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

Circleville Pumpkin Show 2011!

Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, it's fun to be fat, no i really do love ohio
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Kamran’s been bugging me to post pictures of our trip to Ohio for the Circleville Pumpkin Show (mostly to see himself, I imagine), and I guess pumpkins are still in fashion for another week or two before the holiday sales start and my favourite Christmas song begins to wear on me after only a few days, so here’s a recap of our fun:

My best friend, Tracey, has a long-standing tradition with some of her freshman-year college friends of gathering at her house a few towns over on the Friday night of Pumpkin Show and driving down together. We always park in Ted Lewis Park and then walk up the hill to Court Street, which begins the blocks and blocks of closed streets full of vendors selling pumpkin-related everything. On the way, though, we always pass a house that sells pumpkins (on the honor system! adorably quaint!) and has this pumpkin farmer sitting outside:

Circleville Pumpkin Show 2011
Tracey, Dayna the ice skater, and Justin-who-convinced-me-to-buy-my-first-Apple-iBook

Before we had even made it one block into the thing, Tracey was already double-fisting a corndog and a bloomin’ potato that we all shared

Circleville Pumpkin Show 2011

and then we quickly moved on to calzones that my dad introduced me to a couple of years ago. I recognized the booth because the same wildly-stereotypical white trash woman was working in it, but she’s very nice and slathers the things in butter sauce before giving them to you, so I’m not judging.

We met up with my dad at the church booth where my cousins were selling hot chicken sandwiches (an Ohio phenomenon that involves cooking chicken in its broth, shredding it, and mixing it with, I don’t know, lots of black pepper and weird thickening stuff that gives the broth this kind of gelatinous texture; it’s awesome despite this disgusting characterization) and said embarrassing citypeople things to remind my dad how long I’ve been away from home.

And then he left, and we ate some more.

• deep-fried pickles
• pumpkin whoopie pies
• fried cheese on a stick
• homemade ice cream
• cotton candy
• deep-fried s’more
• deep-fried buckeyes
• apple cider slushes

and plenty more that I’ve forgotten, no doubt.

Circleville Pumpkin Show 2011

We visited the six-foot-wide pie and posed in front of the year’s biggest pumpkin (1436 pounds!)

Circleville Pumpkin Show 2011

before sidling up to the stretch of tables, where you can buy every kind of gourd imaginable, for the obligatory sexy pumpkin shot:

Circleville Pumpkin Show 2011

And then the HOLY CRAP, IS THAT A FACE ON A PUMPKIN? shot:

Circleville Pumpkin Show 2011

We could only guess that these things were grown inside of a face mold. They had the texture of the outside of a pumpkin, so they must not have been carved later, but whatever they were, they were creepy as can be.

When we got to the usual pile of various decorative gourds, Kamran picked up one that was especially weirdly-shaped and made a freaky face for me to take a picture of. Well, right at that moment, some big dumb Circlevillian stepped away from whatever meth he was smoking and yelled,

HEY!!”

Now, if it had been me holding the gourd, I would’ve thrown it smack-dab in the middle of his big empty head and said, “I FLEW HERE FROM NEW YORK CITY FOR THIS THING!! IF ANYONE LOVES THE PUMPKIN SHOW, IT’S ME!! YOU’D BE MORE LIKELY TO BRUSH YOUR TEETH THAN I WOULD BE TO STEAL THIS GOURD, YOU SLOBBERING BEEF-WITTED CANKER-BLOSSOM!!

But it was Kamran holding the gourd, so he quickly put it back down and apologized, and I caught this picture of him halfway between making the funny face and whipping his head around to see his accuser:

Circleville Pumpkin Show 2011

The only thing I could do to get revenge on the guy was to continue hanging around the table and taking pictures so he and his redneck cronies were forced to watch us not stealing anything. I never got this sort of treatment before I owned a pleather jacket.

Circleville Pumpkin Show 2011

(I really hope I was making this face to be funny and not because I ever really look like that.)

