Good friends stand back and mock you while you take vanity shots of yourself.
Great friends photobomb you.
Good friends stand back and mock you while you take vanity shots of yourself.
Great friends photobomb you.
Someday, when I’m old and famous and dying of an exploded stomach, they’ll ask me what the most important thing I learned in my immense life was, and I’ll say, “Make friends who not only fulfill you emotionally but also have nice cars, big pools, central air, and pets.” Several years ago, I made the very wise decision to become friends with my co-worker Ash, who later married Michael, who had already made the wise decision to be born into a family that owns a house in Cape Cod.
Kamran wasn’t feeling well, so I left alone for their apartment on a Thursday night a couple of weeks ago, and then we picked up our friend Jeff and drove the four hours to the cutest little cottage in the Cape:
We woke up early Friday morning to hit Keltic Kitchen before the crowds. Michael had been talking about this place for months and telling me it was the best breakfast I’d ever have, but I just couldn’t believe him because of the kitschy name.
But OMG. It was all that he described and more. I had creme brulee French toast with an orange-flavored custard sauce. They had French toast samplers and home fries. We left so stuffed we were unsure we’d ever eat again.
After playing around in the restaurant’s Irish store,
we went to a grocery store to stock up on mostly sweets,
and a surf shop that strangely sold hermit crabs
to stock up on flip-flops and weaponry to protect us on the mean streets of Hyannis:
We headed straight for the beach but found the water cold and the skies overcast,
so we spent the whole time goofing around on a jetty full of fishermen:
Afterward, ankles still covered in sand, we went to Captain Parker’s for breadbowls full of clam chowder, and then spent the night . . . at the arcade in the mall . . . driving around and singing along to “Kiss from a Rose” . . . and seeing X-Men: First Class. Weird, right?
But it was vacation, and we’ll do what we want! We also had ice cream at Four Seas on Kim’s recommendation, and after watching Ash get ogled outside by a maybe-racist/maybe-just-too-smalltown-to-have-ever-seen-someone-not-white girl, I had some crazy concoction of peanut butter ice cream with peanut butter sauce and peanut-butter-infused baby limbs or something, because nothing that doesn’t involve human sacrifice can taste that good.
Unable to resist the call of Irish foodstuffs, we went again to Keltic Kitchen the next morning, and I got something EVEN BETTER than creme brulee French toast, if you can imagine that. It was the 2×4: two eggs (over hard), two Irish sausages, two slices of cinnamon French toast, and two bangers, or thinly-sliced pork belly marbled with fat that melts in your mouth and is a lot less scary than its name would suggest.
We went to a different beach that afternoon and left off the sunscreen this time, having learned our lesson from the day before. So of course it was bright and beautiful and we all burned.
I swear, though, Cape beaches are freaky. The first one was covered in so many shells you had to wear your sandals on the sand, and the second one was full of seagulls plucking crabs out of the sand mere feet from shore.
IS THAT WHAT I’M STANDING ON WHEN I’M IN THE OCEAN? I don’t think I’m enough of a grownup to know these things.
Afterward, we went to the Christmas Tree Shops, to which I can only say, “What a bunch of horse crap! There wasn’t a Christmas tree in sight.” But really, why would I want there to be in the middle of June? Rename your store, you East Coast pinko hippie holiday-loving scum.
Then we stopped for more chowder at Seaside Pub, also on Kim’s recommendation, and everyone agreed it was pretty tasteless, as Kimerly told us it was going to be, so I’m not sure who you want to trust here. For dessert, we went to Katie’s Homemade Ice Cream simply for the name and despite its three out of five stars on Yelp, so of course it turned out to be truly delicious and to have important flavors like cake batter.
That night, we went to Pirate’s Cove for “adventure golf” that included so many testicle jokes,
dancing to entertain people waiting in line at other holes,
holes in one by Ash and me,
and a shark bursting through a wall that I think has very little to do with pirates but was still cool:
Sunday morning, we left the house at 8 a.m. and weren’t allowed any Keltic Kitchen due to time constraints, but even despite that severe oversight, it was a relaxing trip that let me see a whole new part of the U.S. Too bad my beach cravings are only 100 times worse now.
