I LOVE HALLOWEEN. I really do. I attribute it to the fact that I have always had amazing costumes. My mimi is a top-knotch seamstress, and she always made me elaborate, crazy-awesome costumes. Everything from the Statue of Liberty to Glenda the Good Witch (complete with gigantic beautiful crown) to Harry Potter. And she was sweet enough to make my (surprisingly complicated) costume this year! I went with a Game of Thrones Daenerys Targaryen costume (KHALEESI)!
Amazing, right?
So anyway, Eliana and I had a Halloween party!
So if you know anything about Game of Thrones, you know that Daenerys Targaryen is the mother of dragons. Therefore, Eliana dressed up as a dragon.
My dragon trying to eat me?
Trying really hard to pose for a serious picture
...our best attempt at an in-character picture. This is who we are, people.
Hanna dressed as a Freudian Slip. GET IT? I love this costume.
Sam and Patrick. not sure what's happening here...
David (who is maybe dressed as Ira Glass?) and Sarah, dressed as Flo from the Progressive commercials!
Chioma (dressed as a witch, even though you can't see the top of her hat) and me!
Captain Dragon
Rachel and Mikey aka Wendy and Peter Pan!
That was Friday night. And then came...Sandy. All day Saturday, all my family members were calling, texting, and e-mailing to make sure I was prepared. Eliana (my roommate), who is a born-and-raised New Yorker, p'shawed. "It'll just rain a little bit." I agreed with her, but I was also a little anxious. So I stocked up on bottled water, SPAM, and triple-A's, just in case. Sunday is when the rain started and when NYU canceled class. Of course, I was psyched. By the end of Monday (having been INCREDIBLY unproductive due to canceled school), I was getting a little bored. Well, Sandy took care of that! I live in lower Manhattan, so around 8:30 Monday night, we lost power. Naturally, our immediate reaction was to build a blanket fort.
BLANKET FORT!!!
Sign on the door to the emergency exit in my dorm.
Our rations during the blackout.
Only I would make a salad in the middle of a blackout. (Gotta eat those veggies/cheeses before they spoil!)
Ensuring everyone that I was okay and safe in my blanket fort.
"I'm ready for the lights to come back."
The next day, after it stopped raining, we ventured out to see what we could see. Here are some Hurricane Sandy pictures.
Stoplights were out.
Only a few intersections had traffic cops. New Yorkers seemed to be driving civilly, though (for the first time ever).
Working on the subway
The entire facade was ripped off
Below the facade-less building
The small yellow taped-up sign says "Cell Phone Charging"
Lots of downed limbs everywhere
Tuesday night, when told to evacuate, instead of squatting in the student center, we high-tailed it out to Queens to Eliana's home! (Although, Alec Baldwin did visit the refugees staying in the student center. But showers and sleeping in a bed beats Alec Baldwin, I must say.) We ate a lot of junk food, watched a lot of Friends, and I saw Star Wars (Episode IV) for the first time (I KNOW, HOW HAD I NOT SEEN IT BEFORE). We had a nice, long Sandycation, but I must say, I was glad to get back to normal life.
I am proud to say I survived my first hurricane! I was very fortunate to not be all that affected by the storm, unlike a lot of other New Yorkers, who have lost their homes. I highly encourage all of you to help in any way you can! Feminspire.com posted a fantastic list of ways you can lend a hand here: http://feminspire.com/how-you-can-help-victims-of-superstorm-sandy/.
Stay warm, everyone! A "nor'easter" (I still don't understand what this means, even after having it explained to me several times and comprehensively scanning the Wikipedia page. IT JUST SEEMS LIKE A BLIZZARD TO ME.) has hit us, and it is fierce. This Little Bitty is not accustomed to all this extreme East Coast weather. Throw a tornado my way, I am a champ. But hurricanes and nor'easters? I haven't got a clue.
Most NYU students have eaten here at least
once (and definitely less than the embarrassing number of times I go there
during the semester). It’s conveniently located near “campus” in the West
Village (I think so, anyway. It’s in an area that I refer to by the geographically
scientific term “that hood behind Bobst [NYU’s library]”). Anyway, Peanut Butter and Co is pretty self-explanatory: they serve up all kinds of varieties
of your favorite childhood classic: the PB&J.
My most recent trip to Peanut Butter and Co was not just out
of the blue or out of necessity to satistfy a craving—I had a COUPON!!
That’s one great thing about being a student in the city—if you
look hard enough, you can find stuff like this. I obtained a PB&Co coupon sheet in
NYU’s very covert and underground Student Resource Center (or maybe other
students already knew about this magical coupon wonderland and I’ve just been
living in the dark for the last two and a half years). There is a different
special for every month, so you can bet I won’t let these coupons go to waste.
