Eat the Damn Cake

This is a post from Fraylie, my regular guest poster whose perspective I love. She has been sharing stories about finding herself waiting tables after receiving her degree, getting into grad school and deciding not to go, and then trying to get a job in the big city. Here’s an update from her in the form of a delightful little essay about trying on suits for a job interview:

During some point in the day, I stood in a tiny mirrored room with about two dozen garments dangling around my head.  Skirts, pants, silk and wool – I was imagining Stacy London skulking around to rear her head and yelp you look ridiculous!

I was wearing a suit.  Chic women kitten heeled around me, pulling at my waist and examining the lines forming on my skirt.  They told me to sit down.  They told me to stand up.  I just need to see how it moves, darling.  And when somebody announced that my skirt was a size six, my mother exhaled oh boy.

The best question was, what kind of job interview is this? I was inside the dressing room pulling on a navy skirt with too many buttons.  Through the slats in the door, I heard voices conversing about my job prospects. After all, the design of the suit must reflect the desired industry.  With one leg in the skirt, my heart crawled down to the floor.  I didn’t have a desired industry.

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After cutting all of my hair off, I looked in the mirror and my chubby arms no longer looked quite as chubby. They looked more…strong. Or maybe they looked rounded without being gross.

My friend told me a story about getting a compliment on a part of her body that she has always  felt self-conscious about, and then looking in the mirror and thinking that that part of her looked completely different. It didn’t make any sense. Could she have lost ten pounds en route to the mirror? Only if you involve aliens.

And as much as I like the Katy Perry song (I can’t help it. It’s not my fault. It’s the beat.), I can’t involve aliens. I mean, if there were aliens, they would be showing up in a lot more obvious ways. It’s not like they’d have this super secret relationship with the government, and then occasionally abduct some dude in a cornfield, just for kicks. Talking about aliens that way insults their astounding mastery of interstellar technology. They’ve got nothing to hide from this puny little planet. And they probably don’t look even remotely human– think about how we don’t look anything like slugs and seahorses and stuff, and our DNA is a lot more similar to those things than it would be to aliens.

OK, I’m done. I’m sorry. I was made to watch an X Files movie recently, and I’m a little indignant.

This is what I’m really writing about:

It’s not at all clear that we use the right words for ourselves. That we imagine the right images when we think of ourselves.

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This was my first Pride Parade. I yelled a lot. I stood on my tip-toes and tried frantically to see. I sang at the top of my lungs. And I fought not to cry when an elderly man marched by, holding up a sign that read, “This is for my granddaughter Sara!”

This is some of what I saw:

(click to enlarge if you can’t read their shirts)

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Gay marriage passed in New York yesterday!!!! Finally.

I don’t have a post to write about it, just an urge to share my excitement and relief.

Because I really, really, really enjoyed this:

Even though I ruined the rest of the night by throwing up.

I loved getting married, and being married is even better. It’s the best thing in my life.

The fact that so many people who love each other aren’t allowed to get married breaks my heart. It’s obviously cruel. It’s dehumanizing. It’s one of the truly terrible things left in our society and world. And this is a big step towards being fully human.

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Unroast: Today I love the way I feel when I say my new name. I have so many names, and all of them are me.

I didn’t tell the whole story yesterday. About meeting the work people. There’s more. The story doesn’t end with the painting, as happy as I am about the painting. It ends with me in the bathroom, cutting off the rest of my hair.

People keep telling me I’m so bold, for cutting off as much as I did, last time. For having short hair in the first place. But what I’d really wanted was something much shorter. Except the first time, I couldn’t go all the way. I was brave, but not quite that brave yet.

Now I am braver. Or more reckless.

I think it had something to do with the work dinner. With the other women and their long, glossy hair that fell in perfect waves. The kind of waves that a salon does for you, but that only work with a certain kind of hair. I liked the other women, just as I almost always like the women I meet through Bear’s work, and basically anywhere in this city, but the more of them I meet, the more obvious it becomes to me that I am not like them. Which is fine. Actually, it is so fine, that I decided to go all the way different. To be all the way myself.

Sitting there, in my borrowed silky dress and strapless bra and glittering earrings, I suddenly felt very comfortable being nothing like the other women in the restaurant. It suddenly occurred to me that I was not going to impede Bear’s career by being the weird one. So I went home and picked up my scissors. It’s thrilling every time.

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I met Bear’s work people. The strangest thing about them was how real they were. I’ve only known them through his brief descriptions (which weren’t very colorful or even particularly accurate), and then there they were, with partners and personalities and different laughs. Fully developed.

The women were all beautiful, somehow, and I was extremely thankful for my friend who had let me borrow her gold and pale blue silky J. Crew dress. She had also done my makeup (I don’t know how to do makeup). I was also wearing her strapless bra (I don’t own one) and her earrings. I don’t know how to be a girl. But I looked really good, and I think I was funny enough, and everyone seemed to like me enough, and everyone seemed to think it was pretty cool that I am a writer and a blogger, and almost everyone was Dutch and had a cool accent. So that was good, too.

And, in a fit of feeling awesome, I painted something for the first time in a year or so. Here it is:

So even though it is very gloomy outside, and I can almost feel the heat pressing up against the windows, I am happy.

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Unroast: Today I love my nose. That hasn’t happened in a long time. Really long.