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A Day in the Life

Posted by katie ett on April 15, 2013 – 12:10 pm

Filed under a day in the life, all of my friends are prettier than i am, living in new york is neat, living in new york sucks so hard, restaurant ramblings
Tagged as a day in the life, all of my friends are prettier than i am, living in new york is neat, living in new york sucks so hard, restaurant ramblings

I’ve been expectedly terrible about writing my weekly life recaps, but here are some of the importanter events:

• My bedroom is teeny, so I bought a bed frame without an attached headboard to save room, but after two years, I’ve been craving something to bang my head against while listening to angsty music. Thinking a mirror would help make the room appear bigger (and allow me to judge how pretty I must look while sleeping), I set about finding one that was tall enough to be wider than my frame when set on its side but also wide enough to stick up over my mattress to give me something to lean against. Basically the only one that fit the bill remotely was the IKEA Mongstad, but it happened to be perfect. There’s an IKEA in Brooklyn with a free shuttle that leaves from my neighborhood, but thinking it’d be even easier to just toss it in a cab, I bought one off of craigslist from a guy on Wall Street and convinced Kamran to help me move it.

I knew it was going to be big, but I might have underestimated how unwieldy 66 pounds (and 2 ounces) of 74″ tall, 37″ wide mirror is. Kamran and I had no problem carrying it downstairs, but the wind was blowing so much by the time we got to the street corner that I had a hard time staying upright with it resting against me while we waited for one of the big minivan cabs to drive by. Ten minutes later, we had seen a couple of them up the street, but they were snatched up by other people before they got to us. In the meantime, we had tried to hail some of the SUV cabs, but drivers were literally turning around in the middle of the street and going back uptown when they spotted the mirror. We thought about hiding me around the corner and trying to trick someone into stopping for just Kamran, but eventually a nice driver in an SUV stopped out of the goodness of his heart and helped us load the thing into his cab. Of course it didn’t fit. Once it hit the plexiglass partition that separates the driver from the back seat, a foot of it was still sticking out the back of the car. So we gave up, turned back the way we came, and took the thing on the subway.

We hadn’t brought gloves, and we hadn’t drank our protein shakes, so our hands were aching and our biceps were shaking by the time we loaded it onto the 2 train. I was saying things like, “If I have no problem carrying it this way, why can’t you just stop being a pansy and make it work?” And he was saying things like, “I’m a physicist. I’m pretty sure I know the best way to distribute the weight.” It was only two blocks to my apartment from the subway, but we probably stopped five times to yell at each other, but once we got the thing in place behind my bed frame, we were like, “Yeah! Teamwork!” And then we went out for bubble tea.

• My cousin, Ethan, and his wife, Katherine, stayed with me this week while visiting NYC for the first time. They drove to Pittsburgh from Ohio and then took a bus the rest of the way, arriving in Brooklyn at 3 a.m. Thursday. I had signed our spare key out for them with the doorman earlier in the evening, but the overnight guy somehow didn’t understand which of the exactly one keys he was supposed to give to them, so he ended up calling not me, whose name was on the sign-out sheet, but the owner of the apartment, who is my roommate, Jack. At 3 a.m. Having them here reminded me so much of my early days in NYC, lo those nearly eight years ago, when I would get on the subway going the wrong way and when walking anywhere seemed like such a hassle. I remember my first week here, when my boyfriend at the time, Todd, and I were trying to move out of the student housing at NYU he’d been in for a year and get our own place in Chelsea, and I felt like the walk from the subway to the realtor’s office could have taken two hours in the July heat. I later realized that it had been two avenue blocks. Which are admittedly equal to four or five street blocks, depending on who you ask. But still. Two.

• Kamran and I took our friends Nik and Jack to Momofuku Ko for lunch on Saturday. It’s our favourite restaurant in NYC. Period. We sat in the same place at the counter as the last three times we’ve gone, and the same chef we’ve had the last three times served us, and the soundtrack was The Beatles and LCD Soundsystem and The Beta Band, and I got tuh-RASHED on the wine pairings, and Jack and Nik didn’t complain about having to eat an oyster, and I’ll always remember that lunch.

