Tag Archives: no i really do love ohio

What Kind of Pathetic Daddy’s Girl Spends Her Fake Spring Break in Ohio?

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I’ll be visiting my family and (real, not-just-out-of-convenience) friends (haha, just kidding, wonderful and supportive NYC friends) in Ohio for the rest of the week!

So far, my plans include:

• reluctantly eating home cooking when I know there’s a Dairy Queen 10 miles away (which in no way reflects the quality of the home cooking)

• photographing one of our scrapbooks for a brand new blog-in-the-making with my best friend, Tracey

• dancing at Skully’s on Ladies 80s night, which now apparently includes 90s songs (blasphemy!)

• making Dishy’s pumpkin whoopie pies and some sort of (hopefully many sorts of) cupcakes

• planning entire days of scrapbooking based around where Tracey and I want to eat beforehand and afterward

• getting sprinkles for the first time ever on my favourite ice cream from the best ice cream parlor in the whole world, Graeter’s

• trying to figure out why my parents’ TV is always set to the Hallmark channel whenever I turn it on

• as little else as possible

PUMPED!

Living the Ohio Life at Three Times the Rent

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Last Friday, I was alone. I knew Kamran would be at the library all night with just over a week left before the bar exam, so I’d planned for many hours of one-on-one time with the DVR and “Criminal Minds”. But right about quittin’ time, I started feeling like I wanted to do something. I thought about how ironic it is to live in New York City and keep a blog about it and then sit home quietly eating bon-bons on a Friday night.

I thought about calling my former NYCBFF, Beth, but then I remembered she moved to San Francisco. Then I thought about calling my current NYCBFF, Ash, but then I remembered she’s trying to save money to buy a house and move somewhere even worse, Connecticut. Then I thought about calling Chantee, but then I remembered she’s busy rigging rich people’s taxes for the next two months. And on and on. I went through a mental list of each and every person I know in NYC and found a reason not to call any of them. And I felt like if I was just going to sit around on my couch, I might as well be sitting on a couch with my BBFF back in Ohio.

But just then, my NYCBFF IMed me and said she’s now a bazillionaire, doesn’t need to save all of her money anymore, and wanted to hang out! So I went to her luxuriously large apartment in Queens, and we got into her brand new CR-V, and her husband drove us to The Cheesecake Factory. Which was in a mall. In Long Island. Full of people in not just Juicy Couture velour tracksuit bottoms, which Ash says is okay, but the whole tracksuit.

Cheesecake Factory

It was the very un-NYC-est thing we could do and also the un-suckiest.

Living in New York City is HARD

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My boyfriend and I like to talk about how people who don’t live in NYC shouldn’t be allowed to complain about things. It’s not that we don’t think other people’s problems are valid; it’s that problems that are manageable elsewhere are compacted by 100 here.

Hate sitting in your freezing car while it warms up? Hate driving in snow? Try waiting out in the cold for the bus. Try walking through the snow while cabs spray dirty slush onto your slacks.

Think your groceries are too expensive? Don’t have the money to eat out? Here, we pay anywhere from $1 extra to literally twice as much for the same things I used to buy in Ohio. Our grocery stores have one brand of some things and no brands of other things. We go to crappy chain restaurants in Times Square just for the novelty and drop $25 on the plates we used to pay $5 for in our homelands.

Wish you owned your own home? Think your kitchen’s too small? Want more storage space? Hate not having a guest room? Need a new washer/dryer? YOU ARE RIDICULOUS.

I don’t mean to pretend like there aren’t a million benefits to living in NYC, and obviously I love it enough to have spent five and a half years here. It’s just that sometimes I look at my friends lives, and they just seem so easy. I mean, not to put my best friend on the spot here, but she has a bazillion-room house in Ohio with a guest bedroom, an office, and a craft room that she had to put something like 3% down for. (Here, it’s no less than 20% down–even that’s oftentimes not enough–and we’re talking 20% on half-a-million-dollar one-bedroom condos.) She has a two-car garage, every retail giant imaginable right down the street, two personalitied cats and a place to put their litter boxes, the ability to do her laundry right in her house, and three bathrooms that ensure she, her husband, and I can all poo at the same time when I visit. That’s livin’ the dream, man.

But sometimes–and I don’t intend at all for this to sound mean–everything outside of NYC all seems a little generic. Everyone has their carpeted floors and their beige walls, their drive to work with their favourite radio station, their Walmarts and their Red Robins. They have boxes of decorations for each of the holidays and garages full of lawn-trimming equipment, a TV in every room and newspaper clippings of TVs they’d like to buy. The idea of once again having church-going homophobe friends who birth a bunch of babies because they mistakenly think their DNA’s worth passing on sort of makes me sick to my stomach.

Of course, it also seems very familiar, and I’m nostalgic enough to be attracted to that. Sometimes, when my best friend sends me a recipe for homemade Pizza Rolls and I look around my boyfriend’s 250-square foot studio and notice he has no oven, I think, “I will look back at this time in my life someday and ask myself, ‘HOW THE HELL DID I SURVIVE THIS?”’ Sometimes I think about the one-bedroom apartment my boyfriend almost bought, and I crave that extra room and a TV for it. Sometimes I crave an apartment in someplace like Los Angeles or Irvine–places that seemed so not New York City not so long ago–where my boyfriend and I can cook dinner in a room that isn’t also his living room, dining room, office, and bedroom.

How old do you have to be before you can’t live like a college student anymore? But how much will you miss it when you’re not?

“Lost” is So 2010, Apparently

Filed under a taste for tv, no i really do love ohio
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Yesterday, I wore the t-shirt my best friend, Tracey, got me for Christmas with the Dharma Initiative logo from “Lost” on it

where the Dharma in the center is replaced with an outline of the state of Ohio, and not a single person so much as commented on it.

Tracey and I both know it’s basically nonsensical, but still. WHY HAVE I CHOSEN ALL THE WRONG FRIENDS?

The Battles of Hastings

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Comedian Drew Hastings moved from L.A. to Ohio to become a farmer and is making a documentary about his experiences. It’d almost be offensive if it wasn’t so funny:

Last year Drew sold five calves for $3500.

Raising those calves cost him $3000.

Once, while my dad and I were taking care of a dead calf, I asked him why he chooses to farm when it takes so much effort for so little payoff, and he said, “Well, because I like it.” Oh, farmers.