Category Archives: all of my friends are prettier than i am

There is Nothing Hellish About Ohio

Posted by plumpdumpling on April 6, 2011 – 12:00 pm
Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, it's fun to be fat, just pictures, no i really do love ohio
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My best friend, Tracey, picked me up at the airport Tuesday night, and we immediately went to [Giant Retailer That Goes Against Everything I Believe in but is Open at All Hours of the Night] for Cadbury Creme Eggs, Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs, and unmatched photo ops like this:

We sat around getting fat the next day and then drove the 20 minutes to our hometown to have dinner with my parents and dessert with our other best friend from high school, Katie, and her daughters. Well, the older one was already in bed, so we just fed Dairy Queen frozen hot chocolate (FHC for short, of course) to her baby:

On Thursday, we spent literally all day scrapbooking at Archiver’s and then had dinner at The Cheesecake Factory, where Tracey was less-than-pleased with the amount of whipped cream on her plate, which she foolishly considers filler:

(I gladly ate it for her, of course, and a bunch of whipped cream is way better than the PAPER–yes, I said PAPER–I found in my sandwich.)

Then we went to Skully’s for Ladies 80s and had THE BEST time. We got back to her house from dinner around 9:30, and I was hinting practically the entire way home that I didn’t really have the energy for dancing. We kind of hemmed and hawed for a while, and when Tracey’s other friend canceled on us, I was especially ready to sit down with a tub of cookie dough and call it a night. But Tracey was really pushing to go for some reason, and in the end, I knew I’d end up having a good time, but it turned out to be THE BEST time. There were enough people there that we didn’t feel exposed, but there weren’t so many people there that we couldn’t bust out our incredible dance moves, and they’ve started playing 90s music now, so we totally got to relive junior high with Blur and Nine Inch Nails.

The next night, I celebrated my stepbrother’s daughter’s second birthday with my very festive dad:

my spectacularly vested stepmom:

and this CRAZY PRINCESS CAKE that I probably deserve for my next birthday:

Saturday night, I convinced my cousin Ethan and his wife, Katherine, to hold a party so I could see his baby, Kaydence, and take sort of creepy photos of Bethany, my twin cousin (we were born 47 minutes apart!), resting her head on Kaydence’s butt:

Instead of the roadkill his mom promised, Ethan made us these awesome grilled burritos so he could use his MAN SPATULA (or, for my feminist friends, his larger-than-normal spatula that in no way makes it manlier than any other spatula):

We played tons of six-handed Euchre, and since my dad was on a different team, he made someone else cry instead of me. YES!:


even the baby knows Euchre is serious bizness

Now, my dad lives on what he lovingly refers to as The Compound. A couple of years after my mom died, he married my awesome stepmother, Lois, whom he went to high school with and whom I’ve known my whole life, and he moved into her house a few miles away from my childhood home. She lived right next door to her dad, and when he died last year, her daughter moved in there with her husband and twin daughters. Her eldest son, meanwhile, converted the barn in between the two houses into this beeeeautiful home for his wife and daughters, and my dad built another barn behind his and Lois’s house. So it’s basically three big, ol’ farmhouses in a row out in the middle of nowhere. The Compound.

Anyway, arriving home to The Compound on Saturday night, I noticed for the first time that my stepsister’s girls are keeping their 4-H pigs in a little hut out back with a heat lamp built in to keep them warm. My dad, the farmer, scorns them for this, of course, but I think it’s cute. The only problem is that when you look out the back door, it appears that the poor little piggies are being

SWALLOWED BY THE FIRES OF HELL.

I would make an Ohio/hell joke here, but I think it’s pretty clearly much more like heaven.

My Superfantastic Weekend and What I Ate

Posted by plumpdumpling on March 28, 2011 – 12:05 pm
Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, it's fun to be fat, living in new york is neat, restaurant ramblings
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I had such a great weekend that I’m actually going to talk about what I did rather than write some abstract post about “American Idol” or whathaveyou. Ready for this?