“Momofuku” means “lucky peach”.

• “Game of Thrones” started up again. Like you haven’t heard. Kim has been coming over every week to watch it, along with an assorted cast of characters who have seen somewhere between all of and two of the past episodes. As I sat watching it last night in my thrifted orange damask armchair, I looked around the room at Kim and Jack and Nik and Chris and thought about how crazy it is that I was just, like, hanging out all normally in my NYC apartment with my NYC friends. I’m 99% sure Joffrey is going to die soon.

• My friend Jessica was in town from Germany a couple of weekends ago. She was an intern at my company for a year, and there’s absolutely no other way we ever could’ve become friends. We ate queso fundido and sang karaoke (Jessica likes to do the Ken part of the 1997 hit “Barbie Girl” while our friend Jeff does the Barbie part) and one friend developed a crush on another friend while that friend was busy developing a crush on a third friend, and it made me sad that our group of friends is probably legitimately too old to be hooking up with each other with abandon and without consequences.

• My friend/former co-worker Chantee was in town yesterday after having left NYC a few years ago, and we met up with Kamran, Jack, and Jeff for the whole duck at Momofuku Ssam Bar. They take a Long Island duck, stuff duck sausage under the skin, confit the legs, and serve it all with hoisin sauce and fried shallots and greasy chive pancakes and rice that soaks up all of the duck juices. There’s a reason the place appears on “best of” lists along restaurants like Per Se.

You wouldn’t know it from Jeff’s face here, but Chantee is one of those people who’s hilarious but never at your expense and only makes you feel good about yourself when she’s around. I wish my sense of humor was more that and less naming-all-of-your-faults-in-front-of-everyone-we-know, but my mother died when I was 18, and I’ve never recovered. Just kidding. Well, sort of.

• My stomach is tired.

A Day in the Life

Posted by katie ett on March 25, 2013 – 12:15 pm

Filed under a day in the life, adventure time, just pictures, living in new york is neat
Tagged as a day in the life, adventure time, just pictures, living in new york is neat

• Tuesday night, my friends Ash and Kim came over to . . . well, I don’t want to say they came over “to” watch The Skulls on Netflix streaming, because it’d be embarrassing to plan a night around a 2000s-era teen heartthrob secret college fraternity movie, but I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. Kim and I had basically spent the entire afternoon having an online argument about the types of people who have a list of celebrities they’re allowed to cheat on their significant others with–apparently this type of person is everyone but my BFF, Tracey, and me–that eventually escalated into Kim and Tracey–who have never met nor spoken before–exchanging words over a Google document the three of us were editing together and then somehow resulted in me telling Kim I’m ambivalent on whether or not she has a brain. Um, but The Skulls was surprisingly entertaining! I thought maybe Kim was speaking metaphorically when she said there’s a duel in it, but there’s definitely a duel in it.

• Wednesday: “Survivor”! “American Idol”! Have I mentioned that I’m aaaaall over this Burnell Taylor kid? He has such an interesting tone that I really think he can make anything sound good, even a song from a musical. This is the performance that really got me. Even Kamran likes him. I downloaded the “American Idol” app so I could vote for the first time ever this year. I haven’t, you know, done it yet, but I could.

• Kim came over again on Thursday night so she could tell me about the first date she had with a guy who asked her what her credit score is as a way of deciding whether she’s wifely enough. I won’t say anything else about the night so as to not lessen the impact of a man asking her credit score on the first date to determine if she’s good wife material.

• Friday night, it was unclear if anything was being done for happy hour, so there were just four of us left at work when we decided to go out. We work in the Financial District, so by the time we got to this new bar I wanted to try, it was so packed with suits we literally couldn’t get ten feet in the door. We went to an old standby bar instead, and my friend Jeff has an amazing way with waitresses without even trying, so we were led to this upstairs room filled with Victorian-ish furniture that was totally uncrowded and where they were playing everything from my iPod at a totally reasonable level: Cold War Kids, M83, Imagine Dragons, Band of Horses, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Passion Pit . . . it was, um, basically the best time I’ve had in a bar?

