Unapologetically Mundane

My Top Ten Reasons to Live in NYC

Posted by katie ett on August 14, 2012 – 12:00 pm

Filed under good times at everyone else's expense, living in new york is neat, my uber-confrontational personality, why i'm better than everyone else

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.

Adventure Time with Kat and Kam: the East Village, Lower East Side, and Chinatown

Posted by katie ett on August 3, 2012 – 12:00 pm

Filed under adventure time, creepy boyfriend obsession, just pictures, living in new york is neat

Kamran and I had no plan in mind for this walk but to drink some bubble tea and to eat some noodles at Xi’an Famous Foods, which is beloved by Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern and which we’ve talked about visiting approximately every five seconds of our five-year relationship. It was closed that day for no apparent reason, but at least we still got our bubble tea.

I know I’ve shown you versions of this next picture ten times already, but walking out of his building and seeing this against the sky just never fails to make me think, “This is New York City! I LIVE IN NEW YORK CITY!” The architecture in Tudor City is unmatched for me, as much as I love the glass-and-steel highrises in newer parts of the city. I think it’s because it makes me think of 55 Central Park West, the Ghostbusters building:

Kamran in Tudor City, being gorgeous:

The Chrysler Building, also being gorgeous:

Kamran outside of Thirstea in the East Village, where we stopped for bubble teas. He got honeydew, because he always gets honeydew, and I got Pixy Stix, because like there was any way I could resist that:

I always think this sign is going to say “Burger King”. It does not:

We went to Economy Candy and bought chocolate-covered s’mores and ate them in a park with a camel statue in it:

This thing actually tastes better than it looks. And it looks like The Best Thing Ever, soooooo . . .

Kinda want this sign painted on the gate over a store’s window to be recreated on my bedroom wall:

Kamran and I took pictures in front of this graffitied building just because it looks badass, and when I Googled 90 Bowery just to see what it used to be, I thought the place had been turned into condos. Then I realized that the sign actually says 190 Bowery and tried that instead. It turns out that HOLY SHIT, THIS IS SOMEONE’S HOUSE.

It’s a 72-room, six-story, 35,000-square-foot former bank that a photographer bought in the 60s for $100k and turned into a studio/gallery/home. That was back when the Bowery was known for drugs, prostitution, and rent-by-the-week apartments with a shared bathroom in the hallway where you were likely to get stabbed. And now it’s worth $35 million. But it’s priceless to those of us who need graffiti to look cool.

We stopped at Banh Mi Saigon so Kamran could have his first of the famous Vietnamese sandwiches:

You know it’s more authentic than Paris Sandwich down the street both because it has Saigon in the name and because it’s hidden in the back of a store behind a jewelry counter.

Notice the daze in Kamran’s eyes and the crumbs on his lips:

Just a bucket of frogs in Chinatown:

My second bubble tea of the day, an Oreo one from Bubbly Tea. Wait, I’m sorry. Did you see that I said it was an OREO BUBBLE TEA? One person should not live a life this decadent:

We stopped at Malaysia Beef Jerky next to buy pounds and pounds of what is totally not beef jerky at all but bakkwa, which is grilled so that it’s not so hard and chewy. It’s a little saucy, too, so we refer to it as “that wet beef jerky”, usually in a redneck accent:

This is a shrimpy pork jerky, because Kamran likes gross things.

Kamran looking a little bit lonely and lost with his bubble tea and bag of jerky:

Billy’s Antiques & Props closed a year or so ago, and we found it so fitting that the only thing that remains is a coffin in the midst of debris:

And some more pretty buildings to bring us back full circle:

Wouldn’t you just die to live on the upper floor of a building like that? I’m sure those apartments are just as awful as any other New York apartment, but they sure seem special.

ADVENTURE TIME!

The Top Five Most Memorable Movies from My Childhood

Posted by katie ett on August 1, 2012 – 12:00 pm

Filed under there's a difference between films and movies

Earlier this week, my sister texted me to say that Return to Oz, one of our favourite childhood movies, had arrived at her house from Netflix. I went to Wikipedia to read the plot synopsis, and even nearly thirty years later, it still seems just as magical even when distilled down to a few paragraphs that don’t mention any of the dazzling props nor character voices that you can hear in your brain even when you haven’t seen the movie for fifteen years.

It got me thinking about how my mom used to take us to the Pickaway County Public Library, a fifteen-minute drive from our house to the next town over, so many times throughout the year that I could almost draw you a map of the places where the floorboards in the old building would creak when you’d walk on them. It was housed in Memorial Hall, which at the time seemed to me like the biggest, coolest castle I’d ever seen. (The local community theatre, Roundtown Players, is also housed there, and I spent months on end rehearsing a musical on its stage when I was in junior high, because apparently I was outgoing and involved when I was a kid.) A side room held rows of photocopied video cassette and cassette tape covers that had been laminated in thick plastic so that you could thumb through them like records at a music store. Later, they would add the covers of CDs and DVDs.

I don’t remember them being in any kind of order, neither alphabetically nor by genre, so my sister and I would have to look at a hundred boring Oscar-winning film laminates before we found the much-coveted Faerie Tale Theatre movies, hosted by and starring Shelley Duvall, who my sister and I thought was the most beautiful woman in the world and named all of our stuffed animals and Barbies after. (Now that The Shining is one of my favourite movies (thanks, Kamran!), it’s hilarious to me to think that I found this woman attractive as a kid.)

