Eat the Damn Cake

Buried deep in Manhattan, I am looking over pictures from our California trip, and it seems strange, both how big this country is, and how pretty the Bay Area is. I’m not a good enough photographer to capture enough of either the strangeness or the beauty. But I tried.

Having only lived on the East Coast, and only in New Jersey and NYC, my mind never learned how to properly process open space. I can’t get over it. I don’t understand the concept of distance. It makes me feel helpless and awed.

There’s also something sort of awing about having married a man who grew up on the other side of this enormous continent. It really gives one a sense of how good we’ve become, as a civilization,  at transportation.

Anyway, here are a few bits of what I saw. I had to share:

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My friend’s brother filmed my friend and I once, acting out a scene we’d made up. It was something dramatic, destined for a blockbuster movie that we would make when we were fourteen, or some other distant, grown-up age. After, he put the tape in the VCR and we watched ourselves. My friend looked like herself, cute and bouncy. I didn’t recognize myself for a second, and then my heart sank. From profile, I was just a nose, poking out from between curtains of long brown hair. Like a shaggy afghan hound. I looked melancholy. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I wanted to curl forward around my own body and hide myself from the world. I wanted to be a ball.

There was the guest post from Madeline over in Hollywood, and then a reader sent me an email in which she mentioned being a performer and her struggles with body image. It made me think about my back. And about standing up in front of people and singing.

This is me, in a suit I sometimes wore while performing:

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I have it. I am a carrier. I was bitten by the hideous herpes bug. And it is gross. For most of my life, I’ve gotten blisters on my lips, usually when I was already feeling a little sick. Sometimes when I was really stressed. Sometimes just for fun, when I least suspected it. I canceled my first date with Bear because of herpes. I didn’t want him to see me like that.

The majority of people in the country are supposed to have herpes, but everyone acts like it’s a kinda big deal anyway. There are a lot of jokes with a herpes punchline. I’ve made a few of them myself. But I’ve also felt like I couldn’t say the word aloud in reference to myself. I said, “fever blister” or “cold sore.” I hated the thought of being connected with something that… infected sounding. I was afraid people might think I had the other kind of herpes. The even more offensive kind.

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Bear and I were on a streetcar in San Francisco and I had not taken a shower in a while because that’s how vacation works.

This is me:

This is what my hair was doing:

This is where we were going:

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Here in the gorgeous, green Bay Area, we were having a 93rd birthday party for Bear’s grandmother outside, on the patio. Lady Gaga was blaring in the house.

Lady Gaga was still blaring after the guests had trickled down the steep driveway towards their cars. Bear’s mother and brother had a little spontaneous dance party. They rocked out. I was too shy to dance, so I took pictures.

Lady Gaga is kind of everywhere in this house. Her poster is on the wall, in the room Bear’s brother is staying in, the Vogue with her picture on the cover is proudly displayed on the coffee table.

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When I turned 25 a few weeks ago, it felt a little traumatic. It seems like the world doesn’t know what to do with its twenty-somethings anymore. This is a guest post. This is Fraylie: Fraylie prefers cupcakes to cake.  She is a writer and photographer living in Northampton, Massachusetts, though she hails from the motherland of New Jersey.  You should check out her work at www.fraylienord.com.

Last week I frighten myself when, after watching Woody Allen’s “Interiors,” I notice that the psychologically unhinged, disparagingly angry mother, Eve, seems a lot like me.  We have the same lines under our eyes.  When we consider our failures, we stare at walls with mouths like open bags and say “hello.”  Sometimes we cry because crying fills space.  I watch the screen, forming her lines as if they were my own.

“Oh, I can’t… I can’t breathe!” we gasp.

Eve and I are overly dramatic and know it.  And the lines under my eyes are mostly the fault of my ill-fitting glasses, but I start to believe it makes me seem “sleepily dignified.”  And sometimes, it’s amusing to hyperbolize.

(Eve)

I am a twenty-two year old college graduate and, more recently, a waitress.  I serve salmon with balls of sticky brown rice and fried tofu.  A year ago, I would have been interested in an ethnographic investigation of camaraderie and friendship among women in restaurants.  I would have asked questions like, “How does serving food engender a sense of identity?”  Or maybe, “Can you describe the personal language of waitresses in this restaurant?”  At this point, I invest more time in memorizing the intricacies of phantom allergies than I do acting “discursive” whilst peering over steamed cod.  “Glutard” is a more common kitchen offensive than the catchphrase “commoditization in the age of millennial capitalism.”  So maybe we do have a lingo.  But I need to pay rent so that I can keep serving fish, and so on.

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