Eat the Damn Cake

Blogging can get vicious. I didn’t know that when I started. I was pretty innocent.

OK, that’s not true. I was scared. I knew that the internet was a place where people said mean things to each other anonymously, and I was afraid that some of those mean things flying around would hit me, and I’d fall down immediately.

But I started blogging anyway, because I love to write, and because I wanted to talk about things with real people (not just the future self who will one day read my journal but does not yet exist, and who will still be me anyway, when she does exist). And because I started to get the sense that there were all of these little communities out there, like islands, in the stormy ocean of the internet.

I don’t read the comments on my articles for The Huffington Post, because too often they’re really rude, angry, and aggressive. Not that I don’t get nice ones, too. But there are too many awful ones to make it worth my while.

I’m sensitive. People keep telling me to get a thicker skin. People keep saying stuff about “If you want to be a writer…”

Well, I am a writer. And I’m sensitive. I try really hard to be tough. But when people say mean things about me, it pretty much always hurts. It pretty much always gets through.

Which is why I’m up, at 2:00 a.m., sitting with my computer at the table, staring at a tired bouquet of wilting miniature roses in a blue vase, and back at the screen again. It’s also why, about forty minutes ago, in bed with my fiancé, I said, “Who are these people, who are sitting at their computers somewhere in the world, writing mean things about me, when they haven’t even met me? I’m not writing mean things about them!”

“Honey,” he said, “If you want to write stuff and put it on the internet, you have to get used to this.” Continue Reading »

(image source here)

It was the dead of night. My fiancé was asleep beside me, his expression sweet, his face gentle and unguarded, like a child’s. I pushed the covers back and slid out of bed, overcome by a familiar dark desire. I had learned to hide from it, through all these years, but it always seemed to find me eventually. It was ceaseless and ferocious, with claws like a tiger that clutched my mind, and coils like a snake that wrapped me up and moved me where it willed. And it whispered to me in a voice slick and warm as honey, “Just this once…Just one more time…” But it was never just once. And it was never one more time.

I walked obediently through the living room. The table was strangely ominous in the faint moonlight—its surface washed empty; a huge plane of nothingness that might swallow someone whole. Continue Reading »

The other day I had lunch with the president of Interfaith Community, here in the city. We ate in the private dining room of the building fondly called “the GodBox,” by those who know it, because it houses so many religious organizations. It’s a massive block of sandy colored stone, overlooking Grant’s Tomb and Riverside Park. There was a refined, understated buffet, and at the end of it sat two moist, untouched, round cakes. Carrot and chocolate. I ate a gigantic slice of chocolate cake with my meal. The president of Interfaith Community said, “You’re very unique,” gesturing at my two plates. I’d finished most of the cake before I touched my broccoli. There really isn’t much more to that story, but I thought of, well, Eat the Damn Cake. Because I was. And I was a little proud of myself. Which just goes to show you how transformative this whole project is.

And in honor of that thought, here are some amazing photographs that Stephanie sent me:

Continue Reading »

I sit at a computer a lot. I’m doing it again right now. It’s not an easy thing to do. It’s daring and reckless. You risk your life. Your bones crumble, you put yourself at risk for heart disease, you’ll definitely die younger, and now my mother tells me if I put my laptop on my lap, I’ll fry my ovaries and never be able to have babies (she read an article). While I’m not exactly planning on having babies anytime soon, and I don’t even really know what my ovaries look like, the image of them being fried is disturbing. So now I try to keep the laptop at a safe distance, so that I can hunch over it without it zapping me with too many of its invisible death rays.

Anyway, the point is, my shoulders are really tight. My back is tight. There’s a lot of painful tension in my life, and not the kind where my fiancé and I sit across the table from each other in a stretch of silence that seems to last forever, until he breaks it by saying, “Did you ever really love me?” No. The kind that hangs out in my shoulder muscles.

So I decided to get a massage. And being a person of action, I immediately went on yelp.com and typed in “massage” and my address. And I found a respectable looking place on 72^nd near Broadway that didn’t sound as though a bunch of naked guys with their genitals haphazardly covered with tiny white towels might be lying around in a big room divided by emergency room-esque curtains. And I made an appointment. And yesterday I got my first massage. Continue Reading »

(image source here)

I have a lot of friends who don’t want to be called a feminist. It makes them sound unattractive. It makes them sound like they don’t shave their armpits. For the record, I once had a very attractive friend who identified as a feminist AND didn’t shave her armpits. So the armpits are not really the end of the world. But “feminist” is a word that conjures up images of all sorts of un-cool behavior. Getting offended by little things that don’t matter—like when someone slips up and calls God “he,” refusing to even try sexy high heels, and flipping out when referred to as a “girl,” rather than a “woman.” People think feminists don’t have their priorities straight. They say they talk about stuff no one cares about anymore. They beat on the same tired issues. Unequal pay. Not enough women acting in fill-in-the-blank position of authority. They may hate men. They definitely don’t attribute enough importance to a good pedicure.

I used to call myself a feminist. In college. It was an act of defiance. I was going to show everyone. Show them…Something. It was pretty clear to me that feminism meant caring about gender relations, being aware of inequality, and being free to be whatever kind of woman I wanted. Feminism hadn’t turned women into ugly, unfashionable manhaters or sluts. It had allowed women to be left alone for a minute, to figure out what we wanted to be. Continue Reading »