Category Archives: why i’m better than everyone else

Subway Seat Supply and Demand

Posted by plumpdumpling on July 31, 2009 – 10:06 am
Filed under fun times on the subway, good times at everyone else's expense, why i'm better than everyone else
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On the subway, the law of supply and demand is fully in effect: the fewer seats available, the more desirable they are.

I get on the 4/5 after work at Bowling Green, which is the first uptown stop in Manhattan. There are always a few stragglers from lower Brooklyn on it, but most of the seats are empty. Some people still rush into the train, of course, but the majority of us take our time. I usually nonchalantly nab a seat if I’m planning to read, but if I’m going to play my Nintendo DS and don’t want anyone looking over my shoulder to see how terrible I am at Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, I stay standing.

Plenty of other people stay standing at that stop, too, but at Wall Street, the train fills up a little more, and you start to see riders get a little anxious about their lack of choices. They want to sit, but they don’t want to try to squeeze in between the oversize lady with her five bags and the guy with his legs unnecessarily spread three feet apart. People try to look casual, but they’re secretly sneaking looks up and down the entire train to see if there’s anything worth making a move on.

At Fulton Street, there’s no time for pretending. Women rush into the train and plunk down with no regard for how huge their assets are and how small the seat space is. Men who would normally open doors for little old ladies practically push them out of the way. Pregnant women are left clutching their stomachs and fanning themselves with their hands as everyone looks at each other, hoping someone else will volunteer to give up his or her seat first.

I feel very smug about getting to choose whether or not I’ll sit, and I’ll admit that I like to mess with the people who have to stand. I’ve found that if I take off my headphones and turn off my iPod right as we enter Grand Central, the woman standing in front of me will breathe a sigh of relief and grab my seat as soon as I stand. I hate that. So when I want to have a little fun, I’ll take my headphones off as we enter the station before Grand Central, which is Union Square. And Union Square is a full 28 blocks away from Grand Central. Which means that after I take my headphones off and the woman in front of me prepares herself mentally for the joy of sitting down on the crowded train, I’ll make her stand waiting for another five minutes until I actually get off. And if there’s a lot of train traffic or a track fire or anything to slow us down, that five minutes can turn into ten or fifteen. You can imagine how this delights me.

(also posted to Examiner)

It’s Best to Claim Your Bodily Functions

Posted by plumpdumpling on June 18, 2009 – 1:10 pm
Filed under good times at everyone else's expense, my uber-confrontational personality, why i'm better than everyone else
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Nearly every single restaurant in NYC delivers for free, which means that on Saturdays and Sundays, Dr. Boyfriend and I pretty much refuse to leave his apartment and secretly have disdain for friends who attempt to coax us out. So last weekend, we were heading downstairs to pick up our delivered Thai food in his building’s lobby when the elevator stopped at a lower floor. Just as the doors opened, the young Asian man waiting outside let out a very audible burp.

He didn’t excuse himself or anything, so I said, “We heard that!” Because, you know, it’s not like I could pretend it didn’t happen. He just continued to stare at the door and didn’t acknowledge me in any way.

When he rushed out at the ground floor, Kamran held me back for a moment and asked me incredulously, “How could you embarrass me like that?!” I was shocked. Embarrass him? He wasn’t the one to hardcore burp and then just casually slip into the elevator like the reeking fumes of his body gas weren’t surrounding us all.

I thought that acknowledging the burp would actually lighten the mood. When someone calls you out on something, it gives you a chance to turn the joke back around on yourself, right? And it’s not like we caught him raping a cat or something here. It was a burp!

So who’s right here–Kamran or me?

Unjunked

Posted by plumpdumpling on June 3, 2009 – 5:33 pm
Filed under why i'm better than everyone else
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When my company decided about a month ago that my boss–the president until we were acquired by a larger company–wasn’t needed any longer, I offered my immense catalog of services to our marketing department. Mostly so I could attend marketing seminars and steal all of the SEO info for my blog but also because I’m a supremely motivated individual. Who didn’t want to lose her job because no one could figure out what she did anymore without the president around.

In this time, the marketing department has allowed me to use my writing skillz to send out a couple of branded e-mails to our customers, inviting them to events and reminding them that the best place to spend money in this time of economic disaster is on luxury software. And in this time, I’ve also found out that bigtime executives who don’t care about my invites and reminders do this fun little thing called unsubscribing.

Which is something I’ve never even considered in my many years of Interneting. I buy all sorts of things online and inadvertently get signed up for every mailing list in existence, but I’ve always figured that’s what junk e-mail addresses are for. The other day, though, I signed into my junk mail address and unsubscribed from all of the mass mailings I get. All of the offers on my favourite underwear from American Eagle, all of the daily temptations from Amazon.com, all of the NRA propaganda my dad signed me up for and laughed about later.

And it feels amazing. I like unsubscribing so much that I’ve started unsubscribing on my work e-mail, too. I’m starting to become one of those super-indignant people who’s like, “Bitch, did I not send you an unsubscribe request yesterday?! GET ME OFF YOUR LIST!” My former life with a spam-filled inbox just seems so childish. I really feel now as if I have the power.

And now I’m off to tell FreshDirect to take their 10% off e-mails and shove them.

I Still Feel Superior to You Despite the Fact That Apple Has Released Sixty New Computers Since I Bought Mine

Posted by plumpdumpling on February 11, 2009 – 9:46 pm
Filed under why i'm better than everyone else
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I bought an iBook G4 back in the golden years of undergrad, when THE Ohio State University was paying for me to go to school, and I was rolling in cash. My Mac-enthusiast friend told me, “Katie, Macs are beautiful and smart and wonderful, just like you,” so naturally I had to have one THAT MOMENT.