Anyway, all of this nostalgia had me thinking about the most memorable movies from my childhood, and here are my top five:

No big deal. Just Tik-Tok and FAIRUZA BALK as Dorothy.

• Return to Oz: I’m pretty sure my entire love of chickens stems from Dorothy’s pet chicken, Billina. There’s an I Hate Billina Facebook page, which I will not link to because I find the idea of someone being serious about hating a movie chicken inconceivable.

• Labyrinth: My mom, an English teacher, used to show this to her Humanities classes, and I accidentally saw so much of it as she was preparing questions about it for her class that I got interested and finally asked to watch all of it one day. It eventually became such a tradition for my best friend, Tracey, and me to watch it on Friday nights at her house while eating Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food that we fell in love with David Bowie and became devotees of the website dedicated to his crotch.

Don’t worry, guys. It’s not poo.

• The Peanut Butter Solution: My mom was known for recording things off of TV; if I offhandedly mentioned to her that I liked the band Bush, she’d set the VCR for me every time they were on any of the late-night talk shows so that Tracey and I could later sit in front of her TV for hours with the closed captioning on, writing down lyrics so we could sing along to their songs back in the days before the Internet had every lyric to every song ever. She taped The Peanut Butter Solution for my sister and me for god knows what reason, but it turned out to be one of the movies we watched over and over and over. It was scary and exciting and about peanut butter, so how could I resist? Plus, according to Wikipedia, it “features the first English-language songs performed by Céline Dion”. (WHAT?) I had outgrown it by the time my mom died when I was eighteen, so I’m sure my dad didn’t think anything of throwing out the old videotape when he got remarried and moved into my stepmom’s house. Luckily, Tracey is AMAZING and bought me a bootleg DVD of it a few years back. I’ve been too . . . I don’t know . . . sentimental? . . . to watch it yet, though.

• The Phantom of the Opera: Again, my mom taped this off of TV for no apparent reason, but I couldn’t get enough of the thing. I don’t actually remember anything about it except for this one shot of the Phantom’s underground lair, but that scene and the way the light from the water reflected onto the wall is so vivid in my mind that I have no doubt I could figure out which adaptation it was if I watched them. I’m almost sure it’s the 1990 version, which would explain why I like Teri Polo so much. Also because of “Felicity” and the “Criminal Minds” where she was a child molester, but mostly because of “Phantom”.

• Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure: I’ve never seen Star Wars. There’s no reason I’d be interested in this movie. But I guess my mom thought all girls like cute, cuddly things, and I remember being called back downstairs one night after I’d already gone to sleep, lying down on the living room floor on blankets and pillows next to my litter sister, and watching this while wearing my footie pajamas. It became a tradition every time it was on TV when we were kids. Eventually I wasn’t able to stand having my feet enclosed and made my mom cut the footie part off, but the idea was still the same.

So, what are your top five? Write me a blog post if you’re as wordy as I am!

Happy Anniversary, NYC and Me!

Posted by katie ett on July 27, 2012 – 12:00 pm

Filed under living in new york is neat

It hit me this morning that I might have just missed the anniversary of my moving to NYC. And indeed, I went back to my suuuuuper-old LiveJournal and found this post:

Seven years, guys! And how my life has changed! I know how to get anywhere on the subway now and can name you the best restaurant for any occasion. I like big, floppy slices of pizza now and actually eat seafood! I’ve lived in Chelsea, Prospect Heights, Park Slope, Williamsburg, and Downtown Brooklyn in apartments that cost five times more and hold five times less than my apartments back in Ohio. I moved here knowing one person, and now I have a whole group of people I love.

I NEVER thought this would be my life, and I’m so glad it is. Thanks to my last boyfriend, Todd, for making it all possible and to everyone except the jerks on the train for making it wonderful.

Keeping Classy on the Bus

Posted by katie ett on July 25, 2012 – 12:00 pm

Filed under funner times on the bus, living in new york is neat

My bus has really quieted down in the mornings now that school’s out, so there are many fewer people being pushed back outside onto the sidewalk just as the doors close to make more room for the people inside, homeless dudes in plastic-bag-shoes being dragged off by cops, and standing riders ending up in other people’s laps as the driver punches the brake every five seconds as if he doesn’t realize there’s a bus full of people behind him with one hand on the metal bar and one hand holding the bags of stuff all New Yorkers are required to haul around thanks to our not having cars to leave them in. But I can still rely on mean old ladies for entertainment.

Yesterday, the bus stopped at Wall Street, and I looked up from my book just in time to see an old white lady in a teal lace shirt that was way too sexy for her stumbling over the old Indian woman sitting next to her in white linen pants and a black ruffled tank top that was also way too sexy for her. The white lady had been sitting in the window seat but ended up sprawled across the Indian woman’s lap, legs still by the window but face suspended over the aisle, almost in the crotch of the guy across the aisle from them. The white lady righted herself and collected her things to exit the bus, but she wasn’t two steps down the aisle before she turned and gave the Indian lady the craziest stink-eye I’ve ever seen from anyone over the age of ten.

Read the rest here!