OH MY GOD RAIN

Remember my mean post a while back to all of you that sent me floods and floods of emails about how I should blog about my wedding plans 24hrs a day and then I basically told you all to shut up and go to hell and that I would NEVER EVER blog about wedding plans well yeah...whatever.

When I happen to mention to those that ask that E and I are considering getting married in the park it doesn't matter who it is nor how cool they are but everyone says the same damn thing....WHAT IF IT RAINS????!!!!

OH MY GOD! RAIN! RAIN IS SO SCARY! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!
IT'S RAINING! OH MY GOD! MUD! AND RAIN! AND WET GRASS!
WHAT THEN????? OH MY GOD!!!! RAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's not like we are planning a four hour affair here complete with hymnals and a lighting of the unity candle. We are talking a nice modest 20 minutes at most. Have you ever stood in the rain with an umbrella for twenty minutes? Were you ok?

Now that I think about it perhaps we should plan the whole thing around rain. Something involving me in a bikini coming down the aisle which is actually in the form of a bright yellow Slip N' Slide.

BIZARRE CONFESSION

When approaching a revolving door for some reason I feel the need to take a running start and triple my steps and inevitably dive into the revolving door in a very dramatic manner. I also am guilty of doing this when boarding an escalator.

BANNED: CANDY BAR COFFEE

What’s the deal with all you fake coffee drinkers? You know who you are. The kind of people that order those disgusting coffees with like…butterscotch sauce and maraschino cherries and crushed walnuts on top. You are not drinking coffee when you order something like that you do realize that don’t you?

Every morning when I get to work I stand on the coffee line in a daze. I often tune out conversations around me and try desperately to wake up as I recount the except steps of how I got from my bed to this very office lobby. This morning was different. I couldn’t help but overhear the following conversation:

(Note-this is a regular coffee stand-not a Starbucks)

Coffee Guy: Hi, what can I get for you?
Customer Girl: Yes, I’d like a small, skim iced Snickers please.
Coffee Guy: Ok. Coming right up.

Coffee Guy: Hi, how about you. What would you like?
Customer Guy: Ah…you know what. I’ll take a large iced Snickers please.
Coffee Guy: No problem. Coming right up.

At this point I start to look around. Snickers coffee? I know I wasn't quite awake yet but what is going on here? Sure enough there on the blackboard as coffee of the day was written SNICKERS.

I mean really. What next people? The Kit Kat cappuccino?

FASHION BUG

I don’t really appreciate nor understand fashion to the degree most people do. It’s sort of the way I hear people talk about modern art and “not getting it”. Not in a bad way-just that I am often left puzzled and wondering why the hell I am supposed to spend $800 on a pair of shoes I will no doubt ruin in about twenty minutes.

My sister is a fashion diva. She LOVES clothes and knows clothes and has so many god damn clothes…it’s amazing. Unfortunately, her passion for fashion negates my theory that I am fashion retarded because of the mere fact I grew up on Long Island. After all while my cool ‘city’ friends were combing the racks of Benetton I was forced to shop at clothing stores bearing such names as “Fashion Bug”, “Dress Corral” and “Shirt Shack”.

One time my father took me into the city and we went to Antique Boutique –the old, cool one with mannequins hanging from the ceiling and silver spray painted walls and mirrored ramps. Pops bought me a $99 pink denim cropped jean jacket with like…10,000 pockets. For the time it was amazing. And don’t think I didn’t bust it out to the tune of Welcome to the Jungle at my next small town carnival.

Last night I have to confess to watching the final episode of fashion reality show “Project Runway”. I actually enjoyed it despite not having followed along all season. I think it was helpful to see the ‘behind the scenes’ of how a show is put a together. It flashed me back to the one and only fashion show that I attended and actually was in. At the time I was an intern for PAPER Magazine and one of their contacts-a skateboard/snowboard designer was launching a wacky fashion line. They needed ‘normal’ models to wear the clothes in an upcoming fashion show. Thanks to the lack of digital cameras in the day, I think it’s safe to say there is not a single digital photo of me in a plastic see-through blazer with a pink fur collar and a short-short leather mini-anywhere on the Internet. Then again…look what happened to Paris.

WHY YOU STICK TOGETHER

This weekend E and I decided to test our relationship endurance and explore the outlet mall near my hometown on Long Island. Nothing to really get the blood flowing like a few hundred stores full of pokey Americans stuffing their faces with Taco Bell and weeding through a bunch of discounted crap.

