Eat the Damn Cake

Katie mentioned the media and body image in this comment. So this post (and the version of it on the Huffington Post) is for her. 

I saw this commercial last night.

Bear was out until midnight, at a work dinner thing. I’d already hung out with friends, they’d already gone home, and I was sitting around watching Hulu. The same ad kept playing. An extremely thin blond model in underwear and a bra, dancing awkwardly. The camera zooms in on her breasts. Lingers. Zooms out. She places her hands over her face and appears to giggle in glee. She looks a little uncomfortable. She’s supposed to be having a dance party in her lingerie, alone. Because girls are always stripping down to dance alone, laughing and posing. We all know that.

Sometimes people think it’s silly to blame the media for all of the issues with body image girls have. We have free will. We are our own people. We aren’t plugged  into the Matrix (although practically every time I’m waiting for the subway, I think of that epic subway battle, where they’re flying…So cool).

(It’s really, really upsetting me that I can’t find a better picture to represent this scene. source)

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Bear woke up at 2 am. “It’s burning hot in here,” he said. “I have to turn on the air conditioner.” The giant floor unit wheezed to life as he fiddled with it.

“I have to open a window,” he said.

I was barely awake. “Just not too much,” I mumbled. “Minute…” I didn’t want the cat to jump out the window. Do cats even do that?

Bear was lumbering around, sleep-haired and bleary-eyed. “I need cold water,” he said. “I need really cold water.”

“OK, honey, OK,” I said, pulling myself out of bed. “There’s water on the counter.”

“I need it to be COLD.” He sounded desperate.

“There’s ice in the freezer…”

He was already opening a bottle of fizzy water, and I knew it would spray everywhere, because the last one had. “Wai–” I said. It exploded. He jumped back, making a furious sound.

Great. Here it comes.

“Why can NOTHING go right?” he cried. “Why is everything terrible?”

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Dana, I tried to respond to your comment with this post, but it sort of veered off in another direction. I’ll try again later!

I think what you eat has a lot to do with your social class. I mean, it’s not just me– all of the people who do the studies about these things agree. Are you living in an upper middle class, multi-degreed, white collar community? (You don’t have to be upper middle class yourself– you just have to live there.) There are probably a lot of whole wheat options. There are probably a lot of fresh vegetables. Some people might think you’re being ironic if you eat PB&J on white.

Class is interesting. It’s something I think about a lot these days. I just took Charles Murray’s little class test. It’s from his new book Coming Apart. I actually didn’t realize when I first read about it that it was exclusively about white people. Oops. He says the upper middle class is totally out of touch with the majority of Americans– that the cultures are totally different at this point. That basically, if you have two degrees, like me, and live in Brooklyn, like I do, and are not an evangelical Christian, as I am not, then there’s a decent chance you’re in an elite bubble and have no idea what the rest of the country is up to. Personally, I don’t like Charles Murray’s tone. He’s just itching to call people snobs. I can imagine him using the term “Opera lover!” as a slur.

(A popular restaurant in the city. source)

Anyway, I took the test, and waited for Charles to sneer at me and say mockingly, in a snooty liberal voice, “It’s a lovely day for some croquet in Turks & Caicos, after we finish up these vegan cracked spout smoothies and our conversation about Derrida and the politics of identity marginalization.”

My score said that I’m a “first generation upper middle class person with middle class parents.”

Which is true in some ways, but there’s a little more to the story. Like, I went to college and grad school, and my parents didn’t. When I was little, we lived in a pretty rural area, surrounded by farms and a smattering of neo nazis, where we learned all the different kinds of hunting seasons so as to avoid being shot by various projectiles (everyone thought an arrow would be the worst). There were years when my dad did not draw a salary– he was running a business out of the basement. I wasn’t isolated from poor kids or even evangelical Christian kids (shocking! I know!). But my parents were self-educated and cocky about it, we weren’t allowed to watch TV, and my mom grew a giant vegetable garden and bought chickens from the Amish market down the road.  No one watched Nascar. No one ate Denny’s. We didn’t eat out at all. 

(source)

And now here I am– in the big city, where many of the people I know take it as a sign of weakness to cook with spices you didn’t grind yourself (my father also grinds his own spices). Where it feels like an act of rebellion to eat a donut. Where health is on everyone’s minds, at every moment. I am always the only one in the room who doesn’t belong to a gym (I tried it briefly). I am usually the only one to take a second helping of dessert.