Thanks, Mike and Ash!
Remember how I went to Ohio on June 8th for my cousin Bethany’s graduation from vet school? No? Me neither. But here are some pictures that prove I was there or am at least really good at Photoshop!
My best friend, Tracey, was teaching a papercrafting class at the Columbus Museum of Art’s Craftacular Spectacular event, so we arrived early to take lewd pictures of her
in the “Don’t Eat the Art” exhibit
before giving in to our basest desires and dipping our hands into the rhinestone, glitter, and button bucket:
Apparently all of the students at the nearby Columbus College of Art and Design hated this sign when it went in outside the art museum (I believe it’s referred to as the “FART sign”), but I love it:
That night, we were supposed to go dancing at Skully’s as always, but I realized I’d only brought flip-flops and heels home. You can never have too many Chucks, so I was naturally pleased for an excuse to buy some new ones to leave at Tracey’s house. She was naturally pleased to be given an opportunity to step all over them with her own beer-drenched Chucks as we danced, because nothing looks so disgustingly new as new Chucks:
The next afternoon, I went to the HISTORIC Marcy Diner near my childhood home–which amazingly has a website that includes mention of the “pop” they sell–with my dad to eat $1 coney dogs. AND SOMEHOW DID NOT TAKE A SINGLE PICTURE OF THE EVENT. But you can bet it was a better hot-dog-eating experience than any I’ve had in fancypants New York City.
That night, I went to a big swanky vet school soiree with my cousin, Bethany, that Ohio State president E. Gordon Gee seemed to randomly happen upon, like he was taking a shortcut through the ballroom in the student union without realizing there was anything going on in there. Everyone was taking pictures with him, and I was all, “Wait, why?”, but this is for Bethany:
The next night, I went to dinner with Bethany and her family, and we spotted this gem in the Barnes & Noble parking lot:
Afterward, we went to her Doctor of Veterinary Medicine hooding ceremony. I guess this is a hooding:
I call it a choking.
She was simultaneously totally annoyed by all of the pictures I took and secretly thinking she was Wonder Woman:
Then we went to Applebee’s (!) for drinks (!), and Bethany’s brother paid for the whole shebang but not before complaining about Bethany’s $6.50 cocktail. I was confused until they informed me that $6.50 is actually expensive for a drink, and the $16 I’m now used to paying in NYC is offensive.
The next day, my dad and I skipped church (!) and went to Rooster’s for lunch instead of our usual Bob Evans. Adventurous! Then we came back to the house and watched my stepsister, Jenny, shave her girls’ 4-H pigs, which are being kept in my dad’s and stepmom’s back yard. Appaaaaaaaaaarently, 4-H judges think they look better when they’re hairless:
I think they’re the cutest things ever no matter what:
But especially when they’re being fed marshmallows:
Before I’d come home, a giant storm took out trees and power lines all over Ohio, and my family’s compound suffered some wild damage. Not only did a tree fall over onto the front porch, but the limb of another blew off onto the garage, revealing that it was hollow inside! And full of bees!:
That night, Tracey and I went to visit our longtime other best friend, Katie, her daughters Maria
and Evelyn (who looks like Toby from Labyrinth, Tracey decided this week),
and her husband-whom-I-introduced-her-to-because-I’m-the-best-matchmaker-ever-but-only-because-I-tried-to-date-him-first-and-he-totally-rejected-me-but-I-still-love-him, Nick:
After being served dinner by Katie, we all went to the backyard so I could take wildly adorable family pictures of them:
and then we watered Katie’s garden.
Well, Katie watered her garden.
The rest of us played in the water.
