Eat the Damn Cake

So suddenly I’m doing all these giveaways, which is really satisfying. I mean, you’re reading this blog. Reading requires patience and effort and the ability to do all the voices in your head. Sometimes I am not as funny as I could be if I watched more Tiny Fey and thought things through a little more carefully. Sometimes I forget to make a point at the end. For all this, you should get something back, in addition to an abrupt and ferocious craving for cake. Which is generally what I get from looking at the picture on the top. But maybe something’s wrong with me.

First, I ran the numbers (which makes me sound like someone who can do math), and the winner for the eShakti giveaway  is….ALICIA! I felt like I should do that in caps. Alicia said “I love eshakti, and would be thrilled to win an item!!” She definitely did. Yay!!! Alicia, can you write to me, please? kate@eatthedamncake.com.

Now, for all of you who aren’t Alicia, here’s something else: sneakpeeq, a shopping app with sweet deals on constantly updated merchandise from a broad range of designers and stores, has offered you guys a bunch of prizes. They’re calling the giveaway “Let Them Eat Cake.” Yup, they gave our giveaway a name. Because we’re special. You can check out sneakpeeq here. They’re getting a lot of press.

Here’s how this giveaway will work: First of all, you get 20% off your next purchase, just for entering the giveaway.

Two winners will each receive a $25 gift card for food, style, and home products.

Five runner-up winners will each receive a $10 gift card. Not bad.

Enter the giveaway by joining sneakpeeq here and then leaving a comment under this post to let me know you’re in. It’s a Facebook thing. So sorry to those who aren’t on Facebook, but, on the positive side, this giveaway is open to everyone– not just Americans and Canadians! It’s about time that kind of favoritism stopped 🙂

The giveaway ends on Jan 13th, when I’ll pick the seven winners.

Let “Let Them Eat Cake”– the epic giveaway– begin!

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This is my series called Little Victories. In it, I talk about what’s going right for me, in terms of how I’m feeling about the way I look, and the world, in general (maybe. I haven’t gotten that far yet). The entry before this one was called “my breasts.” 

Sometimes I go through a schlumpy phase. I don’t feel like dressing up. At all. I want to wear things that don’t squeeze me too tight and don’t itch in the back, and don’t require heels, and would look stupid with makeup. I want to wear things that would enable me to have a shot at running away if ninjas attacked me. It wouldn’t probably be much of a shot. But it’d be better than if I was wearing stilettos and a tight skirt.

I want to wear my dad’s old stained sweatshirt, with something related to football that I don’t understand on the front. I want to wear it with loose-fitting yoga pants that have never seen a yoga studio. During the schlumpy phase, I am not interested in looking good.

If I happen to look good, it is accidental, and almost irrelevant. Not totally irrelevant. But closer than normal.

“You look great!” says Bear, who doesn’t understand fashion at all. Who thinks sexiness is soft material and easy access.

I roll my eyes.

(because this is the truth. note the sports related shirt that was once owned by a male member of my family and the pink hoodie under it that no one should ever wear. and I do that with my hands a lot. it’s really weird. I don’t understand it. at least Bear is  schlumpy here, too)

When I come home during my schlumpy phase, I change immediately into my most unflattering clothing. Sometimes I forget half of it, and I’m walking around in socks with no pants, with my giant sweatshirt swelling like a football-related bubble over my torso.

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This is a question I’m not crazy about: “What do you do?”

Like most people, I do a lot of things. Every day. But I don’t have a title.

I could make something up. Something like “Mistress of Mystery and Empress of Really Cool Things.” But I’m bad at lying, so instead I usually say, “I write.”

And then they say, “Oh yeah? Where?”

And I could say, “On a train, sometimes, but usually at the table, or on the couch. There are also a lot of to-do lists on my phone.”

But I am not rude. So I try to remember where the last impressive place I got published was, and then, inevitably, it turns out that they don’t read that publication. The other day I met someone who had never heard of the Huffington Post. (That’s the place I mention when I can’t think of anything else quickly enough.) It wasn’t the first time.

Some of my friends have great titles. I have a feeling they get invited to cooler parties than me. I don’t get invited to that many parties.

Bear has a really impressive-sounding title. Which is why he doesn’t like to say it. He thinks it sounds braggy to use your impressive title. He thinks you should down-play it. He doesn’t see why it should matter.

If I could steal his title, I feel like I would rock it. I would practice saying it without grinning. I would get good.

I want a title, because I think that if I had one, I would trip over my words less. It would sound more like I’m doing the things that I’m already doing. It would sound more like those things are important.  I would be able to stop making jokes about “when I publish that book…” that sound more like “oh god, please, I hope I get a book published one day! I really, really hope.”

I want a title because I think that people will respect me more if I have one. They will talk about me with each other after I leave, like this: “Kate is really impressive. She’s such a high achiever. I mean, she’s Mistress of Mystery and everything. Not everyone can do that. Let’s be honest, even Lady Gaga wouldn’t be able to do that, and she can wear the highest heels of anyone.”

“Oh my god, I know! I wish I was Kate! It’s like, you just know she’s doing impressive things all day long.”

“Yeah, exactly. You just know. From her title.”

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Dear Camera,

I don’t look like that. Stop lying.

My father is a believer in technology. He trusts you. He thinks that you always tell the truth. He tells me, “That’s what you look like, and you look fine.”