On Friday night, I picked Kamran up from work, and we rode the subway to Astoria, which is a neighborhood in Queens that’s getting to be known as the new Williamsburg (my previous neighborhood in Brooklyn), because it’s cheap enough that artsy, non-trust-funded types can actually afford to live there and eat from the plethora of Greek restaurants. It’s still not quite as settled as Williamsburg was, though, because there was a point where the streetlights just sort of stopped existing, and we found ourselves thinking, “Why did we agree to come to this god-forsaken borough?!”

But then we remembered we were about to eat CHICKEN, stuffed with CHEDDAR, wrapped in BACON, covered in MOLE, topped with melted MONTERREY JACK, and smothered in crumbled FETA at Fatty’s Cafe. Obviously worth it.


Lorraine seductively models the Contraband Chicken,
as if it’s not seductive enough on its own.


There were much better photos of Ash, Mike, and Lorraine,
but the look on Ash’s face here is SO GREAT.


Please tell me why Kamran posed normally in this photo with Jeff
but threw a gang sign in the photo he took with me.

On Saturday night, Kamran and I went to dinner at the famed Serendipity 3 with my longtime blogfriend Kim of Good Hair, Kim Luck. We’ve seriously been reading each other’s LiveJournals and then blog for years now but failed to meet when we both lived here, realized we probably made a mistake once she moved away for a while, and decided not to butcher it this time when she moved back recently.


The lovely and talented Kim shows off her young chicken sandwich and the hair
she had dyed especially for me, or so I tell myself.


Kamran sips espresso instead of helping me eat our giant Can’t Say No Sundae,
which included peanut butter pie, vanilla ice cream, bananas, chocolate sauce, and whipped cream.

After Kim and I had been talking about “Gossip Girl” stars and handbags for 15 minutes, Kamran leaned over and whispered that Sarah Michelle Gellar was at the table next to ours with her family, which prompted us to try naming more than three things she’s been in. I failed ridiculously and didn’t slyly take a picture of Kim with Buffy in the background, but rest assured that she’ll be ceremoniously added to my list of famous people I’ve seen in NYC.

Even though Kim was in a dress and heels, we coerced her to ride the tram to Roosevelt Island with us, which is basically a 3-minute ride in the air to the tiny island next to Manhattan. We used those 3 minutes wisely, though, by loudly talking about how people from Roosevelt Island are pathetic if they think they’re part of Manhattan.

On Sunday morning, Kamran and I were treated to brunch at La Silhouette, which I think is just trying to get the word out that yes, they serve brunch, and yes, it is awesome. As if my cheesy, crusty, piled-high-with-ham croque madam wasn’t enough,

they also served us the entirety of the dessert menu. (And we secretly kind of liked their sundae better than Serendipity’s!) The full review will follow on donuts4dinner.com, obviously.

Super fun times!

I’m Certain All BFFs Are This Freaky

Posted by plumpdumpling on March 10, 2011 – 12:00 pm
Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, why i'm better than everyone else
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I was talking to my BFF, Tracey, the other day about the fact that neither of us has ever needed prescription drugs. I asked, “Should we be on drugs for something? Everyone else is!” She replied, “It’s weird enough of us to not be on drugs, but it might be weirder that we’ve never sought mental health treatment in the first place.”

And at first I was like, “Yeah! Weird!” But then I was like, “Wait, no, not weird.” And then I confessed to Tracey that despite pretty terrible things happening to me–like, say, my mom dying of brain cancer when I was a senior in high school–I think I’ve managed to stay awesome because I’ve had her to talk to since we were just wee little lasses. And then she confessed to me that despite pretty terrible things happening to her–like, say, her dad’s brain aneurism, brain tumors, and subsequent lifelong health issues–she thinks she’s managed to stay awesome because she’s had me to talk to, too.