I enjoyed that this picture harkened back to the days of yore when I had prize-winning potatoes as my blog header image but would love to know how anyone can judge what makes a good pie pumpkin without actually using it in a pie:

Circleville Pumpkin Show 2011

Tracey and I modeled our pumpkin earrings by Handmade by Sandi maybe slightly too creepily

Circleville Pumpkin Show 2011

and then humped Justin for good measure:

Circleville Pumpkin Show 2011

At the end of the night, well past the supposed closing time, we made our way back to the cars and couldn’t resist stopping for one last hurrah as we passed the farthest cotton candy/soda stand on the strip. As we stood waiting for Kamran to get his soda, someone noticed one of these wooden cane/stick things that I would say I associate with the Pumpkin Show even more than pumpkin burgers and pumpkin cream puffs and all of those things.

Growing up, we would spend hours at the game where you won these things. For $5, you’d get 50 rings that you’d try to toss onto one of the sticks, which were standing up in holes cut through a long table. There’d be 30 kids standing around the table, trying to ring one of the sticks or hook the crook of one of the canes, which were hanging above the table even more out of reach.

It was such a status symbol when we were teenagers to walk around the Pumpkin Show with a handful of these things, tapping the ground to remind people of how many you had. And also to pretend to be blind. Naturally Kamran wanted one after hearing about how cool having them used to make us, and he finally had his chance in the last moments of the evening:

Circleville Pumpkin Show 2011

But of course he actually left it there, because we’re adults who don’t need status symbols to feel good about ourselves. Except for our phones and laptops and vacations and clothes and cars and dinner reservations.

The next night, we came back with my dad, and my sister and her husband drove up from Kentucky, and we did it all over again. And we’ll do it again next year and every year for the rest of our lives.

Love is Patient. Love is Kind. Love Does Not Steal Your Robot Cookie.

Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, everyone's married but katie, travels
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After a bazillion years of dating, my former co-worker, Eric, and his girlfriend, Christine, finally decided to stop living together in sin and started planning their wedding in her hometown of Miami. She whispered the date to me one night at my office dinner club and asked if I could come, and I said I probably couldn’t swing a plane ticket for the wedding and Thanksgiving in Ohio in the same month. And then I of course bought the ticket to Miami, like, the next day. My roommate/landlord/co-worker/friend, Jack, was also representing the not-Eric’s-friend-from-college contingent, so we flew down one night a couple of weeks ago after work for a whirlwind weekend filled with not wearing sandals, one of the best weddings ever, and so many stolen robot cookies.

Jack and I had just the morning and afternoon before the wedding to explore Miami, so naturally we didn’t leave our hotel until noon, and then it took $40 and a ridiculous amount of time to get from our hotel to South Beach, ten miles away. That was the weird thing about Miami: everything looks super-close on the map but never actually is. Since we’re used to walking everywhere in NYC, we thought it’d be no problem to walk across the bridge to South Beach, and then Google told us it would take three hours. So we ended up taking taxis everywhere, which was a different experience in that you call independent companies to come pick you up instead of just walking out your front door and hailing one of a thousand passing cabs, and some guy shows up in what might be his personal car with a backseat full of fast food wrappers. In a way, it’s cool, because you can’t call yellow cabs here and are sometimes left waiting for ten minutes at the side of the road on Saturday nights or when it rains, but in another way, I like the big divider that separates me from my cab driver here and makes him seem more like someone I’ve hired to do my bidding and less like my dad driving me home from the mall in his ’92 Toyota Camry or whatever.

Anyway, once we got to South Beach, we beelined for this restaurant Jack had picked out on Yelp. You know, despite the fact that I have an acclaimed palate and have been professionally critiquing food for the past three years. (Just kidding.) But seriously, I had bookmarked three or four restaurants that had four and five stars and would serve us an authentic Cuban sandwich, but Jack felt like he needed brunch. Brunch. In South Beach. But it was fine (three donuts and no more, if I was reviewing it for donuts4dinner.com), and then we had the rest of the afternoon to walk along the boardwalk separating the beach from the fancy hotels that seem to be having boozy pool parties all day long.

