Tag Archives: living in new york is neat

What Other People’s Lives Must Be Like Every Weekend

Posted by plumpdumpling on October 18, 2010 – 6:00 pm
Filed under creepy boyfriend obsession, it's fun to be fat, living in new york is neat
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It’s been two weeks since it happened, but it lives in my mind as if it was yesterday: the weekend Kamran decided he didn’t care about law school (his last semester!) and let me make a brunch reservation for us.

We dined in front of Lincoln Center at Bar Boulud, which was so completely boring as to render the name of this blog un-ironic, despite its cheese pastries that sparkle in the sun:

We made our way through Central Park to avoid 59th Street and the horse-drawn carriages that line it, but of course those itch-inducing allergybuckets follow us everywhere:

Walking down 5th Avenue, we passed by the all-glass Apple store and saw this man “coincidentally” standing outside:

And then stopped by FAO Schwarz, which oddly, neither of us had been to in our 5+ years here to:

1) take multiple pictures of ourselves with the LEGO Chewbacca while small children anxiously tried to crowd us out:


(that’s me and my cleavage between his legs!)

2) test our strength on a foam puzzle that’s the size of Kamran’s entire apartment:

3) and learn the true meaning of factory farming:

We talked about stopping by a Duane Reade to grab some candy to get our blood sugars primed for Halloween, but then we realized we were too close to Dylan’s Candy Bar to pass it up. What you have to understand about Dylan’s is that it’s a microcosm of New York City itself: it’s the most wonderful place on Earth and has everything you’d ever want in life, but you can’t even begin to afford it, and it’s full of all of the worst people imaginable. Dylan’s has every kind of candy ever made, but it costs $13.99 per pound. It has clear staircases filled with your favourite childhood treats, but they’re constantly crowded with dumb tourists. It’s wonderful. And awful.

So Kamran and I decided to get a single pound of candy to split, which we deemed a “reasonable” pre-Halloween snack. Then we got into the checkout line, which stretched literally to the door. As we stood there, a kind-of-friendly-but-kind-of-surly dad started talking to us out of nowhere about how he’s lived in NYC for 30 years and had never heard of Dylan’s up until then, and we just looked at him like, “Sucker.” Then he turned to his kid and said, “Should we try to make this last until Monday, or should we eat it all today?”, and I felt such love for humanity at that moment.

But then Kamran whispered, “There’s a lady over here on a Rascal who keeps eating the candy, and it’s really depressing me.” And indeed, this superfat middle-aged blobby thing came speeding over to our area a second later, gnawing on whatever she’d picked out of the bins with the “no sampling” signs on them and just smiling to beat the band. She couldn’t fit her scooter through the racks of candy blood we were standing near, so the guy and his son behind us offered to let her in front of them in line.

Outside, we passed a homeless person propped up against the side of a building, and not two feet in front of . . . it . . . I spotted an abandoned gummy bear that would’ve been soooooo perfect for Lost and Lonely Leftovers, so I stopped and took a step backward but then reconsidered and kept walking. Kamran asked what I was doing, and when I told him, he seemed to think this made me a bad person! But clearly this homeless person wasn’t hungry if it was letting a perfectly good gummy bear just sit there.

Moments later, the lady on the Rascal went speeding past us on the sidewalk, honking her horn and digging into her bag of candy as we went on to curse at old ladies.

Well, not “we”. Me.

Everything That’s Good in Life Should Be Mine and Mine Alone

Posted by plumpdumpling on July 29, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under living in new york is neat
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I went apartment-hunting this weekend with my friend Jack, and this was the view from one of the units we saw:


(click here for the uncropped version, which is so much more impressive)

In the larger version, you’ll note the group of identical buildings in the lower righthand corner. That’s government housing. For poor people. Poor people with a great view.

It just ain’t right.

Hamptons Photodump!

