Eat the Damn Cake

You know what I don’t like? The “real world.”

People sound so mean when they talk about it. Once, an ex-boyfriend who was still hurt yelled at me, “You don’t know anything about the real world!”

I thought of this:

(A street fight. That’s what it sounds like. source)

Or maybe it looks like this:

Whenever people say “the real world,” they mean that there’s another world, a fake one, that someone is trying to live in. And that is always bad.

But I especially dislike it when people talk this way about kids. “They need to learn about the real world.” When people say this about kids, they mean that they’re too sheltered, or too spoiled, or too safe, or too innocent.

Sometimes people defend things as awful as bullying by saying, “Well, it’ll teach them to deal with the real world.”

As though this place called the real world is full of cruel people, just waiting to torment you. What a terrible place! I don’t want to live there!

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Bear hates stories where people cheat on each other. He hates stories where people get divorced. Sometimes he mutters, “I hate Elizabeth Gilbert” when people mention Eat, Pray, Love. He doesn’t understand why she left her husband.

“That guy had no direction in his life,” I remind him, trying to remember what her first husband was like in the book. “He was really immature, and she needed someone secure and passionate.”

“I don’t know,” Bear says. “He sounds fine. She just fell out of love with him. Which, apparently, can happen at any moment.”

“Not at any moment.”

I think he equates any woman in the world leaving her husband to me leaving him.  Elizabeth Gilbert leaving her innocent, helpless husband feels like a type of infidelity. I mean, look where she ends up– in the arms of a hot Brazilian guy with an awesome accent! And, wait, even before that, there was James Franco, in the movie, wearing a leather jacket and doing yoga. Am I remembering that correctly?

Bear is positive that if I ever cheated on him, it would be the worst thing in the world. He is really clear on this. I can’t actually imagine Bear cheating on me. It’s like my brain can’t go there. There’s a huge, cinderblock wall. I think it’s actually the wall from every one of my college dorms. Except this one is thick enough to block out the amazingly loud classic rock music that kid next door always played at 3 a.m. when he was drunk. Cheating and Bear don’t make sense together. And, of course, I can’t imagine cheating on Bear either.

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A guest post. You remember her. She wrote about being pregnant and what the hell does “normal” look like anyway– here. And she’s back for more! And the more is amazing.

I am Anna, food-blogger at Icy Violet’s Kitchen, thinker-about-women’s-issues, and lover of Kate’s blog.  My first baby is due tomorrow.  How about that?

NEGATIVE BODY TALK:

I’m so fat!

You’re not!  I am.

You!  You look great!

Chuh.  Have you seen these thighs?

Look at these arms!

What about this double chin!

***

Had a very interesting experience the other day.

I was spending time with family.  Big family.  Family I don’t always see.  Specifically I was spending time with my female cousins.  We’re a large family with a propensity for daughters, and I have a lot (of cousins that is, not daughters…).

My female cousins are beautiful, beautiful women.  My mother’s side of the family just has those genes.  They are small, thin-boned, fine featured and unfailingly thin.

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So I’ve been undergoing a strange metamorphosis. The symptoms started manifesting several weeks ago, when I found myself googling “antique upholstered headboard.” And then I fell in love with this:

(source)

Which is weird, because, well, it’s a bed. And bad, because it’s $2,000 on sale at ABC Home. Not happening. Really, really not happening.

ABC, I’ve recently discovered, has some incredibly beautiful stuff. And it is all overpriced. Even the ugly, random stuff is overpriced:

(source)

This “vintage grape bin” is $595.

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Bear and I got married nine months ago. Not to the day, or anything. I’ve never been like that.

Sometimes I feel a little like a wedding veteran, when people are talking about planning one. They always sound so young and ambitious, and I lean back in my chair, fold my hands over my belly, and say, “Alright now…Alright now, kid…But let’s just slow it down for a minute, here…”

No, I would never say that.

But I feel like I learned a lot from planning a wedding. And I realized suddenly that I never really took the time to write a post that summed up my experience into a neat little post with a moral at the end and a set of convenient bullet points for reference. And I’m a blogger, so that’s sort of unforgivable.

Instead, after I got married, I was really excited to not have to think about weddings ever again. A few months ago, I clicked on some fluff piece called something like “The Post Wedding Blues: Are You Feeling Depressed and Down During Your First Months of Marriage? It May Be Because All That Wedding Excitement is Over!”

I was like, “Wait, what? Are you kidding me? THIS is the good part.”

But sometimes I think I’m too hard on my wedding. It was a great day. I wore a stunning gown. I still remember exactly how Bear looked, and how he looked at me.

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I am moving to Brooklyn. This doesn’t sound like a big deal to people who don’t live in New York City. One of my friends who doesn’t live in New York City was silent for a long time after I delivered the dramatic news. Then she said, “Isn’t that, like, a mile away?”

“It’s Brooklyn,” I said pointedly. “It’s like this different world.”

It feels like a different world to me. When you see Manhattan from a distance, it’s this dense, pricky, gorgeous anemone, erupting skyward in glinting spines and glittering slabs of glass. Brooklyn, from a distance, is spread out. You can’t see where it ends. You can’t see all of its beginnings. There’s a certain potential in it that Manhattan doesn’t have but substitutes with intensity.

(looking towards Manhattan)

(looking towards Brooklyn)

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