Unapologetically Mundane

Gettin’ Hitched in Ohio

katie ett — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:00:36 +0000

I’m leaving for Ohio tonight to visit friends and family, eat all of the fast food in the world, and photograph the wedding of Kim and Jack, two friends introduced to me by my BFF, Tracey. I don’t want to say that this is my first wedding, both because I want you to think I’m a professional and because I helped Jessica shoot Cassie‘s sister’s wedding in Pittsburgh last October. But this is my first time photographing one alone.

I’m totally unprepared for this wedding in that I have no idea what the venue looks like, where I’m allowed and not allowed to stand, and how the service is going to go, but I’m totally prepared for this wedding in that I’m confident Kim and Jack are going to look amazing in every shot. She’s one of the bubbliest people I’ve ever met, and he’s a total James-Dean type of cool guy who doesn’t have a bit of interest in being a model and then he kills it anyway. Here are the engagement photos I shot for them last fall to prove it:

So. Excited. (Slash so-nervous-I-may-faint-at-the-alter.)

Shootin’ Photos of Some Ladeez (17)
Food Photography for Real (31)
The Treeeees of NYCeeeee (15)
New York Fashion Week After-Party (10)
Legit Photographer Nightmares (9)
Gearing Up for the NYC Fashion Week After Party (8)
Totally Legit Wedding Photographer (10)
Christmas in Ohio (16)
Happy End of 2012! (6)
Logo Design and Branding with Elembee Creative (12)

The New York City Apartment

katie ett — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:00:18 +0000

My friend Kim is in the midst of her yearly post-finding-out-her-rent-is-being-raised-another-$200-per-month, “but-I’m-too-pretty-to-move-to-Brooklyn” freak-out and posted this on Facebook to summarize her strife: The Worst Room.

I may be self-centered, but I think NYC is singular in its ability to rent out the very shittiest apartments for the very most amount of money. I lived in some shady campus housing during my years at THE Ohio State University, but slumlords are supposed to take advantage of unwitting college students with their futons and their Gustav Klimt posters, right? I thought that by the time my friends and I all had jobs and hints of grey hair, we’d live in modest but bright/airy/crown-moldinged one-bedrooms in the East Village. But that doesn’t exist for normal people in NYC.

The normal people I know in NYC will have roommates until they’re ready to be moved into the retirement home, unless they want to live in the ghetto. The normal people I know in NYC share a one-bedroom apartment with their brothers so they can get away with only paying $700 each. The normal people I know in NYC live in apartments where there’s no living room because it’s been converted into a second bedroom, and they still pay $1000 each. Apartments are covered in 100 years of paint layers here. Linoleum floors left over from the 70s run rampant. I once looked at a converted factory loft with bedroom walls made of plywood that didn’t even go all of the way to the ceiling, and it was $2800 a month.

And that brings me to Kamran’s apartment. There were so many times I wanted to show you where I was living, but I didn’t necessarily want to show you all of my underwear, and you know it was all over the place in a 275-square-foot studio being shared by two people. When I first started dating Kamran, I carried a tote bag of clothes with me back and forth from my apartment to his every day when I was staying over. By the end of our six and a half years together, I had a small dresser, two tables in a corner with clothes piled on them, a chair for my folded dresses, a chair for my cardigan collection, more in the two closets, and more stored in bags on the floor.

There was a queen-size murphy bed, which we actually raised approximately twice, and once was to take my infamous cape photos, one of which I will now display simply to relive my five-years-ago youth:

You’re welcome.

There was a nook with a dresser piled high with books and a TV stand with a 36″ TV. It was one of the old tube TVs that weighs 200 pounds, made by a company called Classic. (That’s my favourite part.) Kamran would’ve replaced it, only the apartment was furnished by his landlady, so he couldn’t throw anything out. The only table in the place was taken up by his computer and printer, so we ate all of our meals on the love seat on top of two leather ottomans with removable tops that converted to tables when flipped over. I bought those ottomans for Kamran for our anniversary one year (romantic!), and he was so against them at first but then decided that I could use them for storage. So every time I would want to buy something (a slow-cooker, a clothes steamer, a puppy), my BFF, Tracey, would tell me to store it in my ottoman so Kamran couldn’t complain.

The kitchen was a galley style with three cupboards (one of which I couldn’t reach), a convection oven that was later replaced with a microwave when it finally stopped working, a half-size refrigerator, a sink, and approximately six inches of counter space between that and the two-burner stovetop. There was no oven. There was no freezer. The first night I stayed over at his apartment, we tried to save a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Cinnamon Buns and ended up eating ice cream soup in our pajamas the next day. Everything I bought at the grocery store had to be used within four days. Not a single blondie nor brownie was ever baked in that apartment. Any time I pan-fried anything, every wall in the kitchen would be splattered with grease because they were all so close together and to the stove. The refrigerator would fill with ice every few months, and Kamran would need to take a hammer to it while I stood with a broom and dustpan to catch the shards.

There was a phone on the wall that connected directly to a switchboard in the lobby behind the doorman’s desk, so the next-door neighbor who spoke to us approximately three times despite my repeated hellos could simply pick it up whenever he wanted to complain about our not-at-all-loud music. Every night for the first few years, the elderly doorman would call up to tell us to come pick up our delivery from the lobby with “your food is here” in his some-sort-of-European accent. Even when he was replaced with young, unaccented men, we would get off the phone and say to each other in the old way, “Your food is here.”

The room had two windows, one of which was cut in half by the air conditioner and the other of which opened approximately two inches. It always seemed pretty sunny in the room, though, until we realized a few years in that part of the building stuck out from the rest and that the neighbors living in that part could very, very clearly see into the apartment. Where I wore very little in the way of pants. We kept the blinds closed after that. We basically had to run the air conditioner year-round, because there wasn’t enough air coming in through the two-inch crack in the summer, and the building was so old and its walls so thick that it retained and multiplied heat in the winter.

The bathroom was a heavy porcelain pedestal sink where the bowl wasn’t exactly attached to the base and could fall off and, you know, crash through the floor into the apartment below if you pushed on it too hard. The shower had great water pressure but also a healthy mold habit that required many, many replacings of the bath mat thanks to the lack of air flow from that two-inch window opening. There were three mirrored cabinets and two racks for towels but not a linen closet to be seen. The best part was that because there were so many layers of paint on the door, it didn’t actually shut. You could slam it and lock it, but then you were likely wasting the next fifteen minutes trying to pull it open again. I think Kamran and I became very comfortable with each other very quickly because of this.

Kamran paid $1750 a month for the place, which was such a drop in the bucket for him it sometimes made me crazy to think about where we could be living. I wanted us to cook dinner together in our kitchen and then eat it on our balcony and then go to sleep in our bedroom that wasn’t also the living room and kitchen. He tried to buy this apartment in the building two doors down in 2009–forever known as “Joseph’s apartment” because of the realtor who rode a Vespa that matched his blue eyes and the blue tie he always wore–and I dreamed about our life together in this place with a separate bedroom and a view of both the East River and everything down 42nd Street to Times Square. But his offer wasn’t accepted by the building’s co-op board, and they don’t have to tell you why, and so we continued our life of him staying up all night studying for law school exams while I attempted to sleep with the lights on.

But to be honest, I sort of loved living there with him. I felt more at home there than I have in any of my NYC apartments, both because I spent the most time there and because it was so cozy. We used to say things like, “I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me!” and then take two steps to the right. The lighting was just right, and everything was always within reach because the whole place was sixteen feet across. The building itself was beautiful, we could see the Chrysler Building through our window, and there was a garden outside the front door. The United Nations was right across the street, I’ll never be able to replace my favourite food delivery options from the neighborhood, and we went on the most epic walks along the river esplanade that started at 38th Street. My current apartment in Brooklyn may be bigger and nicer and much more conducive to actually living a half-normal life, but living in that apartment was living in the center of New York Fuckin’ City.

Food Photography for Real

katie ett — Wed, 15 May 2013 16:00:23 +0000

If you read my food blog, you’re probably tired of hearing about my love of Chef David Santos’s food, so instead I’ll just brag about myself and how one of my photos from his restaurant opened the “Where to Take Mom for Mother’s Day“ article in the NY Daily News:

I’ve absolutely loved cutting my teeth as a photographer on the mean streets of the NYC fine dining scene. There’s something really rewarding about being stuck to a seat in a restaurant with “mood lighting” where I’m trying to be inconspicuous with my camera so the chef won’t ban me and still somehow coming out with a shot that doesn’t embarrass my good name. I think half the reason I like food photography so much is that restaurants make it such a challenge.

But. Being invited to privately photograph Chef Santos’s food is dreamy. I get to stand up, move around the table, crouch, or hold the camera above my head. I get to arrange napkins and flatware. I get to request a glass of wine from the bar to add to the background. I get to ask the owner to turn up the lights over the table if I’m having to set my ISO above 100. I get to put the plate on the chair or the bar or the floor if it’ll make for a better shot. I get to tell the kitchen when I’m ready for the next dish. And then I get to eat everything, too.

Here are some of my favourite photos from the shoot:

The exterior, shot with the brand new 10-20mm f/3.5 wide-angle lens Kamran bought me just before he moved away last month. (Thanks, Kam.)

The Louro interior: a little bit country, and a little bit books-all-over-the-walls.

watermelon radish, baby lettuces, housemade buttermilk vinaigrette

octopus bolognese, hand cut tagliatelle, goose pancetta, parmesan

pork belly, uni, togarashi cabbage, shiso puree

skate chop, watercress purée, watercress, meyer lemon vinaigrette, rhubarb

walleye, guajillio sauce, avocado purée, hominy, onion ring

lamb shoulder rack, pea-mint purée, english purée, rye berries, carrots, pea shoots, lamb jus

white asparagus ice cream, strawberry compote, shortbread crumble

(cross-posted to my food blog)

The Treeeees of NYCeeeee

katie ett — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:00:14 +0000

We were walking home from a restaurant (#1 reason to live in NYC: you never have to drive home after a tasting menu that includes twelve glasses of wine), and the trees were just beginning to bloom, and I took these pictures of a streetlight falling on the blossoms. And then I Photoshopped the hell out of them, because it was dark out and they were practically black. Which is your favourite?

(Don’t say the first one, because it’s different. And don’t say none of them, you gigantic assholes.)

A Day in the Life

katie ett — Fri, 03 May 2013 16:00:56 +0000

The Kamran’s Last Week in NYC edition:

• Tuesday, we went to dinner at Louro, which is owned by a chef friend of ours and can be summed up in three words: asparagus ice cream:

• Wednesday, we went to Soba Totto for their lunch special that includes a rice dish, a bowl of hot or cold soba, pickles, and salad. The food is deliiiiicious, but the best part is seeing how the different people around you eat their soba. There are the people who use their spoon to gather some broth and then use their chopsticks to add some noodles to the spoon. There are the people who eat some noodles and then slurp some broth. And then there are these young Asian dudes in crisp black suits who don’t talk for an entire hour while they bury their heads in their bowls.

• Thursday, we went to Mission Chinese Food. It’s originally from San Francisco but opened here a few months ago to long lines and hugely hyped reviews. IT IS AMAZING. Wait for my review.

• I have no idea what we did Friday night–probably watched “Shark Tank”, knowing us–but I can tell you that we ate Cambodian sandwiches from Num Pang. They were out of the corn-on-the-cob we like with the spicy mayo and the coconut and, you know, lightly apologized for it. They probably didn’t realize that was MY LAST TIME EATING THAT CORN EVER. Unless I take a half-an-hour subway ride. For corn.

• Saturday afternoon, we met our friends Anthony, Jeff, Nik, and Marko at a sushi buffet called IchiUmi for Kamran’s farewell lunch. (My roommate, Jack, was out of town. I know you’re all in love with him and would have noticed his conspicuous absence.) We ate something like 240 plates of food. Everything tasted better than ever, as everything had all month long. Kamran tried on Anthony’s sunglasses to prepare him for his new life in sunnier climates:

I had asked Jeff to help me move my things from Kamran’s apartment to mine, partly because he’s strong and partly because he’s nice and mostly because he has a car. But over the course of the lunch, everyone else was somehow convinced to help me out (well, except for Marko, who was getting ready to defend his dissertation and thought getting a PhD was more important than schlepping my underwear across town), so I suddenly had a gaggle of movers and Anthony’s car, too. And thank god, because what I thought were a few boxes turned out to be several boxes, a dresser, a nightstand, two ottomans, and a zillion bags stuffed with shoes and toiletries at the last minute. We hadn’t told the building about my move in the hope of avoiding having to get permission from anyone and to avoid the $50/hour fee they charge to use the freight elevator and just walk out the front doors with all of my stuff. But of course the doorman saw through us the moment we asked to borrow one of the rolling carts and told us we needed to use the freight. So we loaded everything onto the carts and rang the bell for the freight elevator, and the porter stepped off and said we had to write him a check for $50 before we could go any further. So Kamran paid $50 for a trip on an elevator for me. And what a ride it was.

Kamran rode with Anthony and Nik to give directions, and I rode with Jeff and was of course the one who got us lost. Never trust a person who drives a car twice a year. One of my biggest annoyances living here is cab drivers who ask me how to get to my apartment. Um, take the 4 train to Brooklyn? I wouldn’t be in a cab if I had a car, buddy! Now do your job. Anthony and Nik went to get coffee while they were waiting for Jeff and me to arrive, and then Kamran had to watch their illegally-parked car, and Jeff had to watch his illegally-parked car, so I was left to bring everything up to my apartment on my own. But of course the doorman at my building was kind and helpful, because it’s Brooklyn.

Anthony and Jeff left in their illegally-parked cars while Kamran and Nik came up to my apartment so we could order banh mi and watch the new Louis C.K. stand-up special and hang out on our roof deck

watching the sun set:

When we got back to Kamran’s apartment that night, it was so weird to look around and not see any of my stuff. When we first started dating, I would haul a bag of clothes from my apartment to his every time I stayed over. Eventually I was staying over so often that he bought me a dresser. And then I filled the dresser so full that I started stacking my clothes on a table beside it. And then another table next to that. And then a chair. I had my laptop there. The scrapbook I was working on. All of my camera gear. My birth certificate. That’s how moved-in I was. So it was strange to be at his apartment and have clothes for the next three days and nothing else. We watched movies and ate one of my favourite meals, the quesadilla enorme from Baby Bo’s Cantina:

• Sunday, we took a walk to Beekman, the secret park we discovered a couple of years ago and have been walking to all of the weekends. There are waterfront parks near me in Brooklyn–much bigger, nicer ones, actually–but this one was ours. I got pooped on by a bird as I was passing under a tree, which is the only thing that could’ve logically happened my last time there with Kamran:

• Monday morning, I took the bus from Kamran’s house to work for the last time. I got the most perfect seat in the front by the window and thought about how it was my last ride on the bus and was nostalgic for a moment until I remembered that I would be going home on the bus, too. So I stopped looking out the window and enjoying the sights of 2nd Avenue and read my book instead. But then Kamran asked me to meet him in the Flatiron after work so we could return his cable box together right off the 6 train, so I didn’t get to ride the bus home for the last time. I’m sure I’ll get over it. Someday.