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

The beach was cuh-RAZY beautiful and totally put our beloved Hamptons to shame, but of course we were idiot Northerners wearing jeans and sneakers and absolutely no sunblock, so I basically ran out onto the beach to take these shots and then ran back in under the shade of the palm trees. We passed all sorts of adorable restaurants blowing mist from fans onto patios full of people sipping giant frozen drinks and then caught a taxi back to the hotel to get ready for the wedding. And by “get ready”, I mean “put some pretty clothes on over our sweat”.

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding
Jack looking swank

The wedding took place at a hotel on a tiny island surrounded by palm trees

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

with a great view of the mainland

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

and was casual enough that we could talk to the groom on the hotel’s generous veranda beforehand but formal enough that we were not allowed to wear flip-flops, the wedding website proclaimed. We were served champagne before Christine walked down the aisle in order to make the ceremony bearable, but it was short and sweet and needed no such bribery.

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding
this guy with all of the shoulder would NOT get out of my picture

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

I do notice that I totally Photoshopped this picture below way more yellow than the picture above, but I’m still stinging from the fact that Eric and Christine didn’t hire me as their totally-unpaid-wedding-photographer, so I’m not going to fix it.

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

This isn’t the kiss picture, but I just love how happy both Eric and the minister look. She thought Eric and Christine were destined for a long and happy marriage because they were both so attentive at their pre-wedding meetings with her, but little did she know that they’re just a couple of do-gooding nerds who were programmed to pay attention in school.

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

I can’t tell if Eric is pumping his fist and saying, “MARRIED! YUSS!” or if he’s thumb-pointing to himself and saying, “Who’s married? THIS GUY!”, but I like it either way.

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

Are those . . . blue flip-flops . . . peeking out from under Christine’s dress? DESPITE HER SPECIFICALLY TELLING ME I COULDN’T WEAR FLIP-FLOPS?

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

The table settings included diskettes with our names on them (but nothing actually stored in the memory–Jack asked)

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

and robot cookies that Jack requested to eat repeatedly throughout the evening and that I told him not to eat over and over. Well, at one point, we left the table, and when we came back, my cookie was gone. And then, after a billion years of dancing, we went outside to cool off in the less-cool-than-inside outdoors, and when we returned, Jack’s cookie was also gone. AND I KNOW WHO DID IT.

So tell your middle brother we hope he enjoyed the cookies, Eric, because he is dead to us now.

(j/k, j/k)

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

The reception started off with Eric and Christine’s first dance and ended with some robot cake

Eric and Christine's Miami Wedding

but in the middle was one of the most awesomely-planned weddings ever. They had a live band that legitimately did not suck, and right after Eric and Christine’s first dance, the band brought us all to the floor to dance. And then they sent us back to our tables to eat our crabcakes while Christine and her dad danced and Eric and his mom danced. And then they brought us all back out to dance. And then they sent us back to our tables to eat our salads while Christine’s dad gave this incredibly involved speech about how wonderful every single member of his family, including himself, is. (And I only say that a little bit mockingly, because I would want my dad to give the same speech at my wedding.) And then the band brought us back out again.

It went on like this until 11 p.m., when the band’s time was up. By this time, they had played “Livin’ on a Prayer”, “Don’t Stop Believin'” (can you believe both of those songs have dropped Gs?), and my very favourite ironic song of the moment, Enrique Iglesias’s “I Like It“. And we danced to every single one of them. With very little alcohol needed.

And then the next day we went to Christine’s parents’ house and ate all of their bagels to make up for not getting any robot cookies. We win.

Congratulations, Eric and Christine! We love you and promise to actually buy you a wedding gift someday!

I Hate All Kids. Except for This One and This One and This One and That One and That One.

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I guess the rule with me is that I don’t like kids unless I know them. Or know their parents. Or have seen pictures of them on a blog. Before I visit my friend Katie, as I do every time I’m home, I secretly start thinking things like, “I don’t feel like seeing kids right now,” and “You know we’re going to start talking about dumb kid stuff the entire time I’m there.” And then I get there and am reminded that I actually love seeing these kids and somehow love talking about dumb kid stuff, too. Weird.

