Author Archives: plumpdumpling

I have (another) new blog!

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Please join me over at my new food blog, donuts4dinner.com!

RSS Feed: if you want to see me in your feed reader
LiveJournal Feed: if you want to see me on your LJ Friends page

It’s perfect for those of you who only care about my food-related ramblings and doubly perfect for those of you who hate when this blog is clogged with whole posts about how much I love mayonnaise.

I wanted to quote The Ting Tings here, but “Great DJ” doesn’t actually have any quotable lyrics whatsoever.

Filed under living in new york is neat, music is my boyfriend
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I went to Le Royale Saturday night with some trepidation to celebrate my friend Sonya’s birthday. See, we like to go to Le Royale on Friday nights for Robot Rock, where we can be sure to hear 80s new wave and current indie music. However, Sonya had to go and be born on April 11th instead of April 10th, so we had to go to what Le Royale was calling Grand Buffet Saturday. Not appealing, right? Unless you’re into Ponderosa and cheap Chinese food, I guess. (Which you are.)

But it turned out to be the best night ever! The DJ, I later learned, was named Vikas Sapra, and he’s now my favourite DJ ever. I’m the sort of person who has a reeeeeeeeeeally great time when the DJ’s playing a song I like and an inversely more horrible time when he’s playing something I don’t like/know. It’s definitely one of my more intolerable personality traits and something I feel bad for subjecting my poor friends to, but there it is all the same, and not even two fistfuls of vodka can make it any better.

Luckily, this Sapra fellow is a master of mixes. One second he’s playing “Kids” by MGMT and I’m going crazy, the next he’s playing some shitty hip-hop song that makes me want to kill myself, but then he’s playing Bowie’s “Modern Love” and everything’s great again. And he only plays the best 30 seconds of each song, which sucks for the songs I love but is perfect for the times I’ve reached for my razorblade.

My friend Beth and I spent the night right in front of the DJ booth in order to have enough room to flail our arms wildly like white girls dancing do and to look approvingly at Vikas when he played Blur and Nirvana and not-so-approvingly when he played One Republic (who I originally called New Republic until I just had the foresight to Google their name to be sure). Now my weekend schedule will officially consist of karaoke on Fridays, Le Royale on Saturdays, and “Celebrity Apprentice” on Sundays.

Nostalgia About the Early Days of the Internet

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Remember how much more important the Internet seemed in its youth? How we didn’t rely on it for everything and didn’t entirely take it for granted?

I don’t remember how I knew what it was exactly, but I do remember the first time I ever used it. My best friend Tracey and I were going to a Men’s Glee Club concert at THE Ohio State University one day in our early years of high school, and we stopped by her older brother’s campus apartment beforehand to waste time and use his computer, which included what must have been the slowest modem ever made.

As I remember, it turned out that we’d left our tickets to the concert in her parents’ car, so we spent the entire afternoon looking up song lyrics and pictures of our favourite bands of the time: silverchair, Megadeth, Bush, and Nirvana. Recently, we had spent an entire Friday night at her house watching, pausing, watching, and pausing Bush’s performance of “Insect Kin” on “Saturday Night Live” that my mom had taped for us so we could figure out all of the lyrics. Which took hours. So yeah, the Internet and all of its tricks seemed AMAZING to us at the time.

I bring this up because my co-worker Nik was hovering over my desk this morning, swinging the laces on the hood of his hoodie back and forth over my monitor like windshield wipers, and somehow, it reminded me of the eSheep I had back in high school.

This little Sheepy would hang out above the taskbar at the bottom of your screen, walking, running, sleeping, and occasionally getting bug-eyed and dying. You could pick him up with your pointer and drop him, causing him to bounce, but that’s literally all he did. AND I THOUGHT IT WAS AWESOME.

Still do, to be honest. And thankfully, there’s a 4-minute+ video on YouTube to help me relive its glory.

So tell me: what did you love about Web 1.0?

NYC Pillow Fight 2009!

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I celebrated World Pillow Fight Day on Saturday by attending the fight on Wall Street. You’ll note that I said I celebrated and not my loyal and faithful friends and I celebrated, because while I’m generally regarded as the flaky one of the group, I was the only one who actually showed up. Boo-yah and a thousand points for me.

I didn’t actually bring a pillow with me, because you know I wasn’t going to risk mussing my hair, but the train downtown was loaded with children with animal-shaped pillows, hipster girls with pillows in handmade cases, and middle-aged couples with pillows they’d seemingly owned their whole lives. This young German-speaking couple got on the train at Union Square and bumped into me without a word of apology, so I set about hating them in my mind and then set about laughing at them in my mind when they got all confused at City Hall when the 6 line terminated and they didn’t know which train to take to continue down to the Wall Street stop. Superiority!

When I got off the train by Trinity Church, masses of people had stopped on the sidewalks to see where all the pillow-carriers were going. The street I had planned to take to the intersection of Broad and Wall was barricaded by the police, so I tried another street, which was also barricaded, and then another street, which was also barricaded. I ended up stopped behind a construction project a good two blocks away from the action, cursing the NYPD for ruining anything remotely community-forming and hopeful, and taking lame pictures like this with my tiny zoom:

The sidewalk opposite me was open almost to Broad Street, so people were crowding in and trying to burst through the barricades, but the police kept pushing them back and yelling through their bullhorns. Everyone looked so dejected coming back toward my intersection, and I was already feeling sort of down about being alone, so I decided just to call it a day and spread the word about how lame the event turned out to be.

But just then, someone slapped someone else with a pillow right beside me. And then someone else slapped someone else. And then it was all-out war, with people streaming down the sidewalk to join in the impromptu fight.

Pillow innards filled the sky as cases ripped open against heads and shoulders, and I was so glad that absolutely no one had heeded the organizers’ rule against feathers:

The police tried to break things up, but the fighters’ will would not bend, and the cops finally settled for merely separating the crowd when cars and bulldozers came through:

Pillows were thrown at windshields, but it was all good-natured fun. My favourite part of the day was when a limo rolled up to the intersection, the throng obediently separated, and just before the car could pass through, a guy unexpectedly ran along the line of people and smacked every one of them with his pillow:

THAT, my friends, is the spirit of New York City.

No More Hiding Behind Tinted Windows

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When I turned 16 years old, my dad told me I could have any car I wanted. I told him I wanted a black truck, because

a) I was a farmgirl living in Ohio, but more importantly,
b) the boy I had a crush on had a black truck, and clearly creepily buying a twin vehicle is the way to any man’s heart.

A few days later, I owned a black ’86 Chevy Blazer with a grey stripe along each side that a family friend’s son was selling. Although it wasn’t exactly the shiny new Dodge Ram I’d imagined, I couldn’t have been happier with the way I could pretty much back into everything in sight and not inflict a bit of damage to my precious bumper with the inherited “Fast Boys Dirt Toys” sticker on it. It was only when my dad made the same offer to my little sister a year later and she ended up with a ’98 Ford Mustang that I reconsidered my ride.

I thought that moving to New York City would rid me of my constant worry that everyone pulling up beside me at red lights was judging my poor Blazer. I thought that without a nonfunctioning rear windshield wiper to hinder me, I’d have no insecurities. What I didn’t realize is that public transportation is ten times worse.

. . . And you can click here to read the rest on my Examiner page. OHHHHH! BURN!