Eat the Damn Cake

I think that when I was a kid, I was never really pretty. Pictures of me with other girls my age reveal their bright eyes and wide smiles and sweet faces. I am odd and complicated looking. Sometimes I appear to be slender and coltish. Sometimes I am lumbering and awkward. It depends on the angle.

But I am comfortable with this.

Because I know that as a kid, I felt pretty. And I got what I needed. And nothing, certainly not my looks, stood in my way.

And now, looking at the photos of me as a kid, I see that I am clearly the scrappy protagonist in a book about a girl who survives happily in the wilderness for two years until she’s finally discovered by a stray mountain climber who got separated from his team by a sudden storm. And chased by a mountain lion. A mountain lion that had fallen into a cautious alliance with the scrappy protagonist.

(source)

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I have some seriously hot friends. Friends with stunning faces and aggressive shoulder blades and slender necks. Manhattan women who are always wearing something perfect. Sexy, coordinated outfits with confident jewelry and runway heels. Their hair does everything right. They don’t go out without makeup. Laid-back Brooklyn girls in worn jeans or yoga pants with layered tops and sloppy hair and lipgloss and perfect smiles. Girls who get checked out by every man who walks by.

(My friends and I used to love to do photoshoots. The red shirt photos are from one I did of my closest childhood friend)

Sometimes, when I’m with three or four of them at once, I look around and realize that I am the odd woman out. I mean, I’m the weirdest looking one, easy. My profile is not clean and simple and sweet. My mouth, when I’m talking, does odd things that always end up captured in the photo. Was she trying to blow a bubble? Or is that a desperate cry for help?

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This is a post from Fraylie, my regular guest poster whose perspective I love. She has been sharing stories about finding herself waiting tables after receiving her degree, getting into grad school and deciding not to go, and then trying to get a job in the big city. Here’s an update from her in the form of a delightful little essay about trying on suits for a job interview:

During some point in the day, I stood in a tiny mirrored room with about two dozen garments dangling around my head.  Skirts, pants, silk and wool – I was imagining Stacy London skulking around to rear her head and yelp you look ridiculous!

I was wearing a suit.  Chic women kitten heeled around me, pulling at my waist and examining the lines forming on my skirt.  They told me to sit down.  They told me to stand up.  I just need to see how it moves, darling.  And when somebody announced that my skirt was a size six, my mother exhaled oh boy.

The best question was, what kind of job interview is this? I was inside the dressing room pulling on a navy skirt with too many buttons.  Through the slats in the door, I heard voices conversing about my job prospects. After all, the design of the suit must reflect the desired industry.  With one leg in the skirt, my heart crawled down to the floor.  I didn’t have a desired industry.

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After cutting all of my hair off, I looked in the mirror and my chubby arms no longer looked quite as chubby. They looked more…strong. Or maybe they looked rounded without being gross.

My friend told me a story about getting a compliment on a part of her body that she has always  felt self-conscious about, and then looking in the mirror and thinking that that part of her looked completely different. It didn’t make any sense. Could she have lost ten pounds en route to the mirror? Only if you involve aliens.

And as much as I like the Katy Perry song (I can’t help it. It’s not my fault. It’s the beat.), I can’t involve aliens. I mean, if there were aliens, they would be showing up in a lot more obvious ways. It’s not like they’d have this super secret relationship with the government, and then occasionally abduct some dude in a cornfield, just for kicks. Talking about aliens that way insults their astounding mastery of interstellar technology. They’ve got nothing to hide from this puny little planet. And they probably don’t look even remotely human– think about how we don’t look anything like slugs and seahorses and stuff, and our DNA is a lot more similar to those things than it would be to aliens.

OK, I’m done. I’m sorry. I was made to watch an X Files movie recently, and I’m a little indignant.

This is what I’m really writing about:

It’s not at all clear that we use the right words for ourselves. That we imagine the right images when we think of ourselves.

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This was my first Pride Parade. I yelled a lot. I stood on my tip-toes and tried frantically to see. I sang at the top of my lungs. And I fought not to cry when an elderly man marched by, holding up a sign that read, “This is for my granddaughter Sara!”

This is some of what I saw:

(click to enlarge if you can’t read their shirts)

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Gay marriage passed in New York yesterday!!!! Finally.

I don’t have a post to write about it, just an urge to share my excitement and relief.

Because I really, really, really enjoyed this:

Even though I ruined the rest of the night by throwing up.

I loved getting married, and being married is even better. It’s the best thing in my life.

The fact that so many people who love each other aren’t allowed to get married breaks my heart. It’s obviously cruel. It’s dehumanizing. It’s one of the truly terrible things left in our society and world. And this is a big step towards being fully human.

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Unroast: Today I love the way I feel when I say my new name. I have so many names, and all of them are me.