.

Well, Anthony,

Jeff,

and I have big, fancy cameras. Jack has an iPhone. But he’s really serious with that iPhone:

We started out in Battery Park, which is just in front of our office building and has the most incredible views of Brooklyn, New Jersey, Ellis Island, and of course, the Statue of Liberty:

Look! Look! She’s in the foreground and background! See how clever I am?

We took about a zillion photos of flowers and bees landing on them (Anthony even tried to demonstrate to us that you can grab a bee and let it go before it realizes what’s going on, but after a few attempts, I think I convinced him he was going to lose a hand), but naturally I didn’t have my shutter speed set fast enough and didn’t capture a single good-looking shot.

Jack did manage to find some slower-moving wildlife, though:

We creepily watched other people’s kids play in the Battery Park fountain,

and saw a woman who may or may not have been Sinead O’Connor wearing a superhero costume play a concert inside Castle Clinton until the sun began to set:

We had been planning to walk up the East side of Manhattan, but the promise of the smoggy Jersey City moonlight drew us West to Battery Park City and the lovely promenade that spans its length. We stopped to watch a blues concert on the water, and I thought about how wonderful it is to live in a city where something like that is going on every second of the day.

Of course, it’s also the kind of city that commissions poop-shaped sculptures for its parks, so maybe it’s a trade-off:

Passing a group of chess tables, we jeered Anthony into planking (or “lying down game”, as Wikipedia calls it):

and then hilariously looked not ten feet away to see another dude copying him.

After that, Jack lost to himself in a sad game of imaginary chess, which I took a picture of:

and Anthony took a picture of:

and Jeff took a picture of (while accidentally using his color picker function, rendering about half of the photos he took black, white, and blue):

To show that he was more important than we are, Anthony pretended to assume professional photo-taking postures but was really just using them as an excuse to air out his crotch:

The sky went from blue

to black before we knew it

and we apropos-ly ended our photo expedition at the in-progress 9/11 memorial. Freedom Tower, as it was known. Or One World Trade, as we fondly call it:

We passed finance types lounging drunkenly at crowded outdoor cafes, collars unbuttoned and sleeves rolled up, and headed somewhere a little more our style:

Because as Jeff’s photos show, clearly we don’t know how to handle ourselves in public: