Eat the Damn Cake

I’m on the edge of insanity, with a list of things to do that’d be as long as the DNA in one of your cells if you could somehow pull it into a straight strand. Make that like three cells-worth.  Doesn’t sound very long? Well, look up DNA! Who would’ve thought we had that much of it? What’s it all doing? It’s making my nose super Jewish, that’s what it’s doing. And some other stuff.

Anyway, because I’m about to lose my mind, I’ve decided to give myself a break in terms of writing, and share a story. I’ve mentioned here how I used to, as a little unschooler, spend a lot of time writing stories. They were fantasy stories. I didn’t understand then that fantasy was for hopeless nerds, who also LARPed, unless it was about vampires, in which case it was for frustratingly squealy preteen and teenaged girls, their mothers, my youngest brother, and the men who “try to understand how women think.” (I’m not kidding, my fiance told me about a prominent Wall Street guy who read Twilight with this explanation. Upon finishing the series, he declared that he finally understood what women want.) Anyway, I failed at fantasy writing, because I didn’t think of Lord Voldemort, or vampires. But it’s storytime….and here’s a little story about….

The Merman:

(source) Continue Reading »

I don’t know how smart I am. And not in an ordinary way, either. As a kid, I never learned where I fit into the hierarchy of intelligence.

There is a lot of debate about intelligence. Remember that book The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray? It is really, really thick. It has a big rainbow lump on the cover. It’s all about intelligence, and how a person’s success is pretty much determinable by how smart a standardized test says they are. As it turns out, according to The Bell Curve, Jews are definitely, on average, smarter than black people. Or at least, that’s what I got out of the section on race. Stephen Jay Gould wrote a book called The Mismeasure of Man about fifteen years before Herrnstein and Murray came out with The Bell Curve, but, laughing sadly to himself, Gould stuck a few more chapters on Mismeasure and republished, saying, “Seriously? We’re still talking about this?” He also said something along the lines of, “One of the big problems here is that people think intelligence is only one thing, and that thing is measurable by a single method.”

People think that intelligence is quantifiable. Well, I’m sure parts of it are. But the whole thing? Isn’t that a little too complex to summarize in a number?

I didn’t take any tests as a kid. None. Continue Reading »

I’m guest posting over at Bikini Birthday! Check it out here.

Samantha, who writes that blog, promised herself that on her 25th birthday, she’d do something she’d never done before….wear a bikini. To do that, she had to get more comfortable with her body. She had to learn more about her beauty. And she did. You should follow her story if you haven’t already. It’s awesome.

Alright. I’m off to go sailing down the Hudson on my gorgeous new boat, Manhattan Mermaid. Kidding. I’m going to clean the table and get back to work on the guest list. But one day, Manhattan Mermaid…One day…. (by then, hopefully, I’ll have a better name for it).

Also, my guest post hostesses keep using the photo of me that I swore I’d change a long time ago. I swear, I will change it soon. Or at least take one of myself eating cake. What kind of an inexcusable hypocrite am I anyway? Sheesh.

(image source here)

I just painted my nails blue. Turquoise, really. They shimmer. The area around my nails shimmers too, because my aim is really bad. How does anyone paint nails neatly? I knew girls who had mastered it by the time they were twelve. But not too many. Because I didn’t really know that many girls.

For most of my life, people have asked me how I learned to socialize. Even while I’m socializing with them. They imagine that you can only learn from a lot of other people almost exactly the same age as you. I learned how to socialize the same way everyone else did. From my parents, first, from my friends, and from the people I ran into, admired from a distance, and read about.

I’ve had to pretend for a long time that I’m normal, because “normal” is proof that I am a success, as an unschooler. Which is funny. Because normal is a pretty boring goal for such a radical lifestyle. It always felt like a conflict. I was obviously really different, because I didn’t spend any time in a classroom, and I spent a lot of time in the woods. And at the piano. And, I don’t know, doing a million things in the middle of the day, when I was the only kid in sight. But then, whenever I met anyone new, I was supposed to show them just how normal I was. Continue Reading »

(image source here)

I tried to let it go. I tried to just stop thinking about it. But it wouldn’t go away.

Last week, on a random day like Wednesday, or maybe Thursday, my fiancé came home to find me staring at the article on my computer.

“Um…hi,” he said. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Just reading some stupid article.”

He sat down and read over my shoulder, “….Start laying the foundations for negotiated infidelity.” And then laughed and said, “What is this?”

It was an interview with a woman who wrote a book called “Sugarbabe.” The book urges every couple to find a young, sexy woman who will provide the man with sex (of course) and, charmingly, “the three C’s” (Cooking, counseling, and conversation.) Cooking! Of course! Because the wife keeps making the same old leathery potroast. And let me correct myself– this doesn’t apply to every couple. Only the rich ones. Or at least only couples who can afford to lavish a lot of resources on the sugarbabe.

So basically the sugarbabe is an escort, except so much better, because she gets to stay! And hang out! And make you tea! Continue Reading »

I’m over at Dances With Fat, guest posting. Check it out here!

Also, I sent some thank you notes. I’m so on top of this whole getting married thing.

(Ha! Kidding!)