Category Archives: everyone’s married but katie

Life as a Single Lady

Filed under everyone's married but katie, living in new york is neat, narcissism
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I know you’ve been thinking about my well-being every moment of every day since I announced the year-in-the-making Great KamKat Breakup of 2013, and I want to assure you that I’m doing fine. Much better than expected. Terrific, really. I don’t want to say that I’m flourishing, exactly, because that somehow implies that Kamran was holding me back, and on the contrary, I think it was he who set me up to flourish: there’s a certain kind of confidence that comes with having been loved so hard for six years. When I visited my family last week to shoot my first wedding, my stepmom sent me home with a card that told me she and my dad were really worried about me in the days leading up to Kamran’s leaving but that I’ve handled myself “beautifully”. That was meaningful.

Before he moved back to California, I wrote in my journal that “the cons associated with Kamran’s leaving are too immense to even begin to list. My life is about to change in just about every way I can think of, and even the things that are staying the same will be affected.” And it’s true that my life has changed, but it doesn’t feel nearly as melodramatic and bleak as I expected. Granted, it’s only been a little over a month since he left, and my feelings may be different when I decide to date again and find that the only available men are finance guys who didn’t get married in their 20s because they were busy “working hard and playing harder”, and by that I of course mean “sleeping around”.

But so far, here are the pros to “being alone”, and by that I of course mean “not dating Kamran but still being surrounded by the love of my friends and family”:

• I’m now actually living in the apartment I’ve been paying rent on for the past two and a half years. All of my things are in one place for the first time in six years.

• The subways that converge at my apartment are as follows: A, B, C, F, G, N, Q, R, 2, 3, 4, 5. I never have to be annoyed at having to go to the West Village or Tribeca, because everywhere is convenient now.

• My roommate is great. The time we spend together doing the mundanest things somehow feels important.

• I have an oven to bake in instead of just a two-burner stovetop. I haven’t baked anything, but I can, goddammit.

• I have a freezer to store ice cream in. Do you know what six years without a quart of ice cream in your home at all times is like? DEATH.

• I have a gigantic 3-D TV and six seasons of “The Sopranos” on HBO Go.

• I have a memory foam mattress and can take up as much space in bed as I want to. Sleeping in the center of it feels like life’s greatest luxury.

• I can order whatever I want for dinner. And if that’s Indian four times a week, no one cares.

• I buy the toilet paper I want to. I have my own bathroom. All of the cabinets are filled with girl stuff. I am a princess.

• My commute to work is one subway stop. One.

• No one will give me a hard time about my low-carb diet. Butter on my omelet! Pizza toppings!

• I can do my laundry once a week or once a month.

• I can go to the gym or not go to the gym.

• I can take up totally random hobbies. Archery!

• I can stay out late on Friday nights with my friends and not have to worry about having anyone to get home to.

• I can wake up the next day whenever I want. I can stay locked in my room that day until 1 p.m., and no one will pretend to clean up around me just to make noise so I’ll get up before I’m ready.

• I can do a photoshoot that afternoon and then go out for dinner without feeling like I have to ask anyone permission.

• I can stay up that night until the sun comes up listening to music, or I can go to bed at 10 p.m.

• I can kiss boooooys.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m enjoying being an independent lady. The great thing is that I have so much time to do anything I want to now, and there’s no one waiting at home for me making me feel guilty about seeing my friends too much.

Let’s forget about the fact that when there’s someone waiting at home for you, there’s nothing you want to do more than sit at home with that person.

Pathetic on Pinterest

Filed under everyone's married but katie, good times at everyone else's expense, my uber-confrontational personality, why i'm better than everyone else
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Can we agree that anyone who has a “wedding ideas” board on Pinterest and isn’t engaged is a desperate psychopath who should never be proposed to?

If you have a “someday wedding” board but had the good sense to make it private, I’ll grant you some leeway.

And actually, I’ll grant you all of the leeway if you pin stuff like this:

My BFF, Tracey, says that women have to hoard these ideas now because we’ll otherwise have forgetten the things we’ve liked about other people’s weddings by the time we actually get married. So I’m convinced that every wedding from now on is going to include the things that were popular when Pinterest began: mustaches-on-a-stick, everything chevron, and ombre cakes.

