Tag Archives: all of my friends are prettier than i am

Coney Island and the Brooklyn Cyclones

Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, living in new york is neat
Tagged as , , ,

I went to a Yankees game once. I also went to a Staten Island Yankees game. But I didn’t even remember that the Brooklyn Cyclones existed until my friend Lizzie invited me to a game last week with the promise of Nathan’s Famous hot dogs hours of honing my pretending-to-care-about-sports skillz.

My landlord/roommate/co-worker/friend, Jack, and I took off after work on the Q train aaaaall the way to the very last stop, Coney Island. (Read about my very first visit back in 2007 on my very old LiveJournal, complete with terrible, terrible photos.) As soon as you step off the train, this greets you, and the then the entire sky opens up in way that makes you feel like the entire world is behind you and the only thing before you is ocean:

Coney Island and Brooklyn Cyclones

We spent a few minutes on the boardwalk, being totally creeped out by the Coney Island Funny Face (although, OMG, check out the original iteration, which is basically the scariest thing I’ve ever seen):

Coney Island and Brooklyn Cyclones

We admired the now-defunct Parachute Jump (I love the picture on that page that looks like a present-day Instagram photo but is actually from the 1930s or 40s):

Coney Island and Brooklyn Cyclones

Coney Island and Brooklyn Cyclones

Then, we got our hot dogs and gummy bears (the softest gummy bears I’ve ever had!) and settled in with Lizzie and her friends at glorious MCU Park:

Coney Island and Brooklyn Cyclones

The mascot came over and greeted a swarm of children who appeared out of nowhere as we tried to figure out what he was. A pigeon? A chicken? No idea. They’re the Brooklyn Cyclones. What possible sense could this make? Although, really, what’s funnier than a chicken in a cyclone? Nothing:

Coney Island and Brooklyn Cyclones

Some d-bag Tim-Tebowed on the field so all the stadium could admire him and comment on his moral fortitude:

Coney Island and Brooklyn Cyclones

And then the game began!

Coney Island and Brooklyn Cyclones

And it went on for a long, long time! And then it went into overtime, too! I eventually got uninterested and started taking pictures of Lizzie:

Coney Island and Brooklyn Cyclones

And then Jack and Melanie:

Coney Island and Brooklyn Cyclones

And then Nico and Lizzie:

Coney Island and Brooklyn Cyclones

And then Lizzie’s and Nico’s shoes while some kid in the background clawed her mom’s mouth out (BROOKLYN!):

Coney Island and Brooklyn Cyclones

A good time was had by all.

But especially by these fools in jorts:

Coney Island and Brooklyn Cyclones

The Jersey Shore Trip That Made Me Kind of Not Hate the Jersey Shore

Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, holidays don't suck for me, just pictures, travels
Tagged as , , , , , ,

So . . . the Jersey shore is better than the Hamptons. My friends and I went to Avalon, which we basically knew nothing about except that renting houses there is about $21,000 cheaper per week than in the Hamptons. And after I signed the lease with our rental agent, she told me that the house is “not new but very beachy”, which I assumed was a nice way of saying “old and full of the sand of a thousand old men’s swimtrunk crotch areas”. So I was worried.

But it turns out that the town of Avalon is full of the cutest restaurants and shops called things like Pudgie Pelican Cafe and Uncle Bill’s Pancake House, that the houses are just as impressive as Hamptons houses, and that the people are so nice they actually said hello to us as we passed them on the sidewalks, which I haven’t experienced since I left Ohio.