E wanted some pants and I wanted some underwear. Normally, this is a type of errand we’d handle individually without one another tagging along. In the entire history of our dating I can’t recall a single time we said, “Hey let’s go shopping! Together!” We were surrounded everywhere by couples that were shopping for hours together. And smiling. I felt like a foreigner in a strange land.

We started out strong we really did. A quick scan of the store, a nod yes or no if we thought it was worth going in and then off we would go to the next. This was a great method and worked for the first 75 stores however by store 475 both of us were tired, hungry and decided that ‘splitting up’ to save time might be a great idea. This was not a good idea. Without E’s support I was on my way to a fast downward spiral of shopping delusion. Take for example where he left me before splitting off-rummaging through the racks of the teenage clothing store Delia’s of all godforsaken places.

When E parted he uttered a phrase I hope to never hear cross his lips again, “I’ll be in Coach if you need me.” What happened to us? We were turning into scary, suburban mall shoppers. The moment he left I had a major What am I doing here??? reality check and quickly tossed down my pile of XXXXL sized “I heart the O.C.” T-shirts to go find him.

Unfortunately, almost simultaneously, E had a similar- What am I doing here??? moment and quickly threw down the leather Coach wallet in his hands and dashed back to Delia’s to find me. Two mall shopping cargo ships passing in the night.

After finally reuniting, we embraced and agreed it was time to go. E volunteered to go get the car while I waited outside Old Navy tapping my foot to “You Can Call Me Al” blasting from the mall stereo system.

E spun around the corner in my mother’s car and I got in:

K: You’re like my knight in a shining white suburban jeep.
E: I sure am.
K: Now let’s get the fuck out of here.

BABY'S FIRST SUBLET

One of the cute, young, bright-eyed assistants in our office signed up for her first sublet apartment in New York this week. Her enthusiasm was contagious. I couldn’t help but get a little misty-eyed as she shared her shady story involving a cash deposit exchange with her future landlord in the dimly lit hallway of her new apartment on a vegetarian’s only floor in the East Village.

It flashed me back to when I was her age. With no immediate plans of employment following graduation, my best friend from Atlanta and I decided to relocate to my parent’s house by the beach and work on our ‘big’ plans. Unfortunately, we worked more on our tans and before we knew it it was almost September and time to give up our bullshit jobs at dueling small town bakeries (her bakery more Lion King themed cakes in nature-mine chocolate dipped biscotti) and scope out our next destination.

Just in time an old friend Hannah that I’d interned with at PAPER magazine called me to let me know of a sublet available on West 4th Street Between First and Second Avenue. It sounded like a steal but she needed two roommates. Perfect. Hannah hadn’t looked at the apartment yet but from the ad she said it sounded “really, really nice”.

The plan seemed reasonable to us-gather $800 in cash for the deposit and go into the city to sign some 'paperwork' which acutally ended up being a 'contract' of terms on a paper napkin. If you could have seen the look on my poor parent's faces when I broke the news of my sketchy plans. My father reminded me that the only thing he recalled me ever signing my name to was a postcard for a Rolling Stone subscription. And my check bounced.

In the end our sublet experience was a fairly positive one and I look back on it with fond memories despite it's downfalls. The bad-A six floor walk-up smelling of curry, no A/C in the gazillion degree summer and the jazz trumpet player who played at all hours of the night. The good-the fact the owners were artists and had paintings on the wall, the big window in my room (aka a walk-in closet) with a tiny view of bustling 4th Street and my tiny desk I set up where I was able to write and draw and watercolor and smoke out my window. Most of all it was my first sublet and I finally felt like a real New Yorker.

HOW DO YOU GET TO CARNEGIE HALL? A PURSE FULL OF CAT FOOD

After brushing off strange looks on the subway this morning, I walked into the ladies room at work only to see that the set of 10 peel and stick stamps that I bought over the weekend and stuffed into my purse had now somehow stuck themselves on to my scarf, hair and side of hat without my knowing.

And as if that wasn't enough...over the weekend friends of ours asked us to join them to see a performance of Flamenco music at Carnegie Hall which was fantastic. At one point I dug in my bag for my glasses and pulled out two cans of cat food I had bought three days ago. Duh.

Time for a clear, Ziploc like purse I think.
I can only imagine what else I am carrying in there.

What Do You Think?

I think I'd like to be http://www.KDunk.com
What do you think?