The best part is that I randomly chose those pins, and then discovered that these are the boards they’re from:

• My .:*eclectic bohemian inspired free-spirited color-filled fun-loving flower child*:. dream wedding board

• FINALLY- Wedding november 16, 2013

• Ideas I wish I’d had for my wedding

THAT’S RIGHT. The last person is already married and still has a wedding board. For her second wedding, I assume.

Totally Legit Wedding Photographer

Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, everyone's married but katie, photography
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This is how behind I am in my blogging:

Last October, my very excellent blogfriend Cassie‘s sister got married and invited my very excellent blogfriend Jessica to photograph it. Not to be left out, I somehow weaseled my way in to the shenanigans as Jessica’s second shooter and scored myself a weekend of being taken care of by Cassie in Pittsburgh.

She and Jessica picked me up at the airport–and by that, I mean they parked in the parking lot and came and met me–with pumpkin-flavored treats from Oakmont Bakery in hand and drove us to her sister’s house to start the festivities. Jessica, who is from Louisiana and only sees one season per year, was almost breathless over the rolling hills flooded with fall colors:

Carly's Wedding

And if she loved the trees, she loved the country barns even more. So much so that we went out in the rain to get a picture of her in front of one of them:

Carly's Wedding

Cassie’s sister, Carly, is one of those down-to-earth people you feel close to as soon as you meet her, and she wasn’t freaking out about anything, which made this, my first time photographing a wedding, so relaxed and fun. And having Jessica there as the first shooter couldn’t have been better: she knew what she was doing, she didn’t mind a zillion questions from me, and she never made me feel like I was in competition with her for the shot. She also took the responsibility of all of the important pictures so that I could focus solely on Cassie having a hissy fit at the hair salon at 8 a.m. the day of the wedding:

Carly's Wedding

No, just kidding, she was hitting the bottle hard to keep herself calm:

Carly's Wedding

No, just kidding, she’s pregnant. And this was the kind of classy affair where pregnant women stayed sober and everyone else drank champagne out of McDonald’s cups:

Carly's Wedding

Cassie’s oldest daughter, Claire, was a total delight despite being a child and spent all of her time either entertaining the adults or taking care of her brother and sister, although I have no idea where she gets her good manners. I was in the back seat of the car with her as we were leaving the salon, and she asked why I didn’t get my hair done like all of the bridesmaids; Cassie turned around in the driver’s seat, gave my hair a disapproving look, and said, “Katie will . . . brush hers . . . before the wedding.” Harlot! Brute! Meaniehead!

Carly's Wedding

I kid, I kid. Cassie, aside from hating my hair, was as good a host as the first time I met her and super-generous to boot. The weekend was a great mix of Cassie, Carly, and their charming mother enchanting us with stories from their childhoods and Jessica and me sharing a hotel room and having important conversations about politics, religion, love, books, and her hot husband. Thanks for the memories, ladeez.

Here are a few of my favourite shots from the wedding reception:

Carly's Wedding
Jessica at work

Carly's Wedding
Cassie in front of the awesome-for-photos light wall in Carly and Ben’s reception hall

Carly's Wedding
Cassie and Jessica, being adorable

Carly's Wedding
Carly and her bridesmaids

Carly's Wedding
Cassie, blowing bubbles

Carly's Wedding
Ben and Carly and a whole lotta Photoshop

Carly's Wedding
I die.

Different, Nay, Special

Filed under everyone's married but katie, living in new york sucks so hard
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I’m under the impression that everyone thinks the way they live their lives is superior to the way everyone else lives theirs. I’ll tell you all day long that I don’t begrudge anyone for wanting to live a quiet life full of children and pets in Hell, Michigan, but the truth is that I’ve made the decisions I’ve made BECAUSE THEY ARE THE BEST DECISIONS. And I’m guessing that everyone else feels that way, too. (Except for women who had abortions in college, because everyone knows that all women regret that.)

But I sometimes forget that everyone’s walking around in a bubble of life-choices-related superiority, and thank god I have my dear great-aunt to remind me. When I was home last month, my sister and I went to visit Crazy Aunt Dorothy (or CAD™) between our three family Thanksgivings. My sister is clearly the favourite with her, a fact that I didn’t realize until recently. I live a 10-hour drive away from home and visit anywhere from six to nine times a year, depending on how often Cassie clicks on my blog ads and earns me money for plane tickets. My sister lives a mere three hours away in Kentucky and visits half as much. I assumed that this made me the most beloved great-niece, but I guess it’s true that absence makes the heart grow fonder, because my great-aunt couldn’t get enough Joanie.