And we even loved the house! Mostly because this was in the backyard:

Jersey Shore

Along with these three ducks, two of which my blogfriend-turned-inreallifefriend Kim C. won from a claw game at a Wendy’s along the way down, and one of which was given to her by a little girl we cheered on as she pumped her mother’s entire paycheck into the machine:

Jersey Shore

And also this hot tub, which was never mentioned on our lease and which my roommate/landlord/co-worker/friend, Jack, was clearly . . . surprised by/pleased by/pooping his pants over?:

Jersey Shore

And many, many of these glowing-eyed owls, which were meant to either ward off rodents or predatorially ogle us in the pool:

Jersey Shore

Our joy over these things allowed us to forgive the fact that the house was this many degrees all week long:

Jersey Shore

The rental agent called me on our way down to the house on Saturday and said, “The air-conditioning isn’t working properly, so the house won’t get as cool as you’d like. They’ll be out to fix it on Monday or Tuesday.” And by that she meant the next Saturday as we were leaving. Even though I’m not the type to complain, I toooootally wrote a letter to the rental agency. Kamran said I should have had him write it on his special lawyer stationary to make it seem really threatening.

But I didn’t want to threaten, because really, we had the greatest time, as you’ll see:

Jersey Shore

Jeff, Nik, Beth, and Andrew sitting by the pool, pretending to make conversation for the sake of this picture. I think this should be used in a brochure for the Jersey shore.

Jersey Shore

Nik doing what Nik did for most of the week. I took this picture from the pool. Which means my $1000 camera was in the pool. I drank a lot of Smirnoff that week.

Jersey Shore

Beth, who was probably technically the first friend I made in NYC, posing with the shady pool owl, who was turned to face the trees many times throughout the week to keep him from watching her in her bikini.

Jersey Shore

A frog by the outdoor shower, clearly not dissuaded by the pool owl.

Jersey Shore

Kim making sangria. From box wine. That spilled out all over the sides of the pitcher as we filled it more and more full of fruits.

Jersey Shore

Grillmaster Jeff, trying to be nice to the people who asked for their steaks well done.

Jersey Shore

Beth and Kim, our resident fashionistas, wearing actual clothes poolside.

Jersey Shore

I don’t remember what Beth is doing here, but this pretty accurately sums up her personality.

Jersey Shore

Nik deconstructing kebabs in the shade of the tree-fence by the pool.

Jersey Shore

Nik deciding to forego the deconstruction and just gnaw the hell out of the things.

Jersey Shore

Jack with his fancy Grolsch bottle, which we later used to capture and drown greenhead biting flies. The flies were the only drawback to Avalon, actually; apparently they live in the bay behind the town and fly over to the ocean when the wind is blowing that way. Murdering them made for some of my sweetest Avalon memories.

Jersey Shore

Kim K. kebab-stick-fighting with Jeff. No eyes were harmed in the making of this photo.

Jersey Shore

Kim C. posing in the bathing suit that showed me her boob.

I guess I should tell that story while I’m here, much as I’d just like to just mention her boob and leave it. So, the ocean was about two blocks from our house, on the other side of some woods with a path through them. Kim and I went one afternoon to jump some waves, and the ocean was a bit unwieldy. We were getting sucked under by the waves and then spit out on the shore over and over. The ocean was also really crabby, so every now and then when we’d put our feet down, a crab would clamp on for a second. Well, just as Kim was shrieking about a crab eating her heel, a particularly crazy wave knocked us both over, and when we came up, one of Kim’s boobs had totally popped out of her suit! So I screamed, “Your boob is showing! YOUR BOOB IS SHOWING!” And then another wave came and wiped us out again, and her sunglasses flew off her head and were gone forever (only someone who grew up in Cape Cod would wear sunglasses in the ocean, right?), and she had totally covered up her boob by the time we both recovered, so I didn’t even get to enjoy seeing it. She saw mine later, too, so we’re totally almost dating now.

Jersey Shore

I told Beth and Andrew to scowl at me. Beth is doing an amazing job, but Andrew looks like a friggin’ model.

Jersey Shore

Jersey Shore

On the 4th of July, we went to the beach to watch the fireworks just as the sun was setting.

Jersey Shore

It was my first time seeing fireworks on the beach (my hometown ones are set off in the high school parking lot, and I’m never on the waterfront for the NYC ones), and I love the way they reflected off the water and silhouetted all of us watching them.

Jersey Shore

Jersey Shore

The peanut butter and jelly sundae from Sundae Best Avalon. It was as good as it looks. Or better, if you think it looks like baby poo.

