I remind myself of this and then go look at the Facebook profiles of all of my now fat, married, and childrened hometown friends every time I find myself complaining about life in NYC.
This video is also amazing but unfortunately has embedding disabled. It shows exactly what it’s like trying to hail a cab in a city where every man is out for himself.
When we weren’t going to Disney World, my family always took weird vacations to places like Missouri and Iowa to check out the birthplaces of literary figures. As soon as I got to college, I started road-tripping to places like South Carolina and Georgia for my spring breaks. The most West Coast I’d ever gotten was a trip to Idaho with my roommate my senior year of college, and even that involved lots of greenery and snow. I never understood the point of visiting the desert and never had any desire whatsoever–I mean whatsoever–to see the Grand Canyon.
And then we flew over it on our way to California.
Not so bad, is it?
I don’t mean to jab at anyone’s sense of style, because I live in granny sweaters, but I spent a lot of my time in NYC thinking, “It is so sad that she spent so much time and effort to look like that.”
Most interesting designs, I think, look wonderful in theory and terrible in practice.
But even I surprise myself sometimes with the things I like these days. Like t-straps and saddle shoes, which my mom used to force me into against my will when I was kid.
Even lately, I’ve found myself not totally hating the idea of things like harem pants, which appeared in jumpsuit form in this season of “Project Runway”, looked pretty amazing, and won a challenge to end up on a Time Square billboard:
But last night, on my way to the subway, I walked behind this girl, who proved my “terrible in practice” theory:
But I applaud her for trying.
The day before I left for vacation, my co-worker Steve came to my desk and said, “Type ghetto bed intruder into YouTube.” Obviously you can’t go wrong searching for videos with those keywords, so I wasn’t surprised to laugh out loud while watching this interview (which I’m sure you all saw weeks ago, because I’m 100 years behind everyone else when it comes to the Internet):
Then Steve showed me the Auto-Tuned remix of the footage, which was so ingenious I found myself basically putting it on repeat:
I made Kamran pause his 17th viewing of an “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” episode that night so he could watch the videos, and even though he was skeptical at first, because I never find the right things funny, he actually laughed out loud, too. And we sang bits of the song to each other over the next couple of hours as we did laundry and packed for California, but I kind of figured that was it.
It happened, though, that the song would become the focal point of our entire 10-day trip. We were whispering quotes from it on the plane. We were watching it on Kamran’s iPod under the table while out for lunch with his parents. We were pretending to show it to his friends just to have an excuse to watch it again ourselves. One night, I woke up to it and thought I was going crazy until I realized Kamran was listening to it in the bathroom while pooing. And last night, a full 11 days since I first saw the thing, I couldn’t sleep because “hide your kids, hide your wife, and hide your husband, ’cause they’re rapin’ everybody out here” kept running through my head.
My friend Jeff pointed me to Engadget’s article on the new Kindle today, and it got me thinking about how my Kindle has been so life-changing and will only be more life-changing for other people now that it’s available in different colors, has an even faster refresh rate, and is selling for $139.
Have you looked at my Shelfari shelf recently? It’s exploding. Now that I’m never without a book, I’m flying through them like never before. Even crappy books like the Sarah Silverman one. Even books I thought would be crappy but turned out to be engrossing, like Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures. If I get 20 pages into a book and don’t care about it yet, I don’t have to wait until I’m home or at the library to get something else; I just click over to my home screen and choose another one. There’s literally nothing I miss about real books.
I assume you’ll all run out and buy the new version when it’s released on August 27th, but in case you decide to buy the Kindle 2 on eBay for even cheaper, let me recommend the cover that I have. I shopped around for days and finally decided on the TrendyDigital MaxGuard Leather Cover in purple. It’s so sleek and feels so good in my hands with its leather shell and soft suede-like interior. The Kindle slides into its pocket and fits so snugly that it doesn’t need any elastic bands or metal prongs to hold it in. The magnetic closure makes this great little snapping sound when you flip it closed that sounds so smart I can’t help but feel as if everyone on the train has heard it and is envious of me.
I’ll tell you who I’m envious of, though: these people who carry their Kindles without any case at all. I see them on the train with their 1/3rd-inch-thick readers, and I think, How rich must you be to not care about scratching that thing up? I’ll bet they’re all reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, too.
(Okay, fine, I read it and didn’t hate it.)
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