And Joanie is great. She also has a husband, a house, a cat and a dog, future plans for children, classic fashion sense, shiny hair, and a job at the university. A SMALL-TOWN GREAT-AUNT’S DREAM. But I’m the one who does all the work! I’m the one who comes home for a week at a time and sees her multiple times and goes shopping with her and eats her German chocolate cake when I don’t even like German chocolate cake. Our great-aunt and -uncle talk nonstop about how wonderful Joanie’s husband is, how he’s “such a character” and “such a catch” when–and I’m not exaggerating–he spends 95% of his visits with them messing with his iPhone and hoping they’ll leave him alone. Meanwhile, the one time Kamran came home with me, he let them teach him how to play The Official Card Game of the Great State of Ohio™, Euchre, and then played all afternoon with them.

JUST SAYING.

Anyway, on this visit, Crazy Aunt Dort announced that she had bought something so cute and went to the back of the house to retrieve it. She emerged from the room where they keep her scrapbook collection and his pocketknife(!) and rifle(!) collection with a plastic bag and announced to me, “I’m going to give this to Joanie, because she has a house.” And I was like, “EXCUSE ME? I don’t have a house? I have a house that we pay $3000 a month for! I have a house in the most important city in the world! My house is better than Joanie’s! It has a doorman and a gym built right into it! What do you mean I don’t have a house?!”

And then we all sat awkwardly silent for a second before I laughed and said, “Juuuuuuuuust kidding.” And I kind of was kidding, because I’m not going to fight my darling sister over a ceramic turkey napkin holder, but as I sat watching her and CAD talk about it, I did feel sort of lonely about my life choices. I told myself, “I don’t need to define my success by my great-aunt’s approval of me,” but of course I want recognition that I’m doing okay. I want her to be like, “You are making different choices than most Ohio-bred women do, but they are the correct choices for you. You have always been different, nay, special.

When I talked to my BFF, Tracey, about it later that night, she said, “Aunt Dorothy just doesn’t even understand what your life in New York is like.” And it’s true. She can’t imagine what it’s like to live in an apartment instead of a house and to have a boyfriend of six+ years but feel no need to get married and to love a job that might not guarantee me a billion dollars. I mean, this is a woman who once told me that Kamran’s easier to love because he makes money. She later told me that she hopes I meet a nice boy like my sister did, and then clearly remembered Kamran’s existence again and had to assure me that he’s a nice boy. She never asks about my job, because she doesn’t understand what I do. She doesn’t care which movies I’ve been in, because she doesn’t have a DVD player. She doesn’t care about the amazing restaurant I went to or how lucky I am to have an awesome roommate or which magazine did an article on me. Ugh.

I don’t need anyone to think I’m doing it better than they are, but I wouldn’t mind if they just didn’t think I was doing it wrong.

Love is Patient. Love is Kind. Love Does Not Steal Your Robot Cookie.

Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, everyone's married but katie, travels
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After a bazillion years of dating, my former co-worker, Eric, and his girlfriend, Christine, finally decided to stop living together in sin and started planning their wedding in her hometown of Miami. She whispered the date to me one night at my office dinner club and asked if I could come, and I said I probably couldn’t swing a plane ticket for the wedding and Thanksgiving in Ohio in the same month. And then I of course bought the ticket to Miami, like, the next day. My roommate/landlord/co-worker/friend, Jack, was also representing the not-Eric’s-friend-from-college contingent, so we flew down one night a couple of weeks ago after work for a whirlwind weekend filled with not wearing sandals, one of the best weddings ever, and so many stolen robot cookies.

Jack and I had just the morning and afternoon before the wedding to explore Miami, so naturally we didn’t leave our hotel until noon, and then it took $40 and a ridiculous amount of time to get from our hotel to South Beach, ten miles away. That was the weird thing about Miami: everything looks super-close on the map but never actually is. Since we’re used to walking everywhere in NYC, we thought it’d be no problem to walk across the bridge to South Beach, and then Google told us it would take three hours. So we ended up taking taxis everywhere, which was a different experience in that you call independent companies to come pick you up instead of just walking out your front door and hailing one of a thousand passing cabs, and some guy shows up in what might be his personal car with a backseat full of fast food wrappers. In a way, it’s cool, because you can’t call yellow cabs here and are sometimes left waiting for ten minutes at the side of the road on Saturday nights or when it rains, but in another way, I like the big divider that separates me from my cab driver here and makes him seem more like someone I’ve hired to do my bidding and less like my dad driving me home from the mall in his ’92 Toyota Camry or whatever.

