The First Love

Posted by katie ett on July 10, 2013 – 12:15 pm
Filed under creepy boyfriend obsession

You know what’s annoying? Waking up one morning and realizing you’ve had your First Love and you’ll never get it back. Not that I regret who I gave it to, and not that I would change anything. It’s just that I saved that thing for so long from boyfriends who didn’t quite have the stuff to wrestle it from me, and it feels strange to know I can’t have it back to give away again. Every relationship after this will be built on the dead body of KamKat.

Emo Katie is emo.

Emo Katie

Tell me about your first love.

Six Years of Dates

Posted by katie ett on July 2, 2013 – 12:00 pm
Filed under creepy boyfriend obsession

You know what I miss most about being in a relationship, aside from the assurance that I’m superior to all of my single friends? Going on dates.

I found myself in my bathroom on a recent Saturday afternoon, wearing a dress and putting on earrings in preparation for going to a friend’s house, and it felt so wonderful and familiar for a second. I realized it was because it reminded me of all of those years of going on dates with Kamran on Saturday nights. It seemed like we had a dinner reservation at some swanky restaurant every single weekend for the last couple of years of our relationship. We were always trying to one-up ourselves the way drug addicts do–going to the newest best restaurant, the oldest best restaurant, all of the three-Michelin-star restaurants–hoping this week’s tasting menu would be even better than last week’s.

We’d plan what time to wake up, what time to eat lunch, what to eat for lunch based on dinner that night. My strategy was to eat a lot for lunch–the chicken fingers parm sandwich from Jackson Hole was a favourite–so my stomach would be good and stretched out, while he would only eat two sushi rolls so he’d be starving by dinnertime. I’d take a shower three hours before we were supposed to leave so I’d have time to let my hair air dry while we watched “Deadliest Catch” or “Project Runway”, sit around in pajamas until the last second and then put on my dress and earrings. Kamran needed my blessing on whatever sweater-vest-and-bowtie combination he’d chosen, and I needed him to straighten the collar on my cape.

I’d try to hurry us out the door by waiting for him in the hallway, and he’d have to run back inside to switch from the glasses he wore around the house to the glasses he wore outside that looked exactly the same, and I’d press the button for the elevator when he was still all of the way down the hallway, and he’d get mad. We’d take a picture of ourselves in the elevator on the way down to the lobby and then try to game whether to wait for a cab on Tudor City Place or walk down to 2nd Avenue and try to get one there. We always chose wrong whatever we chose and had one or two instances of, like, a stranger physically holding another woman back for us so she’d stop trying to steal the cab that clearly belonged to us because we were there first. And then we’d get to the restaurant, and the maitre d’ would ask what name was on the reservation, and we’d look at each other, and Kamran would ask me, “Is it under your name?” even though we both knew it was. And then we’d have the easiest dinner conversation, so much more interesting and voluminous than that of the other couples around us, and we’d get so full and so drunk that we’d just hold hands in the back of the cab on the way home and dazedly stare out the windows at the sights of 2nd or 6th Avenue, and maybe we’d talk about our favourite dishes if we could manage, but we’d try not to let on to the hardworking cabbie that we had just spent his whole paycheck on dinner.

The doorman would wish us a goodnight, and we’d never argue about who got to go to the bathroom first because he always let me, and then we’d collapse on the Murphy bed and watch “The X-Files” or “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” until we fell asleep or until it was time to order Second Dinner from whatever diner was still open at 2 a.m., depending on how teeny the portions had been at dinner.

It’s not that I miss these things specifically, though I loved every minute of them during those six years. It’s just that I miss the routine of it all. The knowing that I had this to look forward to every weekend. The knowing that I had reserved someone’s time. The being so well taken care of. It’s hard not to be nostalgic.

A Day in the Life

Posted by katie ett on June 19, 2013 – 12:00 pm
Filed under a day in the life

Turns out I’m pretty terrible at blogging even when I tell myself I only have to post once a week. So here’s what I’ve been doing the past few weeks, in photos that you’ve probably already seen on Facebook or Twitter, but screeeeeeeew you.

Cassie asked for a picture of the new spire on the 1 World Trade Center building, and I delivered, because I can see it out the window at work. Have I mentioned I live in New York City? That’s weird.


My college friend Sandy got a job here in the city and visited with his wife a couple of weeks before he officially moved. I met them for brunch at Montmartre in Chelsea and had something boring and low-carb, but his wife had these corn pancakes:


Sometimes it gets sort of foggy outside the window when you work 25 floors up. Right below these buildings is the charging bull sculpture that every tourist in the world has touched the genitalia of. There’s also a bronze sculpture of a man in the Time Warner Center that has turned gold in the penis from so many people touching it. Stop it, weirdos.


