I read Dooce for the first time, after reading the Times Magazine article about her and some other incredibly famous women bloggers. I was a little hurt that no one mentioned me. But then I figured out why they hadn’t. I figured out why I don’t get a million hits a day. It’s because I don’t have enough pictures on my blog. All of the really famous bloggers have these gorgeous, sunshiny photos of their kids and their decor and the glittering new stainless steel kitchen that all that sponsor money got them.

So I’m going to make a real effort to change, beginning with this post. I’ve switched the setting on my camera to one that washes everything in white light. I’m also planning on having some kids really soon.

This is what my life looks like right now. Please try not to get too jealous.

That’s my couch.

My dishwasher. It doesn’t work that well. It leaves sticky clumps of stuff that was probably once food on everything. I swear, it’s not just because I don’t rinse things thoroughly before loading them. Bowls by…Martha Stewart, I think. Someone got them for us as a wedding gift.

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This is a guest post from Josh Stanton, one of the most accomplished, motivated young people I know (and the only person I know who can start a story with, “So I had to give this speech at the UN the other day…”). He adapted this article for me from his piece on Huffpo. I’m really happy right now, because I love conversations about masculinity, and I am kind of obnoxiously thrilled whenever guys want to talk about how complex their identities actually are, and the pressure they feel to narrow themselves. I read a lot of gender theory in college. Sometimes it all comes rushing back. And it’s awesome.

On an ideal Sunday, I get up and quietly make my wife breakfast, so that I can present it to her with great gusto before she’s emerged from bed.

After dining and doing the dishes, I throw on my gym clothes and go for a run and a lift, as I’ve been doing since high school. If it’s a truly fortunate afternoon, I then put on the grungiest clothes I can find and meet my guy friends at a bar to holler at the screen while watching football and guzzling beer. (No buffalo wings, of course; I’m a vegetarian.)

Then I progress into the evening with my wife, getting a pedicure at the small nail salon next door and enjoying a romantic dinner at our favorite Indian restaurant. After getting home, I read some of my favorite works of Jewish literature (whether rabbinic texts or more popular pieces). I often get hooked on whatever I’m reading, stay up late and end up tired for my early classes the next day.

To me that is the making of a wonderful day. Yet I have at various points been called “gay,” “metrosexual,” “manly man,” “jock,” “nerd” and (prematurely) “rabbi” for the way I spend my free time.

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I try not to read the comments on articles about cosmetic surgery. People are always yelling. They are always disgusted and horrified. They are always saying things like “then what?” If you are willing to do that to yourself, than what else are you willing to do? What’s next? A clone army? Vanity babies that are genetically manipulated to look like your favorite Sports Illustrated bikini model? Anything could happen.

Sometimes I forget I got plastic surgery. I don’t feel like someone who would do it. I don’t look like someone who did it. It’s easy not to think about it.

The New York Times is talking about how, most notably in New York City,  there are ethnically preferred cosmetic surgery procedures. Like, Italian women get knee fixes and Dominicans get butt lifts and Koreans get their jaws thinned. What was interesting, the article implied, was that the Long Island  women were getting their butts reduced while the Washington Heights women were getting theirs enhanced. In other words, cosmetic surgery is no longer just about fitting into your adopted culture (as it often was for Jews and Irish and blacks), it’s about fitting into your ethnic group.

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Once in a while, I just want to talk about food.

This is an ode to my favorite sandwich in the world. This is a love story about the grilled cheese. I have become an expert at it. A connoisseur. I have become virtuosic. Once, one of my friends ate a sandwich I’d made and immediately faked an orgasm. Or maybe she wasn’t faking. Either way, I have a right to brag.

I remember my first grilled cheeses. They were tuna melts. My dad called them “grilled cheese tuna”s, and he made them for me when I was three or four years old. I hated mayonnaise. I thought it smelled disgusting. He thought it was hilarious that I thought that (you know, he was very concerned about being in touch with his child’s emotions). He licked it off the spoon and I ran out of the room. I came back for the sandwich.