But that can’t be right, because I just looked in the mirror, and there was a different story looking back at me. In that story, my nose was strong and charismatic. My chin was gentle and sweet. My face was a defiant combination of creative themes and contrasting ideas and my body made sense. Here, in this picture, I am an unfortunate set of errors. My nose is definitely too big, and has strange bumps, like lumpy dough. My chin is surprisingly weak. My face is a jumble of mistakes, like the painter tripped and the brush hit the canvas in the wrong spot, and instead of stopping, she kept going from there, deciding at the last moment to make it a commentary on something sad and awkward.

Take it back. Do it better. I want a refund. I want a redo. I want you to tell the truth about me.

This can’t be right, because last night I was beautiful in that dress– with the thick, sexy belt, and the red heels, for Christmas. Christmas has the color red. I went with that. Last night, I could feel that I was beautiful. I remember the feeling even now. The angle of my neck felt right, like I knew exactly how to hold my head. I felt bold and like I could probably get away with impertinence. When someone mentioned some gorgeous woman (“Oh, god, she’s SO beautiful it’s ridiculous”), and everyone agreed, I felt without thinking that I had nothing to worry about. I mean, look at me. Look at me!

In these pictures, I am clumsy and lumbering and lopsided. I don’t appear to know how my own limbs work. I am always caught with one eye blinking, like I didn’t learn how to blink correctly as a child. Like I am winking grotesquely– maybe having a small seizure. Maybe just spasming. My, how often that young lady in the large belt spasms!

I am pretty sure I was graceful. So this is all wrong. My husband was definitely impressed by my grace. I have even learned to walk in high heels, and that’s taken a long time. OK, not perfectly. But I don’t expect perfection.

My legs looked so sleek, when I glanced down. My arms– not so terribly bulky. Or at least, their roundness was more right than wrong. It balanced me. So I kept glancing down. Nice.

And then, you had to do this. The way you always do. Just when I am happy. Just when I find a truly fabulous outfit, or my hair is so much better than I’d expected it would be, or I begin to suspect that I might be hot. Legitimately hot. Then up you pop, flashing your cruel grin, laughing in snaps to yourself.

(btw, your nose is pretty big, too. not your best angle? HA. source)

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Something just happened to me that is like a story with a moral at the end. And it’s a story makes me look bad. You’re going to shake your head and think, “I would have handled that a lot better.”

One of my good friends stopped talking to me a couple months ago.

Everyone’s busy, and we don’t live extremely close to each other, so at first I didn’t even notice. We don’t have to talk every day.  And then I texted her about a movie that’d come out that we were supposed to see together. We had this dorky little pact. It went back years. We had this running joke, and this movie was a part of it. She didn’t text back.

Lame, I thought. OK, so she doesn’t care about the movie. Even though we had that running joke and that silly pact.  I’ll see it with someone else. I don’t necessarily need to see it with her.  Whatevs.

Because I totally say “whatevs” a lot.

A couple weeks went by, and I sent her an email. It was like “Hey– I’m worried that you’re upset at me about something and I’m trying to be funny and act like everything is cool but also show you that I care and I hope you still like me and I’m gonna just send this now before I get weird in case you really are mad at me.” I mean, that’s what I was thinking. I wrote it a little better. But just a little better.

Nothing.

A week went by. Now I was really annoyed. Another week. One more shot. I tossed off a Facebook message: “OK, I’m getting paranoid here. Are you alive?”

Nothing. Seriously? What the hell? She was just dropping me, without any explanation? Come ON. Don’t I deserve better than that? What the hell did I do to her? OK, maybe I wasn’t being that attentive or something. Maybe I was sort of wrapped up in my own stuff. But it’s not like I ever ignored her the way she was now ignoring me.

I told Bear my friend was ignoring me.

“Maybe you should try to get together with her,” he said.

“Whatever,” I said. “I don’t need to see her.”

“Maybe you should be nice to her,” he said. “Maybe we should invite her over.”

“I’m nice enough,” I said, nastily. I was feeling nasty. I was ready to ignore her back, forever. Because this is middle school. No, because that’s really how my mind works sometimes.

It wasn’t the first time Bear and I had a conversation like this about a friend. I’m usually ready to give up. He usually thinks I should try being nicer. When I get hurt, I want to retreat. Immediately. He thinks I should wait it out. He’s not always right. Sometimes things need to end. But usually I run too fast, too soon.

She didn’t write back. She didn’t write back.

And then today she wrote back.

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How appropriate is the title of this series for this particular post?! I have small breasts. You guys know. I’ve written about them before. Hi Mom! I’m writing about my boobs on the internet again! (Sigh. I’ll never amount to anything…)

Refresher: my Little Victories series is a weekly effort to write about something I feel good about, or something I don’t feel bad about. It’s like an extended unroast. It’s a reminder that life is cool and so is my body.

Back to boobs: When I first started developing them, I thought I had cancer. Really. Some annoying kid who was showing off on the skating rink slammed into me and my chest HURT. It hurt in this way that I thought nothing should be allowed to hurt. I assumed I had a tumor. Or two. I was, like, twelve. Already neurotic.

“Mom,” I said, “Something’s wrong with my chest.”

“Probably not,” she said, calmly.

She was right. Later, when I was fourteen or so, I had real breasts. As in, not just lumps buried way under the skin. They stuck out a little. They had legit nipples. And I thought they were fantastic. I met a boy at camp who suggested that my breasts were on the small side, and I proudly corrected him. “No, they’re actually very big.” (Later, he died, and I still think about him sometimes, but that’s another story).

It turned out he was right.

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