Tag Archives: narcissism

No, Wait, I’ve Actually Seen Way More Famous People

Filed under bigtime celebrity, living in new york is neat, narcissism, there's a difference between films and movies
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I could tell yesterday that you weren’t totally blown away by the celebrities I’ve rubbed elbows with, and early this morning, I realized why. I forgot to add the most important ones, the ones I was actually filmed with. And in Meryl’s case, the one that I actually ran into accidentally. So here are the additions to my List of All the Famous People I Can Remember Having Seen Whilst Living in NYC for you to ooh and ahh at:

Meryl Streep, who I filmed scenes with as an extra in the movie Julie and Julia.

Brooke Shields, who I stood 2 centimeters away from while filming scenes as an extra in “Lipstick Jungle“, where I also stood 2 centimeters away from

Andrew McCarthy

and Rosie Perez

and Kim Raver

and Lindsay Price.

Please note that I reserve the right to keeping posting this sort of jazz whenever I remember another one, because nothing else in my life has any meaning.

But Everyone Looks Awful in Their Senior Pictures, Right?

Filed under narcissism, no i really do love ohio
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My mom died of brain cancer my senior year of high school, and since she was a teacher at my school, the principal gave me a sorry-your-life-is-ruined gift of a senior photo package worth some hundreds of dollars. It was a pretty cool present, I thought, since I’m generally narcissistic and loved the idea of having my picture taken over and over again in several different outfits by a willing photographer rather than my not-easily-coerced, annoyed-by-my-pestering-whenever-we-went-anywhere friends.

The photographer was a lanky guy named Scott who was so typical of all the now-thirtysomethings who had graduated from my high school: black mullet, tapered black jeans, tucked-in cheap flannel shirt, black sneakers, giant aviator wire-framed glasses. You know, your basic child molester ensemble. He was nice enough and made polite conversation with the friends who came with me for my shoot, but I think he thought he was shooting for Playboy or something. I of course brought several sweaters to change into, because his props included things like wagon wheels and hay bales, which was fine with me, because I’m straight offa the farm. But he kept telling me to “change into something slinky”, as if I had brought along my littlest black dress to lounge around in on the unfinished wood floor. And then he kept telling me to not smile and to try to look sexy, which was pretty hilarious what with my wearing patterned sweaters and faded jeans and all. At one point, he positioned me in this fake doorway covered with stucco that was supposed to be reminiscent of Mexico (because every Ohio teenager dreams of being Mexican?) with one hand on one side of the arch and the other hand on the other side and told me to look “dark”. And by that, I’m pretty sure he meant “less-clothed”.

The great thing is that my good friend Sheena, who also had her senior photos taken by Scott, really did bring slinky dresses to her shoot. That tramp.

And the even greater thing is that in the set of photos that my dad loved most and wanted to have blown up to astronomical proportions for everyone in my family to display on their fireplace mantles, I had this stray curl sticking out on one side of my head very obviously. When we looked over the proofs with Scott, he told us he could alter the photo to make it look natural, and we agreed to it. Now, in these days of Photoshop whizzes, that would be an easy feat, but this was Ohio in the year 2000, when my family and Tracey’s were the only ones in the whole county to own computers.

So when the pictures came back, poster-sized to outdo all of my cousin’s photos in my grandmother’s living room, one side of my head looked normal and the other side had an extra inch of afro-like curls DRAWN IN with a black marker. It doesn’t in any way resemble the rest of my hair, and you can pick out each of the swirly marker lines very distinctly.

But hey, they were free.

I’m a Nationally-Recognized, For-Real Writer (Sorta)

Filed under bigtime celebrity, narcissism, readin' and writin', why i'm better than everyone else
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Clearly I don’t brag about myself enough here, because I never told you that I totally won an extremely important and incredibly lucrative writing contest earlier this year. The contest was sponsored by the Gotham Writers’ Workshop here in NYC, and the idea of it was to submit a memoir made up of only six words.