His movers had come that afternoon and taken what seemed like almost everything away, but “almost everything” still left, like four hours of packing and cleaning for us. I took his plant, and he posed with the gigantic Scooby-Doo that took up half of his 275-square-foot apartment for seven years but that he wouldn’t throw out (nor give to Jeff, who really wanted it) because he swore he was going to someday mail it to the ex-girlfriend he had won it with in Atlantic City. YET ANOTHER UNKEPT PROMISE COURTESY OF KAMRAN. j/k, j/k.

The first pictures of Kamran I saw before our first date included Scoob creepily looking over his shoulder in his old Princeton apartment. But we still left him by the freight elevator to be tossed out with the day’s leftovers. JUST LIKE OUR LOVE.

We ordered our favourite Greek dinner from The Famous Chicken Place,

and had to, like, actually sit and talk to each other with the cable box already being gone. For the six and a half years we were together, his kitchen table was the same as his computer desk (studio living!), but with his computer gone, we talked about eating at the table for the first time ever. And then we ate on the couch like always. He texted the guy from his floor he’d made friends with to see if he wanted to say goodbye to us, and I was hoping to run into the girl I had casually talked to in the hallway for two years and had been meaning to become friends with but hadn’t, but the guy didn’t text back, and I didn’t run into the girl and didn’t even really know which apartment was hers, so that was that.

We made a trip to the lobby with as much as we could carry, and then I waited downstairs while he went up for another load, and then he waited downstairs while I went up for the last load. I took a picture of the apartment completely empty (I have to do a separate blog post on that because it’s so hilarious/sad) and a picture of the closed door for the last time, and you can faintly see the yellow stain on it that may or may not have been pee but that we didn’t clean off in all of those six and a half years,

and then we went to the doorman to leave our keys. He asked who they were being left for, and Kamran said, “Oh, um, the landlady, I guess. I’m moving out.” And the doorman was like, “Oh, really? Well, sad to see you go. Good luck with your new place!” And we were like, “Yeah, thanks for calling up to us every night when the delivery guy arrived with our dinner.” And that was to be the extent of our goodbye to the building.

It felt pretty strange to be leaving so unceremoniously after so much time there. I mean, it’s not like we were heavily involved in the goings-on of Tudor City–there were art shows and concerts in the park and building committees that we weren’t remotely a part of–but it’s also not like we didn’t know people there. People talked to us. People recognized us by our sweater vests (him) and our winter capes (me). People ran into us in the street and laughed about how funny it was to see each other in regular clothes outside of the building’s gym. We had wildly creative nicknames for people–The Tudor Lady (whose greyhound was named Tudor, after the neighborhood), The Crazy Lady (who stood outside with her mangy old bulldog and danced to music only she could hear)–and people would ask Kamran how his wife was and me how my husband was (awwwww (or barf, depending)). I kind of wanted some sort of send-off from Stacey with the red hair or the woman at the end of the hallway who always passed me in the morning in her yoga gear or even the asshole neighbor who would literally run into his apartment to avoid having to be polite to us if we nearly passed in the hall after he had taken his single empty can of Pepsi to the trash room. But no one was waiting for us with banners and balloons, so we silently carried our things to the curb and waited for a cab to take us to my apartment.

But then a moment later, the girl from the hallway came out to smoke, and we exchanged e-mail addresses. And then another moment after that, the guy Kamran had made friends with walked up, munching on a sandwich. We all stood around chatting and talking about future plans, and then the guy helped us load our stuff into the cab that pulled up. Well, first the cab driver said he wouldn’t take us and drove off. But then he stopped down the block, reversed, and popped his trunk open. CAB DRIVERS. We finally got to my apartment close to midnight. I think it was Kamran’s, like, fifth time there.

• Tuesday, Kamran came to work to say goodbye to all of my co-workers who actually like him better than me, and then we went back to my apartment to do laundry and eat one last banh mi. When we sat down to eat, I accidentally knocked his bubble tea to the ground, and it went eeeeeverywhere. Kamran, who used to act like I was the least-responsible person in the world whenever I spilled anything at his apartment, calmed me down and did all of the work of cleaning it up. And then we shared my bubble tea while watching “Deadliest Catch”, which we started watching together a few years ago and seemed appropriately epic for our end times. We cried and cried and then went to bed and cried and then held hands and cried and I told him not to say anything nice to me the next morning so I wouldn’t cry before work.

• Wednesday, I left for work knowing that I’d come home to an empty apartment. I hugged Kamran and closed my eyes for a second to enjoy it but then was like, “Shit! Shit! Don’t cry!” So I stopped thinking about it, kissed him, and left. It sucked.

That Time When My Boyfriend of Six and a Half Years Broke Up With Me: Part 3

katie ett — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:00:18 +0000

I really love you all and your righteous indignation. I didn’t even know I had that many troops to rally when I wrote that last post. I have to admit, though, that I was surprised by your comments. I thought I had written this touching tribute to my glorious, near-perfect-until-he-decided-he-didn’t-,-you-know-,-want-to-be-with-me-anymore, possibly-never-to-be-matched relationship with a person who in many ways completely changed my life. My food blog exists because of him. My camera and half of my lenses exist because of him. I conquered parts of this city I didn’t even know existed because of him. I feel like I’m a better person because of our relationship, that I grew and came out ahead of where I started back in 2006.

Yes, I’ve had the melodramatic “I wasted the best years of my life with him!” talk with myself a couple of times over the past year, because it is a little scary to think that all of the other sensitive lawyers with PhDs and interesting cultures have been snatched up in the time I was hanging out with this noncommittal one. But I’ve never been one of those girls who wanted to be married at 25 so I could have all my kids by 30 and then spend the rest of my life living vicariously through them. My time with him wasn’t wasted, because I:

a) really fucking enjoyed it.
b) have all the time in the world do all of the boring crap you guys want me to with some other, lamer person.

Just kidding about that last part. But seriously, I didn’t make a mistake by staying with him after he told me he was leaving, and I’m not dumb, and I wasn’t mistreated, and anyone would be lucky to have the kind of relationship we had for those first five and a half years. And I don’t have Stockholm Syndrome, you bastards!

My friend Noel wrote me an email that said, “Well to me it’s hard to read and think about because it’s sort of like someone being terminally ill: you know they are going to die and yeah maybe it would be easier/better/smarter to just stop your relationship with them immediately, but then you’d miss all that sucking-the-marrow-out-of-life stuff.” I hadn’t likened the last year of my relationship with Kamran to the last year of my mom’s life, but they’re similar. I knew she was going to die of brain cancer, and it was hard to be with her and forget that, but it would have been so much worse to miss out on the time with her. And after agonizing over her impending death for a year, when she finally did go, I had dealt with it.

I know that Kamran chose this for us, unlike my mom, and maybe that’s why I feel like I’ve had an easier time dealing with things. I’m not crying, and I don’t feel lost at sea. I feel like I’ve had closure and can move forward with only positive feelings toward Kamran. It’s not that I’m not bothered by the fact that he wanted something new after six years, and I don’t want to give anyone permission to walk on me, but I’m too thankful for what we had to be mad. That would be the real waste of my time.

So thank you for being angry at him so I don’t have to be.

That Time When My Boyfriend of Six and a Half Years Broke Up With Me: Part 2

katie ett — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 17:00:42 +0000

This is the story about how I got half broken up with a year ago by my boyfriend of six and a half years but chose to stay with him because I’m:

1) a sap.
2) very loyal.
3) kind of pathetic?

For me, there’s never been any question of Kamran and me moving to California. I knew from almost the beginning of our relationship back in September of 2006 that he eventually planned to take his career closer to his family in Orange County. Yes, it’d mean leaving all of these friends I feel so lucky to have made, but I’m really, really charming and knew I could make more. Yes, it’d mean leaving the job that I love, but I knew I could find another to suit me. Yes, it’d mean being even farther from my family in Ohio, but I was willing to work hard to see them as often as I do now. Yes, it’d mean leaving NYC long before I felt “finished” with it, but I could justify that, too. I would have to drive (dreadful), but I could sing at the top of my lungs in the car again. I’d have to live in a house (scary), but maybe I could have a pool. I couldn’t eat at Michelin-starred restaurants every weekend (DEATH), but I could finally cook at home in a place with more than just the stovetop and half-fridge in Kamran’s studio.

I pictured us living near Laguna Beach, where he grew up, and being close enough to walk to the water every day. I pictured loving my hair and skin every day the way I have in summers past when we’ve visited his parents and there’s been no humidity. I pictured not having to use air-conditioning and living in linen pants and finally being relaxed in a way I haven’t since moving here almost eight years ago.

But one night last spring, Kamran and I were walking to our favourite sandwich shop, and he told me that he was going to renew the lease on his apartment even though he was sure he wouldn’t be here another full year. I asked, “Oh, is it going to be that soon? And were you going to mention it to me?” He said, “Oh, did you want to move with me?” And I was like, ” . . .”

Because why wouldn’t I want to move with him? We fell in love almost accidentally–I had seen his picture before our date and didn’t think he was right for me but decided I should at least try to be friends with him and then swooned the moment we actually met, and he said at first that he wanted to keep dating other girls but changed his mind as soon as I went on a date with someone else–but I thought that if there was such a thing as fate, we would be the proof to that theorem. We just got along SO WELL. We liked the same kind of music and movies, dancing around his apartment, walking around the city for hours, and cuddling to the point that people would vomit if they knew even an inkling of how much time we spent wrapped up together in his Murphy bed. He introduced me to fine dining and made me try a world of food I either didn’t know existed or thought I didn’t like. We liked different TV (me, reality shows; him, adult cartoons), but we compromised so much that he eventually found himself loving “Survivor”, and I eventually found myself watching “South Park” even without him. We found the same things funny and remarked over and over again about how no one else would ever laugh at them. I thought–and I’m sure every really in love person thinks this, so don’t be offended–that no couple in the world was as perfectly-matched as we were. We were brainy. We were cute. We were creative. We were driven to do different but complimentary things: he was the focused one who worked hard and made all of our weekend fun possible; I was the easy-going one who made friends he got along with just as well as I did. Neither of us liked to eat the ends of pickles. Neither of us understood people who cut in line at the bus stop. Neither of us had ever known what love was until we met.

When people asked why we didn’t get married or insinuated that our relationship was somehow less important than theirs because rings weren’t involved, I didn’t have to be hurt by it, because I thought we were above all of that. I didn’t have to try to coerce him into marriage, because I wasn’t insecure. I thought ours was the purest kind of love, because it wasn’t forced. It had nothing to do with children, finances, or housing. We paid for separate apartments but spent all of our time together by choice. We basically lived in a 250-square-foot studio for six years straight and never got tired of each other.

Here are the reasons Kamran names for breaking up with me:

• He never intended when he met me to have found his final girlfriend.

• He wants to be a bronzed glamourboy and doesn’t think he can be fit and chiseled in the context of our food-dependent relationship.

• He’s not ready for the commitment that comes with moving in together, and I insisted that if I follow him across the country, we should finally officially live together.

• He thinks it’s normal for couples to break up in the midst of a relationship for no reason other than to date other people. He thinks, but is not sure that, his sister and her husband did that and then got back together and got married, and that seems normal and correct to him.

• He wants to meet new people who can introduce him to new ideas. He actually told me years ago that he expected for us to eventually get bored of each other and break up in order to be exposed to different people, and I somehow just thought he was being coy.

He says those are the only reasons. He says he doesn’t expect to find anyone better-suited to him and that he has no complaints about me. Part of me really, truly believes that he loves me and thinks that our relationship was as special as I do, which is the thing that’s keeping me from being mad at him. Not that I haven’t been mad at him. In the last year, knowing that he could pick up and leave at any time, I’ve thought about how I sat at home with him weekend after weekend for years while he studied for law school instead of going to friends’ parties and concerts and happy hours. I could’ve had those six and a half years with a boyfriend who came home from work at 6 instead of 9 and had time to take me to dinner not just on the weekends. I could’ve been with someone who liked vacations and had time to visit my family with me. I could’ve been with someone who went to Hamptons or the Jersey shore just once with my friends and me. I could’ve been with someone who put me ahead of his job just once without my asking.

I’ve also been sad about this. It’s hard thinking that I might’ve spent some of the best years of my life with someone who didn’t feel the same way for me that I did for him. I grew up in a town where none of the boys were like me and waited 25 years to finally find someone worth loving, and then I did, and it was even better than I thought it’d be, so even though some of my friends encouraged me to break up with Kamran before he could break up with me during this last year of waiting and wondering, I held on and decided to enjoy it as much as I could. It didn’t feel stupid or self-disrespecting because he made it feel too special. We had an AWESOME last year together.

Yes, it sucked when he accepted a new job in California last summer and had to keep deferring it to spend more time here. Yes, it sucked being on edge for twelve months, never knowing exactly how much or how little time we had together. It sucked not being able to blog about my feelings because it felt embarrassing to announce that we were breaking up one day and then continue to write about all of our sappy adventures as a super-in-love couple the next. It sucked feeling like I should definitely, definitely be crying all of the time but not letting myself because it felt like wasting time when time was precious. It sucked that I was so exhausted by my emotions during the whole debacle that I was almost relieved when he left just because at least I finally knew. I never wanted my first love to end not with a bang but a whimper, you know?

But we also did it all this past year. We took walks to the waterfront park on Beekman nearly every weekend, stopped caring about how small his apartment was and invited people over, rode the Roosevelt Island tram so many times, chewed each other’s arms to the nubs, tried the Doritos Locos Tacos, admired the Chrysler Building from his window, butter-basted our first steaks at home, played in the snow, ate so many Michelin stars, karaoked, introduced friends to Um Segredo and the Momofukus and Tocqueville and so many others, held hands on the subway, learned about wine and cheese and by that I mean ate a lot of it, chose the loser of every reality show within the first ten seconds of the episode, woke up at 5:45 a.m. to go to the gym, played the game where he would tuck me in at night and I would kick the covers off so he’d have to do it again, and created an Excel spreadsheet detailing our plans for every day of his last month here so we could be sure to live it to the fullest. And we did. And I’ll never forget it.

That Time When My Boyfriend of Six and a Half Years Broke Up With Me

katie ett — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 16:00:09 +0000

R.I.P. KamKat
2006 – 2013

Kamran leaves for California tomorrow for a new job and a new life close to his family.

I’m 99% sad about this and only 1% mad, but I still find myself wanting to listen to, like, girl power songs. This is my favourite one of the moment, even though I totally don’t agree with the message and think I 100% work better with Kamran than without him. I’m basically going to spend the next two years blogging about this breakup, but for now, I just want to know your best “sisters are doin’ it for themselves” kind of anthem recommendation.

Except way, way less lame than that song.

Adventure Time with Kat and Kam: Princeton

katie ett — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 12:00:05 +0000

When we met six and three-quarters years ago, Kamran told me that he had gone to school “in New Jersey”. Later, I found out that he had spent six years at Princeton, getting his PhD in physics before deciding to go into law. The first time he took me to visit the campus was magical, since:

1) I had only lived in a NYC for a year and had never taken NJ Transit, which was completely different from the subway in that it was expensive and comfortable, and
2) living in NYC for a year was long enough that I’d forgotten what nature looked like.

Waiting for the dinghy to take us from the Princeton campus back to the Northeast Corridor station on that first visit, Kamran asked me to “go steady” with him after a month of trying to convince himself that he didn’t want to be yoked exclusively to this lady ox. Aww.

So, all these years later, we decided to go back a couple of weekends ago to relive his golden years and the birthplace of our looooove. We were supposed to leave Penn Station on the 11:15 a.m. train, but of course we got there at 11:16, so we made a stop at the Tim Horton’s inside the station and then casually watched a guy threaten the life of his girlfriend in the midst of a fight while we munched on a bagel in the alley out back. On the 12:15 train, we tucked our tickets to Princeton Junction into the slot on the back of the seat in front of us and alternated between solving the mysteries of the universe and napping.

We took a cab straight to the graduate college (Kamran wanted to show Princeton that he’d left and conquered the world and didn’t need to wait an hour for the dinghy to campus), which was, um, gorgeous.

On our way down to the D-Bar in the basement of the grad college to see where Kamran drank tens of beers during his tenure, we went inside to the dining hall, where adorable/smelly/geeky grad students were eating bananas with their parents and stopped to stare at us, the stylish/successful/handsome people they hope to someday become.

Then we walked up the hill

to the main part of campus

to begin the real reason we’d come: to eat everything Kamran remembered from his six years there.

The first stop was Hoagie Haven, where Kamran got a cheesesteak and I got a meatball hero, and he was so sure everyone inside was going to be like, “Hey, Kamshaft! Kameroon! Kamburger! What are you doing back here after all this time? Didn’t you go off into the world and make something of yourself while we stayed here slinging hoagies?” But no one was the same, and no one was there to congratulate him on becoming The Most Excellent Physicist-Lawyer Princeton Has Ever Produced™.

Next, we walked up to the electrical engineering building to burn off our hoagies and then circled back to Zorba’s Grill for chicken gyros, where the guy in front of us was super rude to the kid behind the counter, and I said we should publicly shame him, but Kamran didn’t want to get knifed.

Next door was Thomas Sweet, where we got cake batter ice cream with Butterfinger and sprinkles, because that combination makes sense.

This is Kamran eating ice cream just like Einstein, who lived/worked/died at Princeton. Only I had handed him both of our spoons to keep my hands free to take the picture, and you can see he’s using both of them at once. And that there’s no ice cream on either of them. Also, there’s a huge glare on Einstein. This could not have failed worse.

But the ice cream was awesome. And then we were full and were mad at how old and small-stomached we are.

Continuing our walk through campus, we came this crazy fountain

and these way crazier heads of animals, which we decided were Chinese zodiac symbols. And we were right (of course). It turns out they’re Ai Weiwei’s “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads“.

It’s hard to describe how huge and affecting these were.

Cutting down a side street on our way to the physics building, we passed by the Princeton eating clubs, which are like the frat houses at your college except classy/elegant/full of much more money. I mean, but still not immune to keg parties in the backyard. (Two weeks later, Kamran is still bringing up “the time we went to that keg party with the live band at the Princeton eating club”. I’m 99% sure he’s joking.)

We stopped to pet the tigers outside the stadium

and then walked through this huge Richard Serra sculpture called “The Hedgehog and the Fox” made of giant panels of rusted metal where one path gets wider and brighter and the other path gets narrower and darker. And where the immaturest of the Princetonians hang out, evidently.

I saw some nature

and then some more

and then still more

and then some involving Kamran,

and then it was time to go home, so we stopped at another of Kamran’s most-remembered haunts, the Wawa, for some water. (Which I would call wa-wa if I was a child or just that much lamer.)

And then we were back on NJ Transit,

and then NYC skyline was coming into view,

and then we were right in the middle of it again.

And that was that.

The Nicest Thing You Can Be Called on the Bus

katie ett — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 18:30:03 +0000

I’m always filled with a sense of dread when I round the corner on 41st Street in the morning and see people squeezed four-deep along the sidewalk, waiting for the bus. For the most part, the buses come more often than I expect and get me to work right on time even when I feel like I’m running late, but when something goes wrong along the 2nd Avenue M15-SBS route, it seems to go really, really wrong. This morning, the bus pulled up just as I collected my receipt at the pre-pay machines and was shockingly empty, so I figured something went really, really wrong uptown and the MTA sent a new bus down to try to fix things. I got a seat right up front by the window and began my long-practiced process of zoning out so the elbow jabs of the person next to me wouldn’t seem so jarring.

The bus was filling up more and more as we made our way downtown, and it was downright packed by the time we got to a stop with a lady waiting in a wheelchair. Now, no one blames anyone for being in a wheelchair, but it’s the simple truth that a wheelchair on the bus is an inconvenience. Everyone in the front has to move back to make room for the wheelchair, and three people have to give up their seats so the wheelchair can be strapped in beside the window, and the wheelchair usually sticks out into the aisle far enough that no one can hold onto the handrail above it. The bus driver always tells people to exit the bus for a moment to make room and then re-board once the wheelchair’s in place, but everyone’s been left at the side of the road once or twice when the bus was too full, and no one wants to risk giving up his spot inside. So it was understandable (but maybe not excusable) when the woman in the wheelchair tried to board and people were reticent to move for her, but she wasn’t in the mood for understanding and muttered complaints to the bus driver as he strapped her wheelchair down. He agreed with her that “people should use common sense” and that he would let the bus sit there all day if they needed to be taught a lesson. “I’m already at MY job,” he said. I was amused, and I thought that was the end of it.

Read the rest here!

Behind the White Line (5)
Sick and Lonely in NYC (6)
An Otherwise Exceptional Existence (9)
Bigtime Bus Touching (10)
Two at a Time (7)
No Free Rides (4)
An Excuse Me Excuses All (4)
The Time I Lost My Cool After the Biggest Jerk on the Bus Called Me Fat (11)
The Time the Biggest Jerk on the Bus Called Me Fat (12)
Blame the Bus Driver (10)

A Day in the Life

katie ett — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 16:10:16 +0000

I’ve been expectedly terrible about writing my weekly life recaps, but here are some of the importanter events:

• My bedroom is teeny, so I bought a bed frame without an attached headboard to save room, but after two years, I’ve been craving something to bang my head against while listening to angsty music. Thinking a mirror would help make the room appear bigger (and allow me to judge how pretty I must look while sleeping), I set about finding one that was tall enough to be wider than my frame when set on its side but also wide enough to stick up over my mattress to give me something to lean against. Basically the only one that fit the bill remotely was the IKEA Mongstad, but it happened to be perfect. There’s an IKEA in Brooklyn with a free shuttle that leaves from my neighborhood, but thinking it’d be even easier to just toss it in a cab, I bought one off of craigslist from a guy on Wall Street and convinced Kamran to help me move it.

I knew it was going to be big, but I might have underestimated how unwieldy 66 pounds (and 2 ounces) of 74″ tall, 37″ wide mirror is. Kamran and I had no problem carrying it downstairs, but the wind was blowing so much by the time we got to the street corner that I had a hard time staying upright with it resting against me while we waited for one of the big minivan cabs to drive by. Ten minutes later, we had seen a couple of them up the street, but they were snatched up by other people before they got to us. In the meantime, we had tried to hail some of the SUV cabs, but drivers were literally turning around in the middle of the street and going back uptown when they spotted the mirror. We thought about hiding me around the corner and trying to trick someone into stopping for just Kamran, but eventually a nice driver in an SUV stopped out of the goodness of his heart and helped us load the thing into his cab. Of course it didn’t fit. Once it hit the plexiglass partition that separates the driver from the back seat, a foot of it was still sticking out the back of the car. So we gave up, turned back the way we came, and took the thing on the subway.