MY DUANE

New Yorkers love a good drug store. Especially this New Yorker who has adoringly nicknamed the local Duane Reade by my work- “My Duane’. You have to understand-unlike the suburbs there is hardly anywhere in New York where one can one stop shop for everything from TP to condoms to roasted peanuts. And not to mention most of it at a fairly reasonable price.

In contrast, I grew up in a small town where there was only one tiny drug store to cater to all of our needs. The aisles were sparse and the products were often dusty, super outdated and also very expensive. Once in junior high school, word got around that the drug store was actually selling crimping irons. Remember those??? By the time I rode my bike there they were already sold out. (They had bought three.)

Our small town drug store did have it’s perks however. You could often ‘pay later’ if you were in a rush or had too much in your hands to get your wallet out. Should you forget your prescription, the pharmacist was often nice enough to fill it for you as long as you ‘brought back the slip later’. While these were the perks, sometimes the small town intimacy was a little too intimate. Especially in high school when I was forced buy birth control on a monthly basis from my former small town Girl Scout troop leader. You don't even wan't to know what badge I got for that.

NEW YORK-SIGNS OF SPRING

Two pigeons pecking away at a melting puddle of frozen vomit near Penn Station.

NEW YORK'S #1 OPTIMIST-OUR GROUNDHOG ...STATEN ISLAND CHUCK

New Yorkers are optimists. Despite our grumpy, ‘don’t talk to me before my morning coffee’ demeanors, at the end of the day it will be New Yorkers that see the Stella pint glass half full.

Take our designated groundhog Staten Island Chuck for example. Just this morning -despite contradictory reports from the critically acclaimed groundhog Pennsylvania Phil-(a pampered looking groundhog with a top hated handler) our Staten Island Chuck didn’t see his shadow. This can only mean two things-either (a.) Staten Island Chuck just wanted to free himself from the tight clutches of Mayor Bloomberg’s spooky American Psycho style leather gloves or (b.) spring will be coming early.

I think groundhog Pennsylvania Phil might learn a little something from our Tony Soprano of groundhogs Staten Island Chuck. After all, any New Yorker knows that when asked if we’ve witnessed anything-a murder, a mugging, a spotting of our own shadow…we all say the same thing.

“Me? I ain’t see nuthin’.”

UNITED

I went to an all women's university in the south. More than half the women were from places that pronounced the word 'pillow' like 'pallow' while the other three women left on campus (I was one of the three) clung to our northern roots. Many of the women were from Texas and to my surprise actually wore T-shirts and sweatshirts that read their state slogan "Don't Mess With Texas!". Despite being from the tough streets of New York (ok-the tough streets of Long Island) even I found the ladies of Texas and their slogan slightly intimidating.

E decided to go this week on a little trip to Dallas. Having felt the winter blues as of late and needing some creative inspiration with his photography he chose a short trip to Texas. All week he has been humming the tune, “All my ex’s…live in Texas…” to which I’ve half jokingly responded, “Um…I certainly hope not.”

I can tell we are in a good place with one another. I know because I was genuinely excited for him to go on a little adventure but the new me was also able to express my, “you little dirt bag-wow it must be nice to go off on an artistic, self-exploration adventure while poor me stays here working like a slave” type feelings. I didn’t say such feelings out loud but instead I drew him a little cartoon drawing to which we both shared a good laugh. See my drawing here

Tonight I made plans to have ‘the girls’ over for Wine & Whining. W&W’ing was started a year or so ago in direct competition to the boyfriends who had their own monthly get together called, ‘Scotch & Farting’. When Scotch & Farting first started I was a little intimidated. What the hell were they all talking about with us not around? When E would come home I’d ask, “What did you tell them? Do they know about my you know what?” Who knew that in the end they were really only drinking...and farting.

I'm proud to which great heights we have taken Wine & Whining. Not only do we really get shit out on the table regarding work, sex, boyfriends, money, family, etc. but we really seem to be quite productive in helping one another with whatever is bothering us. I think we have even succeeded in freaking the guys out. I know because the last time I got home E asked me slightly paranoid, “What did you women talk about? Me? Us? Huh? Huh? Tell me. Tell me!!!” My lips were sealed.

Here is our convo before E left for the airport at 4:30am:

Me: Have fun on your trip honey.
Him: Thanks I will!
Me: What airline are you flying again?
Him: Oh no-thanks. I should be fine with two T-shirts and some underwear.
(awkward silence)
Me: Um…glad to hear it but I actually asked what airline you are flying?
Him: Oh. Oops. United.
Me: United. Well great.