The Garbage Can Is Not Your Plate

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Katie

Despite being a self-professed sports nerd, I just can’t get into the NBA.  Right around the time that Larry Bird and Patrick Ewing peaced out on the NBA, with them went any interest I had in professional basketball.  (Did you know there is a team in New Orleans?  This was recent news to me.)  Being the loving girlfriend that I am, when my boyfriend in his infinite coolness won tickets to Saturday’s game via a Twitter contest, I agreed to go to my very first Knicks game.  Being the cheap broad I can often be, I also snuck in candy to munch on.  Paying 375 dollars for a hot dog and soda hurts my feelings.

The seats were pretty rocking, complete with televisions right in front of us in case anyone wanted to check in on the local cable happenings.  James and I cheered on the Knicks and laughed as we enjoyed our free seat fortune.  All was fun and games until I dropped one solitary Mike & Ike.  Time froze momentarily for the two of us until I spoke.  “If you weren’t here.” I told him, “I would totally eat that.  But since you are, I will refrain.”  We glared at each other for just a second before we returned to our fantastic night, marred only by the Knicks blowing the win in double overtime.

The momentary Mexican stand-off the dropped Mike & Ike caused is a long standing brawl started by a slice of pizza a year ago.  I posted what I felt was a fairly innocuous tweet.  I included the picture below with the caption “Potential snack.”


No harm, no foul, right?  Who among us hasn’t eaten or at the very least thought about eating some food that already was in the garbage can? And while it totally isn’t just me, it has apparently never been James.  Except that I completely don’t believe that at all and feel certain he has at one point considered garbage food.  I just can’t accept the fact that anyone could see, let’s say, a Crumbs cupcake in the plastic box on top of the garbage and not at least contemplate eating it.  But the day the brawl started, he held his ground.

James: Babe, did you eat that pizza?
Me: What pizza? I’m eating waffles.  Eat whatever is in the fridge.
James: No, the pizza you tweeted about. The one in your work garbage can.  Did you eat it?
Me: What? No.
James: Oh ok, thank goodness.
Me: I only didn’t eat it because I wasn’t super hungry.  It was on the top of the garbage can.  I would have.
James: It was still IN the garbage can.  You can’t just eat food out of stray garbage cans.
Me: I don’t particularly see why not.  It’s probably cleaner than the shady pizza place we order from. You know how suspect dollar pizza is.
James:  Eating food out of the trash might be a dumpable offense.
Me: I see. Do you want some waffles?
James: No, thank you.
Me: Well if you change your mind, they’ll be in the goddamn garbage can!

And so it remains to this day.  My relationship is happy, smooth sailing… just as long as no one *eats* food off the floor or from the trash.  I’m pretty sure if we ever got married, his vows would read “Til death do us part. Or until you take a bag of chips from the local dumpster.”

*Also can be read as: is caught eating*

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True Confessions: I Had A Mullet

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Katie

My first real grownup job was working in the radio promotion department at a record label. If you have ever been around the record business, you might laugh at the fact that I called used the word grownup in reference to working at a record label. Nonetheless, it was the first place I was ever required to spend 40+ hours a week at and also got a massive paycheck for. Yeah, it was only $28 grand a year but coming from a girl who waitressed at TGI Fridays twice a week, it felt all kinds of Scrooge McDuck up in there.

There’s a lot of adult life lessons that come with your first job. I learned that days sometimes started earlier than noon, that FICA is a real sumbitch and that if I was going to work in Manhattan, it wouldn’t kill me to have a decent haircut. My hair up to that point had generally been a hippie style that was attributed more to laziness than being a free spirit and was often the shade of an at-home dye job gone terribly wrong. Margaret Ann, my boss at the time, was a large and boisterous Irish lesbian. She was amazing – when she wasn’t tearing me to shreds, anyway. Margy introduced me to her friend Wayne, who was a hairdresser over at One Life to Live and was quite simply magical. It was a match made in heaven.

