So for the New Yorkers among us (and for the non-New Yorkers among us who want to indulge in a little schadenfreude at the expense of the New Yorkers among us), a few things about New York City to be miserable about:

• Gum on subway seats
• Vomit on subway seats
• That adorable boutique down the block where you can’t afford anything
• Views of airshafts
• Windows with bars on them
• Getting your heels stuck in subway gratings
• Trying to find somewhere to use the bathroom
• Finding somewhere to use the bathroom, and then seeing four mice in the food preparation area as you walk by it on your way to the bathroom (this happened to me in a deli in the Village last week)
• Tourists who stop in the middle of the sidewalk to take pictures in Times Square 
• This Craigslist post
• Paying $11.25 for a movie
• Wall Street
• People who walk slowly in the subway station when you’re running for a train
• Ambulances outside your window
• Overpriced greasy diners
• Subway musicians that make you contemplate offering them money to STOP playing
• Apartments with thin walls
• The fact that anything cool you might discover has already been discovered by hundreds of cooler people (who probably live in Williamsburg and get checks each month from their parents in order to pay for their black designer skinny jeans)

What about you?  What makes you miserable about New York City?  Feel free to add to my list in the comments section below, and I’ll post my favorites to my blog, Things to Be Miserable About.

And finally, if you’ve enjoyed my posts this week, there’s a reading and book party on Monday!  It’s free and open to the public.  Details below:

11,002 Things to Be Miserable About Reading and Book Party Monday, January 26 7:00 pm Half King Bar 505 W. 23rd St. (near 10th Ave.) New York Nick and I will be reading from the book, answering questions, signing books, drinking too much, et cetera.

Lia Romeo, co-author of 11,002 Things to Be Miserable About, spent the past week guest blogging on Jewcy.  This is her parting post.  Want more?  Buy her book! 

The post Misery and the City appeared first on Jewcy.

Now, admittedly, times are tough.  Two major wars in the middle east, foreclosed houses and an economic crisis back home, not to mention the tragic deterioration of Amy Winehouse.  We’re certainly in a tighter spot than we’ve been in my lifetime, maybe even in my parents’ lifetimes.  But "a nation that has rarely been in such peril"?  Really?

While writing 11,002 Things to Be Miserable About, my brother Nick and I ended up spending a fair amount of time researching misery from the past.  A quick summary of some things to be miserable about from American history:

• The Revolutionary War (okay, we won, but 25,000 people died first)
• The devastation of Native American tribes by smallpox and other European diseases
• Slavery
• The Civil War (200,000 deaths in battle, and 400,000 more from disease)
• Carpetbaggers who took advantage of the South during Reconstruction
• "Separate but equal" policies and Jim Crow laws
• World War I (116,000 U.S. casualties)
• The Great Depression (unemployment rose to 23.9%, as compared to 7.2% today)
• World War II (the deadliest military conflict in history, with 417,000 U.S. soldiers dead)
• The Korean War (we tend to forget about this one, but there were 54,000 U.S. casualties)
• The assassination of President Kennedy
• The Vietnam War (almost 60,000 U.S. casualties)
• ’80s fashions

Times are hard, but I think it’s impossible to argue that they’ve been a lot worse.  And yet America’s still here, still proud, still gathering together to celebrate our new leaders, still drinking cheap beer and eating bad hamburgers.  So I think we’ll be okay.

Lia Romeo, co-author of 11,002 Things to Be Miserable About, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

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Preview 11,002 Things to Be Miserable About, visit the book’s website, or check out book trailers and videos on YouTube.

The post History’s Miseries appeared first on Jewcy.

The book is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a list of 11,002 things to be miserable about.  It starts with "Death," "Life," "Hitler," and "Erectile dysfunction" and goes from there.  But for the blog, we figured we’d take a more topical approach. Things to Be Miserable About is a collection of the most depressing news, facts, figures, photos, and video from around the globe. (As you can imagine, at the moment it’s practically writing itself.)

One of our features is called the Miserable Fact of the Day.  I was going through our archives recently and decided to share a few of my favorites (actually, I should say "least favorites" … because they’re really all quite horrifying):

• On average, one in five people has genital herpes.  (And it’s one in four New Yorkers).  So if you’ve had sex with more than five people (or more than four New Yorkers) you’ve likely been exposed.

• The average person’s body contains detectable quantities of 148 different synthetic chemicals.

• One third of high school graduates will never read another book for the rest of their lives.

• Statistically, you are three times more likely to be murdered by someone you know than by a stranger.

• There are more bacteria in the ice machines at fast food restaurants than in toilet bowl water.

• The average bed houses over 6 billion dust mites.

• Upon reaching the age of 35, people begin losing approximately 7000 brain cells – which will never be replaced – each day.

• Surgical tools are left inside approximately 1500 patients in the U.S. every year.

• Fifteen percent of Americans hold strong anti-Semitic beliefs.

