Eat the Damn Cake

This is a guest post from Deanna Weiss. Deanna is a fitness professional in Southern California.  She loves writing, taking long walks and spending time with her family.   Unlike many others in the fitness business, she won’t be doing any Triathlons anytime soon!

I took a yoga class a few weeks ago during which the instructor talked to the class about finding relative perfection from within and not looking for approval from outside.  “There is no perfect” she said calmly as we began our Salutations to the Sun.  “You must be at peace with who you are and what you have.”  Before plunging into some more advanced poses, I thought about these words and wondered if anyone else in the class was listening.  The words sounded so true and so relevant to our lives today.  Yet why is it that today people are more competitive with each other than ever before?  What are we striving for?

How often do you hear about someone who was just a nice person? Nice as in someone who loves to read to children or volunteer at a homeless shelter. Sounds good, but let’s face it, nice doesn’t have a sexy ring to it.  Usually we tend to compare ourselves to people who do so much more.  We admire and envy people who make a lot of money, excel at a sport or an artistic endeavor and do everything bigger and better than everyone else.   Women secretly or not so secretly long to be beautiful like a film star or super model, believing that beauty is one key to success.  It’s almost a given that rich, successful men marry flawlessly beautiful women, giving them a status unattainable by most people.

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I think it’s kind of funny and cute that everyone is still trying to figure out what makes men and women different. I mean, now that boys are wearing pink nail polish, maybe people are starting to think, “What if we’re not that different after all?! Oh my god!”

The Wall Street Journal recently published a piece about porn. That was a fun sentence to write. The piece is about desire, really. About how it’s different in men and women. Women tend to read romance novels and sexy fan fiction and try to learn more about Orlando Bloom’s personal life. Men tend to watch porn. One of the reasons the study is so interesting is that it shows how much the internet age has added to sociological inquiry. And how easy it is for researchers to find out exactly what you’ve been googling. Which is a little embarrassing for me, because mostly I’m googling really obvious words that I’ve forgotten how to spell.

(source)

But it’s true, men and women are different. I know. Because I sat next to a couple on a first date yesterday.

This is how it went:

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The AOL/HuffPo merger has been in the news a lot. Especially if you read Mediabistro and other news about the news. All sorts of big, important editors are being brought on to manage huge, new swaths of territory. Reporting is forever being reshaped! Revolutionary tactics are being developed!

And I am being laid off.

I feel a little left out.

It wasn’t personal. All of the MyDaily.com (the AOL site I wrote for) freelancers have been laid off. It’s possible that all of the AOL freelancers have been laid off. I can’t tell. We’re not in the news about the news.

It was totally impersonal, in fact. Which felt bad. We got a mass email from someone we’d never heard of, who began, “Hey All!” She went on to cheerfully inform the group that our contracts were now formally dissolved.

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I look amazing. No photo will ever capture it. I will probably forget about it by tomorrow. But right now, I look amazing.

Bear forgot his test strips (that’s a new one– usually he forgets his insulin), and I had to run down to his office with them. I hadn’t taken a shower, and I didn’t have time to pick an outfit, so I put on shorts, an old red shirt I never wear, and big leather boots. No makeup. No jewelry.

Apparently this was the sexiest outfit in the world. The guys on the street kept saying things as I passed. I pretended to be looking at my phone.

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Things that irritate me about my mind. It’s:

1) Defensive. I assume the worst sometimes, when people aren’t doing their worst.

2) Ambitious but underestimating. I want to do really well at things, but I don’t always aim high enough.

3) High-strung. My mind is almost always on a project.

4) Anxious. A little like the last one. Except worse.

5) Easily discouraged. I tend to think I’m failing, at least a little. What is the deal with that?

Sometimes I feel stuck inside myself. You know, this is it. I don’t get to change bodies and realities. Unless I’m willing to conduct that ancient ritual my grandmother taught me, with the sacrificing of the rodents and the secret machine from “the homeworld” that my family has stored in that barn out back. And I’m not willing to do that because it’s too risky. And I don’t remember the chant or the code sequence exactly. Which could be disastrous.

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I’ve been broken up with a lot. Not by boys, though. Only one guy has ever broken up with me, and it took me about a week to get over him. But girls are a whole other story.

When I was sixteen, one of my closest friends in the world started dating my ex-boyfriend. They kept it a secret from me for months, and as a result she stopped talking to me. I had no idea what was happening when they decided to break the news to me in person. He was older and could drive, and so they picked me up and took me out to lunch. I remember being in the backseat, watching the woods flashing by on the roadside as they talked about getting drunk.

Something had changed. Neither one of them ever drank before. There had been a basic shift, and I felt its effects rippling outward. My stomach tightened. Something was wrong. The drinking meant being grown up, I thought. Grown up without me.

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