Eat the Damn Cake

I have it. I am a carrier. I was bitten by the hideous herpes bug. And it is gross. For most of my life, I’ve gotten blisters on my lips, usually when I was already feeling a little sick. Sometimes when I was really stressed. Sometimes just for fun, when I least suspected it. I canceled my first date with Bear because of herpes. I didn’t want him to see me like that.

The majority of people in the country are supposed to have herpes, but everyone acts like it’s a kinda big deal anyway. There are a lot of jokes with a herpes punchline. I’ve made a few of them myself. But I’ve also felt like I couldn’t say the word aloud in reference to myself. I said, “fever blister” or “cold sore.” I hated the thought of being connected with something that… infected sounding. I was afraid people might think I had the other kind of herpes. The even more offensive kind.

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Bear and I were on a streetcar in San Francisco and I had not taken a shower in a while because that’s how vacation works.

This is me:

This is what my hair was doing:

This is where we were going:

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Here in the gorgeous, green Bay Area, we were having a 93rd birthday party for Bear’s grandmother outside, on the patio. Lady Gaga was blaring in the house.

Lady Gaga was still blaring after the guests had trickled down the steep driveway towards their cars. Bear’s mother and brother had a little spontaneous dance party. They rocked out. I was too shy to dance, so I took pictures.

Lady Gaga is kind of everywhere in this house. Her poster is on the wall, in the room Bear’s brother is staying in, the Vogue with her picture on the cover is proudly displayed on the coffee table.

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When I turned 25 a few weeks ago, it felt a little traumatic. It seems like the world doesn’t know what to do with its twenty-somethings anymore. This is a guest post. This is Fraylie: Fraylie prefers cupcakes to cake.  She is a writer and photographer living in Northampton, Massachusetts, though she hails from the motherland of New Jersey.  You should check out her work at www.fraylienord.com.

Last week I frighten myself when, after watching Woody Allen’s “Interiors,” I notice that the psychologically unhinged, disparagingly angry mother, Eve, seems a lot like me.  We have the same lines under our eyes.  When we consider our failures, we stare at walls with mouths like open bags and say “hello.”  Sometimes we cry because crying fills space.  I watch the screen, forming her lines as if they were my own.

“Oh, I can’t… I can’t breathe!” we gasp.

Eve and I are overly dramatic and know it.  And the lines under my eyes are mostly the fault of my ill-fitting glasses, but I start to believe it makes me seem “sleepily dignified.”  And sometimes, it’s amusing to hyperbolize.

(Eve)

I am a twenty-two year old college graduate and, more recently, a waitress.  I serve salmon with balls of sticky brown rice and fried tofu.  A year ago, I would have been interested in an ethnographic investigation of camaraderie and friendship among women in restaurants.  I would have asked questions like, “How does serving food engender a sense of identity?”  Or maybe, “Can you describe the personal language of waitresses in this restaurant?”  At this point, I invest more time in memorizing the intricacies of phantom allergies than I do acting “discursive” whilst peering over steamed cod.  “Glutard” is a more common kitchen offensive than the catchphrase “commoditization in the age of millennial capitalism.”  So maybe we do have a lingo.  But I need to pay rent so that I can keep serving fish, and so on.

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Yeah, I’m not really an insider. This is a guest post.

Madeline Bertani is an actress living and working in Los Angeles. She used to write a vegan food blog called “Me and Chew,” and is currently working on developing a new lifestyle blog between acting work and assistant teaching. She needs to take more pictures of herself eating cake …

Greetings from the West Coast! First of all, thanks so much to Kate for letting me do a guest post on ETDC – love it!

Here’s a bit of my story:

In the fall of last year, I moved from the Midwest to Los Angeles to begin my professional acting career in a picturesque “bright-eyed girl moves to Hollywood to follow her dreams” fashion.

Once I’d arrived, a director I knew kindly recommended me to a “really, really powerful” manager to possibly represent me. Sweet.

Sitting down to a meeting with the aforementioned manager, she asked to look at my resume (where my hair and eye color, height, weight, age range, contact info, and previous work are listed). As she scanned and scrutinized, her face drew back in disapproval:

“I’d take your weight off here, honey. We’re in size zero land, and that height and weight doesn’t look like a size zero. Now maybe you’re all muscle, but I can’t really tell because you’re wearing a skirt.”

When I retold the story to my director-friend, she said:

“Well, she was probably gently trying to tell you to lose some weight.”

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I am a wimp. I am not resilient or strong-willed or strong anythinged. I hate pain. For six hours, on the plane, I couldn’t breathe. I was already sick, but getting better, and then suddenly it was terrible and I couldn’t breathe. And then my ears popped. There is no word for this, really. It’s “popped” when something inside swells up and threatens to explode. And then it’s “popped” when the same thing squeaks and deflates. So they bad-popped and then they refused to good-pop back. Forever. For a night. And then a day, and then a night.

I cried out of frustration. I couldn’t hear my own voice. Here I am, in California, ruining everything.

There is nothing wrong with me. I don’t have a chronic illness, like Bear. I am young.  When I go to the doctor, the doctor says, “Everything seems normal.”

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