My friend Anthony took this photo of me outside of Dim Sum Go Go, where my co-workers past and present and I met for our monthly dinner club a couple of weeks ago:
Look how freakin’ excited I am about pork buns! And look how hard Meredith‘s pretending not to know me.
The first time I saw Kamran’s apartment building, I’ll admit I was wooed. It looked like a castle on the outside and was filled with fresh flowers and gleaming chandeliers on the inside. One my friends recently said it seems like Harry Potter would live there.
After more than three years of visiting it, though, I’ve gotten used to it and its doormen, porters, and nice-men-who-pick-up-the-recycling-from-the-trash-room. Which is why I thought it was a pretty big deal when Kamran got an e-mail from the building saying they were going on strike if their union didn’t reach an agreement with the local apartment building owners.
But they did, and they didn’t go on strike, and I was a little offended by the piece in the New York Times about it:
A strike would have disrupted the daily routines of hundreds of thousands of middle-class residents from upper Broadway to Brownsville, as well as affluent owners of Park Avenue penthouses. Along with picket lines in front of many of their homes, they would be confronted with the loss of the people who sign for their packages, carry their luggage and let the pizza deliverers and dog walkers into the building.
I’m totally not wrong in thinking that’s written facetiously, right? MY DINNER AND PACKAGES ARE IMPORTANT!! Not the dogs, though.
Kamran said he was going to buy me his glasses for my birthday last year, but then he bought me a Wii instead, so I had to resort to getting myself cheap plastic ones from my local teenybopper store:
Please host 80s-themed events and invite me so I have an excuse to wear them and jump into the foreground of every photo you try to take of yourself and your real friends.
You know when you get gifts from people that prove they really, really know you? And not only know you but actually get you and possibly even don’t mind you? Here are a few that I received at the end of the year that made me go, “Oh, crap, you actually pay attention to me when I talk to you, don’t you?”
In order of appearance in my life:
1) From Tracey, a pirated copy of The Peanut Butter Solution, which is probably my favourite childhood movie aside from Labyrinth. I don’t know why my mom would’ve taped it off of TV, but she did, and I must have watched that thing 700 times as a kid. It scared me to death, but it likely also cultivated my extreme taste for peanut butter as an adult. Having it back in my life feels like regaining a lost limb.
2) Also from Tracey, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds Barbie. I don’t, like, collect Barbies or anything, I need you to know, but I do love the film, and I love that someone at Mattel is weird enough to suggest they make a doll WHO IS BEING ATTACKED BY PLASTIC BIRDS. I think she’s crazy-beautiful.
3) An owl locket ring from Kamran. Not two days before this arrived in the mail, we were discussing the steampunk movement on the way to work, and I told him that steampunk isn’t really my style. What I meant was that I like the aesthetics of it but that I’m too lazy to outfit my computer keyboard with typewriter keys and too conservative to wear goggles ‘round my neck every day. Having searched Etsy for the word steampunk to find the ring, he was worried I wouldn’t like it, but umm . . . it’s an owl on a locket with scrollwork on the band. There is nothing about this that is not me.
4) OMG, a vintage mink stole. Like, for real. It was fate, too, because mere hours before it arrived in the mail, Kamran and I saw this girl in the elevator wearing a fur, and I was like, “Why does she have that and I don’t?” And he totally goaded me into talking for ten minutes about why I love fur so much with absolutely no regard to animal life, knowing that I’d be getting one from him later in the day. It has a giant minky button in the front over the closure, and it’s so soft I no longer care to think about–let alone touch–kittens and bunnies.
My dad also got me a copy of Glenn Beck’s Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government for Christmas, but I prefer not to discuss that.
The view down a lonely Williamsburg street at the last rooftop party of the summer.
Emily brings her hypoallergenic Yorkiepoo to work, and I convince Jack to stick him in the fridge. Emily is not amused.
Steve receives an Amazon gift card from Michael Jackson with the following note: I’m really happy for you, Elvis, and I’mma let you finish, but Steve is one of the best kings of all time. Of all time.
An accidental snapshot confirms that I’m a robot with lifeless doll eyes.
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