If I sound smug as I write this, that is probably because I am feeling totally smug about the whole thing. My hairdresser is the bomb. (I feel less smug as I realize the cool kids probably don’t call things the bomb anymore. Easy come, easy go.) I think for women finding that hairdresser soulmate is a rite of passage. Your first haircut with the right guy is like something out of a fairy tale that probably doesn’t exist but someone should totally write. It sure kicked the crap out of a lot of other firsts, that’s for sure. (If it seemed like that statement was directed at my first boyfriend who is now a multi-pierced semi-professional wrestler with green hair, it was.)

What truly inspired me to spend more money on a haircut than I had ever spent on just about any one thing in my young life wasn’t just the forceful hand of the Dirty Old Irish Joke Lady. It was the last haircut I had received prior to Wayne. A young girl’s vision of beauty turned into a disaster. And if there is a bigger white girl problem than a bad haircut, I couldn’t tell you what it is.

I walked into a salon at the mall in Wayne, NJ (Mistake #1) bearing a photo of Britney Spears latest Rolling Stone cover (Mistake #2). Of course, the only thing stopping me from achieving a Britney level of success in all things was my lack of this haircut. I had to have it. I walked in and regrettably made Mistake #3 and took the first available stylist – Random Broad with frizzyish hair. This did not strike me as odd.

Look How Hot I Almost Was

I handed the picture over and sat getting ready for my closeup.  Not too much later, I was told by Random Broad to check myself out in the mirror as I was gorgeous!  I whirled around in the chair and was confronted with… a mullet.  I gasped in horror as the Jersey Frizz preened waiting for her compliment.  I immediately began to sob and begged to know how anyone could possess the cruelty to do that to another human being.  It was then the Frizz informed me that with my gorgeous thick hair there was no way I could have pulled off Britney’s snazzy jagged bob.

Why didn’t she tell me that before?  That’s a question I have pondered throughout the years.  The only conclusion I have ever been able to come to is that I went to a mall in New Jersey for a haircut.  I did the only thing I could do at that point.  In shock, I paid for my haircut and walked outside.  I caught my reflection in a windowpane a few steps from the salon and it was then that I went Incredible Hulk on everyone.

I stormed back into the salon, screaming and crying and demanding my money back.  I shouted obscenities at passersby and those unlucky enough to walk into the salon during my tantrum. I flailed wildly about and knocked over all sorts of overpriced products off the shelves.  I was asked to leave on multiple occasions but I could not be contained except by force.

The employees tried everything while they waited for security to come apprehend me.  I pounded my fist on the cash register over and over, shrieking over and over “Look at it! Look at it!”  Finally in an attempt to calm the beast the mullet created, someone offered me a free shampoo.  No conditioner, just the shampoo.  Mullet or no mullet, a college kid being offered a free pricey hair product was too good to pass up.  I gladly accepted and kicked the magazine rack over on my way out.

My 2012 wish for all the women out there: May you find your Wayne before you have a Jersey mullet.  And for the men, I hope that I never get so bored that I force you to read a tale about women’s hairdos again.

**Addendum**

This conversation occurred immediately after I posted this.

Allison:  Why aren’t there pics of  your mullet? I am sad.

Me: Because I got hair extensions two days later that were even worse than the mullet.  I then tried to dye it blonde and it came out orange.

Allison: Oh god.

Me: I wore a do rag for 2 months.

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I Can’t Have Nothing Nice

Posted on October 22, 2011 by Katie

While life generally isn’t as much like television as I would like, I do find that there is one constant that runs through both: catchphrases.  There have always been certain words or phrases that I associate with specific people or times in my life.  There was my friend Jessica who would shriek “Why bother?!” at least several times a week.  There was the  time in my life known as the Boot Scooting Boogie, for reasons I will probably never get into with anyone.  There’s my little brother, who will answer “I’ll allow it” to nearly anything you say.  The current era in my life shall henceforth be known as the period of “We can’t have nothing nice.” (Shove it, English fiends.  It’s just how it goes.)