Nik and Jeff in repose:

Dranks:

• Saturday night, Kam and I went for a tasting menu at Tocqueville in Union Square, which is one of our favourite restaurants, one of the best restaurants in NYC, and one of the restaurants most deserving of a Michelin star that doesn’t have one. We were treated like a king and queen and then went home to watch “X-Files” and The Game, which I’ve basically been thinking about nonstop since, especially this song, which is so annoyingly and catchily 1960s.

• Yesterday, we watched Safety Not Guaranteed, which was adooooorable, and Midnight Cowboy, which was well done but totally depressing and made me feel like I will pretty obviously end up living in a condemned tenement building someday and almost killing children with stolen coconuts. Also, thank god Angelina Jolie looks like her mother and not her father.

Later in the afternoon, we went on a walk up the East side of Manhattan and into Central Park, which I’m using as an excuse to use my Adventure Time logo:

the Queensboro Bridge at the edge of Manhattan, looking over Roosevelt Island

a modern building with art-tastic balconies and doors

looking down the East River toward lower Manhattan

a crazy wild boar statue surrounded by all sorts of marine life and snakes eating toads and stuff

Apparently this is Sutton Place Park’s replica of Porcellino, a sculpture by Pietro Tacca from 1634. Bill Clinton liked it, too, although for a completely dumb reason.

a Colonial-looking house with a vibrant door

This place had a private drive and a private park overlooking the East River. A Latino-looking person driving a Honda–obviously the hired help–wanted to leave but waited to open the gate until Kamran and I were well across the street. We talked about how we spend so much of our lives feeling better-off than everyone everywhere else in the U.S. that it’s annoying to see someone wagging their rooftop solarium in our faces.

New Yorkers play tennis inside giant balloon-domes

Magnolia Bakery cupcakes from Bloomingdale’s

a store devoted entirely to buttons

Hans Christian Anderson in Central Park

apartment buildings on 5th Avenue behind the Central Park conservatory

the Alice in Wonderland statue, which is totally freaky and not at all for children

squirrel/rat

an elaborate temple on 5th Avenue

sunset over the Central Park conservatory

A Day in the Life

Posted by katie ett on March 14, 2013 – 12:00 pm

Filed under a day in the life, living in new york is neat
Tagged as a day in the life, living in new york is neat

Lisa told me that my blog is antiquated because I still live in the LiveJournal era when people wrote about their crushes and clashes with family and DIY abortions using vitamin C. In a way, I love what most of the blogs I read have become–themed posts, usually about clothes or crafts, using beautiful photos that have been manipulated in one or more editing programs–but a lot of me still misses those days of locked-down super-personal posts that you worried about your father finding and made your best friend promise to delete if you ever died prematurely.

I don’t have a lot of juicy life happenings these days, but I still like the idea of keeping a record of my goings-on. So as consistently as I can, I’m going to try to do a weekly “a day in the life” post. Here’s the first:

• Tuesday, I went to lunch with my friend Ash at Ippudo, which is supposed to have some of the best (if not the best) ramen in NYC. (Here‘s her review of her first visit without me.) Is ramen a huge thing right now where you are? It seems like every blog I read is talking about it, and everyone I know is eating it. Soup is dumb. But soup with pork belly in it is something special.

• Kamran left to take a deposition in California on Wednesday, so I had my friends Ash and Kim over to my apartment on Wednesday night. We watched the end of “Love Actually”, which is OLD at this point, guys, and Kiera Knightley’s constant half-shirts show it. Remember when we used to think belly buttons weren’t gross? Then we watched two episodes of “Girls”, which were amazing (Lena Dunham’s tweets, which I read for the first time later, indicate that she actually had OCD as a kid), and Varsity Blues, which was terrible aside from that Collective Soul song, “Run”. We drank gin and juice, because my roommate/landlord/co-worker/super great friend, Jack, recently became obsessed with hosting and built himself a home bar that rivals those in the offices of “Mad Men”. We mostly talked about vaginas, periods, and how to style our hair.