We hadn’t brought gloves, and we hadn’t drank our protein shakes, so our hands were aching and our biceps were shaking by the time we loaded it onto the 2 train. I was saying things like, “If I have no problem carrying it this way, why can’t you just stop being a pansy and make it work?” And he was saying things like, “I’m a physicist. I’m pretty sure I know the best way to distribute the weight.” It was only two blocks to my apartment from the subway, but we probably stopped five times to yell at each other, but once we got the thing in place behind my bed frame, we were like, “Yeah! Teamwork!” And then we went out for bubble tea.

• My cousin, Ethan, and his wife, Katherine, stayed with me this week while visiting NYC for the first time. They drove to Pittsburgh from Ohio and then took a bus the rest of the way, arriving in Brooklyn at 3 a.m. Thursday. I had signed our spare key out for them with the doorman earlier in the evening, but the overnight guy somehow didn’t understand which of the exactly one keys he was supposed to give to them, so he ended up calling not me, whose name was on the sign-out sheet, but the owner of the apartment, who is my roommate, Jack. At 3 a.m. Having them here reminded me so much of my early days in NYC, lo those nearly eight years ago, when I would get on the subway going the wrong way and when walking anywhere seemed like such a hassle. I remember my first week here, when my boyfriend at the time, Todd, and I were trying to move out of the student housing at NYU he’d been in for a year and get our own place in Chelsea, and I felt like the walk from the subway to the realtor’s office could have taken two hours in the July heat. I later realized that it had been two avenue blocks. Which are admittedly equal to four or five street blocks, depending on who you ask. But still. Two.

• Kamran and I took our friends Nik and Jack to Momofuku Ko for lunch on Saturday. It’s our favourite restaurant in NYC. Period. We sat in the same place at the counter as the last three times we’ve gone, and the same chef we’ve had the last three times served us, and the soundtrack was The Beatles and LCD Soundsystem and The Beta Band, and I got tuh-RASHED on the wine pairings, and Jack and Nik didn’t complain about having to eat an oyster, and I’ll always remember that lunch.

“Momofuku” means “lucky peach”.

• “Game of Thrones” started up again. Like you haven’t heard. Kim has been coming over every week to watch it, along with an assorted cast of characters who have seen somewhere between all of and two of the past episodes. As I sat watching it last night in my thrifted orange damask armchair, I looked around the room at Kim and Jack and Nik and Chris and thought about how crazy it is that I was just, like, hanging out all normally in my NYC apartment with my NYC friends. I’m 99% sure Joffrey is going to die soon.

• My friend Jessica was in town from Germany a couple of weekends ago. She was an intern at my company for a year, and there’s absolutely no other way we ever could’ve become friends. We ate queso fundido and sang karaoke (Jessica likes to do the Ken part of the 1997 hit “Barbie Girl” while our friend Jeff does the Barbie part) and one friend developed a crush on another friend while that friend was busy developing a crush on a third friend, and it made me sad that our group of friends is probably legitimately too old to be hooking up with each other with abandon and without consequences.

• My friend/former co-worker Chantee was in town yesterday after having left NYC a few years ago, and we met up with Kamran, Jack, and Jeff for the whole duck at Momofuku Ssam Bar. They take a Long Island duck, stuff duck sausage under the skin, confit the legs, and serve it all with hoisin sauce and fried shallots and greasy chive pancakes and rice that soaks up all of the duck juices. There’s a reason the place appears on “best of” lists along restaurants like Per Se.

You wouldn’t know it from Jeff’s face here, but Chantee is one of those people who’s hilarious but never at your expense and only makes you feel good about yourself when she’s around. I wish my sense of humor was more that and less naming-all-of-your-faults-in-front-of-everyone-we-know, but my mother died when I was 18, and I’ve never recovered. Just kidding. Well, sort of.

• My stomach is tired.

I’m Feeling 82

katie ett — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 20:55:02 +0000

Today, musings of a madwoman (which I look forward to reading in almost a creepy way, which makes sense since I know her through Ellie) introduced me to Taylor Swift’s “22″

and its parody, “32″:

I was kind of mad that the parody didn’t do anything with this line, which infuriated me when I heard Taylor sing it:

We’re happy, free, confused, and lonely in the best way
It’s miserable and magical, oh yeah

I’m not quite 32 yet, but I’m old enough to tell sweet, innocent Ms. Swift that the only thing that changes between 22 and 32 is that you’re still happy, free, confused, and lonely, but now you’re smart enough to know that it’s ALL MISERY FROM HERE ON OUT. The magic is all dried up. You can’t stay awake long enough to have midnight breakfast, you can’t forget the deadlines or you’ll lose your $3000-a-month 3-room apartment, you don’t want to dream because all your dreams are about failing to get reservations at whatever half-a-paycheck restaurant your boyfriend is counting on you to get him into, and if you dance like you’re 22, your knees will give out on you.

But on the bright side, I’m even more tempted than ever to read Fifty Shades of Grey thanks to the face the woman in the parody makes while singing about it.

EMBRACING MY FUTURE AS A SURLY OLD PORN-READER.

A Day in the Life

katie ett — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 16:15:58 +0000

• Tuesday night, my friends Ash and Kim came over to . . . well, I don’t want to say they came over “to” watch The Skulls on Netflix streaming, because it’d be embarrassing to plan a night around a 2000s-era teen heartthrob secret college fraternity movie, but I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. Kim and I had basically spent the entire afternoon having an online argument about the types of people who have a list of celebrities they’re allowed to cheat on their significant others with–apparently this type of person is everyone but my BFF, Tracey, and me–that eventually escalated into Kim and Tracey–who have never met nor spoken before–exchanging words over a Google document the three of us were editing together and then somehow resulted in me telling Kim I’m ambivalent on whether or not she has a brain. Um, but The Skulls was surprisingly entertaining! I thought maybe Kim was speaking metaphorically when she said there’s a duel in it, but there’s definitely a duel in it.

• Wednesday: “Survivor”! “American Idol”! Have I mentioned that I’m aaaaall over this Burnell Taylor kid? He has such an interesting tone that I really think he can make anything sound good, even a song from a musical. This is the performance that really got me. Even Kamran likes him. I downloaded the “American Idol” app so I could vote for the first time ever this year. I haven’t, you know, done it yet, but I could.

• Kim came over again on Thursday night so she could tell me about the first date she had with a guy who asked her what her credit score is as a way of deciding whether she’s wifely enough. I won’t say anything else about the night so as to not lessen the impact of a man asking her credit score on the first date to determine if she’s good wife material.

• Friday night, it was unclear if anything was being done for happy hour, so there were just four of us left at work when we decided to go out. We work in the Financial District, so by the time we got to this new bar I wanted to try, it was so packed with suits we literally couldn’t get ten feet in the door. We went to an old standby bar instead, and my friend Jeff has an amazing way with waitresses without even trying, so we were led to this upstairs room filled with Victorian-ish furniture that was totally uncrowded and where they were playing everything from my iPod at a totally reasonable level: Cold War Kids, M83, Imagine Dragons, Band of Horses, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Passion Pit . . . it was, um, basically the best time I’ve had in a bar?

Nik and Jeff in repose:

Dranks:

• Saturday night, Kam and I went for a tasting menu at Tocqueville in Union Square, which is one of our favourite restaurants, one of the best restaurants in NYC, and one of the restaurants most deserving of a Michelin star that doesn’t have one. We were treated like a king and queen and then went home to watch “X-Files” and The Game, which I’ve basically been thinking about nonstop since, especially this song, which is so annoyingly and catchily 1960s.

