Eat the Damn Cake

I have a beautiful engagement ring. It’s not from Tiffany, but it looks like it might be. It’s not the ring I pictured having, but I like it. I didn’t picture having a ring at all, until it became clear that Bear was going to propose. Mostly, it became clear because he said, “So if I asked you to marry me, would you say yes?” And I burst out laughing and said, “Of course I would!” And he sat there looking stunned and then said, “You would?” And then added, “Wait, that didn’t count. I’m going to do it for real.”

When it became clear that he was going to do it for real, I called my best friend Emily and we talked rings. She even sketched some for me. We agreed on one thing immediately: no diamonds. They weren’t my style. Way too fancy, the wrong look. We thought citrine would be better. I didn’t know what citrine was until we started looking online. I loved the color. A gentle shade between orange, brown, and yellow, that looked like it might be warm to the touch. We looked at rings that were interesting and creatively done.

(OK, that’s a little bigger than I was anticipating…source) Continue Reading »

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I was walking down the street the other day. It was warmer than it is now, and some of the restaurants still had outdoor seating. A man and a woman, obviously on a date, sat at a little table, talking and laughing. On the woman’s plate was a bun. You know, a hamburger bun. It had once contained a hamburger, but she had eaten that part. Now only the husk remained, an emptied shell, like the one a hermit crab leaves behind. Or a cicada. Or the skin that a snake sheds. Or—OK. Anyway.

I looked at the empty bun, and I felt like I knew that woman. Or at least, I knew something important about her. I knew that she was finished eating. I could see where she’d picked at the edges of the bread, when she wasn’t paying attention. She was full, and in the distant back of her mind, she was a little proud of herself for resisting temptation. She didn’t want him to notice and say something, because she didn’t want to explain herself. Continue Reading »

I’m wearing giant headphones. They’re Bear’s. They cover a lot of my head, and inside them I am blaring “Wonderwall” by Oasis. And because of this, I can only barely hear the jackhammer. But it’s there. Oh, is it ever there.

So it happened again. The event you’ve all been waiting for. I went bra shopping. Remember last time? For the wedding? I didn’t even end up wearing that stupid strapless bra (in part because of all you awesome readers who were like, “um….chill out and don’t wear a bra. It’s not against the law or anything.”). Remember the time before that? Victoria’s Secret. I thought I wouldn’t have to go for a while, after all that. But, and this is my very honest opinion, Victoria’s Secret doesn’t make great bras. And I’m breaking a very, very lucrative contract with them when I say that, so I wouldn’t if I didn’t feel very strongly about it. (I can’t be a sullen sex angel for you anymore, Victoria! I have to be my own person!) The edge pops out after like three months. You know what I’m talking about? That little lip that appears, along the upper border of the cup, and then starts pouting?

So when my mom and I went shopping yesterday, in New Jersey, where they have these crazy things that are, like, collections of individual stores with big parking lots around them, I stopped in at the Maidenform outlet store. And that’s where I became a private detective. Hired by myself, paid in plain donuts and apple cider, but with no less ruthlessly sharp sleuthing instincts than….other detectives. Father Brown.  And Miss. Marple.  Continue Reading »

Homeschooling was a failure for me. I had suspected as much, but I didn’t realize it fully until just now, as I sat at the table, trying to write yet another thank you note. Bear and I turned out to be more popular than expected, especially with our families. So now I’m writing lots of thank you notes. And by lots I mean about one hundred thousand. And my hand hurts so much that I had to stop. Which is why I’m typing now.

We all know how important penmanship is. It’s the mark of a well-educated, cultured, refined person. You can tell everything about a person by one glance at a note they’ve written by hand.

“Ah! What a lovely, elegant, beautiful woman she must be!”

Or, in my case, “Oh dear lord. Lock her up before she kills again!” Continue Reading »

I have a new phone, and I can’t seem to figure it out. I think I accidentally took a photo of a woman on the subway platform. She definitely thought I did. I keep hitting something that says, “Voice activation. Speak now.” And then, when I say, “Whoa…Wait…Stop…” It goes, “You have searched for ‘Jeremy,’ by Pearl Jam,” and takes me promptly to youtube, where a video of a live performance awaits. I put it on mute a lot with my chin when I’m talking to people. Sometimes speaker, which is fun when in public and unable to figure out what just happened. I can’t operate the keyboard, so my texts look like, “ho moiim. Hoewez ut goon/?”

There are only two advantages. The photos it takes are really clear, and since it was my brother’s phone before mine, he took a lot of photos on it and then forgot about them. So I get to see what he’s been up to, now that he’s all grown up (eighteen). Apparently, he has gone to some museums and a hip hop concert. They were about equally interesting and a third of the way through the concert, I gave up on combing through blurry shots of people with microphones who I didn’t recognize, and went back to trying to figure out how to change the ring tone to something less raucous and peppy. Continue Reading »

It was inevitable. Eventually, there were going to be photos. And I was going to have to see them. And my opinion of myself on the day of my wedding was going to suddenly change.

It was also inevitable that due to all of the mornings I wake up in the city, I was going to be woken up at some point by the incessant, unrelenting pounding of a jackhammer. That was today, and naturally it stopped as soon as I gave up completely on sleep. But first it did this thing where it’d stop for a minute or so. There’d be this sudden, blissful space of peace. Like the world had settled under a soft blanket. And then, BAM. Bambambambambambambambambambambam! Just when my mind slipped back into white nothingness. I began to think, dimly, that we were having a kind of dialogue. The jackhammer was mostly just swearing at me, and calling me terrible things I can’t repeat here. I was mostly being pretty nice.

And to turn this all into a neat little metaphor, photos are a little like that. There are these soft spaces of quiet where I begin to imagine that I actually look the way I look in the mirror, to myself, on a good day. Or the way I feel when I’m grinning. Or dancing. Seriously, when I put on music and dance by myself (which I would never really do, of course, cause that would be weird…), I feel like I look really, really hot. My body moves in such cool ways, and I think things like, “Who could resist this? And THIS? Yeah, that’s right.” And “Damn, girl! Make that booty go!” And I do. Make that booty go, that is. But I do not want to see myself doing it. Because I know what would happen. I wouldn’t see a sex goddess, or Salome, but a nerdy Jewish girl who is obviously trying way too hard. And who doesn’t seem to know quite what to do with all the junk in her trunk. Continue Reading »

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Breaking news from science: beauty is quantifiable! You can measure it! Did you think that beauty was subjective? It’s not. Did you think that people were attracted to different appearances? They aren’t. All men are attracted to the same woman. She’s…Jessica Biel! And the rest of us? We just occasionally remind men of Jessica Biel in some small way.

I was watching a documentary on Netflix called The Science of Sex Appeal. I was nervous. I was waiting to be told by the most prominent scientists at the most prominent research centers and universities that I would never be hot. And then I was waiting for them to explain to me why not, using some very serious-looking equations, a bunch of fancy computer generated diagrams, and a legion of student participants who all eagerly confirmed their hypotheses.

It wasn’t the first time. Continue Reading »