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Happy Birthday, U.S.A.!

Posted by plumpdumpling on July 9, 2008 – 1:10 pm

Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, holidays don't suck for me, living in new york is neat, no i really do love ohio, restaurant ramblings
Tagged as all of my friends are prettier than i am, Dumbo, holidays don't suck for me, living in new york is neat, no i really do love ohio, restaurant ramblings

For the past two years I’ve been in New York City for the 4th of July instead of at home in Ohio watching my family burn off their fingers on sparklers like I’m supposed to, I’ve purposely avoided the fireworks and gone to dinner at Serendipity, first with then-boyfriend Todd, who hated crowds, and then with now-boyfriend Kamran, who appreciates a sugar coma as much as I do but still managed to get me back to his house in time to see the throngs of fireworks-viewers streaming off FDR Drive but not a lot of the show itself last year.

This year, though, Kamran was off visiting his family in California, so I let myself get talked into watching the ‘works with my friends Beth, Emily, Sonya, Adam, Christos, and Chad, and Emily’s friends Jeff and Carrie. Emily and Beth had bought us adult sippy cups on their way to my house, so we stopped off at my C-Town to buy Crystal Light and water to mix in with our vodka and rum like the high school girls we are. I was carrying Emily’s brother’s ridiculously adorable Yorkiepoo in a bag over my shoulder, and the checkout girls went crazy over how cute it was. I thought I was the new star of the grocery store until I came back the next day, and they were all like, “Where’s the dog?! . . . Oh, it wasn’t yours? SNUB.”

We spread out the blankets that Emily and Sonya were so kind to bring in the park between the Brooklyn

and Manhattan bridges

and set to sippin’

and piggin’ out.

Just as the show was about to start, it started to rain pretty heavily,

so everyone got out their umbrellas and totally blocked my view (but in kind of a pretty way).

I’ll admit that fireworks viewed through the Brooklyn Bridge are a bit of a novelty

but after they were over, I was like, “That’s IT?! The fireworks in Ohio are 100 times better!” Everyone just sort of shrugged me off, but I seriously think these people don’t understand how seriously Ohio takes its fireworks. Not only do they use the awesomely pun-y name Red, White, and BOOM!, but they have a whole mash-up of America-themed songs playing on a local radio station that the fireworks are timed to perfectly. Everyone brings their portable radios and sings along, the finale lasts at least 20 minutes, and only one or two people get stabbed every year. Honestly, what is the 4th of July without Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America” playing on a million boomboxes around you?!

Once the totally-crappy-and-in-every-way-disappointing-but-for-the-fact-that-Carrie-served-warm-apple-pie-and-vanilla-ice-cream-in-plastic-cups fireworks were over, we decided that the subway was going to be way too crazy and instead chose to take a quick walk down to the neighborhood of Carroll Gardens, where Chad promised us was a great bar. THIRTY-EIGHT MILES LATER (give or take thirty-seven), we were still walking. In the rain. At night. In uncomfortable shoes. I guess I wasn’t doing anything to hide how cranky I was, because Chad kept saying, “Who’s the biggest trouper here? Katie! She wins the trouper award!” and when I wouldn’t fold up my umbrella and enjoy the rain like everyone else, Emily and Beth started singing to Carly Simon’s tune, “Katie’s so vain/she probably thinks this song’s about her hair.”

The bar, Moonshine, turned out to actually be worth the walk (though I’m not sure you could convince me to do it again). There was an empty couch for us to sit on along one wall with the couch across from us occupied by young men with side-parted hair, one of them in a complete seersucker suit. The jukebox played Bloc Party and then Cat Power and then Devo and then HEART. There was plenty of Big Buck Hunter and House of the Dead

Christos, the Joyous German Murder Machine

a thick dark wood table for playing board games on

Seen here: Jenga, with Truth or Dare challenges written on each piece by previous Moonshine patrons

and . . . shoes nailed to the wall?

Please note Beth’s enormous cleavage.

What more could you want?

I am not the least bit Irish.

Posted by plumpdumpling on March 20, 2008 – 4:28 pm

Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, holidays don't suck for me, par-tay

When you’re a Persian, a Korean, and a German, you naturally spend your St. Patrick’s Day eating . . .

JAPANESE BARBEQUE!!!

My co-worker Sonya met Kamran and me for dinner on Monday night at Yakitori Torys for what has become our new favorite thing: random meats, skewered and dunked in sweet sauce for grilling. We’ve been going to a place in the East Village called Oh! Taisho regularly now since Sonya introduced us to it, but after knocking out all of the chicken gizzards and french-fries-dipped-in-cod-roe and other such nonesense there, we thought we were ready to try some softened chicken bones at Torys. That’s right; softened, grilled chicken bones. No meat. Just bones. Delish.

The place was full, so we got to sit at this table in the middle of the room that had a frame built around it and curtains covering it from all sides. We started off with a bowl of shredded chicken with bitter melon and fish flakes, and once I got past the fact that I was eating dried fish when I don’t even eat wet fish, I really enjoyed the saltiness that it added to the chicken. And after biting into the bitter melon, Kamran and I ruminated on the fact that even as twentysomethings, we can experience a taste that’s brand new to us. They were already sold out of a lot of the limited dishes, so unfortunately there were no chicken knees to be had, but we filled up on skewers and skewers of kobe beef tongue and pork with scallions and chicken with plum sauce and shishito peppers. Even better than all of those, though, were the steamed vegetables with wasabi mayonnaise and green tea salt. And my figurative hat is off to any restaurant that can make me like steamed anything. Kamran picked up our $100 tab, naturally, ’cause that’s just how he rolls.

There was a whole lot of carryin’-on in the streets that Sonya wouldn’t let us go home without adding to, so we stepped into a bar called the Pig n Whistle on 3rd for an Irish Car Bomb drank in time to a cheesy pop song, with me shouting slurred commands in the background:

I particularly love hearing myself saying, “Lefth guh! Lefth guh!” at the beginning. And, uh, I’d only had about two sips of my drink at that point. But at least I didn’t hold a squishface at the end of the video like Sonya did, thinking I was taking a picture rather than a video.

Here, Kamran and Sonya show the curdled remnants of their bombing