I went to Peanut Butter and Co to use my coupon on my break
between classes. I am indecisive when ordering food anyway, but when
it comes to peanut butter sandwich varieties, I want one of everything. I
considered trying something I’ve been curious about since my first time there,
the Pregnant Lady (peanut butter and bread and butter pickles), but I wasn’t
feeling courageous enough. I had my heart set on the Peanut Butter Cup (peanut butter and Nutella), but then I saw it… the sandwich I knew I had to
get. I, of course, forgot the name, but I could never forget what it contained:
peanut butter, vanilla cream cheese, and chocolate chips.
After freaking out the employee by placing my order way too
overexcitedly, I got my free hot chocolate.
And then… the glorious sandwich.
It was delectable, OBVIOUSLY. The hot chocolate could have
been better, but… it was free. Peanut Butter and Co is a lovely and delicious
place to have your lunch (or dinner!), and it always makes me feel like a little kid. Even if
you can’t make it the shop in New York, you can order some of their delicious
peanut butter online (they’ve got about a billion different kinds). I know I’ll
be stocking up before going home to Texas for the summer.
I’m Kirsten. I’m
20 and in my third year at New York University, and this is my blog about a
small-town Texan living in the Big Apple. And when I say small, I mean
$400-a-month-apartment-in-Brooklyn small.
That's me. See? Some of us actually do have big hair in Texas.
I tell most people that I’m from a city called Wichita
Falls, which is only kind of true. I went to school—all 13 years of it—in a
nearby town called Holliday. Along with me, only 1, 632 people call Holliday
home (so says Wikipedia). That still seems like too many people to me. Let me
give you some more accurate statistics. There were 51 people in my graduating class, and the
class that graduated a year before mine had about 80, and that felt bigger than Texas itself. I was
one of five or six people from my class going out-of-state for college—and I
went to the place that is the literal opposite of my hometown.
Here are the top 3 questions I am asked by people in my
hometown about living in New York:
1) Why NYU/why New York?
NYU has a spectacular creative writing program, which is what
drew me in initially. I’m now a student at NYU’s Gallatin School of
Individualized Study, a unique and fantastic program that’s allowed me to
pursue my weirdly specific interests and get a degree in them. As for New York:
it’s true what they say. It’s the greatest city in the world. It’s a concrete
jungle where dreams are made up, etc etc. I have gotten to do so many things I
would have never experienced.
2) Do you like it?
I love New York. (Well, most of the time. I don’t really
love New York when I’m trudging home in the pouring rain because I can’t afford
to refill my MetroCard and out of nowhere it smells like human feces, but other
than that, yeah, I love it.) But it’ll never beat Texas.
3) Didn’t you transfer back home?
No. No, random person I graduated from high school with, I
didn’t. I sure as hell got close, though. My freshman year at NYU was really,
really hard. Which is why I didn’t start my blog then, even though it seems
like it would make a lot more sense to do that—y'know, chronicle my experience from the beginning. The whole thing probably would
have been pretty depressing. Not that I was miserable 100% of the time, but I
did spend a lot of nights ordering in Chinese food and throwing myself pity
parties.
One last thing you might be wondering: Why am I calling
myself Little Bitty in the City?
The idea came to me while listening to a song from my childhood—Alan Jackson’s “Little Bitty.” I don’t really listen to country music anymore, but when I was younger, I would belt my little heart out with more twang than Brooks and Dunn combined.
Cuuuuuute mullet, Alan.
You might have noticed the chorus: It’s
alright / To be little bitty / Little hometown or a big ol’ city. Appropriate to my life, right? I moved from a little
hometown to a big ol’ city. And when I moved to New York I felt, well, little
bitty. I was all alone among 8 million people, and I wasn’t a car ride away
from my mama like all my friends. I was incredibly homesick and missed
everything about Holliday—my family, my friends, my boyfriend, the Dairy Queen,
and even Friday night football (something I HATED in high school). And it
seemed like I was the only NYU freshman feeling this way. I wanted so badly to
quit and to give up on my dream, to say Hey!
I gave it a good run, but it wasn’t for me. But the thought of chickening
out on living in the greatest city in the world made me feel little bitty.
Being alone in the city made me feel little bitty, too, but I knew giving up on
the dream I had since I was 12 would make me feel even bittier. So I forced myself
to smile and trudge on, and as it turns out, I learned that life does go on for
a little bitty while.
