Category Archives: why i’m better than everyone else

Horrific Hurricane

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I understand that Hurricane Sandy was devastating to untold numbers, and I don’t mean to make light of their situation at all, but here’s the account of someone who basically just got a long vacation out of it:

I spent last weekend in Pittsburgh with freaky Internet strangers Cassie and Jessica, and we knew the hurricane was going to hit this week, but we all expected it to be a Hurricane Irene situation where everyone filled their bathtubs with water and bought eighteen cans of Pringles and then felt shame the next day when we barely got a rainshower.

It started seeming a little more serious on Sunday morning when Cassie burst into the hotel room I was sharing with Jessica and warned me that I might want to try to bump up my flight home. And then they announced that the subways and buses would stop running at 7 p.m. and that my office was in the flood zone and would be closed Monday.

Of course nothing happened on Sunday night, so Kamran and I ordered one of our favorite dinners and stayed up all night watching horror movies in anticipation of Halloween and eating the baked goods Cassie had bought for me from Pittsburgh’s Oakmont Bakery.

Nothing was happening still on Monday morning, and we chided the city for making such a deal about nothing once again as we ordered lunch from one of the many restaurants that were still open despite the public transportation closures. We caught up on our of our DVRed shows, napped, and answered texts from worried friends and family who were hearing melodramatic/completely false accounts of how the city was crumbling.

We went down to the lobby of Kamran’s building at 5 that afternoon to check the mail and saw that the little convenience store inside his building was completely wiped out. There was also a sign on the elevators telling us to limit our use after 7 p.m. in case the electricity went out, so we decided to go ahead and order dinner to make sure it got there early enough that we wouldn’t have to–god forbid–climb stairs.

I was using a delivery app on Kamran’s iPad to order from our favorite cheap Mexican place when it suddenly told me that the restaurant had unexpectedly closed. And that’s when I kind of freaked out. My grocery delivery service had cancelled my order on Sunday afternoon. The grocery store had already closed when we tried to go Sunday night. The convenience store was empty. And now we couldn’t even get any quesadillas. WE WERE GOING TO STARVE.

But thank god for the Asians. There was so much sushi and Indian still to be had that we had a hard time deciding which restaurant to order from. When we finally did, though, I was practically screaming at Kamran to hurry up and get the order in before even they decided to pack it up. We didn’t actually believe that the food would ever come even once the order went through, but an hour later, a nice young Indian man brought us a bag full of $100 worth of biryanis, masalas, kormas, and samosas to feed us for the next two days.

Ellie texted me to say that her friends in Long Island were facing a mandatory evacuation, and The Weather Channel was doing nonstop coverage from beach houses being torn apart on the Jersey shore, so I finally decided to fill a sink with water. Not the bathtub, though, because seriously? I did look up how to flush the toilet with a bucket of water, though, in case the Internet went out mid-poo. We prepared an old season of “Big Brother” on Kamran’s computer so the cable could feel free to stop working. We charged all of our devices so there’d be plenty of Angry Birds on the iPhones and “Wuthering Heights” on the Kindle if everything else failed.

And then nothing happened. It rained a lot, and the wind sometimes sounded violent, and the power certainly flickered all night, but we sat munching on Skittles and pepperjack cheese like it was any other weekend. We figured out that the convenience store wasn’t empty at all but that they had just consolidated everything to the refrigerated case in the back. We let the water out of the sink and brushed our teeth and went to bed, and everything was perfectly normal the next morning.

After spending Tuesday afternoon eating our second round of Indian food and assuring our families that absolutely nothing had gone down and that the news reports were wildly overblown, we decided to actually leave the house and check things out. We walked ten blocks north and found a couple of overturned trees, a bus stop shelter with its glass blown out, leaves blown under cars. I received an e-mail from my office’s building management saying that the building had sustained no damage but that the electricity was out. My roommate texted me and said, “People tell me there was a hurricane, but I don’t see it.” All of the mentions of looting and dumpster-diving seemed ridiculous.

For the next few days, my office stayed closed, and the subways weren’t running, so I woke up when I pleased and did what I wanted. Kamran went to work out of guilt, and I met him for lunch every day. Most restaurants in our area were open right away, and they were packed with business people and tourists as usual. The buses came back online on Wednesday, and the trains began running above 34th Street on Thursday, and part of me felt really bad for the people who had to spend two hours just getting into the city from the boroughs, but part of me was soooooooooo thankful/superior that I work a nice, quiet office job where the management was encouraging us to stay home.

