Eat the Damn Cake

Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish new year. Tonight begins the celebration of the beginning of creation– the birth of the world. That’s a big thing to celebrate. And tonight begins an intensive period called the Days of Awe, in which Jews are supposed to look very carefully at their lives and think about what went right and what went wrong over the past year. Were there people who they hurt? It’s time to apologize. It’s time to start taking responsibility.

Rosh Hashanah always comes up suddenly, even though it’s every year. I never feel completely ready, and then, when I think hard about it, I realize I am.

I am ready.

I remember the fluttering panic leading up to a piano recital, when I was a kid. I was terrified of messing up. I think I’m still scared of messing up.

I’m scared sometimes that I made the wrong decision when I decided to try to make writing my career. What if that was irresponsible and foolish? What if I never “make it”? What if I’m just messing up?

I’m scared that I’m not enough.

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I am having one of those days. Rosh Hashanah starts tomorrow, and I’m going to be standing behind a podium in front of hundreds of people. They are going to all look at me at the same time. And then I’ll sing. A lot. In Hebrew. Which I am used to, because I’ve been doing it for ten years now. But I’m not used to it, either, because it’s really hard to get used to singing in Hebrew in front of a lot of people.

Once Rosh Hashanah gets started, there’s no stopping it. Thursday and Friday will be spent in the synagogue, my eyes skipping ahead on the printed outline of the service that sits on the podium in front of me. “Oh, shit. Here comes the ha-melech…I never get the melody exactly right. I never remember to take a big enough breath before the high part…”

(the huge, heavy High Holiday prayerbook I chant from. You wouldn’t believe what that thing does to your wrists after you hold it up for awhile)

I am having one of those days. It started yesterday, actually, when I was frantically shopping for a white skirt, because it turned out that nothing fit right or looked right, and I have to wear white for the High Holidays. No one is selling white now. There’s a rule. It involves Labor Day, which already happened. I was in the dressing room, and I looked bad from every angle. Every time I looked at myself I could think of ten things that were unfixably wrong with me. “No woman could ever make that neck work.”

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I like my women striking. It’s self-centered. It’s because I have a big nose, I think. I’ve been to war and back with my big nose, but the women I think are the most stunning almost always have big noses, too. I can walk by a hundred Victoria’s Secret posters (and I do. Who doesn’t, in the city?), and not care. But when I  meet a woman with something different going on with her beauty, I am immediately intrigued.

Maybe I just like tension. I like love stories about Muslims and Jews. I am bored by romantic comedies where the difference between the girl and the guy is that she is a girl and she has brown eyes and he is a guy and he has blue eyes.

I like beauty that surprises a little.

And then, inevitably, when I get to know a surprising beautiful woman, she doesn’t like the thing about her that makes her surprising.

And even though I am exactly the same, I am a little crushed.

(wait, it’ll make sense in a second)

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I don’t have a full post today because I stayed up all night last night reading a book about Wall Street. I mean, all night. Until seven in the morning. That’s really stupid. I am dead to the world right now.

But since I am too dead to write, I thought I’d share something else. Some of the recent photos that I’ve received from readers and quietly added to the Cake Gallery without letting anyone know. I’m a bad businesswoman. Maybe I need to read even more about Wall Street. Maybe I really, really don’t.

So here are a few of the awesome cake shots I’ve been getting:

Amazing, right? Send me yours!

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Unroast: Today I love that I am too tired to look in the mirror.

P.S. Congratulations/mazel tov to my grandmother, who just received an award for all of her volunteer work at her local hospice! That woman is amazing. She never stops working. She also reads this blog regularly, so I know she’s seeing this. Hi, Grammoo! I’m sorry you have to read about your granddaughter’s awkwardness and body images issues and marital stuff on the internet!

P.P.S. There’s a version of my post about talking to other women about weight gain up on HuffPo. Just so people know I still appear occasionally on really big international forums, other than this blog 🙂 Wait, can you call HuffPo a forum? That sounds wrong. Maybe if people were nicer in the comments it’d sound more right.

Things are looking up, from yesterday. Bear has referred to Minute/Minnow/Minette and I as “my girls” several times. He calls her Minna, so there’s yet another name.

I’ve also made myself incredibly annoying–both by taking lots of cellphone pictures of the cat sleeping with her paws over her head (probably in an effort to hide her face from the camera) and by trying to think of common phrases with the word “minute” in them.

“Just a minute!” “It only takes a minute!” “Give me a minute!” “Minute Maid!” “Minute to win it!” Is that a common phrase? It doesn’t sound like one. Whatever. And Minute Maid is orange juice. Whatever again. I’m clearly not very good at this.

Thank you, commenters, for the cat thoughts and advice. You always help me out. And make me less afraid of dying of horrible parasites.

But this is not another cat post. This is a post about a weird thing I learned about the world this week:

It is really hard to give big things away (in NYC).

We moved a little over a month ago, and since then, I have been dragging this giant black Ikea shelving unit from room to room (there are only two rooms, so it’s not as much dragging as I guess it could be). In our last apartment and the one before that, there wasn’t enough space for two dressers, so we got this thing and some cloth bins and put Bear’s clothes in/on it. It’s like six and a half feet tall. And then there’s the pretty almost-oriental rug (what exactly makes something an oriental rug, anyway?) that my uncle, an auctioneer, got at one of his sales and gave my parents who gave it to me. It feels nice, looks nice, and is 8×10. We are using another rug, also from my uncle through my parents, that matches the couch more and there isn’t enough space for two. I’m sorry, that was boring.

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Trader Joe’s Honeynut O’s make this strange crackling sound in the milk. It’s distracting. It also freaks me out a little. Why are they popping? Is that what all-natural cereals that are supposed to be made out of pure sugar do?

The other thing that’s distracting is this tiny orange cat on my lap. Her name is Minette. Or possibly Minnow, or Minute, or all three of those and more. My cousin found her outside, being bullied by other, much larger cats. We have taken her in for as long as it takes for her to get all of the shots and tests and apartment-training she needs before she can be officially adopted. Except that she has a bump on her nose, and I sort of love her.

And Bear and I are having the most stereotypical moment in our new marriage, because, while he likes her, he doesn’t see any reason why she absolutely has to stay, and he is making a lot of points about the smell of the litter and how this is a new apartment and how there’s this awful parasite cats carry that can destroy your brain. It’s even worse if you’re pregnant. It will destroy your brain and the brain of your unborn child, who will appear perfectly normal for several years and then suddenly…I point out that I am definitely not pregnant. Still, he says, he doesn’t want anything to happen to HIS brain.

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