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This post was inspired by this comment, from Erin. 

Grilled cheese. This is how I impress people and make friends. It’s also, apparently, the centerpiece of the most boring scene ever written.

A couple years ago, a family friend mentioned that she lived next door to this big-shot book agent. He specialized in fantasy and sci fi. He had four other houses. The books he represented got turned into movies starring Tom Cruise.

(I’d be OK with this being a character from a book I wrote. source)

“You’re writing a book– right, Kate?” the family friend asked.

“Yes! Yes! Yes!” I said. Or something to that effect.

She put me in touch with him. He offered to read my manuscript. I died of fear and joy and then fear again. And then joy. This is it, I thought. This is my big break. Kate, girl, this is the best thing that will ever happen to you.

I was not exactly putting all of my eggs in one basket. I had just started grad school. Just moved to NYC. And it was more about offering up my entire soul than anything to do with eggs, I think.

I sent him the book I’d worked on in college. It was the story of a dangerously powerful young woman named Sanla who is attending an all-girls boarding school at the edge of an enormous jungle, when suddenly she is selected by the Master Mage– the most powerful man in the world– a mysteriously blind, surprisingly young man with long curly black hair, to become his apprentice. But Sanla has the wrong kind of magic. She is a dark mage. And dark magic has long ago been outlawed. It is the magic of dirt and instinct and poverty. The ruling class practices a magic based on memorization, and words, and levels. Could it be that the Master Mage is experimenting with the dark? Could it be that the world is about to change, because of one little orphan girl?

Well, yeah.

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This post is for Cate, who commented here. 

I am a dreamer.

I want big things. I want gorgeous settings. I am idealistic. I am impractical.

I am old enough to know better, so I don’t think I will ever know better.

I am fragile. I want to be famous. God, that’s embarrassing. At least there’s this: I don’t want to be famous and get invited to all the best penthouse parties and know all the names of the owners of the sexiest clubs. I don’t want fame to follow me outside, into the street. I want to be a famous writer. I want people to read my words and disappear briefly inside them. That’s what happened to me, as a kid, reading fantasy novels. I slipped inside another world. I want to do that for people.

I am a failure. I tried being practical. I tried growing up right. At fifteen, I got my first serious job. I worked through college. For a while, I was making more money than all of my friends. I was a little smug about it, when a guy who liked me bragged about how much he made at his job, repairing computers, and I made more. Don’t say anything, I thought. Don’t you dare say anything. I really wanted to say something. I only let myself get A’s, and I only considered Ivy League grad schools-– I got into the one my professors wanted for me. There was this straight, groomed path, and I was on it, and I was going to take my degrees out into the world and knock on a bunch of impressive doors with them (they make a more important sound than just my bare hand), and things would fall into place.

And then I couldn’t.

(that’s my backpack. And my chocolate milk. This is where I was writing yesterday)

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I am sitting here, staring at my laptop, and I have no idea what to write. Sometimes this happens to me. Sometimes I have weeks where I want to write about everything. Everything is a good idea. Someone coughs on the subway, and I’m inspired. I’ll do an essay about riding the subway! About coughing! It’ll be witty and relevant and perfectly constructed!

Right now, I feel like I don’t have a single good idea. And no one on the subway has done anything interesting for like the past four days.

So rather than wallowing alone in my failure, I thought I’d ask you guys. What do you want to read about? Specifically, what do you want to read about from me?

I think my posts on this blog tend to fall into some basic categories: body image, relationships, what’s the deal with life, and totally random (like the one about politics).

Are there other topics you think I should cover? Do you prefer posts that fall into one of the categories above? WHAT DO YOU WANT?

I’m sorry for yelling. That was wrong of me. I will make it up to you, with some great posts. But first…let me know what you’d like to read.

OK, I’m going back to wallowing now.

(this is my wallowing face. it’s kinda boring– all the chaos is internal)

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Unroast: Today I love the way I feel when I’m wearing skinny heels and a big coat.

P.S. RE: secret date: Bear took me to Shake Shack (wherein resides my favorite cheeseburger in the world) and then to see The Book of Mormon!! I was ridiculously happy. I’ve wanted to see it since it opened. It was awesome. He was proud of himself. I was impressed. And then we came home and made grilled cheeses. Hooray, romance!!