Catching Up with Kitsch’s Co-Founder
There is life after Cornell, apparently, and sometimes it involves working in New York City and making fun satirical Web sites. At least that’s what worked out for Kitsch’s very own Samantha Henig, who corresponded with me via e-mail about being the co-creator of a Web site called IThoughtObamaWouldGetMeLaid.com. The site satirizes what Henig, along with fellow co-creators Jonah Green (friend) and Jessica Zimmerman (sister), perceived as the unrealistic expectations to which voters held then-president-elect Obama. Check it out: each time you click on the big block text, it refreshes into another hysterically delusional conjecture. Personal favorite: “I thought Obama would nominate a Secretary of Cute Bunnies and Kitties.” A boy can dream, can’t he?
CornellWatch: How did you, Jonah, and Jess come up with the idea?
Jonah and I were gchatting during work, complaining about what a bad time it is in the book/magazine industry and various more superficial complaints (my junk-food-binge-induced achey body, his alcohol-and-salt-induced puffy face), and the idea grew really organically and almost instantly out of that.
The basic rundown was this: Jonah said “I thought Obama would end all this suffering,” I said “I thought Obama would make my body stop hurting,” he said “I thought Obama would get me laid,” I said “We should buy ithoughtobamawouldgetmelaid.com and make a website like the bicycle one listing our unreasonable complaints,” he agreed. The tough part was that neither of us knows how to code something like that. So I gchatted my sister, Jess, who has a bunch of computer geek friends, to see if she knew anyone who could do it. While she asked around about that, the three of us started a Google doc with all our ideas for the site. When Jess found out that we needed to find someone who knew PHP to code the site, I emailed my ex-boyfriend, Lee, who’s an IT guy, to see if he could do it. I also changed my gchat and Facebook status to “Anyone know PHP?” About an hour later, Jess’ husband Dan gchatted me and said “I know PHP.” He hadn’t even know at that point that this was for a project Jess was part of! So Dan got to work setting up the site, and in the end it was Lee who wrote the code, which Dan then implemented. A big ol’ group effort. And oh so webby the way it unfolded.
CW: What volume of traffic does the site drive on a daily basis? How has it varied throughout the months it’s been around?
The site launched on December 19, and was picked up by The Huffington Post and Digg and a few other places almost immediately. In the first two days alone we got 110,000 hits. Things settled down after that. By comparison, we only got about 210,000 hits for all of January.
CW: How are your unrealistic expectations of Obama different from those of BarackObamaIsYourNewBicycle.Com?
We wanted to be sure we didn’t overlap with BOIYNB too much, so our general rule of thumb was that they deal with Obama being a total nice guy (remembering your birthday, making you cupcakes) and we deal with ridiculously unrealistic expectations of him (fixing the economy, curing diabetes, getting rid of your crow’s feet). We wanted to take it beyond satirizing the fact that everyone’s in love with Obama and ascribes all these wonderful traits to him, to the more recent issue: the degree to which we expect him to tackle the impossible.
CW: One Cornell-sanctioned blogger said this about an MLK rally in LA: ‘Today’s parade was like the fifteen or so I went to before it, but at the same time it was different… On hardened faces one would not consider friendly beamed signs of laughter, smiles, and hope… While Obama might not be the complete savior we all imagined, one thing is for certain hope/faith is the evidence of things not seen, and while America might face problems you couldn’t tell that by the faces of the crowd.’ Obviously the guy doesn’t really expect Obama to be the Messiah, but he kind of hoping for it. Is this desire for a politician to be some sort of ’savior’ indicative of what you guys are trying to push against?
I wouldn’t say we’re trying to push against it, necessarily, so much as point it out and snicker. But yes, it’s that whole feeling of “Obama is a superhero! Obama can do anything!” that initially got us joking about him being able to fix the publishing industry or get Jonah laid or whatever. And I know we weren’t the only ones making those jokes; my mom said it was eerie seeing the site once it launched, because apparently my dad had been making “I thought Obama would…” jokes for weeks!
CW: I’ve noticed you guys have asked for more submissions to the site. Now that Obama’s president, where do you plan to go with it?
We don’t have any real plans, other than to let it float out there and keep getting discovered anew.
CW: How has Barack personally failed you today?
He actually did fail me today! Or, I guess it was yesterday. I felt kind of played by his whole “I screwed up” media blitz after Daschle pulled out, as I blogged about this morning on Slate’s XX Factor.
Samantha Henig ‘06 got her degree in sociology and, after a long journey through the NYC media landscape, is now the associate editor of Double X, a women’s web magazine that Slate is launching in the spring.
Tags: alumni, henig, interviews, kitsch, sam henig, websites