For the last year plus, I have lived in a spectacularly cheap apartment with two friends, Laree and Gina.  We are all relatively hard-working women (the two of them more so than me – I work hard when I eventually arrive to work and when I don’t have a more important gchat to attend to) who just can’t seem to have anything nice.  No matter what.

When something breaks in my house, it is inevitably the worst possible thing you can break.  Whether it’s my prized Alice in Wonderland salt shaker or a giant decorative glass containing 300 glass marbles, that’ll always be what smashes.  I’m not sure anyone has ever dropped a pan or something that would survive a fall.  Nor has anything that none of us give a crap about ever broken.  It’s par for the course at our place.

Food only burns when it’s for someone’s birthday dinner.  One of us forgets our keys only when no one else is home.  The only things ever misplaced are the things we need immediately and will be in some semblance of trouble for losing.  We’ve all just sort of given into it.

This is seriously the only picture I have of the three of us. I'm barely in it.

This past week was a classic episode in my own inability to have a single thing nice.  It was a week filled with my boyfriend’s birthday festivities, highlighted by dinner with his family.  Having never met his parents before, this was a panic inducing big deal.  I woke up the morning of dinner with a giant swollen eye, really for no reason in particular other than to completely screw with my self confidence.

I left for work with my contact lenses in my bag, my glasses on my face and the knowledge that no one would ever believe me if I even attempted to cancel.  As the day wound down, my eye returned to relative normalcy.  I put my contacts in and left to face the music, which luckily for me turned out to be a perfectly lovely tune.

The days that followed were packed with my own mother’s birthday dinner, the boyfriend’s birthday party and a weekend in Washington, D.C. to watch James’ beloved Redskins get trounced by the Philadelphia Eagles.  At some point in the midst of all of this, I realized I hadn’t seen my glasses since the day of the birthday dinner.

I tried not to immediately worry, assuming I had left them at work.  When I returned to the office after my long weekend was when panic set in.  I tore my office apart, spilling a hot and delicious coffee down my leg, to no avail.  They were gone.

Of course they were gone.  They are the most expensive item I own that I regularly carry around with me.  I have every chapstick I have ever owned in my bag and every pen that’s ever grazed my fingers in my bag.  I know where each and every one of those are.  It only made perfect fitting sense that the glasses would be the only missing item.

After making James tear apart his house and his car and demolishing my bedroom and every bag I own, I finally gave up.  Mark down another one in the “Destruction of Something Important to Me” column. Why would I ever be able to have a single nice thing?

After the hunt, I was slightly dejected and completely pissed off.  For some reason, I take no issue with spending a pair of eyeglasses’ worth of loot at the bar on a weekend but paying for glasses I lost? Hella furious.

But maybe every now and then I can have something nice.  I walked in the door that day to find my slightly bent and mildly scratched pair of glasses on my kitchen table.  Maybe not in perfect condition, but I was more than willing to take it.

I questioned my roommates to figure out where in the holy bananas I had left them.  They were, of course, in the most obvious of spots – inside one of the boots I had borrowed from my roommate.  I mean, why wasn’t that the first place I looked? (Sadly, I had checked the inside of a different pair of boots.  This has been known to happen.)

I wish I could end this post with some sort of all’s well that ends well adage, but unfortunately I need to go look for my glasses.  They’re lost again.

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Google Has Answers to Questions You Didn’t Mean to Ask

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Katie

My boyfriend might just have the craziest landlord of all time. And coming from me, the girl whose landlord yelled at her for gypping him of 47 cents in rent, this is serious business.

Last week, the hot water in his apartment decided to take an extended vacation. Knowing he was going to spend most of the weekend hanging at my place, he gave her permission to go into his apartment if need be to make sure he could take a decent shower on Monday.

And go into his apartment, she sure did. When he arrived home on Monday morning, she was perched by her doorstep waiting to pounce. What happened next, I have only a second hand rendition of so I will not even attempt to recount the conversation with any sort of accurate syntax.

