Eat the Damn Cake

I am essentially a pretty wimpy person. I think I’ve done a decent job coming to terms with it. If someone offered me a magic cape and a brightly colored spandex suit and a decent superpower, I’d be like, “I’m afraid of heights and I get the flu a lot. You should pick someone else.”

In fact, I spend a disturbing amount of time imagining scenarios like that one. You know, a magic portal opens in front of me in a misty wood that I happen to be wandering through (probably The Ravine in Central Park, on a day when the water smells like actual water and there aren’t any tourists making their small children stand on precarious rocks for photos), and I peer into another world, where tiny fairies with translucent wings chase mosquitoes and a mysterious woman wearing a deep green cloak beckons. What do I do? If I go through it, it will probably close behind me and I’ll never find my way back to Manhattan, 2011, and I’ll miss Bear and my family and friends too much, and what do women in the strange, ancient elvyn world do when they get their period? I bet there aren’t any tampons. I bet there isn’t any Midol.

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One of the best parts of having really short hair is that I look a little like a boy. This was something I was nervous about, when I thought about cutting my hair. I thought, “What if I look a little like a boy? I can’t let that happen. What if someone thinks I’m a boy? What if someone calls me ‘sir’? Then my life will probably be over.”

But a surprising thing happened when I cut my hair. I stopped caring so much about looking like a girl. Maybe it’s all the fussing that long hair demands. I stopped looking in the mirror as much, because I didn’t have to check and make sure my hair was OK. Because it’s always pretty much the same.

Since I already look so different, something in me that was constantly competing to look just as good as or better than other women shut off. It’s like I removed my name from the roster. And when the guy who runs the world is calling out, “Potentially beautiful, sexy women: Molly Aacker! Christina Abbens! Tianna Abbey! Jessica Alba! Jennifer Aniston!” He will never get to my name, because I’m  not even there. My name was scratched out and replaced by one of those smiley faces with the tongue sticking out.

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I fake it a lot.

I nod and smile. I pretend to understand when I don’t. Someone is telling me about their job in insurance, and they’re mentioning big firms in the city, and I get the sense that everyone in the world (which happens to include me) is supposed to know these firms by reputation, name, and possibly company crest. Until now, I hadn’t been entirely clear on the point that you could use the word “firm” to describe anything outside of law and handshakes and the occasional pair of unrealistically depicted breasts. Maybe, and I refuse to clarify this, I’d long imagined some actor-packed offices on Law and Order every time someone used the word to mean something involving business and physically space. I don’t know. Maybe.

(look at those people at their firm! source)

As a kid, I kind of assumed that by the time I grew up, I’d know everything. This could mean one of two things

1. I’m not grown up yet

2. Being grown up isn’t that different

When I was a kid, I kind of assumed that by the time I grew up, I’d be gorgeous. I guess I thought the world owed it to me. I thought that beauty was the same as being good at stuff. You got better at stuff the older you got, and you also got hotter, at the same time. Beauty queen scuba diving ballerina astronaut saves puppy from burning building, yet again!! Becomes movie star supermodel! I figured I had the potential to transform into anything. Anything good, obviously. There was absolutely no chance that I’d wake up in my mid-twenties, still looking awkward and feeling like I didn’t understand anything, and without having become a movie star, famous gymnast, ballet star, or world renown concert pianist.

I should clarify something: I feel more and more like I understand less and less. As a kid, I felt like I knew a lot more for certain.

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Once I shaved my arms. It was an accident. Sort of. I was in the shower, shaving my legs. So the razor was already in my hand. Which is a dangerous place for a razor to be, apparently, and then I looked down at my arm and curiously drew the blades along its surface, leaving a naked patch like a road cut through a forest.

I stared at it for a second and I thought, “Oh shit.” And then I shaved the rest of my arm. Which meant I had to do the other one. Which meant I would have stubble on my arms in a few days. But I wasn’t thinking about that then. I was just thinking that actually they looked pretty good.

(This kind always cut me. Men’s razors are better. source)

I have really hairy arms. I blame it on my dad. He’s incredibly hairy. He jokes that soon hair is going to start growing out of the top of his nose, and sprouting from his ears. When I was little, he liked to pretend he was a gorilla to entertain my brothers and I. He based his ability to be a gorilla on his hairiness. Which does not bode well for any daughter he might have.

And since he has a daughter, and that daughter is me, I’m the one it doesn’t bode well for. That was a little convoluted.

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So while I was reading one of the aforementioned women’s magazines (occasionally I walk by the stack on the couch and get hypnotized by the hot pink bubble letters in the headline and start thinking, “What IS he really thinking about sex every time he sees my hair?”), I stumbled upon an article about women and ambition. Women, said the article, don’t like to admit that they’re ambitious. In fact, the only woman who has ever been known by the editorial staff at this particular magazine to refer to herself as ambitious is Catherine Zeta-Jones. The rest of us just blush and look down modestly when we receive our Olympic gold medals. We say afterward, to the hordes of hungry reporters, “Oh, gosh…I don’t know. I guess I was lucky?”

Of course, I immediately thought, “Yet another way in which Catherine Zeta-Jones and I are soul sisters.” No, not really. But I did think that I don’t know very many women who aren’t ambitious. And it seems to me that they are willing to admit it.

I am ambitious. It drives me crazy. I don’t want to be. I want to be completely content with a delicious sandwich, a decent job,  and a good TV show. Or several delicious sandwiches, a reasonably decent job,  and a few mediocre TV shows. Life would be  a lot easier. I want to be OK with leading a quiet life, surrounded by family, like my fantastic 90-year-old grandmother.

But I’m ambitious. I don’t need to be a celebrity or a world-famous something or other. I have no interest in the paparazzi and I’m incredibly unphotogenic anyway. I don’t feel any need to make a million dollars. But I want to be recognized for what I do. I want people to think that I’m awesome. I want to be perceived as successful. I want to push myself to be better at the things I’m good at. To be better at the things I’m bad at. To be better.

(source)

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I was buying a stack of women’s magazines the other day. Maybe eight or ten of them. All of the covers featured bubblegum or hot pink something or other. They were heavy. I plunked them down on the counter and the woman behind it glanced curiously up at me.

She gestured at the one on top, to the woman posing seductively on it, and asked if it was a certain actress from a TV show I’d never heard of.

I said, “I really don’t know. I’m a writer. These are just for research. I don’t actually ever read them.”

She looked the slightest bit impressed. “Oh!”

(This one’s a couple years old. Notice the pink. Always with the pink. source)

I was smacking myself internally as I walked out. Seriously? What happens next– you buy a couple cartons of ice cream and tell her you’re feeding it to test subjects as part of a study on dessert and neurology?

It was true. I was buying them for research. I am trying to figure out which magazines to submit essays to. Everyone who has given me any advice about this has begun with, “Get a bunch of magazines. Learn their format and their tone.”

The real reason why you have to get a bunch of them is because finding the articles takes a long time. They’re buried between thousands of glossy ads for Gucci and veggie pizza and mystical age-defying creams that can make a sixty-year-old woman look eighteen again. You become a detective, following the trail of an article, trying to guess its next move. Learning how deep inside the ads it will hide when it’s running.

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