Category Archives: too much information

Unused

Posted by katie ett on April 27, 2012 – 12:00 pm
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I don’t use things. I collect them. Buy me a maple bacon lollipop, and I’ll display it on my bookcase for years, waiting for the right time to enjoy it. Buy me robot window clings, which are meant to be used and reused, and I’ll hang them with clear tape to avoid removing the backing until I find the perfect thing to put them on. Buy me a copy of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and I’ll get another copy from the library just so I don’t accidentally bend the spine of mine.

And the things I’m forced to use, I cover meticulously like so many old ladies with their plastic couches. My Kindle, which I’ve owned for more than two years, has nary a scratch thanks to its thick purple leather case. My iPod, which I’ve owned for more than five years, still had the original protective sheet over the front until I had a momentary lapse of reason late last year and pulled it off. I have fabric book covers for my hardcover books, filters to protect all of my lenses, bags for my not-expensive shoes. I buy new clothes but never wear them. I buy fancy lotions but never use them. I didn’t touch my new comforter for the first nine months I lived in my current apartment.

And I realize it doesn’t have to be this way! I see people with their Kindles case-free, one hand fitting neatly around the unencumbered devices, so easily able to hold them up without wanting to rest them on the crotches of the people standing in front of them on the subway. I see people who know that scratches don’t affect the function of their iPods and who don’t want to diiiiiiiiiie when they drop them on the ground. I know people who wear out clothes and comforters and shoes and just buy new ones. And I kind of want to be that way.

But I’ll tell you this. The one time I went crazy and bought a sticker headboard for my bed at my last apartment and actually used it . . .

. . . we moved out three months later, and I had to rip it off and throw it out.

The Impression That I Give

Posted by plumpdumpling on April 15, 2011 – 12:00 pm
Filed under creepy boyfriend obsession, too much information
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Kamran and I try not to do gross couple-y things around our friends, but it’s kind of hilarious that this is how people think of us:

The Private Lives of City Dwellers

Posted by plumpdumpling on February 24, 2011 – 12:00 pm
Filed under creepy boyfriend obsession, too much information
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Kamran is officially finished with law school and the bar exam! Now he has great plans for his free time:

I’m not sure you want to know the story behind that.

But obviously I’m going to tell the first person who asks in the comments.

I Always Want to Be Looked at, Except When I Don’t

Posted by plumpdumpling on November 3, 2010 – 12:00 pm
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Sometimes when I’m in the elevator up to Kamran’s apartment, I’ll dig around in my bag for my keys for so long without finding them that I’ll start to believe everyone’s noticing it, and it becomes embarrassing for me to the point that I’ll pull something else entirely unrelated out with an expression of triumph like, “Ah-ha! Found what I was looking for all along, you guys!”

And it’ll end up being, like, my checkbook. Or a baggie of ice, because yes, I steal ice from my workplace. I somehow believe this is better than continuing to dig.

When I Was Young in the Mountains: Ett Family Outhouse Edition

Posted by plumpdumpling on April 23, 2010 – 3:30 pm
Filed under no i really do love ohio, too much information
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When I was growing up in Ohio, our little farmhouse had an outhouse. We didn’t use it, of course, but we would paint it when it started chipping, knock the wasp’s nests off of it when they began to show up in the summers, and peer curiously into its butt-size seat hole when we’d use it for concealment in games of Hide & Seek.

My mom used to tell my sister and me about the days just after she and my dad got married in the 70s, before they built a bathroom onto our house. The two of them actually did use the outhouse as if it was a normal toilet back then and would just drive up the road to my grandparents’ house to shower every morning. Sometimes when my mom would have a hard time pushing her poop out–and I can tell you this because she’s dead now and likely won’t be able to do anything about it–my dad would bring a glass of hot water or milk to the outhouse in the middle of the night to help her out.

Can you imagine this? It’s the dead of winter, the ground is covered in snow, and you have to trek out across the yard in your parka to get to the bathroom. And once you’re there, you have to sit in this unheated little wooden room, shivering and still half-asleep.

AMAZING! And, you know, my parents only did it for a year, I think, which is crazy enough. But I wondered to myself today: who lived in our farmhouse before us, and what the hell were they doing without a bathroom?