Even though things seemed so no-big-deal to us after the hurricane, we later learned that basically everyone below 39th Street lost power. And we live two blocks from that. Even though my office building wasn’t damaged at all, it’s still closed even a week later because of its lack of heat and hot water. The subway platforms are packed. The buses seem to come when they feel like it. Only about half of our regular delivery restaurants are open.

We’re just barely feeling a percentage of what the people downtown and in Staten Island and on the outer banks of Brooklyn and on the shores of New Jersey are, and we know how lucky we are.

My Top Ten Reasons to Live in NYC

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photo by my friend Anthony

I was complaining to my friend Kim the other day about people who say to me, “I could never live in New York City.” They rarely mean it in an “I’m in awe of how you’ve managed to make so much of yourself and live such an exciting existence in a city that so often leaves lesser humans battered and broken!” sort of way. It’s usually more like, “Sucks that you wanted to make something of yourself, big shot. Now pardon me while I go make a baby quilt in this entire room I have set aside in my huge house just for crafting.”

Kim said that people say that to her all of the time, too, and that her response is: “You probably couldn’t live in New York City.” God bless her.

I’m sure it’s fine wherever you are. Just don’t try to make me feel bad about where I am. Just in case there was any question, here are the top ten reasons I never want to leave NYC:

• Feeling so much safer than I ever did in Ohio. Houses scare me. Big, open roads scare me. Someone is lurking in my bathroom in Ohio, and someone is waiting to throw himself from the forest in front of my car. I figure if I live in an apartment building with thirty floors and ten or so apartments on each floor, there’s very little chance that the psycho rapist who somehow got past the doorman is going to choose my apartment specifically to break into. I can walk home at 5 a.m. alone from watching “Game of Thrones” all night at Ash‘s and feel totally secure. I can also walk home at midnight, 2 a.m. or 4 a.m. It’s always safe.

• Food delivery. It’s not just that nearly every restaurant delivers. It’s that they deliver for free. And that you can place your order online so you don’t have to actually have to speak to a person. And that you can have something from your favourite restaurant on 14th Street delivered to you on 42nd Street, which is considered three neighborhoods away. It’s so easy to have food brought to you that you actively wonder why people bother cooking. But if you want to cook for whatever reason:

• Grocery delivery. There are big warehouses on Long Island full of all kinds of groceries you can’t buy in your small town outside of NYC, and if you order them by midnight, they’ll be at your house before work the next morning. And the local grocery store delivers, too. So does the local bodega. WHY ARE YOU LEAVING YOUR HOUSE?

• Having everything within walking distance. Sometimes, when we’ve run out of toilet paper and Kamran won’t let me flush tissues, and he walks a block down the street to the convenience store that has the toilet paper we like, I think, “Somewhere, someone in Ohio has just had to load up his car and drive twenty minutes to the nearest grocery store for the same thing.” Which brings me to:

• Having a lot of things inside your own apartment building. A gym, a laundry room, a post office, a restaurant, a hair salon, and a convenience store are all in Kamran’s building. (Mine only has a gym and laundry room, BUT THAT’S NOT IMPORTANT.) I don’t have to wear shoes to do most of the things I need to do in my life.

• Being able to complain about apartments like this. I don’t want to make fun of anyone, but when I saw a friend of a friend post that photo of her apartment in an attempt to get someone to sublease it, a little of me died. That bedroom has a front door in it. Like, to the outside. And no steps leading up to it. I hate NYC housing aloud, but I secretly admire myself for being able to fit my entire life into a ten-foot-by-ten-foot space. And I would choose a studio apartment over a house any day.

• Having access to the best restaurants in the world. You know how many three-Michelin-star restaurants there are in L.A.? None. In Chicago? One. In San Francisco? Two. In NYC? Seven. (Okay, fine, there are ten in Paris, but France is for weenies.) If you don’t sometimes weep while reading donuts4dinner, you’re probably one of those people who eats for nutrition. Oh, I also have access to some of the best museums, theatre, and nightlife. Sorry.

• Getting totally trashed at those three-star dinners with wine pairings for all sixteen courses and not having to drive home. Not having to drive anywhere ever. Getting to read books on my commute to work. And not having someone read them to me over my car stereo speakers, which is not reading in case no one noticed. I’d rather have a fight with an old lady on the subway every single morning than ever touch a car again.