Jersey Shore

Kim C. in the pool, sippin’ on a lowball.

Jersey Shore

The Kims, looking ethereal in their bedroom on the first floor that was perfectly cooled the entire time because the air-conditioning actually worked down there.

Jersey Shore

Roommates Jeff and Nik, pretending to hate each other.

Jersey Shore

Roommates Jeff and Nik, pretending to like each other.

Jersey Shore

The whole group with the creepy owl, which we had forgiven for its lascivious ways and were feeling nostalgic about by the last day.

Jersey Shore

To say that this was our best trip in three years is like saying I’m mildly interested in getting Kim back into the ocean with an even less sturdy swimsuit. We spent approximately eight hours a day in the pool (and sometimes many more), the ocean was uncrowded and actually warm enough to swim in, every restaurant and store in town was run by sixteen-year-olds who were sweet and polite, there were places to kayak and paddleboard (which only 75% of us did, because eww, bay water), Jeff brought a projector so we could watch HBO on the living room wall, I wore nothing but tank tops and jersey shorts every day except for the night when we went to Atlantic City and ate Cuban food and I lost $3 on the slot machines but paid $5.99 to use an ATM, and I totally didn’t sunburn for the first time in three summers. I just got heat rash. No big deal.

JERSEY SHORE!

Otto, PS1, 5Pointz, and Other Really New Yorky Things

Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, living in new york is neat, restaurant ramblings, there's a difference between films and movies
Tagged as , , ,

On Friday night, my co-workers and I went to Mario Batali’s Otto for pizza and pasta and cured meats and gelato in flavors like OLIVE OIL and CREME FRAICHE. My friend Ash took awesome pictures of the meal, including some of me pretending to eat an entire plate of salad like a taco once we figured out there was a big slice of cheese underneath all the lettuce. No big deal.

Otto Pizzeria
photo by Ash at Not Bored in NY

Afterward, we went to see Prometheus in 3-D, and I thought we’d all agree that it was awwwwwwwwwwesomely entertaining, but it turns out that fully half of the group thought it was a plague on the rest of the franchise. So go see it if you want fun and suspense and gore, but don’t see it if you like films that don’t try to cram three movies’ worth of material into one.

Saturday, we met our friends Nik and Marko at PS1, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) baby sister in Queens. There were some crazy cool things there (a roomful of confetti being blown around by fans, a movie with animated LEGO people reading pathetic online conversations between real people), but because some of it was a little avant-garde, it was no surprise to hear middle-aged women saying things like, “This is as useless as Twitter.”

P.S. 1 NYC
Wendy being constructed in the museum’s courtyard

Then we walked across the street to 5Pointz, a factory that’s been turned into a graffiti park where artists can spray on the weekends. We’ve probably seen it a hundred times from the 7 train but have never stopped to actually take it all in.

5 Pointz Graffiti Park NYC

Obviously it brought out the badass in the boyz:

5 Pointz Graffiti Park NYC

And then we went to a Bosnian restaurant to eat cevapi, the sausages Nik and Marko ate while growing up in Serbia. They were totally delicious,

Cevapi

and now I’ve threatened to take everyone out for Ohio food.

Bethany, Tracey, the Chocolate Dentures, and the Little Nubbin

Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am
Tagged as , ,

My cousin Bethany and I were born 47 minutes apart. Same day, month, and year.

My uncle called my grandpa from the hospital: “You have a granddaughter!”

And then my dad called 47 minutes later: “You have a granddaughter!”

“I know,” my grandpa said.

“No, another one!”

Growing up, Bethany and I got along–very well, I’d say–but there were little things that separated us. She was really into the outdoors, and I was really into my hair. She was really into Jesus, and I was really into shock humor that she found appalling. She was really into being a smartypants knowitall first-grade-skipper, and I was really into being a bratty tattletale who didn’t care about anyone else. But we both liked New Kids on the Block and Pass the Pigs and Mastermind, and we could play in her basement for hours when she devised “pool tests” for my sister and me to challenge our skills (comma “lack of”) on her family’s billiards table, and she once helped me learn all of the books of the Old Testament during her church service so I could impress her Sunday School class afterward.

