Just Another Day in the Life of a City Curmudgeon

Posted by katie ett on June 8, 2012 – 12:00 pm
Filed under good times at everyone else's expense, living in new york is neat, why i'm better than everyone else

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.

Welcome Home, or Welcome Back to NYC, At Least, Because It’s Still Unclear If This or Ohio is My Home

Posted by katie ett on June 6, 2012 – 12:00 pm
Filed under living in new york is neat, no i really do love ohio

There are a lot of things I love about Ohio, neither ironically nor just out of sentimentality for the first twenty-four years of my life. Of course because my family and my lifelong friends live there, but also because the people are kinder, everything’s wildly inexpensive, and it’s just generally easier to exist there in the wide-open spaces. The cool things in Ohio seem cooler because they’re undiluted by a million other cool things around them, you know?

But after the most perfectly Ohio goodbye with a lunch at The Cheesecake Factory with my best friend and our friends Erin and Jenn, I came back to NYC on Saturday afternoon, and the city felt welcoming for once. My plane flew way up past the airport in Queens over the Bronx and City Island, over sailboats sprinkled in Pelham Bay, over tiny islands I’ve never seen before with a single house on each one. Pea Island! Goose Island! Hog Island! Kamran and I walked to Grand Central to shop once I arrived at his apartment, and the employees at Banana Republic were extra nice, the desserts at Financier were extra delicious, the cheese selection at Murray’s was extra impressive. We ordered organic grass-fed burgers for dinner, which you have a hard time finding in the grocery store in Ohio, let alone have them delivered to your house for free by a man on a bike. And then we stayed up all night watching ancient episodes of “X-Files” in which people wear pink eye makeup.

On Sunday, a Mila Kunis/Zoe Saldana/Marion Cotillard/Clive Owen/Billy Crudup movie was filming outside Kamran’s building, which we only figured out when we realized we’d been hearing squealing tires on the street below for three hours straight. The modern street signs had been pasted over with “Knickerbocker Ave.” and “54th St.”, and 70s-era cars filled the parking spaces while cops in old-fashioned uniforms staged a chase between them.

United Nations Rainbow

There was a rainbow over the United Nations building, which we attempted to follow to the river but lost somewhere between 43rd and 51st Streets. The sky in general was brooding and bright blue at the same time and somehow more expansive than it’s ever seemed. The French pastry place was closed and the Jamba Juice was closed, but we found a restaurant specializing in Indian kati rolls and stopped by Crumbs for cupcakes, and everything was more delicious than ever. And we went to our grocery store that only has natural and organic products, and we ordered dinner from our usual favourites that don’t exist in Ohio, and it felt like this place missed me.

Roosevelt Island and the East River

I love Ohio, and I love NY, and they’re almost complete opposites, but I still think of them both as home.

Gone Fishin’

Posted by katie ett on May 25, 2012 – 3:30 pm
Filed under no i really do love ohio

I’m going to Ohio for a week to see my friends and family and let them grill meatz for me on Memorial Day.

I keep thinking that this is a real holiday, like Christmas or Pumpkin Show or the 4th of July.

Sparkler

But people are going to be working while I’m there! And my best friend says the latest she’ll stay up with me is midnight! And my dad says the attic is full of bats! And if I eat any cookie dough, my pants will explode! And I’m going to miss “Girls” and “Game of Thrones”! WHAT KIND OF LIFE IS THIS?

You Can’t Handle How New York City I Am

Posted by katie ett on May 18, 2012 – 4:00 pm
Filed under bigtime celebrity, living in new york is neat

Sometimes I feel like I don’t live New-Yorkily enough. Every time I go straight home after work to catch up on “Law & Order”, a part of me thinks about all of the girls my age who are sitting at swank bars with their swank friends trying to get boys to buy them whatever cocktail matches their swank dress. Every time I go to sleep before midnight because I have to wake up early to go to the gym and then take a shower and then watch the morning news like some geriatric, a part of me thinks of all of the girls my age at the Neon Indian or the Beach House show, staying out until 4 a.m. and then rolling out of bed again a few hours later in the same clothes to go to their start-up jobs in SoHo or DUMBO.

But I realized a minute ago that:

• tonight, I’m going with Kamran and our good friends to a second meal with a pedigreed chef who hosts secret dinners in his home

• tomorrow, I’m going to be an extra in a movie, and it’s not even the first time I’ve done that, either

• the next day, I’m going to the best restaurant in New York City for the third time with Kamran to celebrate his many accomplishments

I’m not saying this to brag. I’m saying this to tell you that I will not be made to feel bad about my life, so quit expecting me to be Carrie Bradshaw. Or Miranda Hobbes. You expect me to be the lesbian, don’t you? DON’T YOU?

You Push Down Everyone Around You

Posted by katie ett on May 17, 2012 – 1:00 pm
Filed under good times at everyone else's expense, my uber-confrontational personality

Sometimes I feel more powerful than most women. Sometimes I feel like I’m more capable, that I’m stronger and better able to handle myself in tough situations. That I’m quicker-witted and slower to get used or walked on. Sometimes I think that being sharper, better at arguing, funnier is the most important thing. Sometimes, when I look at really snarky, dry, biting women like Gena or Sandy or Ellie, I think about how lucky the world is that all women aren’t cutesy. They’re not all “girl power”, unshaven-armpits-exposed-as-they-sway-their-arms-back-and-forth-over-their-heads-at-Lilith-Fair, either. And these women are intimidating. They require “keeping up” with and “being on” with; you don’t just leave any old comment on their Facebook posts, because their cleverer other friends have already said cleverer things than you were going to. I’d be scared to date either of the Mean Kims, as much as I love both of them. And if I feel that way, how must nice, normal girls feel about them?

Sometimes I feel much less powerful than most women. Sometimes I feel like I’m so busy being sharper, better at arguing, stronger and better able to handle myself that I forget to just be nice. There’s a moment in “Friday Night Lights” where Coach Taylor says to Jason Street, “You lift up everyone around you.” That line hit me so hard in the place in me that was raised by the sweetest, kindest mother who never said a bad word about anyone and was still considered by everyone to be hilarious. She never said anything shocking. She never cursed. She never made fun of someone just to get a laugh. (Mrs. Bachelor Girl reminds me of her in that way.) I know that people respond better to positivity and cute pictures and women in frilly lace dresses with shining hair and winning smiles than to uppercuts to the vagina, but I don’t know how not to point and jab! And I worry that the alternative to snarkiness for me is lameness.

I have a friend who has approximately 2.6 million friends on Facebook and never says anything remotely interesting but is “spunky” and “full of life”. If she’s not posting a motivational quote, she’s posting a motivational typographical image. And people eat. that. shit. up. I post mean things about Jason Segel? I lose a Like on my Unapologetically Mundane Facebook Page. She posts the picture of the cat on the rope with “hang in there!” written on the bottom? She gets 200 Likes and an award for Krazy Kool Friend or something.

I want to die.

But in a way that will lift up everyone around me.