I think it helps that Maria and Baby Evelyn are overwhelmingly outgoing. They were napping when we arrived, and when Katie went to check on them, Maria asked, “Who’s here?” Katie said, “Katie, Tracey, and Kamran,” and Maria said, “I’m scared of Kamran.”

Which is hilarious, because

1) she’s never met Kamran, and
2) approximately three minutes later, they were best friends.

Here are some pictures of them that in no way capture their cuteness:

Maria put on her Halloween costume for us. When you press a button in the crotch of the skirt, it plays classical music. It looks very inappropriate until you figure out what’s going on.

I also had to include the uncropped version of the picture so you can see Evelyn swinging off the side of the piano bench in a short-lived suicide attempt.

I know this is kind of cheesy and unlike me, but I guess even I like to be reassured that babies like me:

No, really, they like the game where their dad, Nick, forces them into a box and puts the lid on, I swear!:

I love Nick’s expression in this one; he seems to be confused by one of his children quietly strangling his other one, as if this doesn’t happen on a daily basis:

For real, you can’t help but love them, right?

Photo Excursion: Battery Park

Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, just pictures, living in new york is neat
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A few of my friends and I have big, fancy cameras and no idea what to do with them, so we decided to start a photo excursion club and take periodic jaunts in photogenic locations to improve our skillz.

Well, Anthony,

Jeff,

and I have big, fancy cameras. Jack has an iPhone. But he’s really serious with that iPhone:

We started out in Battery Park, which is just in front of our office building and has the most incredible views of Brooklyn, New Jersey, Ellis Island, and of course, the Statue of Liberty:

Look! Look! She’s in the foreground and background! See how clever I am?

We took about a zillion photos of flowers and bees landing on them (Anthony even tried to demonstrate to us that you can grab a bee and let it go before it realizes what’s going on, but after a few attempts, I think I convinced him he was going to lose a hand), but naturally I didn’t have my shutter speed set fast enough and didn’t capture a single good-looking shot.

Jack did manage to find some slower-moving wildlife, though:

We creepily watched other people’s kids play in the Battery Park fountain,

and saw a woman who may or may not have been Sinead O’Connor wearing a superhero costume play a concert inside Castle Clinton until the sun began to set:

We had been planning to walk up the East side of Manhattan, but the promise of the smoggy Jersey City moonlight drew us West to Battery Park City and the lovely promenade that spans its length. We stopped to watch a blues concert on the water, and I thought about how wonderful it is to live in a city where something like that is going on every second of the day.

Of course, it’s also the kind of city that commissions poop-shaped sculptures for its parks, so maybe it’s a trade-off:

Passing a group of chess tables, we jeered Anthony into planking (or “lying down game”, as Wikipedia calls it):

and then hilariously looked not ten feet away to see another dude copying him.

After that, Jack lost to himself in a sad game of imaginary chess, which I took a picture of:

and Anthony took a picture of:

and Jeff took a picture of (while accidentally using his color picker function, rendering about half of the photos he took black, white, and blue):

To show that he was more important than we are, Anthony pretended to assume professional photo-taking postures but was really just using them as an excuse to air out his crotch:

The sky went from blue

to black before we knew it

and we apropos-ly ended our photo expedition at the in-progress 9/11 memorial. Freedom Tower, as it was known. Or One World Trade, as we fondly call it:

We passed finance types lounging drunkenly at crowded outdoor cafes, collars unbuttoned and sleeves rolled up, and headed somewhere a little more our style:

Because as Jeff’s photos show, clearly we don’t know how to handle ourselves in public:

Padded Seats and Warmed Hearts

Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, fun times on the subway, just pictures
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Jack, Nik, and me as photographed by Kamran on the Long Island Rail Road (or Railroad, in my opinion) on the way to our friend Anthony’s house two weekends ago with our friends Eric and Christine for cheeses, habanero vodka, and fun times in the schoolyard pretending to be cast members from The Breakfast Club:

I’m not sure I remember the scene where Anthony Michael Hall gets a titty-twister from Judd Nelson, but I’m sure it happened.