On Friday night, Kamran and I went to a restaurant that I spent all day maligning and all night half-maligning and half wanting-to-exclaim-openly-and-not-quietly-about. Only everyone around us was actually doing just that, and it seemed so ungainly to me. It’s funny to see your own awful qualities reflected in other people, right? A few years ago, I would’ve been the one calling out to the chef about how good the food was to earn his favor. I would’ve been trying to crack jokes to make all of the other diners like me like I used to in all of my college classes. I wouldn’t have loudly mistaken the green onion for bok choy, though.
Since the restaurant is across the street from my apartment, Kamran was practically forced to spend the night at my apartment for the first time since I moved in last January. We ate Cadbury Creme Eggs and one of my 1000-calorie Reese’s eggs while watching Boogie Nights, since my roommate had ordered HBO that day, and Kamran finally stopped mentioning the possibility of taking a cab back to his place around 2 a.m. The next morning, we ate banh mi and drank bubble tea and watched The Breakfast Club and played Call of Duty and had the kind of day that people all across Brooklyn were probably having at that exact moment.
That night, we met our friends Nik and Marko and my roommate, Jack, at Yuka for all-you-can-eat sushi on the Upper East Side and ate all we could. Including hand rolls with shiso and plum and fermented soybeans. We walked past the giant building-high white structures the MTA is constructing over 2nd Avenue as they complete the new 2nd Avenue subway line on our way to Dunkin Donuts/Baskin Robbins, where I got a scoop of ice cream called Icing on the Cake that had sprinkles and the consistency and flavor of vanilla frosting. AMAZING. I also got a cream-filled, not custard-filled donut. Those things are hard to find, you know. Which is ridiculous, because cream is obviously superior. We took our treats to a platform over the East River and watched boats drive by without their lights on and then went home to do laundry, because we are responsible.
On Sunday, we went clothes shopping for Kamran and bought matching hoodies even though it’s now regularly 70 degrees or more. We brought Milky Ways and wasabi peas to our park to stare at the haunted house and the puppies and the homeless guy who was very conspicuously hiding a backpack under the stairs to the street overpass. But we didn’t call the cops. We bought French bread and a creamy Reblochon and covered them with honey and watched X-Files and Celebrity Apprentice and couldn’t fall asleep until after midnight.
non-Instagrammed photo by Jack
And then Kim came over last night for Game of Thrones and brought a Cadbury Twisted candy bar for me from the British candy store that of course exists in Manhattan. I found out about this bar when British Mel left me a comment about them but warned that she and all her SPOILED, ROTTEN, UNAPPRECIATIVE (j/k, j/k) friends agree that the creme-to-chocolate ratio is wrong. I can see what they’re saying, because yeah, there’s a LOT more chocolate in the bar than in a Cadbury Creme Egg, and unlike the thin shell on the Egg, the shell of the bar is really thick. And amazing. And I need more. But I could never replace the Eggs with the bar completely.
And if I didn’t have a BlackBerry, I would have Instagrammed all of this.
