Eat the Damn Cake

This is the first time I’ve been to Ohio.

(Bear, waiting at the airport, when we arrived)

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Because I loved Fraylie’s ability to write gorgeously and wryly about transitioning between college and the rest of life (see her last post here), I invited her back. We’re experimenting with the idea of making a regular place here for her on ETDC. Here are some of her thoughts on coffee shops:

David Attenborough, the celebrated voice of great nature documentaries, would probably enjoy narrating the interior life of the coffee shop.  Think of this:

The young male, upon sniffing the woody perfume of the approaching female, arches his neck in common cafe battle stance.  He mops a ring of coffee from the oak table to make his territory more inviting.  She, aroused, ruffles her collar and enters his domain.

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Florida is weird.

(Bear and I, at this little fast food waffle place, where a lot of stuff on the menu cost a dollar. Imagine that!)

Who looked at the endless stretches of flat swamp and thought to build houses? There’s a highway that everyone calls Alligator Alley. There are signs along paths that say “look out for snakes” and Bear’s uncle reports, in a satisfied tone, as though proud of the Everglades, that there have been python sightings in the neighborhood.

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Or maybe not so wild. The one time I tried zip-lining was disastrous…And that’s about as wild as most urban people on vacation get.

So Bear got the job. He quit his last job and he doesn’t have to start work at the new place until three weeks from now. And we are suddenly leaving, tomorrow, to travel around the country and visit as many as we can of the relatives we’ve been meaning to visit. And then we are going somewhere with a lot of beaches to lie on. For the rest of our honeymoon. The original honeymoon was about two days long, and it was chilly. Bear had to get back to work. I was sort of done with the whole planning-wedding-stuff thing at that point, and just wanted to get back to my life.

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So while I was getting laid off, Bear was busy interviewing for a new job. Life is a funny balance. And it happens all at once, sometimes.

He had to fly to Amsterdam on two days’ notice, and I was freaking out. My mind was a checklist, like, “Tiny travel deodorant! A towel, in case he has to wash his hair in the airport bathroom! Insulin and syringe prescriptions so that no one thinks he’s a terrorist or a drug addict! Gum! Tic tacs! Sunglasses!”

He was about to be under an enormous amount of pressure, and I was feeling it. I looked over the itinerary that the Dutch company had sent, the day of, and it was terrifying. Back- to-back meetings all day long. Everyone he was meeting with had a scarily important-sounding title. That’s how titles are supposed to work, I guess.

(source)

And then he was on a plane and I was standing in the checkout line at Whole Foods, and suddenly I was definitely going to throw up. It hit me like…um…a ball, hitting someone in the face. (OK, I failed there. Bad writer!) Anyway, it was extremely abrupt. I was unzipping my hoodie, remembering that I wasn’t wearing a bra and my shirt was not particularly thick and then zipping it back up halfway.

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You know how people tell you that you should never send naked pictures of yourself to someone? Even if you’re dating them and they’re really, really nice? And you know how you say to yourself, “Well, yeah, it doesn’t make sense for OTHER people to do that, but I totally have this under control”?

Just don’t do it.

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