Well, some of us played in the water while some of us licked the water from the watering can:
Then we went back inside to enjoy the Cheesecake Factory desserts Tracey had brought (the only Cheesecake Factory I had on the entire trip!) and to watch Katie play with her new toy:
Until Tracey got too jealous and needed to see how much she remembered from her one quarter of string instrument training while getting her music education degree at OSU:
And that was it! Tracey and I spent the next day chowing on pizza and Graeter’s ice cream at the mall, and then she dropped me off at the airport so I could return to my babyless, pigless, expensive-drink world.
I got sick again! I’m guessing this is to spite me for all the “I’m a farmgirl; my germ defenses are country strong” bragging I do and all of the “let your kids play in the dirt so they won’t end up with pansyass immune systems like yours” advice I give.
The worst part is that it just so happened to be during the four days my cousin Will came in from Ohio with a couple of his ladyfriends for his first time touring the city as an adult. So the things I did with them included:
• dinner in my neighborhood at Lobo, followed by dessert at VanLeeuwen, neither of which I could taste
• dinner at “Top Chef” contestant Angelo Sosa’s Social Eatz with Kamran, my roommate, Jack, and our friend Nik, where I could taste even less
• five minutes on our rooftop deck before we all chickened out from the heat
Aaaaaaand . . . that’s it. On the bright side, Will and his friends totally learned how to use the subway on their own! And anyway, they probably didn’t want me along on their big city adventures, trying to convince them not to spend $300 on shoes. Although I probably could’ve prevented that pesky two-hour separation that occurred when Will decided to hop onto a train without his friends just as the doors were closing.
But where’s the fun in that.
I’ve had a week of work and a trip to Ohio since my weekend in the Hamptons, but I WILL NOT BE DETERRED from writing about a memorable event for once, because man, this thing was memorable. Eleven friends and I booked the same Southampton beach house we enjoyed for a weekend last year and were fortunate enough to get a $200-a-night discount on it thanks to some springtime water damage that left us without kitchen cabinets. ($200 off per night just because we had to store our groceries on the kitchen window seat instead of the cabinets. Talk about richpeopleproblems.)
My friend Nik and I met our friends Ash and Mike in Queens on Thursday morning so they could drive us in their car to a for-real grocery store with more than five aisles, the Cheesecake Factory in Long Island, and the pet hotel, where they left their dog, Gizmo, for the weekend:
Nik spent most of the trip doing this in the back seat to show off that dammit, he was on vacation, and he was going to wear his most comfortable and most inappropriate shorts:
We arrived at the house around 3 p.m., greeted by our friends Chantee, Brandon, and Gretchen, and took in the most wonderful sight in the world: the ocean mere steps away from our front door:
Our house is this crazy three-story behemoth with 12 beds, all of them in these charmingly-terrible themed rooms:
But we rarely ever see the house before 9 p.m., because there’s this
right across the street. It was unfortunately too early in the season for swimming, but just the feel of the water on my feet and the sand in my hands and in my hair and up my butt sends me into this blissful state of sedation that requires no actual paddling.
The boys went on a drive to look at the multi-million-dollar homes surrounding us, so we girls sat in the downstairs living room, talking about boys and gazing out into the bay behind the house:
We weren’t the only ones gazing, though:
Earlier in the car, Nik had been making fun of the superficiality of southern rappers, saying they only talked about cash and cars and girls. But when he’d left the house on his drive, he’d left his iPod hooked up to the living room speakers, and as we sat talking about our sordid dating pasts, a song came on with a chorus that went, “Ro-tating my tires. I’m just ro-tating my tires.” Rap is dumb.
We met the boys for dinner in town at a restaurant where women with shawls wrapped around their shoulders glared at us across the patio, and I took two pictures that I totally thought I could successfully make into a panorama later. And I did! Unless you look at Nik’s right shoulder, which is freakishly square and cut down the middle:
We spent that night playing Xbox Kinect, drinking Mike’s Hard everyflavor until we contracted diabetes, and just generally feeling superior to our friends who weren’t arriving until the next evening.
