Eat the Damn Cake

On Fifth Ave, in the fresh spring light that bathed the Prada store, a six foot tall blond wrapped in high fashion teetered above a much shorter, much older man with a snarling face. Her hair was perfectly straight, and fell in shiny sheets. The bottom of her angular cheekbones were just visible beneath her pitch-black designer sunglasses. Her mouth was expressionless, her chin high, as though life was a runway.

I looked at Bear. He looked at me. We had both seen them.

Two blocks later, it was a petite, curly-haired woman, strikingly gorgeous, with a much older man with a sagging face and stringy hair. She was wearing a wafting short white skirt with tasteful brown embroidery and a clinging vest.

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Sometimes I regret dating the boys I’ve dated. I imagine that if I could have swung forward into my future and seen myself with Bear, I would have made different choices. I wouldn’t have wasted my time. That’s the thing about the future, of course– It’s always so frustratingly mysterious.

It’s actually really hard to write about the future, because I think like five million people are also writing about it at the same time, and I’d have to think a lot more to come up with an original description.

The future is like that dough that you have to freeze overnight, except you can’t ever finish making the cookies. You just keep adding ingredients, hoping they’ll come out even more delicious. Sorry. That was the best I could do on short notice. Now I’m embarrassed.

One of my biggest regrets about the boys I dated is attraction. I wasn’t that attracted to most of them.

I get the sense that it’s uncool or uninformed or immature to emphasize attraction. You learn to love. You grow together. You are similar people, with similar interests. You both really enjoy badminton (is that really the spelling? Weird).

No. I’m sorry. I want to want to rip his clothes off.

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I saw some photos of myself at sixteen or so and I had this horrible thought: was I a lot hotter then?

(me being beautiful at sixteen, in a rare unpimpled moment, in low light)

It’s horrible for a couple of reasons.

1) It doesn’t even matter, so the fact that my mind does that to me is insulting. I’m smart, and sort of grown up. I should be making intelligent, logical observations about the world.

2) When I was sixteen, I was pretty sure I was going to be even hotter by the time I was twenty. I couldn’t actually imagine being twenty-five, because that sounded like it might be located on a planet so far away astronomers could only speculate about its existance based on how the light of a distant star flickered ever so slightly. But if I had been able to imagine it, I would’ve been positive that I would’ve been even hotter than twenty by then.

3) I don’t want my sixteen-year-old self to win!

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I was pretty happy when guys started wearing pink. My youngest brother was one of them. He did it practically every day. And lavender. And bright yellow. He loves color. He wore color because he was cool and confident, because he was masculine and comfortable with it. Sometimes his best friend is a girl, sometimes a guy.

I keep trying to convince Bear to let me put some mascara on him, because his eyelashes are so long and pretty. Just once…Just for a few hours…

People (Fox News) are flipping out over a picture on the J.Crew site. Jenna Lyons, the company’s president and creative director, is hanging out with her son, painting his nails. His favorite color is pink, she says. The kid looks like he’s having a great time. The people who are yelling things about “unnatural” and “liberal identity politics” and “gay! gay! gay!” are not having a great time. They are scared. I think they might be scared about the downfall of civilization. That’s an educated guess, because they’re usually scared of that. Someone named Erin Brown from something called the Media Research Center said these words (and more) about the ad: “…blatant propaganda celebrating transgendered children.”

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Buried deep in Manhattan, I am looking over pictures from our California trip, and it seems strange, both how big this country is, and how pretty the Bay Area is. I’m not a good enough photographer to capture enough of either the strangeness or the beauty. But I tried.

Having only lived on the East Coast, and only in New Jersey and NYC, my mind never learned how to properly process open space. I can’t get over it. I don’t understand the concept of distance. It makes me feel helpless and awed.

There’s also something sort of awing about having married a man who grew up on the other side of this enormous continent. It really gives one a sense of how good we’ve become, as a civilization,  at transportation.

Anyway, here are a few bits of what I saw. I had to share:

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My friend’s brother filmed my friend and I once, acting out a scene we’d made up. It was something dramatic, destined for a blockbuster movie that we would make when we were fourteen, or some other distant, grown-up age. After, he put the tape in the VCR and we watched ourselves. My friend looked like herself, cute and bouncy. I didn’t recognize myself for a second, and then my heart sank. From profile, I was just a nose, poking out from between curtains of long brown hair. Like a shaggy afghan hound. I looked melancholy. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I wanted to curl forward around my own body and hide myself from the world. I wanted to be a ball.

There was the guest post from Madeline over in Hollywood, and then a reader sent me an email in which she mentioned being a performer and her struggles with body image. It made me think about my back. And about standing up in front of people and singing.

This is me, in a suit I sometimes wore while performing:

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