I don’t get tired of seeing this thing. I know it’s a gross display of American power, corruption, and excess, but it sure is pretty when the light catches its faceted sides:


I went to Ohio and texted my roommate:


While I was there, I went through my great-aunt’s scrapbooks and found this picture that’s supposedly me at 14 months, but I’m just not seeing it. Everyone on Facebook claims the eyes give me away, and I guess I don’t disagree, but I kind of feel like I’m such a nondescript baby here and grew up to be such a descript adult, you know? I guess maybe this proves that my hair is my entire personality. I’m not even sure my mom brushed mine here. And now she’s dead, so I can’t even give her a hard time. #deadparentproblems


Speaking of descript babies, that’s my grew-up-to-be-perfectly-normal-and-not-a-serial-killer uncle in the middle there and my dad on the left and his sister on the right. My dad is wearing a bowtie. And here I thought all of the guys I’ve dated have been exact opposites of him.


I shot a wedding while I was there, and it was KIND OF A BIG DEAL, but I didn’t have any pictures of that on my phone. I did have a picture of my stepbrother’s baby, though, who I did a shoot with the day before I left. And who is perfect. It’s so strange to not want babies of my own but to edit pictures of this kid and think words like precious, angelic, and whatisgoingonwithme.


Here’s a beaten-up farm cat to cancel the baby cuteness:


I came back to NYC, and it was still foggy. This is a building going up near my apartment, and all I can think about when I look at it is how there are suddenly going to be hundreds more people trying to get on the subway with me every morning. It’s strange to imagine where these people come from. SOMEONE is filling these new buildings. Ohioans, all of them.


It was my friend Nik’s birthday, and I went to Louro with him and our friend Anthony, where we had cardoons, which were terrible, and maple bacon donuts, which were incredible. But all I took a picture of were our drinks:


The weird part about being single is that I don’t technically ever have anything to do on a Saturday night, so when other single friends call my landlord/roommate/co-worker/friend Jack up and ask us to go to dinner on an hour’s notice, we just kind of shrug and do it. This was from a night when Jack, Jeff, Anjam, Gherald, and I went to Joya for Thai food down the street from our apartment and then went to a bar where Gherald told me the watermark I use on my photos is generic and the table we sat down at had this ticket on it:


Jeff did a photoshoot for Gherald’s company, and I was the girl who held his reflector for him. This is akin to being a boxing ring girl, but I wore much higher heels and a much skimpier bikini.


Three of my favourite dudes at our first archery lesson together:


We went to the Brooklyn Promenade to celebrate there being sun. This is what it looks like when Nik celebrates:


Jack did somewhat better (in his new glasses):


I’m sure the look on Andrew’s face was downright gleeful:


Nik again, pretending to be troubled:


Right before he bombed my beautiful flower photo:


I learned how to use the panorama function on my phone in the kitchen at work:


And then I learned how to use my new 10-20mm f/3.5 lens at Grand Central, where I found this adorable old sign about personal checks:


Anthony, Nik, and I went to Louro again for a guest chef dinner with Ken Vedrinski from Lucca in Charleston, SC. The gnudi was huge balls of cheese stuffed with mushrooms. My life is so good.


Bridgette moved back into town after two years in Paris, Chantee was visiting from Philly, and Jeff is also black, and I’m pretty sure that was the entire reason for this picture:


Bridgette, Jeff, and I went to see the new Star Trek movie in a theatre attached to this ridiculously clubby hotel with lights under the couches. Everyone says the first one was better, but I think they were just upset that the second one made them cry.


KILLED IT. “It” being whatever smallcutefurry animal we’re imagining this target as. Ignore that fourth arrow that’s almost completely off the paper; I’m sure that was Jack trying to hit his target next to mine and missing by that much. The best part of archery, aside from my being really ridiculously good at it, is that we have to take a car to get there. This particular Sunday, it was raining, and we first went to another archery place that was full and then had to get back in the car and drive even farther, and we were listening to a 90s Pandora station full of Nirvana and Soundgarden and Tool, and it was glorious for someone who hates driving but loves being driven.


Kamran set up a photoshoot for me in his former firm’s office so I could get this shot for him to decorate his new California office with. I’ll show you the real-camera version later, because it’s sort of epic.