The next morning, Gretchen and I went on walk down the beach that was supposed to last only a few minutes and therefore didn’t involve me wearing any sunscreen. (Because I learned nothing from the sunburn last year that still has my back looking like it’s covered in tiger stripes.) Our section of the beach is basically just sand, but we found that farther east, there are piles of mermaid’s purses, a crab graveyard, a jetty, freakishly big seagulls, wildly green seaweed, and not a single shark that we could see, despite that week’s earlier sighting:
Gretchen, Ash, Chantee, and I went back to the beach that afternoon (this time with sunscreen!) and walked in the opposite direction to the end of the beach, where we found a shelterhouse full of ice cream treats and constantly-tan people who probably think they’re quite sophisticated living two hours from New York City.
That night, we all showered and started to pile into our cars to see the new X-Men movie before checking Brandon’s iPad and realizing the closest theatre was more than 30 miles away. So we sat considering our options
until the pool boy (for real) came and told us he’d found a kitten underneath the house. Having raised approximately 152 cats while growing up on the farm, I suggested that we leave it there for a while and check to see if the mother would return for it; mothers carry their young from location to location one at a time, I’m sure you know, so I figured there was a good chance she’d left it there on purpose. But Mike was apparently overcome with fatherly instincts and decided he needed to take the kitten to a vet, who confirmed that she had recently been fed.
But I guess you can’t dump a kitten back underneath a house once you pull her out, so Mike and Ash are now the proud owners of baby Penelope! Whom Ash tried to name Katniss after the character in The Hunger Games, which is the cleverest name ever! Because it’s a cat! Get it? But not everyone has read the book to understand the name. So she’s Penelope. But I’ll obviously still be calling her Katniss in secret.
Here she is sitting in Nik’s lap, right before she peed a pee that covered the entire front of his shirt:
Jack, Roxanne, Beth, Eric, and Christine all arrived late that night, and we spent the rest of the evening watching movies, playing Xbox, and making fun of Nik for getting so sunburned that day it was making him nauseated. Haha, skin cancer is funny.
We spent the entire next day at the beach, and then that night, Eric, Christine, Gretchen, and I went for a walk along the bay, which is the much more interesting/much more disgusting body of water behind our house. While the ocean side has clear water and little visible sealife, the bay is green and carpeted with breeding snails, dueling horseshoe crabs, and oozy sand you don’t want to stick your feet in.
Right off the bat, Eric spotted a horseshoe crab on its back way too far up on the beach and flipped it over with a stick to see if he could lead it back to water. Its tail was wrapped in a clump of seaweed, and half of its legs seemed to be nonfunctioning, but it sloooooooowly turned back toward the bay and inched its way along, traveling whole feet in the hour we spent exploring the beach:
The water in the bay had retreated hundreds and hundreds of feet so that we could walk on the squishy sand that only hours before had been covered over in murkiness. There was some concern that the sand wouldn’t hold up and we’d find ourselves ankle-deep in stinky snail sand at any minute, but we made it back to the house mostly un-gross and were greeted by Chantee for our family dinner:
Yes, that was an entire plate of Pizza Rolls in front of me. Some of which I actually shared with my friends. But most of which I did not.
The next morning, we went to the beach one last time, and I admired the elderly couples there sitting on lawn chairs in sweatshirts and ballcaps, too chicken to swim but still unable to resist the draw of the water. I think a lot of people use their Hamptons presence for economical braggarting, but it’s much more special than that to me. Most of my vacations are spent in Ohio, and while I obviously wouldn’t trade those for anything, I still feel a lot of anxiety around flight delays, trying to fit in all of the visits to relatives and old friends, and making sure I look presentable so no one thinks I’m falling apart out here. Traveling by car, listening to music, escaping all of the pressure of the city, not caring about my hair or my makeup or my clothes, not having any responsibility, being near the water . . . truly my idea of paradise, and it’s only two hours away.