I have a blogfriend whose best friend died a couple of years ago in a horrific and horrifically random shooting, and for a while, her online journal was almost solely about coping with this sudden death and the tremendous life changes it brought. Some of her friends were annoyed by her constantly talking about it and acted like she should move on with her life, but I totally got it. To have a best best friend–not just a good friend but a best friend who knows everything about you and doesn’t need to put you down to make herself feel better and doesn’t try to make you jealous and can handle you practically living with her for two weeks straight during your Christmas visits home–and then to lose that? The pain is almost unimaginable to me.

On the phone yesterday, I asked Tracey not to die, and she agreed to try, but we decided that if either of us does kick the bucket too soon, the other will keep her memory alive in the very best ways.

Tracey says she’ll build a roadside shrine to me (this may only be in the case of death by car crash, but I hope it’s no matter what) with a cross and flowers and all the fixin’s and that she’ll come every day to replenish it with–and I’m not sure what this means–baby doll limbs. Is that a common shrine element? I hope so.

I decided I’ll end every blog post with mention of her passing, but she said she’d actually prefer if I put it in my e-mail signature. So I said I’ll sign every letter, “3/9/11 – Never Forget,” a la all the 9/11 memorial crap. She thought it a little morbid for me to use yesterday’s actual date, but I’m nothing if not totally creepy.

Then we started talking about the “Hoarders” episode where the lady’s brother was a fireman who’d died trying to rescue people from the towers on 9/11, and the pain of losing him was so great that she was over-collecting anything related to 9/11 or NYC in general or patriotism or simply the colors red, white, and blue. We decided that my “Hoarders” episode about all of the Tracey-related paraphernalia I’ve saved over the years would be pretty embarrassing. But her episode about her Katie-related collection would be much, much worse.

Because she has my FINGERNAIL CLIPPINGS!!!

BFFs! BFFs! BFFs!


on the subway


pretending to smoke at Pete’s Candy Store and looking so awkward


feeding shaved ice to a gargoyle in the East Village


and then tasting his sweet ice breath


in the changing room at Dylan’s Candy Bar

Living the Ohio Life at Three Times the Rent

Posted by plumpdumpling on February 16, 2011 – 12:05 pm
Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, living in new york is neat, no i really do love ohio
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Last Friday, I was alone. I knew Kamran would be at the library all night with just over a week left before the bar exam, so I’d planned for many hours of one-on-one time with the DVR and “Criminal Minds”. But right about quittin’ time, I started feeling like I wanted to do something. I thought about how ironic it is to live in New York City and keep a blog about it and then sit home quietly eating bon-bons on a Friday night.

I thought about calling my former NYCBFF, Beth, but then I remembered she moved to San Francisco. Then I thought about calling my current NYCBFF, Ash, but then I remembered she’s trying to save money to buy a house and move somewhere even worse, Connecticut. Then I thought about calling Chantee, but then I remembered she’s busy rigging rich people’s taxes for the next two months. And on and on. I went through a mental list of each and every person I know in NYC and found a reason not to call any of them. And I felt like if I was just going to sit around on my couch, I might as well be sitting on a couch with my BBFF back in Ohio.

But just then, my NYCBFF IMed me and said she’s now a bazillionaire, doesn’t need to save all of her money anymore, and wanted to hang out! So I went to her luxuriously large apartment in Queens, and we got into her brand new CR-V, and her husband drove us to The Cheesecake Factory. Which was in a mall. In Long Island. Full of people in not just Juicy Couture velour tracksuit bottoms, which Ash says is okay, but the whole tracksuit.

Cheesecake Factory

It was the very un-NYC-est thing we could do and also the un-suckiest.

Long-Lost Videos of 2010: Part 3

Posted by plumpdumpling on January 24, 2011 – 12:00 pm
Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, potty mouth, super furry animals, travels
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Okay, okay, I know you didn’t watch any of the videos I posted last week. But these are great and seriously deserve to be seen. Well, the second one, at least. The first one is purely fish porn.


Kamran and I spotted these guys in an Asian grocery store while in California last August. Of course I had to set them to Ween’s only good song.


Jack and I test the strength of my new bathroom walls against fart sounds. Because you have to know how much noise you can pollute the bathroom with before everyone in the living room can hear you.