The upstairs room at our go-to happy hour bar has this upstairs room with Victorian furnishings and an indie rock playlist. Probably going to have to bring a model back here immediately to take advantage of these cool lights, because Nik’s grimace isn’t cutting it for me:


After archery one weekend, Anjam drove us in his navy blue SUV with the chocolate leather seats and the moon roof (sorry, can’t help myself) to SriPraPhai, which has the prettiest little curry puffs:


Jeff, his girlfriend, Jack, Ash, Michael, and I went to Medieval Times, which is a completely real place in New Jersey and not just something you see in movies when you’re a kid in Ohio, and when we got back to Brooklyn, Jack and I walked to the Promenade and saw this, which I assure you pictures can’t even begin to capture:


Jack, Nik, Kim, and I drove to Connecticut last weekend for a party with Jeff, Anthony, and Anjam at our friends Ash and Michael’s apartment, and this was the view leaving the city:


While we still had the rental car from our trip to Connecticut, Jack and I drove to the not-at-all-subway-accessible Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook, where we bought Maine- and Connecticut-style lobster rolls from the Red Hook Lobster Pound and ate them on a pier overlooking the place where the Hudson and East rivers meet. Summer, you guys.


In keeping with the theme of me not being horrified by seafood, I also ate this fried fish sandwich at Schnipper’s in Times Square with my new friend Sarah, who is originally from Ohio and is therefore genuine and earnest and basically had me telling her my deepest, darkest secrets within five minutes of our meeting.


Have I mentioned that Jack has a robotic vacuum cleaner? It does a great job of allowing us to be lazy, but I sometimes get freaked out when I come home and see shoes in weird parts of the apartment and assume someone’s hiding out in his bedroom and waiting to strangle me but had the decency to remove his shoes first:


And now I’m going to Ohio until Sunday to shoot another wedding and my very pregnant friend. LIFE.

Real Life on Reality TV: Ready for Love

Posted by katie ett on June 12, 2013 – 5:00 pm
Filed under a taste for tv

So, did anyone watch “Ready for Love”? It was an NBC matchmaking reality TV show that ended recently and was apparently canceled because only I am sappy enough to watch a series about three wildly successful and ridiculously handsome men who are each matched with twelve somewhat successful but still ridiculously good-looking women and have nine weeks to whittle down the group one-by-one to find the least-unfunny and least-unsmart of the group. Which is what love is.

I secretly thought it was a pretty great show. In that it’s teeeeerrifying to see grown people admit to what dating’s really like when you’re superficial. The matchmakers would meet with the women before their dates with the men every week and give them gems of advice such as:

• “Men don’t like humor. If you find yourself about to say something funny, keep your mouth shut and instead find a way to touch him.”

• “Never do anything to emasculate him. If he offers you his coat, take it whether you’re cold or not so he’ll feel like he’s taking care of you.

• “Flirt with your eyes. But also make him feel like he’s at home in them. But not an incestual home. Don’t become his sister.”

I strangely don’t remember a lot of “you’re perfect just the way you are, so if he doesn’t like that, screw him and his Honduran philanthropist self”, shockingly. And yet one of the guys–Tim Lopez, the frontman for the Plain White T’s (oh, god, the unnecessary apostrophe)–somehow ended up with the least-pretty girl there in his top 2. I guess he liked her personality somehow, even though her personality seemed to me like the classic Only Pretending to Care About Love to Get a Record Deal Out of Your Reality TV Appearance.

It was pretty clear from about episode 3 who each guy was going to choose, and then we had to sit through six more weeks of the guys “wrestling” with their “feelings” for the other women. And the moment the women didn’t reciprocate those somewhat shady feelings, they were sent home. So you’re vying with 11 other women for the affection of one dude who’s telling all of you that he’s feeling the exact same feelings for you each in turn, but if you hesitate to fall in love with him in the interest of preserving your heart, you’re not putting your back into it, and you’re out. Okay.

The one brilliant move of the show was made by said Honduran philanthropist, who recognized whom he ultimately wanted to end up with when he had three women left, sent two of them home one week, and rose from underneath the stage in his glass box (this is real life) alone. He then proceeded to awkwardly but all-the-same-impressively climb the 40-foot-high structure where they line the women up at the end of each show (also real life) to be with his lady. And then they spent the finale episode just, like, hanging out together and looking pretty bored while the other guys got to make grand gestures of love to their chosen women.

But anyway. It was OBVIOUS that Plain White Unnecessary Apostrophe was going to choose this woman Sara, who was certainly pretty enough but not even in the same league as the other women, who were genuinely Miss Americas and stuff. Her features were severe, and when she smiled, she looked like a cartoon rendering of a gargoyle. She was also one of those people who isn’t fat but somehow just carries her weight badly, youknowwhatImean?

But she had this great backstory about being engaged to a guy who fought cancer for three and a half years, and she stuck by him the entire time, and that means Plain White Unnecessary Apostrophe could really count on her to stick with him through the tough times. Like when his band only has that one semi-hit. Or when he cheats on her with his cutoff-shorts-wearing friends, who call themselves the Buffalo Club and are sooooo gay together.

