I went to the opera last night. At the Met. It was the first warm night in the city, after a lot of snow and a lot more of that whole gray-slush-and-garbage-bags-piled-as-high-as-your-head thing. The fountain at Lincoln Center was underperforming. I was telling Soo-Jin, the friend I was seeing the opera with, that it was about to shoot up like ninety feet in the air. And then it kept not doing that. And I kept being like, “No, really. It does that. All the time. I’ve seen it . I filmed it on my phone…Wait. OK, that was my old phone. But I’m not lying.”

We stood on the balcony during the first intermission and talked about the outfits of the people below us. Some of them were really great.  We especially liked the elderly women who wear these enormous fur coats to the opera. They seem so classic. Like they’ve always been there, doing that.

(One of my absolute favorites of Klimt’s pieces. source)

The Met is worth going to, even if you don’t want to spend a startling amount of money on an opera ticket that gets you a very, very high seat. Just walk into the building. The red of the walls bleeds onto the gold of the ceiling. It’s gold like in Klimt’s paintings. That real gold gold. It looks brushstroked. The chandeliers are prickly diamond barbs. Marc Chagall did some truly enormous paintings for the lobby.

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Introducing:

Women Eating Cake

It’s always a big decision. There’s always a disclaimer. There might be a brief struggle. We’re never supposed to. Actually, we really shouldn’t. We’re always saying that. “I shouldn’t.” We insult ourselves. “I’m such a pig.” We roll our eyes. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

It’s a piece of cake.

But it’s never JUST a piece of cake.

It’s sinful. It’s disobedient. It’s wrong. It’s bad. It’s breaking a promise with ourselves– with the world. It’s unhealthy.

It’s delicious.

I don’t want it to mean so much, every time. Or I want the meaning to change. I want it to mean, “Yes!” I want it to mean chocolate and cherries and ice cream and happiness. I want it to mean play and pleasure. I want to eat it defiantly. With dinner. Whenever the moods strikes. I want to eat it without having to think about it.

So many women have developed an antagonistic relationship with food. Because of our bodies and the ways we want them to look, and the ways our world tells us over and over they should look. When I noticed that very young women and even girls, who were fifteen and eighteen and twenty and twenty-three, would say, “I shouldn’t,” when I offered dessert, I got confused. When I noticed myself turning down cake, I got angry. I named my blog “Eat the Damn Cake,” and started talking about my relationship with my body. I wanted other women and girls to talk, too. And while we were talking, I wanted us to eat some cake.

I’ve teamed up with the absolutely incredible photographer Gloria Baker Feinstein on a project that’s all about women and cake. Gloria invited women and girls into her studio to eat cake and talk about how they felt about it, and then we compiled the photos and quotes. Please check it out! I really want this project to grow. I would love to share any pictures you send me of yourself with cake. Spread the word! And the love! And, most importantly, the cake!

Thank you so much to all the women and girls (and several toddlers) who participated. You are all amazing!

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Un-roast: Today I love how excited I always am about eating.

The weirdest thing is happening. My body is changing. I’m like a transformer– one second I’m just an ordinary looking person and the next…I AM SPACE ROBOT KATE FROM THE PLANET ZYLEX FOUR. I HAVE COME NOT TO HURT YOU BUT TO HELP YOU SAVE YOUR WORLD FROM CERTAIN DOOM. It’s a pretty noble calling, saving the world from doom. I try to take it one day at a time, y’know?

(I’m this one. It’s the cutest. Except I don’t start out as a car.  source)

But really. I hit twenty-four, March of last year, and my body was like, “Alright. Enough is enough. I’m bored as, um, bored can be. Things are about to get CRAZY in here!” (My body watches its language when we’re in public.) Things got crazy. All of my fat started relocating, like it had just decided to up and move to the mountains and never come back. Which I sympathize with.

Suddenly, my butt was a lot bigger. Bear did that thing where he sweeps me off my feet and runs around with me (to show how strong he is and how seriously he takes being a husband), and we went by a mirror and I was like, “Whoa. Stop right there. Is that my butt?” He stopped. I was like, “I mean, like, all of that…Does that all count as the butt? Even way over on the sides? Because that is HUGE.”

He seemed like he may already have known.

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(source)

I was eighteen. It was Valentine’s Day. I didn’t have plans. So I took myself shopping, on a whim. I set some important rules: you can only buy pink or red stuff and it has to be romantic.

Somehow, I hadn’t been properly educated about the holiday. Or maybe I had, but it hadn’t stuck. I don’t like little chocolate candies with unexpected fillings, and I think that probably has a lot to do with the failure. I also don’t like the heart shape*, which I found very challenging to draw evenly as a child.

I didn’t like it when the guys I dated got me flowers. My mom gardens too much. I know exactly which flowers I like. Her parents were florists. My dad has really good taste in flowers, and every Valentine’s Day, he gets her this truly colossal bouquet, which she puts in the humungous crystal vase on the table. Later, she divides the flowers up and puts them in little vases all over the house. And it’s all very beautiful. So I am a snob. And I wished they wouldn’t even try. They were doing it because they felt they should. They were poor, and they shouldn’t have been spending their money on flowers. I wished they would save it instead.

(I love that wildflower look. They never sell it on Valentine’s Day. source)

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I’m over at Oh My Stinkin’ Heck today, guest posting. Heather, who writes OMSH, is awesome, and you’re going to have to go over there to see what her blog is like, because how can I summarize a blog with that title? I wouldn’t want to spoil the anticipation.

You may recognize the guest post from a while back. It’s called “I used to be a skinny person,” and it’s about, well, that. I used to be really skinny. My ribs stuck out a little. Now, not so much. I discovered Insomnia Cookies and how fantastically diverse grilled cheese sandwiches can be, and I never went back.

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Un-roast: Today I love how square my shoulders are. I think they’re like my dad’s shoulders, except the girl version. Which is actually very nice.

New post on Un-schooled, about the film Race to Nowhere. It’s really good. And a really big deal right now. And the screening I went to was the first time I’ve gotten in somewhere crowded and trendy for free as “press.” It was ridiculously exciting. Probably more exciting than it should’ve been. You know what? Whatever. Nothing wrong with being excited.

This is the best idea ever. It is not mine. Andrea Owen thought of it, and she did it here. I found her through Plus-Size Models Unite. And now it’s my turn. This is a letter to my body:

Dear Body,

This is surprisingly hard to start. Usually I just write a sentence and go from there. But there’s so much here, that it feels almost impossible. There’s so much history. You’ve been there, through everything. Before I knew who I was, or what it was to be alive, you were there. You were me before I was my mind. Weird, right?

You do everything right. I’m the one who messes things up.

You let me move and walk and breathe and taste and experience pleasure and color and everything. You hardly ever falter.

You must be baffled by me. I’m always telling you you’re not good enough, and here you are, doing everything you need to. You must be thinking, “What does she want from me?”

I get frustrated with you for not fitting random aesthetic standards that you have no good reason to fit. Once, I held you down and tried to cut off your nose. That was incredibly mean of me.

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