I never want to be one of those people who thinks she’s better than the place she came from. I want to always think Columbus and the village (seriously, village) where I was raised in Ohio are unbeatable.
For the longest time, I fought the word soda. I was raised on pop, and soda sounded funny to me every time I heard it used. No matter how many times people told me I gave myself away as a Midwesterner, I refused to switch. Why should I feel bad about where I’m from?
But after about a year of living here, I found myself saying soda automatically. And when I went home to visit and my best friend said pop to me, I accidentally made fun of her without even realizing what it meant for my heritage.
Seriously, though, this picture from my last trip home still cracks me up:
Not only does it say pop, but it only costs 35ยข! How adorable, right?
I’m still not buying into other NYCisms like stand ON line (instead of IN line) or call OUT sick (instead of IN sick), though. I still have some standards.
Although I absolutely can’t get behind Charlyne Yi’s weak chin, there’s one reason I’ll be seeing the movie Paper Heart, and it’s this clip from the trailer:
I am a hot wing fiend. But only boneless wings. And only the ones at Applebee’s, really. Sitting in a booth with my best friend in Ohio during Applebee’s happy hour, when a basket of wings will run you $3.50, is my idea of heaven. I once knew someone who worked at Applebee’s, and when I asked him if he could get me a bottle of the buffalo sauce, he told me it comes in a 20-pound bag. And while that should be disgusting, it only made me love it all the more.
However, there’s one thing that may keep me from ever eating a buffalo wing again, and it’s these photos of my friends Jack and Jeff from our recent outing to Leisure Time Bowl. This should not in any way dissuade you from going to Leisure Time, though it may dissuade you from keeping your lunch down:
One of my writing professors (and a member of my senior thesis panel), Michelle Herman, wrote this really excellent book called The Middle of Everything that’s supposed to be about motherhood but is actually about best friends and how terrible life is when you don’t have one. It’s been years since I read it, but I thought about it last weekend while I was home in Ohio visiting my family and my best friend, Tracey.
When I moved away to New York without really so much as asking her what she thought of the idea, she should’ve given me up. If I’d been the one left behind for some stupid city she’d visited only twice where she only knew one person and didn’t have a job waiting for her, I first would’ve cried my eyes out and second would’ve deleted her number from my cellphone. Instead, Tracey sent me postcards and packages and called me and let me call her eight times a day all through that first year when I was so poor I could only visit, like, once.
Now that I’m toooootally rich and visit all the time, we pretty much spend all of our minutes together playing with her cats, watching TV marathons, visiting the one high school friend we still care about (inflammatory!), and eating all of the chain restaurant food you can’t get in NYC. Which is how it should be with best friends.
Highlights from my very short trip this weekend include trying on the tiniest purple fur vest at Forever 21 on our way into the premiere of Up:
and making this video that will only be awesome to us and our friend Eric Leath:
I'm Katie, a farmgirl originally from Ohio who moved to NYC in 2005 for no apparent reason. I like vintage-looking things that are actually new, filagree everything, people who don't make me feel awkward, meaning it when I say "no sleep till Brooklyn", and not trying too hard.
