Eat the Damn Cake

I’m guest posting over at Beauty Schooled, one of my absolute favorite blogs ever (wow, I feel like I should start clapping my hands and jumping up and down now).  Find out more about alternative barbies there. OK, that may be slightly misleading, but you should still check out the post. And the rest of Virginia’s blog.

In honor of my upcoming wedding, I want to do a series of posts about my relationship. I was sitting in the car with my rabbi yesterday, feeling stressed out. We were driving to lunch. I said, “Sometimes the marriage part itself gets buried under the wedding part.” She laughed a little. She said, “I think that’s the way it usually goes.” I said, “But I feel guilty. I want to be thinking about the marriage part a lot. These are the last couple months that I will be unmarried. I want to think about what that means.”

It’s hard to think about what that means, because there are seating charts to go over. And napkins to pick. And all of the other unrelated stuff that’s happening in my life that won’t stop just because I happened to have decided to get married.

So I want to take the time to write about why I’m getting married in the first place. It makes me stop and think. It makes me happy. It briefly distracts me from my endless nervous pacing, up and down the long hall, up and down….Kidding. There are no halls. It’s an apartment.

One more thing. I’ve referred to my fiance throughout this blog as– yeah, that: “My fiance.” Which has been annoying, because I don’t think those words when I think of him. They’re too generic. So from now on, I’m going to refer to him as “Bear.” I actually call him this, in real life. And it’s a lot more fun. So let’s see how that goes.

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We met online. The perfect beginning to the greatest love of all time, right? Who doesn’t swoon from the sheer, pure, overwhelming romance of it when you mention meeting someone online? Continue Reading »

So, special treat, Stephanie is back! Since I’m losing my mind due to the tons of things that I have to do right this very moment, I begged her to write another post. And she, taking pity on me, and also just getting tired of me crawling all over her floor, agreed. Here she is!

I have struggled in the past with worrying that I am prideful, or too vain—often in
conjunction with my writing or academic work, or during presenting in classes or
at conferences. I, as a young Christian woman who grow up in a rural, conservative
area, have internalized too many messages about the sins of pride and vanity. Continue Reading »

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I tried on my wedding gown for the first time since I picked it, ages ago. I wore the bra. You know, the strapless bra from the post I called The Girl Without Any Breasts. I’m standing there, in my massive wedding gown, which has nearly swallowed me whole, and this tiny seamstress comes up to me, edges around the hem, and touches my chest.

“Why are you not wearing bra?” she asks tersely.

“I am,” I say. “I am wearing bra.”

“No,” she says. “No bra.” She gestures at my chest.

I pull back the bodice to reveal the bra. “See?”

“Oh.” She bustles out of the room and returns a moment later with two huge pads.

“Wait—“ I say. “Do you mean I should have those AND the bra?”

She shrugs. “Maybe.”

My friend Liane starts laughing. I start laughing. The seamstress is very serious. Continue Reading »

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We live in a culture that thinks being young is definitely better than being old. I know, “culture” can’t “think.” People think. Culture is a bunch of people thinking. And they think that being young and tight-skinned and sexy is where it’s at. When I was a kid, the pop stars and movie stars and models all seemed appropriately much, much older. Suddenly, in the past few years, it occurs to me that they’re my age. Wait—they’re younger than me. They’re teenagers. They’re kids. Lady Gaga and I are the same age. But she can wear shoes that are taller than five pairs of my shoes stacked on top of one another. She’s gone beyond me. At twenty-four, I feel old. I feel like I haven’t accomplished nearly enough.

And in some ways, it’s worse for women. Because after you turn thirty, you’re not very desirable anymore. Or at least, that’s what online dating research shows (and you should read this article, because it is amazing). As men get older, they want to date younger and younger women. As the women get older they want to date…men. In other words, men get picky, and women stay pretty open minded. Although the fact that men exaggerate their incomes more lavishly the older they get suggests that they at least feel as though women care a lot about how much money they make. And maybe women do care. So we run into the old stereotype: women want rich men, men want hot women. Oy vey. Continue Reading »

It’s scary how little I know myself. How little we all know ourselves. I mean, I’m terrified. I’m always waiting for myself to do something awful to me. And mess up my whole life. I’m unpredictable. I’m wild and dangerous and I don’t know exactly what I’m capable of. Which is sort of the negative side to the end of my post about not knowing how smart I am.

I’m reading Stumbling on Happiness. I’m embarrassed that I like it so much, because I don’t like liking things that everyone else already likes. I prefer to find those things obviously lacking and smile a tiny, condescending smile while I continue on my tiny, condescending way. But Gilbert won me over with these two lines:

Line 1: “Phineas Gage was a foreman for the Rutland Railroad who, on a lovely autumn day in 1848, ignited a small explosion in the vicinity of his feet, launching a three-and-a-half-foot-long iron rod into the air, which Phineas cleverly caught with his face” (Gilbert, 2006, pg. 11).

Line 2: “For example, most Americans can be classified as one of two types: those who live in California and are happy they do, and those who don’t live in California but believe they’d be happy if they did”  (Gilbert, 2006, pg. 114).

I completely forget how to cite quotes. And college wasn’t even that long ago. Continue Reading »