Eat the Damn Cake

I was having this debate with a friend about self-discipline and food and dieting and what really matters in life. He thought that self-discipline matters a lot and is reflected in what you choose to eat and how able you are to not eat the things you shouldn’t eat. If you are strong enough, you can lose as much weight as you want. If you’re the kind of person who successfully loses weight, you’re the kind of person who succeeds at everything else too. It’s all about the attitude.

I thought that people should like themselves.

Really, there’s probably a compromise here. If someone is trying to lose weight, I’m not standing next to them at the gym with a bag of Doritos, going, “You’re wasting your time! Want some pizza? I could really go for a pizza…” I think losing weight is a completely legitimate goal in plenty of cases. I don’t think it has to be a symptom of superficiality or self-hatred. It can be really, really healthy.

But I also think that it’s important to think about why you have the goals you have. It’s really easy to want something without thinking about why you want it. Or, when you’re asked why, to cough up the response you heard someone give on TV.  It’s really easy to cough that response up when you ask yourself.

There are a lot of things I’m not supposed to eat.

Continue Reading »

People are confusing. Bear’s brother is into personality tests, and when we saw him over the weekend, we took some, too. Bear was grumbling a lot about how ridiculous the whole thing was, but his results really sounded like him. They had positive titles like “The Investigator.”

Mine were just wrong. No, really. Not like, I’d hoped it would say “The Coolest Person in the World” and instead it said, “Average.” My particular combination of categories was dubbed “The Servant.” It read, “You are incredibly concerned with other people’s wellbeing, to the point of not taking care of yourself. You have a hard time expressing your opinions, and aren’t very goal-oriented. You hover at the back of rooms, with your hands clasped behind you, waiting for orders and pretending to be invisible. You overhear things you shouldn’t, but only repeat them to other servants. But this is damaging enough, because even the gossip of servants can upset a household.” Or something like that. OK, a lot of that was from a BBC movie based on a Jane Austen book, but it was pretty bad.

I mean, give me a break.

Continue Reading »

I think that when I was a kid, I was never really pretty. Pictures of me with other girls my age reveal their bright eyes and wide smiles and sweet faces. I am odd and complicated looking. Sometimes I appear to be slender and coltish. Sometimes I am lumbering and awkward. It depends on the angle.

But I am comfortable with this.

Because I know that as a kid, I felt pretty. And I got what I needed. And nothing, certainly not my looks, stood in my way.

And now, looking at the photos of me as a kid, I see that I am clearly the scrappy protagonist in a book about a girl who survives happily in the wilderness for two years until she’s finally discovered by a stray mountain climber who got separated from his team by a sudden storm. And chased by a mountain lion. A mountain lion that had fallen into a cautious alliance with the scrappy protagonist.

(source)

Continue Reading »

I have some seriously hot friends. Friends with stunning faces and aggressive shoulder blades and slender necks. Manhattan women who are always wearing something perfect. Sexy, coordinated outfits with confident jewelry and runway heels. Their hair does everything right. They don’t go out without makeup. Laid-back Brooklyn girls in worn jeans or yoga pants with layered tops and sloppy hair and lipgloss and perfect smiles. Girls who get checked out by every man who walks by.

(My friends and I used to love to do photoshoots. The red shirt photos are from one I did of my closest childhood friend)

Sometimes, when I’m with three or four of them at once, I look around and realize that I am the odd woman out. I mean, I’m the weirdest looking one, easy. My profile is not clean and simple and sweet. My mouth, when I’m talking, does odd things that always end up captured in the photo. Was she trying to blow a bubble? Or is that a desperate cry for help?

Continue Reading »