Their example was a famous one by Hemingway that says,

“For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Ohhhhhhh, it tugs on your heartstrings, doesn’t it? My boyfriend Kamran’s friend Mike told us about the contest and offered up,

“I should have asked her age,”

to which Kamran replied,

“And then I got crabs again,”

and while I thought those were both brilliant, I went a much more serious route and submitted,

“I’ll never know mom’s meatloaf recipe.”

I didn’t actually expect to be chosen, of course, because I thought it was only meaningful to me. This is sort of embarrassing, but I’d been having a deep hankerin’ for meatloaf around that time, and my mom’s was so much better than any I’ve had since, and I’d kill to make it just like she did. But of course she’s been dead eight years now, and of course I can’t remember exactly what she put in it, and of course my dad isn’t any help in the matter. And thinking about the empty hole in my stomach where that meatloaf should be made me think about all the empty holes in me that parts of her should be filling, and so I entered the contest.

Weeks later, I received an e-mail from the Writers’ Workshop that said,

Here’s a writing contest update from the co-editors of the New York Times bestseller Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.


———————————–
Dear Gotham Writers,

Thank you so much for taking the time to enter our Six-Word Memoir Writing Contest. You guys crafted some amazing submissions, and choosing a winner was extremely tough (when we compiled Not Quite What I Was Planning, a least we got to choose 832!)

But, this time around, the winner is….

I’ll never know mom’s meatloaf recipe.
by Kathleen Ett of Brooklyn, NY

———————————–

The “but, this time around” dashed my hopes, but then I realized that this was a mass e-mail and that the but was intended for everyone BUT me! So evidently the judges got the implicit meaning, even if the explicit words themselves were sorta lame.

And my prize? Well, absolutely nothing. But it looks like I’ll be published in the sequel to the original six-word memoir book, and that’s pret-ty rad. Plus, my name is all up in lights on the results page at the Gotham website. Neat, huh?

The interesting thing is that this was the same week I found out I was going to be in an issue of Time Out New York (and more on that here, for posterity) and that I’d gotten a part in an upcoming Meryl Streep/Amy Adams film. I guess good things really do come in threes.

A First Trip to the New Brooklyn Ikea

Filed under living in new york is neat, narcissism
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The weekend before last, Boyfriend Kamran and I decided to explore the new Brooklyn Ikea and buy a tiny dresser for me to overflow with the zillions of polka-dot shirts that I’m currently storing folded on a chair in the corner of his apartment. We’ve always had access to the Ikea in Elizabeth, New Jersey, via a free shuttle bus from Port Authority, but the new Brooklyn Ikea is located in an up-and-coming neighborhood that we want to explore, anyway, AND it’s accessible via a free water ferry from lower Manhattan.

But of course we took the free shuttle bus outside of the Borough Hall subway station. (Which, if you’re oddly here for informational purposes, is on Joralemon Street near the northeast corner of Court Street.) And instead of buying a dresser, we:

1) Played with the plush

2) Imagined my future library when I can finally afford to buy books again

3) Defiled a sheepskin rug by pretending I was wearing nothing underneath it

4) Appreciated the old industrial Brooklyn while surrounded by the new-Brooklyn aging-hipster dads with their thirty-is-the-new-twenty mentality and their ANNOYING CHILDREN

5) Ate some really weird stuff in the cafeteria

6) Didn’t eat some other weird stuff in the grocery section, thankfully

7) Tried to figure out the difference between hand-blown and mouth-blown

We ended up buying a set of plastic containers for me to haul salad fixins to work in (which will never actually happen) and a wooden artist’s model, which Kamran named Chip and kept petting while murmuring, “You’re my only friend.” We are truly a pathetic lot. But we have a good time.

The Strange Things You Find in Your Local Bodega

Filed under it's fun to be fat, narcissism
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My best friend Tracey pointed this out to me on her visit a few weeks ago, and boy, am I glad she did.

Everyone knows that nothing makes food taste better than a smattering of JOYOUS MELTED CHILD.