I marched right down to the Apple store with my best friend–and by marched, I of course mean drove forty-five minutes, because we lived in the country–and bought my iBook right off the shelf. I knew it didn’t come packaged with enough RAM, but I figured one of my genius friends could buy it cheap and install it for me.

Fast forward to 2009, when my Mac is four+ years old and still has the 128MB of RAM it came with. It frequently attempts to commit suicide if I try to start GIMP while running Firefox, and it leaves red marks on my legs from all of its overheating when I’m wearing one of my many leather miniskirts around the house.

But I love it, ’cause it’s white, it has a pink gel keyboard cover, and its icons are so much prettier than Windows icons. That’s right–I love it solely for superficial reasons, and I’m not embarrassed. Everyone tells you that they love their Macs for the video-editing capabilities, for photo manipulation and other bullshit. The truth is that they just look good next to your latté on a table at Starbucks.

When I left for Ohio two weeks ago for my sister’s wedding, I left my iBook on and open at Kamran’s apartment to finish downloading some television. I didn’t think to tell Kam to put it to sleep after a couple of hours or anything, because I was too busy NOT THINKING ABOUT NEW YORK. And then I came back five days later, and it refused to accept my login password.

I politely shut it down by ripping out its power cord, and it in return politely sat at its startup screen for an entire day, its pretty grey apple icon staring me down as it refused to switch over to the login screen. I calmly Googled the hell out of the problem and seriously thought I could solve it myself by booting from an external drive, so I searched eBay for a retail copy of OS X–because apparently the copy that comes with your computer is only good on your computer, and my copy is in a barn on my family’s farm in Ohio along with all the rest of pre-NYC Katie–found out that they cost more than $3, and started asking all the Mac-owning rich people I know if they’d bought the newest version retail and would FedEx it to me from Chicago or Munich.

Finding plenty of evidence that even a boot disc was impossible to make, I ferociously attacked every single person at my software company to ask for help. My dear friend–and obviously favourite co-worker–Jack was all up on having his way with my hard drive to uncover all the things about me that even Kamran doesn’t know, claiming that he could fire up some magic Linux disc that can cure world hunger along with reading burnt hard drives. He even bought a miniature hard drive enclosure just so he could extract my drive and hook it up to another computer if needed. He was nearly foaming at the mouth in anticipation of the geekery, and I was all for it, ’cause four years of writing and photos were at stake.

So I brought the iBook into work this morning, and Jack hauled it back to his desk in his greasy paws, expecting a huge ordeal that would end in one of us sobbing. But a few minutes later, he IMed me and asked for my password. Pardon?

He brought it back to my desk and restarted it, and after two seconds of the grey apple screen, the login screen popped up, and everything was completely normal. Only a day earlier, I’d been pricing Dells and consoling myself with the idea of a pink Inspiron Mini 9, but as soon as my iBook was up and working again, all I could think about was how wonderfully elite I am for owning one.

So I guess that sure, not knowing a damned thing about how your computer works means that you don’t know a bit about fixing it, but spending an extra $1,000 is totally worth it to be able to use the phrase mount a disk image. And speaking of mounting, I asked my friend Aaron to send me some amazing photos that demonstrate his love for his Mac. And boy, did he deliver:


Aaron calls this The I-Woke-Up-And-Didn’t-Put-Makeup-On-To-Show-My-Love-For-You-And-Oh-Look-I’m-Wearing-An-iPhone-Shirt.


And this is The Come-To-Bed-Baby-I’m-Not-Wearing-Any-Pants, or as I like to call it, My ARMS Are Fatter Than This.

When I checked to make sure I could use the photos for my evil-doing, he said, “Those legs need to be SEEN to be BELIEVED.” And how.

Now if that doesn’t make you want to buy a Mac, I don’t know what will.

You Can Take My Childhood, but You’ll Never Take My FREEDOM

Posted by plumpdumpling on January 9, 2009 – 4:22 pm
Filed under everyone's married but katie, narcissism, why i'm better than everyone else
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This morning, one of the blog writers I just started to follow wrote the following:

I’d love to write about parties and dates and where I went to eat. Impress you with the cutting-edge emo playlists on my iPod and casually mention that I caught such-and-such eyeliner-and-irony-clad band at a hole in the wall bar the other night.

At this point in my life, those stories would include a lot of Hot Wheels, mad dashes to the early movie, and tales of Ruby Tuesdays. My iPod playlists are full of songs to keep toddlers quiet while I’m on conference calls in the car.

Sweet, right? Snore.

And I was like, “OMG, please never let me grow up.” I get that women’s feelings apparently change hardcore after they have children, and I’m told that even I may devolve into something nurturing and selfless was I ever to give birth, but not being encumbered by adult stuff feels so good. As Dr. Boyfriend said after spending time with his married/babied friends over the holiday break, “I really appreciate the little life we’ve made for ourselves.” That little life being one that involves never eating dinner at home, dancing on Friday nights, and non-stop caring only for ourselves.

So in celebration of my perpetual youth, I offer you:


My (unexpected) teenage celebrity crush, which is not really a crush but an example
of how I’d like to conduct myself if I was to become famous. Look how cool his wave is.


My overly-emo song of the moment.


My really amazing birthday dessert sampler at Max Brenner that included
POP ROCKS covered in liquid chocolate.


And my best friend and me, looking soooooo badass
on New Year’s Eve at our friends’ house party. (No?)

Sure, most of that party was spent taking pictures of their baby eating the husband’s nose

but I was wearing my homemade Bulletproof necklace while photographing, so they cancel each other out and leave nothing but my natural hardcoreness and me.