Monthly Archives: January 2016

Serial S2 E5 Recap: That sounds like a personnel problem.

Posted on January 26, 2016 | Leave a comment

Think about your favorite hole-in-the-wall pizza place, the one you order from every week. Imagine that it suddenly becomes popular. You don’t even have to convince your friends to eat there anymore so that you have someone to talk to about it. They all love it as much as you do.

But then something changes. Maybe the chef can’t handle the pressure of millions of customers and takes on too big of a menu. Maybe the way she used to make the pizza was sort of illegal and now that she’s famous she has to follow the rules. Or maybe the pizza just doesn’t work without the ingredients she used last time. Either way, the quality isn’t as good as it used to be. When Thursday comes around, you aren’t even excited about your weekly pizza anymore. Sometimes it takes you a whole day to finish. Your friends are like, “Lucy, why did you make me order this? This pizza sucks!” You keep eating it anyway, though, in hopes that one week it will taste the way you remember it.

Then one Thursday morning–with no notice–you call to order your pizza, and they say that they’re only delivering every other Thursday now. The chef says she is going to start getting better ingredients from people who really know about pizza. The ingredients are going to be so good that it’s going to take her two weeks to collect them all. But she promises it will be worth the wait. Two weeks later, your pizza shows up. You wake up 30 minutes early so that you can walk to work and eat it during your commute. That’s how excited you are.

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Posted in .edu, Reel Life & Recaps, Serial

A Tree Froze in Brooklyn

Posted on January 24, 2016 | 2 comments

Alternate title: Snow Diggity

28: Hours since Mayor de Blasio declared a Winter Weather Emergency in New York City.

85 million: People in the path of Blizzard Jonas.

30: Inches of snow predicted in southern New York.

26.8: Actual inches of snowfall in Manhattan.

16: Emergency alerts on my phone from Notify NYC.

11: Texts from my grandmother asking if I’m alive.

500: People in line at Trader Joe’s on Friday night.

4: Free scones the guy at the coffee shop by my apartment gave me since they were closing early.

5: Minutes it took to regain feeling in my fingers after writing this.IMG_8803-1.JPG Continue reading →

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Posted in .edu, Just Life, New York

Oh, hoe is me!

Posted on January 21, 2016 | Leave a comment

Last weekend I had a friend over for a glass two bottles of wine in my new apartment. We discussed the oddities of being twentysomethings; how weird it is that people we know are having babies ON PURPOSE; the perils of being fat and broke, which–in the scheme of things–neither of us is; and recent dates we’ve been on…or lack there of. Taking advantage of the opportunity to show off what a cool, open-minded New Yorker I am, I said that I had just created a profile on Tinder. “Tinder?” she responded, in a tone that I can only describe as “What is this, 2014?” I might as well have said, “I still pull my hair through a cap, and tomorrow I’m getting my first diaphragm!”

There I was, thinking I was this modern woman, when really I was your grandfather who still mail orders two DVDs from Netflix every week because he doesn’t know about online streaming.newyorkmen

I’m sort of kidding. I didn’t really believe Tinder was a hot new way of meeting Mr. Right, or Mr. Right Now, or experimenting, or whatever I’m supposed to be doing at this point in my life. But I did think it was still relevant.

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Posted in Ideas, New York

Serial S2 E4 Recap: Keeping Up with the Taliban

Posted on January 17, 2016 | Leave a comment

On Thursday, Sarah Koenig said bye weekly episodes in favor of bi-weekly episodes. She made a similar pun on the podcast but it fell flat. Sort of like when I was dating an Indian guy and I went out on a limb with “sorry I’m not sari” and he didn’t get it. It’s a joke meant for print.

Koenig also recently spoke out against people who accuse her of being in love with Adnan Syed. I see why that might be offensive, but come on, Koenig. Can you really blame us for wondering if you wanted to taste that forbidden fruit? Isn’t it every little girl’s dream to fall in love with a convict and then draw enough attention to his case through a Peabody Award-winning podcast that he is granted a new hearing and released just in time for your fairy tale wedding? It’s the premise of, like, every chivalric romance.

Plus she’s gotta give the public some credit for refraining from saying she wanted Adnan in her “kuchi tent.” It’s what everyone was thinking the second she said a word that sounds like “cootchie” on an NPR podcast. And anyone who says that isn’t what they were thinking is a liar. But I guess I should recap last week’s episode now. Continue reading →

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Posted in Reel Life & Recaps, Serial

25 Things Besides “Mingle” That Single People Are Ready To Do

Posted on January 3, 2016 | Leave a comment

In 2006, Abercrombie & Fitch had a gray t-shirt that said “Single and Ready to Mingle” in brown, curly font across the chest. When my 8th grade boyfriend Pablo Gibbs (née Gomez) and I broke up, I wore said t-shirt to school the very next day. I can’t remember if I bought the t-shirt preemptively or if it belonged to one of my step-sisters, but I bore the words like a badge of honor that told the world I was on the market. In this context, “on the market” means “able to spare a slow dance at the next mixer.” Things were simpler then. ISIS wasn’t a threat, and I wore a size 2. A breakup was painless enough that I was ready to wear a t-shirt about it less than 24 hours later. Fast forward 10 years, and I’m not so stoked to “mingle.” After collaborating with 3 of my girlfriends, here is a list of 25 things single women are actually ready to do. Continue reading →

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Posted in America, Just Life, Lists