Week after week, I thought he was going to send her home for her pug nose, but he kept keeping her and kept talking about how deep their connection was. The world didn’t make sense, but I of course wasn’t upset about it, and I finally gave in and decided to like them together. When it got down to the final 2, I was pretty appalled at how he was clearly in love with Sara but continued to make out with Jenna, who was younger and even blonder and just all-around hotter despite her taste in purple chiffon rhinestoned dresses.

I felt pretty bad for Sara, who would be married to Plain White Unnecessary Apostrophe soon and would have to look back at the show and watch her husband enjoy this one. last. chance. to more or less cheat on her with the better-looking, more-fun woman whom he liked enough to keep around until the final 2 and would therefore live in his mind as the one who could’ve been, the one he let get away, once he gets bored with all of the cancer-fiancé deep-feelings talk.

So Tim took Sara down to the underground garden (totally real life) in the finale to reveal whether she was his pick or not, and she accidentally said something about the rest of their life together before she realized that could be pretty embarrassing if he didn’t end up choosing her, but of COURSE he was going to choose her, because he’s a sensitive rockstar and she wrote a goddamned song for him.

AND THEN HE CHOSE THE HOT GIRL.

The end.

Life as a Single Lady

Posted by katie ett on June 4, 2013 – 12:00 pm
Filed under everyone's married but katie, living in new york is neat, narcissism

I know you’ve been thinking about my well-being every moment of every day since I announced the year-in-the-making Great KamKat Breakup of 2013, and I want to assure you that I’m doing fine. Much better than expected. Terrific, really. I don’t want to say that I’m flourishing, exactly, because that somehow implies that Kamran was holding me back, and on the contrary, I think it was he who set me up to flourish: there’s a certain kind of confidence that comes with having been loved so hard for six years. When I visited my family last week to shoot my first wedding, my stepmom sent me home with a card that told me she and my dad were really worried about me in the days leading up to Kamran’s leaving but that I’ve handled myself “beautifully”. That was meaningful.

Before he moved back to California, I wrote in my journal that “the cons associated with Kamran’s leaving are too immense to even begin to list. My life is about to change in just about every way I can think of, and even the things that are staying the same will be affected.” And it’s true that my life has changed, but it doesn’t feel nearly as melodramatic and bleak as I expected. Granted, it’s only been a little over a month since he left, and my feelings may be different when I decide to date again and find that the only available men are finance guys who didn’t get married in their 20s because they were busy “working hard and playing harder”, and by that I of course mean “sleeping around”.

But so far, here are the pros to “being alone”, and by that I of course mean “not dating Kamran but still being surrounded by the love of my friends and family”:

• I’m now actually living in the apartment I’ve been paying rent on for the past two and a half years. All of my things are in one place for the first time in six years.

• The subways that converge at my apartment are as follows: A, B, C, F, G, N, Q, R, 2, 3, 4, 5. I never have to be annoyed at having to go to the West Village or Tribeca, because everywhere is convenient now.

• My roommate is great. The time we spend together doing the mundanest things somehow feels important.

• I have an oven to bake in instead of just a two-burner stovetop. I haven’t baked anything, but I can, goddammit.

• I have a freezer to store ice cream in. Do you know what six years without a quart of ice cream in your home at all times is like? DEATH.

• I have a gigantic 3-D TV and six seasons of “The Sopranos” on HBO Go.

• I have a memory foam mattress and can take up as much space in bed as I want to. Sleeping in the center of it feels like life’s greatest luxury.

• I can order whatever I want for dinner. And if that’s Indian four times a week, no one cares.

• I buy the toilet paper I want to. I have my own bathroom. All of the cabinets are filled with girl stuff. I am a princess.

• My commute to work is one subway stop. One.

• No one will give me a hard time about my low-carb diet. Butter on my omelet! Pizza toppings!

• I can do my laundry once a week or once a month.

• I can go to the gym or not go to the gym.

• I can take up totally random hobbies. Archery!

• I can stay out late on Friday nights with my friends and not have to worry about having anyone to get home to.

• I can wake up the next day whenever I want. I can stay locked in my room that day until 1 p.m., and no one will pretend to clean up around me just to make noise so I’ll get up before I’m ready.

• I can do a photoshoot that afternoon and then go out for dinner without feeling like I have to ask anyone permission.

• I can stay up that night until the sun comes up listening to music, or I can go to bed at 10 p.m.

• I can kiss boooooys.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m enjoying being an independent lady. The great thing is that I have so much time to do anything I want to now, and there’s no one waiting at home for me making me feel guilty about seeing my friends too much.

Let’s forget about the fact that when there’s someone waiting at home for you, there’s nothing you want to do more than sit at home with that person.