Posted by plumpdumpling on July 14, 2010 – 1:30 pm
Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, living in new york is neat, par-tay
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No, we actually did go to the Hamptons. And here are the pictures to prove it:

[svgallery name=”hamptons”]

Most of these were taken by my friend Anthony, who I want to be when I grow up. He took more than 1000 photos during the trip, if that’s any indication of what a good time we had. The pictures of us playing drunken Cranium (which I don’t even like) for five hours every night have been omitted. As have the pictures of me crying for another five hours after I fell down Rollerblading.

How to Water Plants in NYC

Posted by plumpdumpling on July 13, 2010 – 10:30 am
Filed under living in new york is neat
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You should’ve seen the look this guy gave me when he saw me taking a picture of him.

People in some foreign countries don’t have any water at all, and we spray ours all over the sidewalk. I find it kind of sad and kind of awesome.

(Mostly awesome.)

My Most Brooklynest Night

Posted by plumpdumpling on June 30, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Filed under living in new york is neat, living in new york sucks so hard
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Anyone who’s lived in NYC for five minutes can tell you that the electric company, ConEd, sucks. Now that I’m nearly halfway to becoming a “real New Yorker” (they say it takes 10 years, and if how New York you are is based on how much you despise all other New Yorkers, I believe them), I have a few horror stories of my own. But Monday night’s takes the cake.

On Monday morning, I posted about tiny and therefore easily air-conditioned apartments being a good reason to never leave Manhattan, and Bachelor Girl said, “At least you live in a place where you will not DIE without air conditioning.” I should’ve known it was foreshadowing.

So, my friend Tessa was staying with me, as I mentioned, and after work that day, we met up with her-friend-who-I’ve-also-hung-out-with-once, Mark, and my friend Ash at Caravan of Dreams, a raw organic vegan restaurant that goes against everything I believe in but is delicious. Afterward, we went for a couple of hours of karaoke, which turned out to be amazing, because I somehow only make friends with people who have incredible voices.

Tessa and I got back to my apartment at around 11 p.m. and sort of started getting ready for bed but then ended up chatting for 45 minutes or so about how much better we are than everyone else, how people try to ruin our lives because we’re so great, the usual. And then all of the lights went out. Had I been awake alone and, say, in the bathroom, I would’ve freaked the hell out. As it was, we sat in shock for three seconds, and then I realized I was holding my BlackBerry and scrolled the trackwheel on it so the screen would give us a little light. The air conditioner was oddly still on, so I went over and switched it off to see if that would fix anything, and then we went to my bedroom window to see if the whole block was down, but the houses across the street were still lit. Tessa has some experience with fuse boxes, so she went to work on ours, flipping everything every which way, but nothing changed. I tried to turn the air conditioner back on, but of course it wouldn’t work anymore.

We slipped on our shoes and trudged out to the street, and while the houses across the street really were lit (with one smug asshole surfing on his computer right in front of his bay window), neighbors on my side of the street were all filing out of their houses in confusion. A ConEd emergency truck parked right in front of us and set about making some horrendous noise as it worked on the cables below the street, no doubt waking up anyone who had been sleeping peacefully and hadn’t noticed the power go out (my roommate).

We stood outside for perhaps 15 minutes, figuring 95 degrees and a slight breeze was better than 95 degrees and a non-functioning air conditioner, and then a girl from my building came out and announced that ConEd had called and left her a message about how it was a planned outage meant to last anywhere from two to six hours. WHO PLANS AN OUTAGE ON THE HOTTEST DAY OF THE YEAR THUS FAR? And who thought midnight, when there’s nowhere to be except your apartment, was a better idea than, say, noon, when most people are at work, anyway, and everyone else can just walk down the street to an air-conditioned coffee shop? Oh, ConEd.

The thing is–despite the fact that:

1) we had to sleep through the sweltering heat that night with no relief,
2) the two to six hours ConEd promised turned into twelve, and
3) Kamran’s Manhattan apartment has free and unlimited air conditioning,

I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything. All of us hanging out on our stoops, my landlord’s non-English-speaking Italian mother coming out of our building in her housecoat, an old lady who still had electricity yelling from her window for everyone to shut up and let her sleep . . .

It was so Brooklyn.