Eat the Damn Cake

Things that irritate me about my mind. It’s:

1) Defensive. I assume the worst sometimes, when people aren’t doing their worst.

2) Ambitious but underestimating. I want to do really well at things, but I don’t always aim high enough.

3) High-strung. My mind is almost always on a project.

4) Anxious. A little like the last one. Except worse.

5) Easily discouraged. I tend to think I’m failing, at least a little. What is the deal with that?

Sometimes I feel stuck inside myself. You know, this is it. I don’t get to change bodies and realities. Unless I’m willing to conduct that ancient ritual my grandmother taught me, with the sacrificing of the rodents and the secret machine from “the homeworld” that my family has stored in that barn out back. And I’m not willing to do that because it’s too risky. And I don’t remember the chant or the code sequence exactly. Which could be disastrous.

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I’ve been broken up with a lot. Not by boys, though. Only one guy has ever broken up with me, and it took me about a week to get over him. But girls are a whole other story.

When I was sixteen, one of my closest friends in the world started dating my ex-boyfriend. They kept it a secret from me for months, and as a result she stopped talking to me. I had no idea what was happening when they decided to break the news to me in person. He was older and could drive, and so they picked me up and took me out to lunch. I remember being in the backseat, watching the woods flashing by on the roadside as they talked about getting drunk.

Something had changed. Neither one of them ever drank before. There had been a basic shift, and I felt its effects rippling outward. My stomach tightened. Something was wrong. The drinking meant being grown up, I thought. Grown up without me.

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On Fifth Ave, in the fresh spring light that bathed the Prada store, a six foot tall blond wrapped in high fashion teetered above a much shorter, much older man with a snarling face. Her hair was perfectly straight, and fell in shiny sheets. The bottom of her angular cheekbones were just visible beneath her pitch-black designer sunglasses. Her mouth was expressionless, her chin high, as though life was a runway.

I looked at Bear. He looked at me. We had both seen them.

Two blocks later, it was a petite, curly-haired woman, strikingly gorgeous, with a much older man with a sagging face and stringy hair. She was wearing a wafting short white skirt with tasteful brown embroidery and a clinging vest.

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Sometimes I regret dating the boys I’ve dated. I imagine that if I could have swung forward into my future and seen myself with Bear, I would have made different choices. I wouldn’t have wasted my time. That’s the thing about the future, of course– It’s always so frustratingly mysterious.

It’s actually really hard to write about the future, because I think like five million people are also writing about it at the same time, and I’d have to think a lot more to come up with an original description.

The future is like that dough that you have to freeze overnight, except you can’t ever finish making the cookies. You just keep adding ingredients, hoping they’ll come out even more delicious. Sorry. That was the best I could do on short notice. Now I’m embarrassed.

One of my biggest regrets about the boys I dated is attraction. I wasn’t that attracted to most of them.

I get the sense that it’s uncool or uninformed or immature to emphasize attraction. You learn to love. You grow together. You are similar people, with similar interests. You both really enjoy badminton (is that really the spelling? Weird).

No. I’m sorry. I want to want to rip his clothes off.

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I saw some photos of myself at sixteen or so and I had this horrible thought: was I a lot hotter then?

(me being beautiful at sixteen, in a rare unpimpled moment, in low light)

It’s horrible for a couple of reasons.

1) It doesn’t even matter, so the fact that my mind does that to me is insulting. I’m smart, and sort of grown up. I should be making intelligent, logical observations about the world.

2) When I was sixteen, I was pretty sure I was going to be even hotter by the time I was twenty. I couldn’t actually imagine being twenty-five, because that sounded like it might be located on a planet so far away astronomers could only speculate about its existance based on how the light of a distant star flickered ever so slightly. But if I had been able to imagine it, I would’ve been positive that I would’ve been even hotter than twenty by then.

3) I don’t want my sixteen-year-old self to win!

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I was pretty happy when guys started wearing pink. My youngest brother was one of them. He did it practically every day. And lavender. And bright yellow. He loves color. He wore color because he was cool and confident, because he was masculine and comfortable with it. Sometimes his best friend is a girl, sometimes a guy.

I keep trying to convince Bear to let me put some mascara on him, because his eyelashes are so long and pretty. Just once…Just for a few hours…

People (Fox News) are flipping out over a picture on the J.Crew site. Jenna Lyons, the company’s president and creative director, is hanging out with her son, painting his nails. His favorite color is pink, she says. The kid looks like he’s having a great time. The people who are yelling things about “unnatural” and “liberal identity politics” and “gay! gay! gay!” are not having a great time. They are scared. I think they might be scared about the downfall of civilization. That’s an educated guess, because they’re usually scared of that. Someone named Erin Brown from something called the Media Research Center said these words (and more) about the ad: “…blatant propaganda celebrating transgendered children.”

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