Eat the Damn Cake

1. More news on the science and sex appeal front. Lucy, from Australia, recommended this recent New York Times article to me. Men, the Times reveals, don’t just look at women’s bodies! They look at their faces, too! And those faces better be perfect. And by perfect, I mean Plato’s Golden Ratio. And by Plato’s Golden Ratio, I mean something about the eyes having to have an eye’s width between them and the base of the nose being half of the length of both ends of the mouth that are not covered by the shadow of the base of the nose. Or something. Anyway, I don’t have that face, which I think is the bottom line.(Golden ratio. Bam. source) Continue Reading »

I have a beautiful engagement ring. It’s not from Tiffany, but it looks like it might be. It’s not the ring I pictured having, but I like it. I didn’t picture having a ring at all, until it became clear that Bear was going to propose. Mostly, it became clear because he said, “So if I asked you to marry me, would you say yes?” And I burst out laughing and said, “Of course I would!” And he sat there looking stunned and then said, “You would?” And then added, “Wait, that didn’t count. I’m going to do it for real.”

When it became clear that he was going to do it for real, I called my best friend Emily and we talked rings. She even sketched some for me. We agreed on one thing immediately: no diamonds. They weren’t my style. Way too fancy, the wrong look. We thought citrine would be better. I didn’t know what citrine was until we started looking online. I loved the color. A gentle shade between orange, brown, and yellow, that looked like it might be warm to the touch. We looked at rings that were interesting and creatively done.

(OK, that’s a little bigger than I was anticipating…source) Continue Reading »

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I was walking down the street the other day. It was warmer than it is now, and some of the restaurants still had outdoor seating. A man and a woman, obviously on a date, sat at a little table, talking and laughing. On the woman’s plate was a bun. You know, a hamburger bun. It had once contained a hamburger, but she had eaten that part. Now only the husk remained, an emptied shell, like the one a hermit crab leaves behind. Or a cicada. Or the skin that a snake sheds. Or—OK. Anyway.

I looked at the empty bun, and I felt like I knew that woman. Or at least, I knew something important about her. I knew that she was finished eating. I could see where she’d picked at the edges of the bread, when she wasn’t paying attention. She was full, and in the distant back of her mind, she was a little proud of herself for resisting temptation. She didn’t want him to notice and say something, because she didn’t want to explain herself. Continue Reading »

I’m wearing giant headphones. They’re Bear’s. They cover a lot of my head, and inside them I am blaring “Wonderwall” by Oasis. And because of this, I can only barely hear the jackhammer. But it’s there. Oh, is it ever there.

So it happened again. The event you’ve all been waiting for. I went bra shopping. Remember last time? For the wedding? I didn’t even end up wearing that stupid strapless bra (in part because of all you awesome readers who were like, “um….chill out and don’t wear a bra. It’s not against the law or anything.”). Remember the time before that? Victoria’s Secret. I thought I wouldn’t have to go for a while, after all that. But, and this is my very honest opinion, Victoria’s Secret doesn’t make great bras. And I’m breaking a very, very lucrative contract with them when I say that, so I wouldn’t if I didn’t feel very strongly about it. (I can’t be a sullen sex angel for you anymore, Victoria! I have to be my own person!) The edge pops out after like three months. You know what I’m talking about? That little lip that appears, along the upper border of the cup, and then starts pouting?

So when my mom and I went shopping yesterday, in New Jersey, where they have these crazy things that are, like, collections of individual stores with big parking lots around them, I stopped in at the Maidenform outlet store. And that’s where I became a private detective. Hired by myself, paid in plain donuts and apple cider, but with no less ruthlessly sharp sleuthing instincts than….other detectives. Father Brown.  And Miss. Marple.  Continue Reading »

Homeschooling was a failure for me. I had suspected as much, but I didn’t realize it fully until just now, as I sat at the table, trying to write yet another thank you note. Bear and I turned out to be more popular than expected, especially with our families. So now I’m writing lots of thank you notes. And by lots I mean about one hundred thousand. And my hand hurts so much that I had to stop. Which is why I’m typing now.

We all know how important penmanship is. It’s the mark of a well-educated, cultured, refined person. You can tell everything about a person by one glance at a note they’ve written by hand.

“Ah! What a lovely, elegant, beautiful woman she must be!”

Or, in my case, “Oh dear lord. Lock her up before she kills again!” Continue Reading »

I have a new phone, and I can’t seem to figure it out. I think I accidentally took a photo of a woman on the subway platform. She definitely thought I did. I keep hitting something that says, “Voice activation. Speak now.” And then, when I say, “Whoa…Wait…Stop…” It goes, “You have searched for ‘Jeremy,’ by Pearl Jam,” and takes me promptly to youtube, where a video of a live performance awaits. I put it on mute a lot with my chin when I’m talking to people. Sometimes speaker, which is fun when in public and unable to figure out what just happened. I can’t operate the keyboard, so my texts look like, “ho moiim. Hoewez ut goon/?”

There are only two advantages. The photos it takes are really clear, and since it was my brother’s phone before mine, he took a lot of photos on it and then forgot about them. So I get to see what he’s been up to, now that he’s all grown up (eighteen). Apparently, he has gone to some museums and a hip hop concert. They were about equally interesting and a third of the way through the concert, I gave up on combing through blurry shots of people with microphones who I didn’t recognize, and went back to trying to figure out how to change the ring tone to something less raucous and peppy. Continue Reading »