• “You are from New York. Therefore you are just naturally interesting. It is not up to you to fill all of the pauses. You are not in danger of mortifying yourself. The worst stuff you say sounds better than the best stuff some other people say.” – Hannah, “Girls”

• Waking up every morning and being amazed that you live here and realizing that people all around the world want to be here. People write blog posts about how badly they wish they lived in NYC. People write diary entries about how they’ll make it in NYC someday. And I live here. I want to be here. And I’m making it.

Just Another Day in the Life of a City Curmudgeon

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Last night, Kim came over with Big Gay Renly Brownies™, and we finished this season of “Game of Thrones” (I fell in love with Khaleesi all over again), and then my roommate/landlord/co-worker/friend, Jack, and I watched the last three episodes of “Girls”, all of which were so entirely MY LIFE that I have no idea how everyone isn’t feeling the bignostalgicfeelings I’m feeling for this show. Hannah considers moving back home to Michigan for exactly one minute before realizing she needs to date boys whose buttholes she can stick her finger in, and those boys don’t exist in Michigan. She and her friends go to a Williamsburg warehouse party not because they want to but because it’s just what everyone’s doing. She calls herself a writer but is really an unemployed administrative assistant by anyone else’s standards. It is good.

This morning, I was waiting in line to go up the stairs from the subway platform when a woman in a way-too-classy-for-work silk blouse and pencil skirt clomped by me in some suede sandals with too-tall heels. Her feet had gotten sweaty from the heat, so she was sliding around in them and appeared to be having a really hard time walking, but that didn’t keep her from cutting in front of ten people in line to get upstairs first. I got on the escalator, still thinking about her sweaty feet, and watched as a shrimpy little man in a tight polo shirt tucked into pinstriped pants that showcased how tiny his waist and how ample his backside were ran up past me like his bowels were imploding. I heard him start saying, “Excuse me! Pardon me! STEP ASIDE!” to someone ahead of me and saw that the woman was standing still on the left side of the escalator. WHICH LITERALLY EVERYONE KNOWS is for people who wants to walk up instead of ride up. He said to her, “Do you not know how to use an escalator?”, and she said, “Shut up!” But you know she moved aside.

Then, going into my office building, a woman behind me got frustrated with my leisurely pace, decided she couldn’t wait for me to get through the revolving door, and opened up one of the side doors. I’m not sure why, but people not using the revolving door causes seething hatred to rise in me; I feel like these people are not just careless but, like, actually-bad people who torture kittens and send spam e-mails to grandmothers asking that $50,000 be sent to an offshore account to help rescue the king of Namibia from his captors or whatever. She rushed ahead of me and was already waiting in the elevator bank when I got there a minute later. We have one of those newfangled elevator panels where you type in your floor, and it tells you which elevator to get into. Only not all of the elevators are in the system yet, so it sometimes just tells you to wait for one of the unmarked elevators to come. Well, she had evidently been told that, because when I came up and typed in my floor number and was told to get into Elevator C, she watched and then huffed and puffed like the elevators had committed a personal offense against her. She then came over to re-enter her floor in an attempt to get on my elevator, but my elevator arrived just then, so as she approached with her arm already outstretched, I cut her off, and she apologized for the privilege.

I know that I’m a very small person, but I feel like everything’s coming up Katie.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Dumb

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Isn’t it funny when you’re so close to something that other people’s lack of knowledge about it seems preposterous?

Like when your co-worker comes up to your desk in the year 2010 and asks, “Have you heard of this band Radiohead?”

Or when you overhear a guy dining at the finest restaurant in the city ask the waiter if the oysters can be left off of their signature dish.

Or when you read a blog post in which a woman goes to see the movie version of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, one of your favourite books of all time, and writes:

I was tearing like a silly woman at some point whereas my hubby was holding up his chin and trying hard to keep himself awake with the pop corn. The story about a boy who lost his father in 911 is sentimental but rather slow moving. I think it’s probably not a movie for men who usually enjoy comedies and action.

Have you ever seen someone so entirely miss the point?

Yes, I have a superiority complex.

Someone Has Issues

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Why does it annoy me so much when people continue to use their umbrellas after it’s stopped raining?