Eat the Damn Cake

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I tried on my wedding gown for the first time since I picked it, ages ago. I wore the bra. You know, the strapless bra from the post I called The Girl Without Any Breasts. I’m standing there, in my massive wedding gown, which has nearly swallowed me whole, and this tiny seamstress comes up to me, edges around the hem, and touches my chest.

“Why are you not wearing bra?” she asks tersely.

“I am,” I say. “I am wearing bra.”

“No,” she says. “No bra.” She gestures at my chest.

I pull back the bodice to reveal the bra. “See?”

“Oh.” She bustles out of the room and returns a moment later with two huge pads.

“Wait—“ I say. “Do you mean I should have those AND the bra?”

She shrugs. “Maybe.”

My friend Liane starts laughing. I start laughing. The seamstress is very serious. Continue Reading »

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We live in a culture that thinks being young is definitely better than being old. I know, “culture” can’t “think.” People think. Culture is a bunch of people thinking. And they think that being young and tight-skinned and sexy is where it’s at. When I was a kid, the pop stars and movie stars and models all seemed appropriately much, much older. Suddenly, in the past few years, it occurs to me that they’re my age. Wait—they’re younger than me. They’re teenagers. They’re kids. Lady Gaga and I are the same age. But she can wear shoes that are taller than five pairs of my shoes stacked on top of one another. She’s gone beyond me. At twenty-four, I feel old. I feel like I haven’t accomplished nearly enough.

And in some ways, it’s worse for women. Because after you turn thirty, you’re not very desirable anymore. Or at least, that’s what online dating research shows (and you should read this article, because it is amazing). As men get older, they want to date younger and younger women. As the women get older they want to date…men. In other words, men get picky, and women stay pretty open minded. Although the fact that men exaggerate their incomes more lavishly the older they get suggests that they at least feel as though women care a lot about how much money they make. And maybe women do care. So we run into the old stereotype: women want rich men, men want hot women. Oy vey. Continue Reading »

It’s scary how little I know myself. How little we all know ourselves. I mean, I’m terrified. I’m always waiting for myself to do something awful to me. And mess up my whole life. I’m unpredictable. I’m wild and dangerous and I don’t know exactly what I’m capable of. Which is sort of the negative side to the end of my post about not knowing how smart I am.

I’m reading Stumbling on Happiness. I’m embarrassed that I like it so much, because I don’t like liking things that everyone else already likes. I prefer to find those things obviously lacking and smile a tiny, condescending smile while I continue on my tiny, condescending way. But Gilbert won me over with these two lines:

Line 1: “Phineas Gage was a foreman for the Rutland Railroad who, on a lovely autumn day in 1848, ignited a small explosion in the vicinity of his feet, launching a three-and-a-half-foot-long iron rod into the air, which Phineas cleverly caught with his face” (Gilbert, 2006, pg. 11).

Line 2: “For example, most Americans can be classified as one of two types: those who live in California and are happy they do, and those who don’t live in California but believe they’d be happy if they did”  (Gilbert, 2006, pg. 114).

I completely forget how to cite quotes. And college wasn’t even that long ago. Continue Reading »

I’m on the edge of insanity, with a list of things to do that’d be as long as the DNA in one of your cells if you could somehow pull it into a straight strand. Make that like three cells-worth.  Doesn’t sound very long? Well, look up DNA! Who would’ve thought we had that much of it? What’s it all doing? It’s making my nose super Jewish, that’s what it’s doing. And some other stuff.

Anyway, because I’m about to lose my mind, I’ve decided to give myself a break in terms of writing, and share a story. I’ve mentioned here how I used to, as a little unschooler, spend a lot of time writing stories. They were fantasy stories. I didn’t understand then that fantasy was for hopeless nerds, who also LARPed, unless it was about vampires, in which case it was for frustratingly squealy preteen and teenaged girls, their mothers, my youngest brother, and the men who “try to understand how women think.” (I’m not kidding, my fiance told me about a prominent Wall Street guy who read Twilight with this explanation. Upon finishing the series, he declared that he finally understood what women want.) Anyway, I failed at fantasy writing, because I didn’t think of Lord Voldemort, or vampires. But it’s storytime….and here’s a little story about….

The Merman:

(source) Continue Reading »

I don’t know how smart I am. And not in an ordinary way, either. As a kid, I never learned where I fit into the hierarchy of intelligence.

There is a lot of debate about intelligence. Remember that book The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray? It is really, really thick. It has a big rainbow lump on the cover. It’s all about intelligence, and how a person’s success is pretty much determinable by how smart a standardized test says they are. As it turns out, according to The Bell Curve, Jews are definitely, on average, smarter than black people. Or at least, that’s what I got out of the section on race. Stephen Jay Gould wrote a book called The Mismeasure of Man about fifteen years before Herrnstein and Murray came out with The Bell Curve, but, laughing sadly to himself, Gould stuck a few more chapters on Mismeasure and republished, saying, “Seriously? We’re still talking about this?” He also said something along the lines of, “One of the big problems here is that people think intelligence is only one thing, and that thing is measurable by a single method.”

People think that intelligence is quantifiable. Well, I’m sure parts of it are. But the whole thing? Isn’t that a little too complex to summarize in a number?

I didn’t take any tests as a kid. None. Continue Reading »

I’m guest posting over at Bikini Birthday! Check it out here.

Samantha, who writes that blog, promised herself that on her 25th birthday, she’d do something she’d never done before….wear a bikini. To do that, she had to get more comfortable with her body. She had to learn more about her beauty. And she did. You should follow her story if you haven’t already. It’s awesome.

Alright. I’m off to go sailing down the Hudson on my gorgeous new boat, Manhattan Mermaid. Kidding. I’m going to clean the table and get back to work on the guest list. But one day, Manhattan Mermaid…One day…. (by then, hopefully, I’ll have a better name for it).

Also, my guest post hostesses keep using the photo of me that I swore I’d change a long time ago. I swear, I will change it soon. Or at least take one of myself eating cake. What kind of an inexcusable hypocrite am I anyway? Sheesh.