Eat the Damn Cake

I didn’t tell the whole story yesterday. About meeting the work people. There’s more. The story doesn’t end with the painting, as happy as I am about the painting. It ends with me in the bathroom, cutting off the rest of my hair.

People keep telling me I’m so bold, for cutting off as much as I did, last time. For having short hair in the first place. But what I’d really wanted was something much shorter. Except the first time, I couldn’t go all the way. I was brave, but not quite that brave yet.

Now I am braver. Or more reckless.

I think it had something to do with the work dinner. With the other women and their long, glossy hair that fell in perfect waves. The kind of waves that a salon does for you, but that only work with a certain kind of hair. I liked the other women, just as I almost always like the women I meet through Bear’s work, and basically anywhere in this city, but the more of them I meet, the more obvious it becomes to me that I am not like them. Which is fine. Actually, it is so fine, that I decided to go all the way different. To be all the way myself.

Sitting there, in my borrowed silky dress and strapless bra and glittering earrings, I suddenly felt very comfortable being nothing like the other women in the restaurant. It suddenly occurred to me that I was not going to impede Bear’s career by being the weird one. So I went home and picked up my scissors. It’s thrilling every time.

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I met Bear’s work people. The strangest thing about them was how real they were. I’ve only known them through his brief descriptions (which weren’t very colorful or even particularly accurate), and then there they were, with partners and personalities and different laughs. Fully developed.

The women were all beautiful, somehow, and I was extremely thankful for my friend who had let me borrow her gold and pale blue silky J. Crew dress. She had also done my makeup (I don’t know how to do makeup). I was also wearing her strapless bra (I don’t own one) and her earrings. I don’t know how to be a girl. But I looked really good, and I think I was funny enough, and everyone seemed to like me enough, and everyone seemed to think it was pretty cool that I am a writer and a blogger, and almost everyone was Dutch and had a cool accent. So that was good, too.

And, in a fit of feeling awesome, I painted something for the first time in a year or so. Here it is:

So even though it is very gloomy outside, and I can almost feel the heat pressing up against the windows, I am happy.

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Unroast: Today I love my nose. That hasn’t happened in a long time. Really long.

So remember how Bear got that new job? He’s been working really, really hard since then. Sometimes he’s at the office until 11:30. Sometimes he’s working until 4 am. I don’t know how anyone can work for that long. Actually, I don’t know how anyone can do anything for that long. I don’t think I’d be able to watch TV for that many hours in a row. There’s a slight chance I might be able to cuddle with Bear for that long. But that’s about it.

Anyway, tonight I’m meeting his team.  And I’m really nervous.

(us, before the last work event I attended, when I went so far as to straighten my hair)

Tonight is not really about me meeting his team. It’s about everyone getting together for office solidarity, or something along those lines. Bear set it up. He said, “Are you free Wednesday?”

I was surprised.

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I just sat here and wrote an entire post that was so bad I can’t bring myself to publish it. I’m trying to figure out what I actually want to say.

I think it’s more like this:

I was sitting at this same table three days ago, writing, as usual, and I looked down and hated my stomach passionately. I hated it for existing. For the physical weight of it. For its soft curve. The way I can’t ever completely suck it in. It was, in that moment, an alien parasite, attached to my body. Something that could never belong.

Poor stomach. It didn’t do anything wrong.

I want to go back in time and pinpoint the instant when this thing started. When I irreversibly decided that this was bad.

I remember standing in the hall with my mom, when I was seven or so, and there was a party going on in the living room and kitchen. I looked up at her and thought she was incredibly beautiful. I reached out and touched her gorgeous belly, which swelled out slightly, and I said, “You look like you’re pregnant.”

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Last night, my brother and I were standing at the checkout counter at the CVS, buying batteries for our dad’s insulin pump, and a row of magazines was staring me in the face. They were almost at face-height, really, and some airbrushed movie star or model’s perfectly flat stomach was flashing me tauntingly.

Without thinking, I read aloud the first words I saw:

“What Do Guys Lust After in July?” I laughed and said, “Enlighten me,” sarcastically to the closest magazine.

The guy behind the counter, a young Indian man, said something so quietly I didn’t catch it the first time.

“What?” I said, embarrassed and thinking I might have handed him the wrong amount.

“Ice cream?” he said again, louder. “We lust after ice cream?”

Everyone started laughing.

“Makes a lot of sense,” agreed my brother, another man who would soon face the scorching month in question.

Actually, we’d gotten ice cream just minutes before, at a nearby Thomas Sweet.

But the point is, if you’d like to know what a man wants, maybe you should just ask him.

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Unroast: Today I love the way I look in a bikini. I know I hated it a couple weeks ago, but yesterday I put one on, and it looked great. Depends on my mind.

P.S. New post at Skipping School, in response to a NY Times piece about homeschoolers.

Here are the mirrors I look in every day:

Bathroom

Full-length, on the door

Subway window, while it’s underground

(ok, didn’t quite capture a window there, but you get the idea)

Compact that I keep in my purse

Except for the subway, which is a wildcard, I know my mirrors pretty well. And I don’t like strange mirrors coming into my life and trying to tell me things about myself.

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