• Yesterday, we watched Safety Not Guaranteed, which was adooooorable, and Midnight Cowboy, which was well done but totally depressing and made me feel like I will pretty obviously end up living in a condemned tenement building someday and almost killing children with stolen coconuts. Also, thank god Angelina Jolie looks like her mother and not her father.

Later in the afternoon, we went on a walk up the East side of Manhattan and into Central Park, which I’m using as an excuse to use my Adventure Time logo:

the Queensboro Bridge at the edge of Manhattan, looking over Roosevelt Island

a modern building with art-tastic balconies and doors

looking down the East River toward lower Manhattan

a crazy wild boar statue surrounded by all sorts of marine life and snakes eating toads and stuff

Apparently this is Sutton Place Park’s replica of Porcellino, a sculpture by Pietro Tacca from 1634. Bill Clinton liked it, too, although for a completely dumb reason.

a Colonial-looking house with a vibrant door

This place had a private drive and a private park overlooking the East River. A Latino-looking person driving a Honda–obviously the hired help–wanted to leave but waited to open the gate until Kamran and I were well across the street. We talked about how we spend so much of our lives feeling better-off than everyone everywhere else in the U.S. that it’s annoying to see someone wagging their rooftop solarium in our faces.

New Yorkers play tennis inside giant balloon-domes

Magnolia Bakery cupcakes from Bloomingdale’s

a store devoted entirely to buttons

Hans Christian Anderson in Central Park

apartment buildings on 5th Avenue behind the Central Park conservatory

the Alice in Wonderland statue, which is totally freaky and not at all for children

squirrel/rat

an elaborate temple on 5th Avenue

sunset over the Central Park conservatory

My Once and Future Home

katie ett — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:00:52 +0000

My former co-worker/former friend/now bitter enemy Adam was one of the most admired/most feared people at my company because of his crushing sardonic humor. I figured I would never be on the receiving end of it because I kept him well-supplied with Bit-O-Honey candy and because we have a shared homeland: the lush, rolling hills of Ohio. So when I asked Adam to write a guest post for me–because his brilliant blog has now been dormant for a year–of course he decided to write about Ohio sucking.

I’m not entirely sure why Katie asked me to guest write this blog. Maybe she’s trying to throw me a bone because she feels sorry for me that I have 2% of the number of followers she has on Twitter. I don’t need your charity!

I like Katie’s blog, so I agreed to write a post for her. I don’t want to go into completely uncharted territory my first time, so I decided to write about one of her “favourite” topics: Ohio.

Like Katie, I am from Ohio. Unlike Katie, I am not proud of this. I am from the part of the state that is best known for–depending on your age and your politics–the transvestite from the TV show “MASH”, or Joe the Plumber, or nothing at all. And while I was raised and educated in Ohio, I wasn’t born there, which allows me to honestly answer questions about where I’m from without mentioning the state.

Why my hostility to Ohio? It’s nothing personal. But this blog is normally filled with Ohio-pride, so I feel it’s my responsibility to temper that.

The best I can say about Ohio is that it isn’t that bad. I mean, you never hear of anyone dreaming about moving to Ohio. Today, that is. Tomorrow is another matter.

Two things make up Ohio’s northern border: Michigan and Lake Erie. Michigan is notable for being shaped like a hand. Lake Erie is notable for being one of the five Great Lakes. The Great Lakes are notable for holding over 20% of the fresh water that currently exists on the entire planet.

Lake Erie is the second smallest of the Great Lakes, but it’s still a pretty big lake. At almost 10,000 square miles, it’s bigger than 6 states, including New Jersey. And at one time it was almost as polluted as New Jersey. In 1969, a river that feeds Lake Erie caught fire. That river and others like it had been catching fire sporadically for 100 years by that point. But the 1969 fire was a significant enough embarrassment to virtually every level of government that it served as a catalyst to the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Global warming, climate change, tree-hugger chicken-little bullshit… whatever you prefer to call it, if it’s actually happening, access to fresh water may become a source of wealth and power, much like access to energy sources are today. So it’s actually conceivable that people will dream about moving to Ohio in the future.

God, I really hope that day never comes.

A Day in the Life

katie ett — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 16:00:02 +0000

Lisa told me that my blog is antiquated because I still live in the LiveJournal era when people wrote about their crushes and clashes with family and DIY abortions using vitamin C. In a way, I love what most of the blogs I read have become–themed posts, usually about clothes or crafts, using beautiful photos that have been manipulated in one or more editing programs–but a lot of me still misses those days of locked-down super-personal posts that you worried about your father finding and made your best friend promise to delete if you ever died prematurely.

I don’t have a lot of juicy life happenings these days, but I still like the idea of keeping a record of my goings-on. So as consistently as I can, I’m going to try to do a weekly “a day in the life” post. Here’s the first:

• Tuesday, I went to lunch with my friend Ash at Ippudo, which is supposed to have some of the best (if not the best) ramen in NYC. (Here‘s her review of her first visit without me.) Is ramen a huge thing right now where you are? It seems like every blog I read is talking about it, and everyone I know is eating it. Soup is dumb. But soup with pork belly in it is something special.

• Kamran left to take a deposition in California on Wednesday, so I had my friends Ash and Kim over to my apartment on Wednesday night. We watched the end of “Love Actually”, which is OLD at this point, guys, and Kiera Knightley’s constant half-shirts show it. Remember when we used to think belly buttons weren’t gross? Then we watched two episodes of “Girls”, which were amazing (Lena Dunham’s tweets, which I read for the first time later, indicate that she actually had OCD as a kid), and Varsity Blues, which was terrible aside from that Collective Soul song, “Run”. We drank gin and juice, because my roommate/landlord/co-worker/super great friend, Jack, recently became obsessed with hosting and built himself a home bar that rivals those in the offices of “Mad Men”. We mostly talked about vaginas, periods, and how to style our hair.

• On Thursday, I watched Stranger Than Fiction and cried until Jack came home from a “business trip”, and then we finished season 2 of “Boardwalk Empire”, which was SHOCKING.

• Friday, a few co-workers and I went to Fraunces Tavern for dinner. George Washington, like, signed the Declaration of Independence there. Or was born there. Or died there. Or something. It’s an important place. It’s also a restaurant, and the fish & chips there are not good.

• Saturday, Kamran and I went to Babbo for lunch despite having been to another Mario Batali restaurant recently and thinking it was just okay. It seemed like they were actively trying to make it a bad time for us, but the food was so good we couldn’t help but enjoy it. Even after I spewed red wine all over Kamran while laughing at a thought I was having.

On the way home, we saw:

this guy doing sand art in Washington Square Park

some tiny, sleepy dogs, barely able to keep their eyes open

this sign at a seafood restaurant

The end.

A Day in the Life (5)
A Day in the Life (7)
A Day in the Life (9)
The New York City Apartment (8)
The Two Kinds of People Who Visit NYC and My Bitterness Toward Both of Them (13)
New York Fashion Week After-Party (10)
Tonight, We Are Young (17)
Jury Duty in NYC with No Mob Bosses in Sight (27)
Weekend Update (9)
Horrific Hurricane (6)

Meanwhile, Elsewhere on the Internet

katie ett — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 17:00:24 +0000

I have a crazy backlog of food photos building up on my hard drive and no time to blog about them because I’m always busy rubbing your nose in my self-importance here, so I think I’m going to focus more on that for the moment and officially ask for your support of my food blog, donuts4dinner.