• The average length of sexual intercourse in humans is two minutes.

Want more?  You can sign up to receive the Miserable Fact of the Day via email.  And who knows?  This time next year, there may be a page-a-day calendar.

Lia Romeo, co-author of 11,002 Things to Be Miserable About, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

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Preview 11,002 Things to Be Miserable About, visit the book’s website, or check out book trailers and videos on YouTube.

The post A Few Miserable Facts appeared first on Jewcy.

The $150 to $170 million total cost

The fact that there are only 5000 portable toilets for 2 million people

The upscale toilets that were brought in for members of Congress and dignitaries, but are off-limits to everyone else  

Pepsi’s adaptation of Obama’s "O" symbol into the Pepsi swoosh

All of the disappointed fashion designers Michelle Obama didn’t end up wearing

Scalpers who sold free inaugural tickets for $99 and up

The hour-long lines for the DC Metro 

The scam in which teenagers paid thousands of dollars to represent their states "for" the inauguration, but received no tickets

The overwhelmed cell phone networks and dropped calls

The long list of very ordinary items prohibited at the parade, including bottles, strollers, and umbrellas

The 30-degree weather

The fact that the Capitol was built by slaves

The possibility that pregnant women who live on Capitol Hill will go into labor during the inauguration, and be unable to get to the hospital due to the crowds

The miles of gridlocked traffic in and around Washington

The impossibility of Obama’s living up to everything that everyone is expecting from him

Okay, I meant to make a list of 44 things, in honor of our 44th president… but honestly, I’m having a hard time coming up with anything else.  The media, typically a reliable source of gloom and doom, is full of stories about low-income teenagers receiving free trips to the capitol, racially segregated churches coming together to offer hospitality to those attending the event, and families setting aside their political differences to celebrate together.  It’s a tough day to be a writer who specializes in misery. But I have to admit, it’s a pretty exciting day to be an American.

Lia Romeo, co-author of 11,002 Things to Be Miserable About, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

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Preview 11,002 Things to Be Miserable About, visit the book’s website, or check out book trailers and videos on YouTube.

The post Things About the Inauguration to Be Miserable About appeared first on Jewcy.

It was 1998, and I was feeling depressed.  I was a senior in high school, I had small breasts and big glasses, and boys didn’t like me.  A friend, thinking I needed some cheering up, gifted me with a copy of a little white book with a bright, crayoned smiley face on the spine: 14,000 Things to Be Happy About.

14,000 Things to Be Happy About, which has sold over a million copies, is a stream-of-consciousness list of life’s small joys.  "Baseball."  "Beef brisket."  "Believing in one great love."  And 13,997 more in the same vein. 

It failed to resonate. 

My only experience with baseball was being last-picked in elementary school, I knew too much about industrial meat processing to enjoy eating beef anything, and if there was only one great love, I was fairly sure I’d never find it.

My brother Nick suggested that it would be funny to write a parody: 14,000 Things to Be Miserable About.  I thought that was a fantastic idea.

And so we did nothing about it.  For the next ten years.

Then, about a year ago, Nick and I were sitting around drinking wine, and we decided to look up literary agents that specialized in humor books.  By this time, the ubiquity of the internet had made it easy to do so without investing $27.99 in a Writer’s Market directory, which would have meant relying on the roaches under my sink as my primary protein source for the next week.  

So we put together a query letter, and, shortly thereafter, we had a book deal.  That was when we realized that the downside of getting a book deal is that we’d actually have to write a book. 

Specifically, we’d have to make a list of 11,002 things to be miserable about.  (Our publisher, Abrams Image, cut the number down from the original 14,000 so the book could be sold at a lower price point.)  We’d each have to come up with 5,501 things that sucked – more, actually, because inevitably there were some duplicates.  ("Mad Cow Disease."  "Machiavelli."  "The Mongol invasion.")

We started by passing a legal pad back and forth across my kitchen table.  Nick wrote: "Death."  I wrote: "Life."  Nick wrote: "Hitler."  I wrote: "Erectile dysfunction."   And we went from there.

Of course, spending six months working on the book – and then the past three months writing and maintaining a blog (a collection of the most depressing facts, figures, news, photos, and video from around the globe) – may not have been the healthiest thing for my state of mind.  The other night I went to a friend’s party, and while everyone else was singing "Happy Birthday," I was thinking about the artificial flavorings in the cake. 

And so tomorrow, in honor of a historic and exciting day in our country’s history, I’ll present a list of Things About the Inauguration to Be Miserable About.  I’m a huge Obama fan, and I’m as excited about the new administration as anybody… but I’ve become an expert at seeing the misery in just about anything.

Lia Romeo, co-author of 11,002 Things to Be Miserable About, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

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Preview 11,002 Things to Be Miserable About, visit the book’s website, or see book trailers and videos on YouTube.

The post How the Misery Began appeared first on Jewcy.