James, being a single dude, has a single dude’s apartment. And by that, I don’t mean it’s dirty or gross. It’s just a boy’s apartment. The fact that he has exactly 2 spices in his cabinets is more of an issue than the fact that he occasionally leaves a few dishes in the sink. Or at least it is for a relatively sane person.

When he walked in the door, she began to scream and berate him for the state of cleanliness of his apartment. F-bombs were thrown and the yelling match was probably louder than any human being needs during the 7 o’clock hour of a Monday. When he was finally able to calm her enough to head into his apartment, he found that SHE HAD CLEANED THE ENTIRE THING. She had done his dishes, scrubbed his bathtub and tossed his trash. While I thought this was a really solid perk and requested that she get riled up at me, James quite fairly felt his personal space had been violated.

All this seems to have led to a needed kick in the pants. He had been looking to buy a house a while back and when it kind of just didn’t pan out, he let the idea go. The idea has now become more of an absolute and he’s going full steam ahead with the plan to get away from crazy cleaning lady.

The one place he had thought about ages ago happened to still be available and the price had dropped by quite a a bit, thanks to the wonderful still-not-repaired economy. He informs me this house is in Lodi, NJ. Despite having spent a good amount of years in New Jersey, I am unbelievably inept when it comes to New Jersey geography. I can find Hoboken and Atlantic City and not much else. There are towns 15 minutes from me, sizeable ones at that, that I have never even heard of. I forever am refusing to go to places, thinking it’s a huge hike to get there, only to discover I probably could have walked from my apartment.

So because of this flaw in my life’s knowledge, I decided to google Lodi. First, I checked on the location. Next, I checked on local pubs that had the MLB package. I looked into a few other things a normal person would check about a city they may end up spending a decent amount of time in. Then, I screwed up.

It was time to get into the meatier things, so I began my search with the most logical query “Lodi gang violence.” No point in starting with the smaller things. Do I really care about vandalism or pickpocketing if I am probably going to get killed in a drive-by shooting? I do not. Not too concerned with the results as I hit enter, Google shows me 32,000+ results on gang violence in Lodi.

I panicked. Fine, I panic a lot, so I figured I’m an old pro at covering it up. I could be supportive about Jersey’s version of Compton.

I can’t. My big plan, like pretty much all my big plans, goes to hell the second the topic comes back up.

James asked, “Do you want me to go get you a lemonade?”

Ok, so the topic didn’t exactly come up, but it sort of did in my head.

“You can’t move to Lodi. There’s a very serious gang war going on there.”

James, living relatively nearby to Lodi, questions where the hell I am getting my information from.

“Google. Plus, pretty much everyone is talking about it. I don’t know how you don’t know. The owner of The Ringside lives in Lodi.”

“Is that true?”

“Yes.” (It’s not. Or if it is, that was a really lucky guess by me.)

“Let me see Google right now.”

James then pulled his phone out and began shaking from laughter, which only ceased to enrage me further. Pardon me for trying to keep his ass safe.

“What the hell are you laughing at? I am a concerned citizen and this is truly not a joking manner. People are dying in Lodi!”

He handed over the phone and says, “Lodi, California. Please look at this.”

It seems I made a huge mistake. Lodi, CA is a hot bed of violence and Lodi, NJ is just overrun by guidos. Now that I think about it, I’m not even sure which is worse.

The problem now is that even though I am well aware that I had the wrong Lodi, I no longer trust the namesake of a gang-filled town and intend to rally against it.  Probably this is why I was not asked for my opinion or to help in this matter.

I think the real problem here is not me or my incompetence.  I don’t claim to be a mind reader.  But Google does with its’ shifty and eerily accurate Gmail ads.  They’re the ones to blame for not knowing which Lodi I meant.  The real moral of the story here is that Lodi is still kind of weird and Google doesn’t know as much as it thinks it knows.

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