In case you need visual prodding:

I know it’s hard to think of a hundred different ways to say “that brown sugar cake you ate at that restaurant I’ve never heard of and will never visit sure looks tasty”, but

a) Kelly, Jessica, Ellie, Ash, and Tracey do it, and

b) I always find incredibly insightful things to say about your pets/kids/clothes/hot husband, so you can probably swing a “yum!” my way every now and then. (Meaning every day. (Miss a post, and you’re dead to me.))

j/k! Love you!

Here’s the RSS link if you just want to go ahead and add that to your reader right now: donuts4dinner RSS. And I’ll see you there.

Behind the White Line

katie ett — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 17:00:50 +0000

Last night on the bus, a man and woman stood talking to the driver from the Wall Street stop to the East Village. It was clear that the driver and the man knew each other in the way that the man draped himself across the payment box casually and laughed and laughed at everything the bus driver said, but it seemed the woman in the leopard-print coat had been sitting in the seat behind the driver, gotten jealous of the fun they were having, and jumped up to join in. They weren’t bothering me at all, but then I’m a really forgiving, really self-sacrificing, really charitable person. Also a humble one.

But out of nowhere came a creaky old-lady voice:

“Excuse me! Don’t talk to the driver while the bus is in motion, and get behind the white line. It’s the law! All you’re doing is messing around. ALL OUR LIVES ARE AT STAKE.”

Read the rest here to bring me fame and riches!

katie ett — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 17:00:04 +0000

The best way for me to judge how well my life is going is to spend ten minutes reading Facebook statuses and see how depressed I feel about other people’s lives.

The Two Kinds of People Who Visit NYC and My Bitterness Toward Both of Them

katie ett — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:00:07 +0000

When you live in Ohio, people don’t assume they know anything about what it’s like to be you. Maybe they have some vague idea that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is in Cleveland, maybe they’ve read that the Cincinnati Zoo is so good it can breed rocks, maybe they’ve heard of Jeni’s ice cream–or maybe, like the majority of my co-workers, they think Ohio is considered part of the South and is solely responsible for producing all of the existing mullets in the United States.

When you live in NYC, people like to think they know eeeeeverything about your life. They assume you love Broadway shows, eat every meal at either Serendipity or Shake Shack, have Magnolia cupcakes after every weekend brunch with your girlfriends, wear nothing but stilettos, and date men in finance with slicked-back hair who take cabs everywhere. A lot of people have a lot of experience with NYC, either because they visited once for their friend’s bachelorette party, watched Big as a kid, or listen to a lot of Alicia Keys. In my experience, these people fall into two categories:

1) They’re glamoured by the city but don’t think they could live here. They’re pumped to see the Empire State Building and to walk down 5th Avenue, have read up on the tricks to getting cheap show tickets, want to take high tea at the Ritz, and have brought special clothes that they think will help them fit in here. But they’re shocked at how much everything costs, won’t feel like they’ve accomplished anything if they don’t live in a detached house with a yard, and can’t imagine having to sit side-by-side with strangers on a train.

To these people, I want to say: my life is just like your life but better. Sure, it’s expensive here, but I make a zillion more dollars doing what I do here than I would in Ohio. Sure, I don’t have a detached house, but I feel so safe encased in a big apartment building with a doorman to keep out the crazies. Sure, I don’t have a car, but I can take a cab when I need to, and I wouldn’t trade anything for being able to read on my way to work and to never have to park again. Sometimes I go out for fancy dinners, but sometimes I just want some boxed mac & cheese. Sometimes I get dressed up and go to a “club” with my “crew”, but sometimes I just want to sit at home and watch “Shark Tank”. Sometimes I go to the Empire State Building, but I usually just go to Rockefeller Center, because that’s where my boyfriend works. Every day. And it’s totally normal.

2) They feel like they’re supposed to live here. They already did all of the touristy stuff long ago, so now their visits are comprised of sunbathing in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park instead of Central Park, eating at the restaurants of the lesser-known “Top Chef” contestants, and going to SoulCycle classes “like all of the celebrities”. They claim that they just look so naturally New-Yorky that whenever they visit, people stop them on the streets to ask for directions. They spend all day combing job sites to find a reason to move here and don’t know anything about the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville but are excited that apartments look affordable there.

To these people, I want to say: MY LIFE IS NOTHING LIKE YOUR LIFE, AND YOU COULD NEVER CUT IT HERE. Sure, apartments look affordable in some of the outlying neighborhoods, but that is because YOU WILL DIE THERE. Sure, I feel so safe encased in a big apartment building with a doorman to keep out the crazies, but I will never ever ever have a place big enough to suit more than a five-pound dog. Sure, I wouldn’t trade anything for not having to own a car, but it’s rough having to haul everything around on my back all of the time because I can’t just throw it in my car until I need it. I hope you don’t like cooking, because your apartment probably doesn’t have an oven. I hope you don’t like holidays, because there’s not a chance you have a place to store your Christmas tree. I hope you don’t like your friends, because they will all move away to buy detached houses with yards to raise their children in.

Yesterday, Kamran told me, “You know what makes me feel bleh? When Facebook friends of mine from other parts of the country post pics of themselves visiting NYC.” I asked, “Because you want them to try to meet up with you?” He said, “Well no, no, I don’t. But I want them to want to try to meet up with me. It’s especially weird when those friends post pics of themselves in front of landmarks. It’s like, yea, good for you. I pass that every day and don’t even bother to notice. And then I feel petty and bitter.”

And that’s exactly my experience living in NYC, too. People are coming here all of the time to visit, and only half of them are asking to see me, and I’m only actually seeing half of the ones who ask because I’m apparently SO BUSY with my BIG AND IMPORTANT LIFE. (And by that, I mean lazy and not at all interested in meeting you in some Times Square bar where we won’t even be able to hear each other talk.) But then I’ll see those people I didn’t bother to see or who didn’t want to see me post a picture of the Chrysler Building on Facebook, and I’ll be like, “Uh, YEAH, I pass that thing every single day. It’s not really a big deal. You should sort of be embarrassed about how you’re fangirling over that thing. Oh, you saw the Rockefeller Christmas tree? GREAT JOB. So did the half of Ohio who visited NYC for Christmas. Hope you enjoyed that visit to Serendipity and the frozen hot chocolate. I’ve been there, like, ten times and know the frozen hot chocolate is about the worst thing on the menu. WAY TO GO.”

Give me credit for living here, okay? I’m special and need to be recognized as such. Just ignore those other eight million people around me.

New York Fashion Week After-Party

katie ett — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 17:00:07 +0000

My latest gig shooting a New York Fashion Week after-party for The Set NYC was moved from Friday to Saturday night because of the “snowstorm” that “buried” all of Manhattan in half an inch of freezing rain, but the crowd turned out despite the rescheduling, and I was all up in their business with my camera and my flash and my skillz.

I arrived early to watch the models get their faces and hair did,

and then I shot my patented mix of models,

regular people livin’ it up,

and professional dancers gettin’ down:

My favourite moment of the evening was when I marched up to this girl and told her she was adorable and that I needed her picture,

not realizing that one of the women she was with was runway model and “America’s Next Top Model” finalist Maytee Martinez (left):

Oops.

In the elevator before work this morning, I heard a woman tell another woman that she was “busy last week with fashion shows”, and I know that even as recently as a year ago, I would’ve thought something akin to “blahblahblahshowoff” upon hearing this. But today, I thought, “Oh, weird, so was I.” Obviously I ain’t no bigshot photographing the Marchesa runway show or whatever, but it’s crazy to me that I’m participating in this very New-Yorky thing in my own way. And I seriously love the sort of freedom in editing that comes with shooting pictures that are inherently artistic. I’m sure plenty of people would vomit over my 1995 raver aesthetic, but I DO WHAT I WANT.

The rest of the set is here, on my Ettible Photography Facebook Page.

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