I decided to go to OSU as a high school senior after visiting Bethany there her freshman year, requested to live on her dorm floor the next year, and had a group of movie-watching, trivia-playing, Chinese-buffet-eating friends already waiting for me because she let me hang out with her. We lived together for a year in college in what basically amounts to a slum house with a broken stair we would’ve fallen through several times if the carpet covering it hadn’t been there to save us, a random working kitchen in one of the bedrooms, exposed power lines on the fire escape, neighbors who lit our dumpster on fire, and a parking lot where our cars were spraypainted. Soon after, Bethany moved to Russia for two years, figured out she wanted to be a veterinarian, and came home to go to vet school at OSU.

And . . . something was different. Maybe we had just grown up. Or maybe the distance had made us subconsciously realize how important family is. But where I used to see this smartypants knowitall dork kid, I saw a genuinely warm and caring person who could constantly make me laugh and knew everything about me because she’d been there for all of it. Now I look forward to seeing her on holidays and try to spend extra time with her and her mom before big family dinners, making their famous cloverleaf rolls and pumpkin rolls and exchanging gifts that only we would be amused by.

So when I only had time to see Bethany on Christmas and New Year’s Eve during the first week of my last visit home, I talked my best friend, Tracey, into driving us to see her in Portsmouth, Ohio, which is the halfway point between our hometown and Bethany’s new vet job in Kentucky. We were using some pretty crappy directions we’d printed out, got ourselves lost in downtown Portsmouth, and found ourselves driving across the Ohio River into Kentucky accidentally. U-turns are illegal in Ohio, but when we got to the end of the bridge, we decided we were technically in Kentucky, and Tracey swung her car around right there in the middle of the intersection. We cheered and high-fived and congratulated ourselves for being total badasses.

We had dinner with Bethany at a BBQ joint called Scioto Ribber (See what they did there? It’s a play on the Scioto River! Which I challenge any non-Ohioan to pronounce.) and then went for dessert at DQ (even though there was a cute local place right across the street), which is really the whole point of this post.

Bethany’s ridiculous faces as she enjoyed her Blizzard:

And Tracey’s ridiculous faces as she tongued the little nubbin on the top of her sundae and then found a dentures-shaped piece of chocolate in the cup:

Good times.

(nubbin!)

Noel. No-EL. Knoll. NO-uhl.

Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, no i really do love ohio
Tagged as , ,

I’ve met my blogfriend and yours Noel five or six times now. We found each other through a girl I went to high school with, and I was immediately drawn to the way she can write soulfully about seriously provocative issues without turning hippie-dippy or New-Age-y. Noel’s husband was a few years behind me in school, so I was aware of his brother, and he was aware of my cousin, and Noel had been to all of my favourite places in Ohio. Like my hometown. And the one and only pizzeria in it. And the Circleville Pumpkin Show.

Noel gets mad that I sometimes mention our dates here but never show any pictures of us together, so I’m continuing the trend (mostly because I didn’t actually take any pictures of us this time around). Here’s a picture of my best friend, Tracey, holding Noel and Ryan’s son, Silas:

Did you just feel your reproductive system cry out a little? No? Mine, neither, but let me tell you that Silas is twice as cute in person as in pictures, and this was in the rain when he was in need of a nap and had just watched us gnaw on burgers at Max & Erma’s for an hour while he had, like, peas or something.

Later in the week, Tracey and I met Noel again for dinner at The Cheesecake Factory while Ryan watched the kid, and we talked about families and teaching and boys and blogs and boobs. Then we went to see My Week with Marilyn, in which Michelle Williams had my hair, and in which Hermione Granger didn’t get naked, and in which I snorted so loud when Marilyn Monroe announced that Abe Lincoln was her dad.

And thus concludes the December meeting of blogfriends who pronounce their names weirdly.