Anyway, once we got to South Beach, we beelined for this restaurant Jack had picked out on Yelp. You know, despite the fact that I have an acclaimed palate and have been professionally critiquing food for the past three years. (Just kidding.) But seriously, I had bookmarked three or four restaurants that had four and five stars and would serve us an authentic Cuban sandwich, but Jack felt like he needed brunch. Brunch. In South Beach. But it was fine (three donuts and no more, if I was reviewing it for donuts4dinner.com), and then we had the rest of the afternoon to walk along the boardwalk separating the beach from the fancy hotels that seem to be having boozy pool parties all day long.

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

The beach was cuh-RAZY beautiful and totally put our beloved Hamptons to shame, but of course we were idiot Northerners wearing jeans and sneakers and absolutely no sunblock, so I basically ran out onto the beach to take these shots and then ran back in under the shade of the palm trees. We passed all sorts of adorable restaurants blowing mist from fans onto patios full of people sipping giant frozen drinks and then caught a taxi back to the hotel to get ready for the wedding. And by “get ready”, I mean “put some pretty clothes on over our sweat”.

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding
Jack looking swank

The wedding took place at a hotel on a tiny island surrounded by palm trees

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

with a great view of the mainland

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

and was casual enough that we could talk to the groom on the hotel’s generous veranda beforehand but formal enough that we were not allowed to wear flip-flops, the wedding website proclaimed. We were served champagne before Christine walked down the aisle in order to make the ceremony bearable, but it was short and sweet and needed no such bribery.

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding
this guy with all of the shoulder would NOT get out of my picture

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

I do notice that I totally Photoshopped this picture below way more yellow than the picture above, but I’m still stinging from the fact that Eric and Christine didn’t hire me as their totally-unpaid-wedding-photographer, so I’m not going to fix it.

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

This isn’t the kiss picture, but I just love how happy both Eric and the minister look. She thought Eric and Christine were destined for a long and happy marriage because they were both so attentive at their pre-wedding meetings with her, but little did she know that they’re just a couple of do-gooding nerds who were programmed to pay attention in school.

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

I can’t tell if Eric is pumping his fist and saying, “MARRIED! YUSS!” or if he’s thumb-pointing to himself and saying, “Who’s married? THIS GUY!”, but I like it either way.

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

Are those . . . blue flip-flops . . . peeking out from under Christine’s dress? DESPITE HER SPECIFICALLY TELLING ME I COULDN’T WEAR FLIP-FLOPS?

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

The table settings included diskettes with our names on them (but nothing actually stored in the memory–Jack asked)

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

and robot cookies that Jack requested to eat repeatedly throughout the evening and that I told him not to eat over and over. Well, at one point, we left the table, and when we came back, my cookie was gone. And then, after a billion years of dancing, we went outside to cool off in the less-cool-than-inside outdoors, and when we returned, Jack’s cookie was also gone. AND I KNOW WHO DID IT.

So tell your middle brother we hope he enjoyed the cookies, Eric, because he is dead to us now.

(j/k, j/k)

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

The reception started off with Eric and Christine’s first dance and ended with some robot cake

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

but in the middle was one of the most awesomely-planned weddings ever. They had a live band that legitimately did not suck, and right after Eric and Christine’s first dance, the band brought us all to the floor to dance. And then they sent us back to our tables to eat our crabcakes while Christine and her dad danced and Eric and his mom danced. And then they brought us all back out to dance. And then they sent us back to our tables to eat our salads while Christine’s dad gave this incredibly involved speech about how wonderful every single member of his family, including himself, is. (And I only say that a little bit mockingly, because I would want my dad to give the same speech at my wedding.) And then the band brought us back out again.

It went on like this until 11 p.m., when the band’s time was up. By this time, they had played “Livin’ on a Prayer”, “Don’t Stop Believin'” (can you believe both of those songs have dropped Gs?), and my very favourite ironic song of the moment, Enrique Iglesias’s “I Like It“. And we danced to every single one of them. With very little alcohol needed.

And then the next day we went to Christine’s parents’ house and ate all of their bagels to make up for not getting any robot cookies. We win.

Congratulations, Eric and Christine! We love you and promise to actually buy you a wedding gift someday!