Eat the Damn Cake

Young women are supposed to be afraid of getting old. Terrible things happen when you get old. The first one is sagging skin. That’s probably the worst. I think it might already be starting for me. But it’s only the beginning. You gain weight. Your hair turns gray. You can no longer wear skinny jeans without looking like you’re trying too hard. You can no longer wear a lot of things without looking like you’re trying too hard. Life is miserable.

(It might be more about having really, really long legs than being a certain age. source)

Except that most of the women I know over forty seem to be a lot happier. They seem to be a lot more comfortable with themselves. They laugh at me when I complain about feeling awkward about whether or not I’m gesturing too largely when I’m telling a story at a party. And when I agonize over my face in the bathroom mirror. They’re like, “Yup, I remember those days. Back when I didn’t know anything. And I thought the shape of my nose mattered in some real, meaningful way.”

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One in ten women refuse to let their partner see them without makeup

50% of women would much rather have some makeup on than not

One in three women will not be seen in public without makeup

So says a poll by Superdrug of 3,000 women, reported on by Yahoo’s Shine. Yahoo isn’t my favorite information source, but my mom sent me this article and said, “blog?” I sometimes still do what my mother tells me do.

Superdrug is a makeup supplier. I’m sure they want women to want to wear makeup. I imagine them on the phone with survey participants, going, “So how weird and ugly would you feel without ANY makeup to cover your pimples and wrinkles? Really ugly, right? I mean, who wouldn’t? Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

But even if Superdrug told women they’d win a thousand lipsticks if they answered that they would kill themselves on the day they woke up to no makeup in the bathroom cabinet, makeup is still a big deal. And women definitely do feel like they can’t live without it. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’ve talked about it for No Makeup Week, and when I tried to figure out if I had a beauty routine, like Beauty Schooled.

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I’m very polite. I open doors for people a lot. And hold them. And stand there while twenty additional people come through. I’m running late, but I stop to have a conversation with my neighbor in front of the CVS, because he wants  to talk about the elevator in our building.

I used to have a lot of trouble at holidays, when I had to open gifts, because I wanted to act the same amount of excited about all of them. I remember unwrapping a little plastic Disney character toy, maybe a keychain, actually, that a relative had picked up last minute. I was grinning and exclaiming, “I love it! This is SO great!” And my face hurt.

(This would’ve been worse. source)

Because of this, I don’t like receiving gifts. Unless people send them to me by mail. Or let me open them later. Those boyfriends who bought me jewelry and clothes were the worst. After breaking up, I gave away heaps of necklaces (I don’t wear necklaces) and bright little dresses.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

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Being a nerd has gotten complicated. It used to be that nerds were never cool. It was assumed that nerds secretly wanted to be popular, cool kids. Glasses were bad.

And now the hipsters have taken over Brooklyn, and are spreading throughout the coastal and urban areas like…healthy green algae.

People are buying glasses that don’t magnify anything, just for that sexy black-framed look. People are quoting philosophers they haven’t read and listening to bands so obscure even their members mothers don’t know they play instruments. Everyone is alternative everything. We’re all aware of everything. It’s this magical blend of wickedly sharp cynicism and blatant hope.

But I don’t know that the hipsters can take nerding for themselves.

(source)

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last night, I had a dream about looking in a mirror and thinking, “You would look amazing if you cut your hair off.”

And then this morning, when Bear forgot his insulin and I brought it to his office and I had a hat over my greasy hair because I’d just woken up, he said playfully, “You should cut off your hair. You’d look so cute.”

And then I was back home, later this morning, working on yet another article, and suddenly I got up and went into the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror for a full minute, or maybe slightly longer, and I thought, “It’s so annoying how it gets knotted every time I wear my coat.” Which is all the time, because it’s winter.

I went into the other room and got the scissors with the blue handles. I came back into the bathroom and before I could think anything that meant anything, I cut off a huge chunk of my hair. In the front.

I kept cutting.

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I just read this article, in The Atlantic, about Duke University. I really didn’t want to talk about Karen Owen at any point, ever, because everyone in the world with a soap box got immediately up on it to say something about her.

Karen Owen: the girl who wrote a “thesis” detailing her sexual encounters with Duke athletes. I read a little of it and got upset and stopped. I got upset when she was saying, “The next day, I was in so much pain I could barely walk. Which meant it’d been really great.” Or something to that effect. And then she was saying, “I was so drunk I don’t even remember what happened, but we definitely had sex.”

I am angry, thinking about it. I didn’t follow the immediate aftermath, the frantically jabbering media frenzy, because I didn’t want to hear people call her empowered. I didn’t want to read them praising her, or heaping insults on her, or describing her as something new and creative. I didn’t want to read her described as anything except for ordinary and tragic. But somehow, the tragedy has been sucked out of stories like hers. She’s telling it, after all, trumpeting it– yelling out her exploits as though they are actually HER exploits, and not her being exploited and exploiting herself.

I’m exhausted by her story. A young woman who will do anything the boys want, while the boys don’t even seem to want her very much. Everyone is incredibly drunk in it. They can’t do anything before they are drunk.

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