• On Thursday, I watched Stranger Than Fiction and cried until Jack came home from a “business trip”, and then we finished season 2 of “Boardwalk Empire”, which was SHOCKING.

• Friday, a few co-workers and I went to Fraunces Tavern for dinner. George Washington, like, signed the Declaration of Independence there. Or was born there. Or died there. Or something. It’s an important place. It’s also a restaurant, and the fish & chips there are not good.

• Saturday, Kamran and I went to Babbo for lunch despite having been to another Mario Batali restaurant recently and thinking it was just okay. It seemed like they were actively trying to make it a bad time for us, but the food was so good we couldn’t help but enjoy it. Even after I spewed red wine all over Kamran while laughing at a thought I was having.

On the way home, we saw:

this guy doing sand art in Washington Square Park

some tiny, sleepy dogs, barely able to keep their eyes open

this sign at a seafood restaurant

The end.

The Two Kinds of People Who Visit NYC and My Bitterness Toward Both of Them

Posted by katie ett on February 19, 2013 – 12:00 pm

Filed under living in new york is neat, living in new york sucks so hard, my uber-confrontational personality, why i'm better than everyone else
Tagged as living in new york is neat, living in new york sucks so hard, my uber-confrontational personality, why i'm better than everyone else

When you live in Ohio, people don’t assume they know anything about what it’s like to be you. Maybe they have some vague idea that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is in Cleveland, maybe they’ve read that the Cincinnati Zoo is so good it can breed rocks, maybe they’ve heard of Jeni’s ice cream–or maybe, like the majority of my co-workers, they think Ohio is considered part of the South and is solely responsible for producing all of the existing mullets in the United States.

When you live in NYC, people like to think they know eeeeeverything about your life. They assume you love Broadway shows, eat every meal at either Serendipity or Shake Shack, have Magnolia cupcakes after every weekend brunch with your girlfriends, wear nothing but stilettos, and date men in finance with slicked-back hair who take cabs everywhere. A lot of people have a lot of experience with NYC, either because they visited once for their friend’s bachelorette party, watched Big as a kid, or listen to a lot of Alicia Keys. In my experience, these people fall into two categories:

1) They’re glamoured by the city but don’t think they could live here. They’re pumped to see the Empire State Building and to walk down 5th Avenue, have read up on the tricks to getting cheap show tickets, want to take high tea at the Ritz, and have brought special clothes that they think will help them fit in here. But they’re shocked at how much everything costs, won’t feel like they’ve accomplished anything if they don’t live in a detached house with a yard, and can’t imagine having to sit side-by-side with strangers on a train.

To these people, I want to say: my life is just like your life but better. Sure, it’s expensive here, but I make a zillion more dollars doing what I do here than I would in Ohio. Sure, I don’t have a detached house, but I feel so safe encased in a big apartment building with a doorman to keep out the crazies. Sure, I don’t have a car, but I can take a cab when I need to, and I wouldn’t trade anything for being able to read on my way to work and to never have to park again. Sometimes I go out for fancy dinners, but sometimes I just want some boxed mac & cheese. Sometimes I get dressed up and go to a “club” with my “crew”, but sometimes I just want to sit at home and watch “Shark Tank”. Sometimes I go to the Empire State Building, but I usually just go to Rockefeller Center, because that’s where my boyfriend works. Every day. And it’s totally normal.

2) They feel like they’re supposed to live here. They already did all of the touristy stuff long ago, so now their visits are comprised of sunbathing in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park instead of Central Park, eating at the restaurants of the lesser-known “Top Chef” contestants, and going to SoulCycle classes “like all of the celebrities”. They claim that they just look so naturally New-Yorky that whenever they visit, people stop them on the streets to ask for directions. They spend all day combing job sites to find a reason to move here and don’t know anything about the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville but are excited that apartments look affordable there.