I started to get creative when I moved to the city. I was on my own, and I didn’t have to eat college dining hall food ever again. First I bought baked beans and chocolate croissants and eel rolls and tons of spinach and the occasional pastrami sandwich. I bought bagels. And then I felt a little sick and the baked beans grew mold in the back of the refrigerator, and I started to make sandwiches. I made grilled cheeses with alfalfa sprouts and fresh mozzarella and homemade honey mustard and crisp lettuce. I made grilled cheeses with bright orange cheddar and garlic chicken and sautéed onions. And then with three different kinds of cheese. And then with tzatziki sauce. On whole grain. On potato rolls. On my favorite, sourdough. Once in a while, on a bagel. Once there was filet mignon. I searched for watercress.

(source)

My friend came over at that point and faked the orgasm. She swore she would integrate tzatziki into more of her meals. Possibly all of them. And then she couldn’t find it anywhere, and she called me to tell me I was a tease.

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I went to the opera last night. At the Met. It was the first warm night in the city, after a lot of snow and a lot more of that whole gray-slush-and-garbage-bags-piled-as-high-as-your-head thing. The fountain at Lincoln Center was underperforming. I was telling Soo-Jin, the friend I was seeing the opera with, that it was about to shoot up like ninety feet in the air. And then it kept not doing that. And I kept being like, “No, really. It does that. All the time. I’ve seen it . I filmed it on my phone…Wait. OK, that was my old phone. But I’m not lying.”

We stood on the balcony during the first intermission and talked about the outfits of the people below us. Some of them were really great.  We especially liked the elderly women who wear these enormous fur coats to the opera. They seem so classic. Like they’ve always been there, doing that.

(One of my absolute favorites of Klimt’s pieces. source)

The Met is worth going to, even if you don’t want to spend a startling amount of money on an opera ticket that gets you a very, very high seat. Just walk into the building. The red of the walls bleeds onto the gold of the ceiling. It’s gold like in Klimt’s paintings. That real gold gold. It looks brushstroked. The chandeliers are prickly diamond barbs. Marc Chagall did some truly enormous paintings for the lobby.

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Introducing:

Women Eating Cake

It’s always a big decision. There’s always a disclaimer. There might be a brief struggle. We’re never supposed to. Actually, we really shouldn’t. We’re always saying that. “I shouldn’t.” We insult ourselves. “I’m such a pig.” We roll our eyes. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

It’s a piece of cake.

But it’s never JUST a piece of cake.

It’s sinful. It’s disobedient. It’s wrong. It’s bad. It’s breaking a promise with ourselves– with the world. It’s unhealthy.

It’s delicious.

I don’t want it to mean so much, every time. Or I want the meaning to change. I want it to mean, “Yes!” I want it to mean chocolate and cherries and ice cream and happiness. I want it to mean play and pleasure. I want to eat it defiantly. With dinner. Whenever the moods strikes. I want to eat it without having to think about it.

So many women have developed an antagonistic relationship with food. Because of our bodies and the ways we want them to look, and the ways our world tells us over and over they should look. When I noticed that very young women and even girls, who were fifteen and eighteen and twenty and twenty-three, would say, “I shouldn’t,” when I offered dessert, I got confused. When I noticed myself turning down cake, I got angry. I named my blog “Eat the Damn Cake,” and started talking about my relationship with my body. I wanted other women and girls to talk, too. And while we were talking, I wanted us to eat some cake.

I’ve teamed up with the absolutely incredible photographer Gloria Baker Feinstein on a project that’s all about women and cake. Gloria invited women and girls into her studio to eat cake and talk about how they felt about it, and then we compiled the photos and quotes. Please check it out! I really want this project to grow. I would love to share any pictures you send me of yourself with cake. Spread the word! And the love! And, most importantly, the cake!

Thank you so much to all the women and girls (and several toddlers) who participated. You are all amazing!

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Un-roast: Today I love how excited I always am about eating.