Eat the Damn Cake

A girl on the street in Dumbo, talking on her cellphone: “…and I think I gained some weight.”

Guy she’s walking past: “It looks good!”

Made my day.

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Unroast: Today I love the way I laughed when I saw myself in on the security camera screen in the drugstore, because I looked awful, and it was funny.

Note: I feel bad about writing that glib post yesterday. I hadn’t realized at the time how awful the storm was for a lot of people. So I’m extremely sorry if your house got washed away while I sat here looking confused and waiting for the rain to increase!

And, appropriately, this is a post about regret.

I don’t often feel regret. I often feel anxious that I will feel regretful if I don’t do certain things a certain way. That might have been what a lot of that book, Stumbling on Happiness, was about. I can’t remember.

I’d like to  blame my mom for the way I can’t say no. It’s always easy to blame the mother, so that feels a little petty. So instead I’ll blame the way I interpreted my mother. She sees everything as an opportunity. She was always urging me to try things. Always imagining the good places those things might lead.  She was worried I might miss out.

I became too worried that I might miss out, so I sometimes said yes too often, to things I could have just as well missed out on. I spent nearly a year working for free for a guy who told me he’d pay me, soon, really soon. He kept telling me it was a good opportunity. I kept believing him just enough to keep going. Finally, I left, and it took a lot of deciding to leave, but I did it. And then I waited for the regret, but it never came. And then I thought, “Of course it hasn’t come! What were you even doing there?”

I taught kids for a while, for an organization that could never quite get organized, and the parents of those kids kept asking me, “What year are you in college?” even though I was in grad school, and then, even when I had gotten my MA. It wasn’t that they should’ve been able to tell from my worldly look– it was that they couldn’t imagine anyone more advanced than a college student being involved in the organization. I kept staying, because I kept being told that I was needed, and special, and that it would lead to opportunities. And when I finally left, it was a big decision, and I felt guilty, and it was hard to tell everyone I had to go, and then— I felt nothing. It was over. I was a little surprised I’d stayed so long.

But you know what I regret?

I regret not buying the portrait.

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I had this other post to write today, but I got distracted by the hurricane that’s supposed to hit the city really soon. I mean, seriously? I just survived an earthquake. What is this crap? It’s starting to feel a little apocalyptic out there. So I’m writing another natural disaster post. Back to body image and stuff soon. If I’m still around in a few days.

I am trying to decide how worried I am.

We’re in Zone C, which is the “yeah, you’ll get hit a little, but you’ll probably be OK” zone. The other two, scarier, zones are one and two blocks away. The scariest contains my favorite park. No visiting parks during the hurricane. Mental note.

I am not scared enough. I’m sick today, and don’t feel like going to the store to get emergency rations. Which is stupid. I think of my ancestors in Nazi Germany, who were like, “Whatever. This will all blow over. Why would they want to kill us?” And then I think, “Why does everything make you think of the Holocaust?” And then I feel like if other people could hear me thinking, they’d think, “Jews are always talking about the Holocaust.” And then I wonder why my brain takes everything at least three steps too far.

Nazis are different than hurricanes. There.

(source)

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I was hanging out with two girls the other day, and at some point, I was talking with one of them about the men in our lives. And about fifteen minutes into the conversation, the other girl said, “Can you guys not talk about that right now?”

She was feeling sensitive. She had never had a boyfriend, and sometimes it was fine, and sometimes it was painful as hell.

She is not the only friend I have who has never had a serious boyfriend. And sometimes, each one of them seems to feel like she’s the only one in the world in that situation.

I was annoyed. I didn’t want to censored. I wanted to be able to talk about whatever, whenever.

“My relationship is a big part of my life,” explained the girl I’d been talking with. “I wish I could tell you about it without hurting your feelings.”

“You can, just not right now.”

“We don’t all have to have the same things to talk about our lives with each other,” I said.

And suddenly we were having this huge talk about– well, talking. About relationships.

We were telling each other in what ways we felt resentful towards each other, in what ways we felt alone. In what ways other people always misunderstood our situation. In what ways we were really proud of ourselves, but unsure of how to express it.

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This is how crazy I am.

So the closet door started rattling, and it kept rattling, and I thought my neighbor must be doing something weird on the other side of the wall. That was logical, I guess.

And then the front door started rattling, hard, and I thought someone was probably breaking in, so I ran over to and pressed my eye against the peep hole, so that I could see who was about to murder me. No one.

I thought about grabbing a knife from the kitchen, anyway, just in case. But then the hanging lights in the kitchen started swinging, and the floor was shaking, and I came to the only reasonable conclusion possible:

“Oh my god. It’s an alien invasion.”

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When Bear and I went on our belated honeymoon, back in May (about seven months after our wedding), we went all out. We did everything honeymoon-y that the hotel suggested. We sipped champagne as we looked at the ocean, we had a romantic twilight (people are still allowed to use that word in non-vampiric contexts) dinner, and then another one of those. We did yoga together at dawn (Bear wasn’t thrilled about this). And, of course, we got a couple’s massage.

It was my third professional massage of all time. My first two were from a very cool woman who works out of a tiny place on the Upper West Side and wrote a guest post for me here. Bear had never gotten a professional massage. Neither one of us was prepared for how incredibly expensive they can be.

A couple’s massage sounds sort of romantic, or sexy, or something good. But this was awkward from the start.

I had scheduled it ahead of time. “Do you guys have a man? You know, for my husband?” That doesn’t sound awkward at all…

“Oh, yes, Jay is very popular. And you’ll take a man for yourself as well, then?”

“No, no. A woman.” Was I supposed to “take” a man?

“Oh, a woman…I see. Well, there are only a few slots left with that combination.”

We got one of them.

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