To these people, I want to say: MY LIFE IS NOTHING LIKE YOUR LIFE, AND YOU COULD NEVER CUT IT HERE. Sure, apartments look affordable in some of the outlying neighborhoods, but that is because YOU WILL DIE THERE. Sure, I feel so safe encased in a big apartment building with a doorman to keep out the crazies, but I will never ever ever have a place big enough to suit more than a five-pound dog. Sure, I wouldn’t trade anything for not having to own a car, but it’s rough having to haul everything around on my back all of the time because I can’t just throw it in my car until I need it. I hope you don’t like cooking, because your apartment probably doesn’t have an oven. I hope you don’t like holidays, because there’s not a chance you have a place to store your Christmas tree. I hope you don’t like your friends, because they will all move away to buy detached houses with yards to raise their children in.

Yesterday, Kamran told me, “You know what makes me feel bleh? When Facebook friends of mine from other parts of the country post pics of themselves visiting NYC.” I asked, “Because you want them to try to meet up with you?” He said, “Well no, no, I don’t. But I want them to want to try to meet up with me. It’s especially weird when those friends post pics of themselves in front of landmarks. It’s like, yea, good for you. I pass that every day and don’t even bother to notice. And then I feel petty and bitter.”

And that’s exactly my experience living in NYC, too. People are coming here all of the time to visit, and only half of them are asking to see me, and I’m only actually seeing half of the ones who ask because I’m apparently SO BUSY with my BIG AND IMPORTANT LIFE. (And by that, I mean lazy and not at all interested in meeting you in some Times Square bar where we won’t even be able to hear each other talk.) But then I’ll see those people I didn’t bother to see or who didn’t want to see me post a picture of the Chrysler Building on Facebook, and I’ll be like, “Uh, YEAH, I pass that thing every single day. It’s not really a big deal. You should sort of be embarrassed about how you’re fangirling over that thing. Oh, you saw the Rockefeller Christmas tree? GREAT JOB. So did the half of Ohio who visited NYC for Christmas. Hope you enjoyed that visit to Serendipity and the frozen hot chocolate. I’ve been there, like, ten times and know the frozen hot chocolate is about the worst thing on the menu. WAY TO GO.”

Give me credit for living here, okay? I’m special and need to be recognized as such. Just ignore those other eight million people around me.

New York Fashion Week After-Party

Posted by katie ett on February 14, 2013 – 12:00 pm

Filed under just pictures, living in new york is neat, photography
Tagged as just pictures, living in new york is neat, new york fashion week, photography

My latest gig shooting a New York Fashion Week after-party for The Set NYC was moved from Friday to Saturday night because of the “snowstorm” that “buried” all of Manhattan in half an inch of freezing rain, but the crowd turned out despite the rescheduling, and I was all up in their business with my camera and my flash and my skillz.

I arrived early to watch the models get their faces and hair did,

and then I shot my patented mix of models,

regular people livin’ it up,

and professional dancers gettin’ down:

My favourite moment of the evening was when I marched up to this girl and told her she was adorable and that I needed her picture,

not realizing that one of the women she was with was runway model and “America’s Next Top Model” finalist Maytee Martinez (left):

Oops.

In the elevator before work this morning, I heard a woman tell another woman that she was “busy last week with fashion shows”, and I know that even as recently as a year ago, I would’ve thought something akin to “blahblahblahshowoff” upon hearing this. But today, I thought, “Oh, weird, so was I.” Obviously I ain’t no bigshot photographing the Marchesa runway show or whatever, but it’s crazy to me that I’m participating in this very New-Yorky thing in my own way. And I seriously love the sort of freedom in editing that comes with shooting pictures that are inherently artistic. I’m sure plenty of people would vomit over my 1995 raver aesthetic, but I DO WHAT I WANT.