Eat the Damn Cake

One in ten women refuse to let their partner see them without makeup

50% of women would much rather have some makeup on than not

One in three women will not be seen in public without makeup

So says a poll by Superdrug of 3,000 women, reported on by Yahoo’s Shine. Yahoo isn’t my favorite information source, but my mom sent me this article and said, “blog?” I sometimes still do what my mother tells me do.

Superdrug is a makeup supplier. I’m sure they want women to want to wear makeup. I imagine them on the phone with survey participants, going, “So how weird and ugly would you feel without ANY makeup to cover your pimples and wrinkles? Really ugly, right? I mean, who wouldn’t? Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

But even if Superdrug told women they’d win a thousand lipsticks if they answered that they would kill themselves on the day they woke up to no makeup in the bathroom cabinet, makeup is still a big deal. And women definitely do feel like they can’t live without it. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’ve talked about it for No Makeup Week, and when I tried to figure out if I had a beauty routine, like Beauty Schooled.

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I’m very polite. I open doors for people a lot. And hold them. And stand there while twenty additional people come through. I’m running late, but I stop to have a conversation with my neighbor in front of the CVS, because he wants  to talk about the elevator in our building.

I used to have a lot of trouble at holidays, when I had to open gifts, because I wanted to act the same amount of excited about all of them. I remember unwrapping a little plastic Disney character toy, maybe a keychain, actually, that a relative had picked up last minute. I was grinning and exclaiming, “I love it! This is SO great!” And my face hurt.

(This would’ve been worse. source)

Because of this, I don’t like receiving gifts. Unless people send them to me by mail. Or let me open them later. Those boyfriends who bought me jewelry and clothes were the worst. After breaking up, I gave away heaps of necklaces (I don’t wear necklaces) and bright little dresses.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

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Being a nerd has gotten complicated. It used to be that nerds were never cool. It was assumed that nerds secretly wanted to be popular, cool kids. Glasses were bad.

And now the hipsters have taken over Brooklyn, and are spreading throughout the coastal and urban areas like…healthy green algae.

People are buying glasses that don’t magnify anything, just for that sexy black-framed look. People are quoting philosophers they haven’t read and listening to bands so obscure even their members mothers don’t know they play instruments. Everyone is alternative everything. We’re all aware of everything. It’s this magical blend of wickedly sharp cynicism and blatant hope.

But I don’t know that the hipsters can take nerding for themselves.

(source)

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last night, I had a dream about looking in a mirror and thinking, “You would look amazing if you cut your hair off.”

And then this morning, when Bear forgot his insulin and I brought it to his office and I had a hat over my greasy hair because I’d just woken up, he said playfully, “You should cut off your hair. You’d look so cute.”

And then I was back home, later this morning, working on yet another article, and suddenly I got up and went into the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror for a full minute, or maybe slightly longer, and I thought, “It’s so annoying how it gets knotted every time I wear my coat.” Which is all the time, because it’s winter.

I went into the other room and got the scissors with the blue handles. I came back into the bathroom and before I could think anything that meant anything, I cut off a huge chunk of my hair. In the front.

I kept cutting.

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I just read this article, in The Atlantic, about Duke University. I really didn’t want to talk about Karen Owen at any point, ever, because everyone in the world with a soap box got immediately up on it to say something about her.

Karen Owen: the girl who wrote a “thesis” detailing her sexual encounters with Duke athletes. I read a little of it and got upset and stopped. I got upset when she was saying, “The next day, I was in so much pain I could barely walk. Which meant it’d been really great.” Or something to that effect. And then she was saying, “I was so drunk I don’t even remember what happened, but we definitely had sex.”

I am angry, thinking about it. I didn’t follow the immediate aftermath, the frantically jabbering media frenzy, because I didn’t want to hear people call her empowered. I didn’t want to read them praising her, or heaping insults on her, or describing her as something new and creative. I didn’t want to read her described as anything except for ordinary and tragic. But somehow, the tragedy has been sucked out of stories like hers. She’s telling it, after all, trumpeting it– yelling out her exploits as though they are actually HER exploits, and not her being exploited and exploiting herself.

I’m exhausted by her story. A young woman who will do anything the boys want, while the boys don’t even seem to want her very much. Everyone is incredibly drunk in it. They can’t do anything before they are drunk.

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I realized something big the other day. It was an epiphany, I think. I mean, it was on that level. The world opened up. I understood reality in completely new terms. I saw the light. It was beautiful.

I don’t think about boys anymore.

That is it. That’s what I realized. It looks so small when I write it. Like it doesn’t really matter. But here’s the thing–

I used to think about boys all the time. Even when I was thinking about something else, I was secretly thinking about boys. As a girl, I was comfortable with the expression “boy crazy.”

When I read old journals, I begin to despise myself. Hundreds of pages describing boys so unremarkable that the memories of them vanish when I try to call them to mind. Boys so pitiful that I grit my teeth, remembering. Boys I met twice. Boys I wish I could repress without a trace. But most of all, boys who didn’t matter. Who didn’t matter to me even then. I tried to make them matter, because I was curious about love. I was fascinated by it. In fact, thinking about boys didn’t even have to involve an actual, live boy. Often it took the form of vague fantasizing about the possibility of love.

(it was hard to find a picture that even remotely related. source)

I was always doing something else. Studying, writing, finishing a project, playing a recital, teaching twelve-year-olds how to sing the prayers, trying frantically to get all A’s in college, applying to grad school, moving to New York City, whatever. My life was full. But I wanted more, so I tugged and squashed and wriggled boys into my schedule. Just in case.

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People like to argue about what’s best for kids. And then they like to tell other people what’s best for kids. For all kids, usually. People have argued for parenting methods as disparate as locking a crying baby in a room by itself, to teach it independence, and literally never putting a baby down, from birth, until, um, it can give birth to its own baby. And they’ve argued these positions passionately, and convinced a lot of other people that if the thing they are arguing for doesn’t happen then the child will grow up to be a blathering, pathetic, hopeless failure who is obsessed with collecting tiny porcelain Disney character figurines.

Have you read the latest piece about parenting? It’s called Why Chinese Mothers are Superior. It is an excerpt from Yale Law professor Amy Chua’s new book, and it was published in the Wall Street Journal, inspiring about 2,500 comments like, “What is WRONG with you?!! I don’t understand why people are so stupid, and you should be ashamed of yourself for writing this, because you are really a terrible person.” But then, as everyone who writes or reads anything on a big site knows, you will find identical comments at the bottom of a piece about why fawns are adorable little animals with sweet round eyes.

Still, we all know this is a cultural hot button. And we all know a lot of people will have a lot to say about this stuff. And we all know I’m going to be one of them. So:

Chua explains that Chinese mothers (and parents from other non-white American cultural groups) think about children differently. They think about potential, rather than protection. They know their kids can accomplish anything, and so they make sure they accomplish everything. No excuses. No play dates. No grades below an A. No TV. She complains that a lot of the (white) parents she knows are constantly worried about their kids. How do they feel? How is their self-esteem? Are they enjoying life enough?

Chua says, you enjoy life later, when you’re accomplished. And at that point, you enjoy it a lot more. In the meantime, she is willing to forbid her little daughter from using the bathroom until she perfects a piano piece. She’s willing to throw away a handmade card from her daughter, because it’s not good enough.

The truth is, well, I can’t completely disagree with Chua.

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