Eat the Damn Cake

So while I was getting laid off, Bear was busy interviewing for a new job. Life is a funny balance. And it happens all at once, sometimes.

He had to fly to Amsterdam on two days’ notice, and I was freaking out. My mind was a checklist, like, “Tiny travel deodorant! A towel, in case he has to wash his hair in the airport bathroom! Insulin and syringe prescriptions so that no one thinks he’s a terrorist or a drug addict! Gum! Tic tacs! Sunglasses!”

He was about to be under an enormous amount of pressure, and I was feeling it. I looked over the itinerary that the Dutch company had sent, the day of, and it was terrifying. Back- to-back meetings all day long. Everyone he was meeting with had a scarily important-sounding title. That’s how titles are supposed to work, I guess.

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And then he was on a plane and I was standing in the checkout line at Whole Foods, and suddenly I was definitely going to throw up. It hit me like…um…a ball, hitting someone in the face. (OK, I failed there. Bad writer!) Anyway, it was extremely abrupt. I was unzipping my hoodie, remembering that I wasn’t wearing a bra and my shirt was not particularly thick and then zipping it back up halfway.

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You know how people tell you that you should never send naked pictures of yourself to someone? Even if you’re dating them and they’re really, really nice? And you know how you say to yourself, “Well, yeah, it doesn’t make sense for OTHER people to do that, but I totally have this under control”?

Just don’t do it.

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This is a guest post from Deanna Weiss. Deanna is a fitness professional in Southern California.  She loves writing, taking long walks and spending time with her family.   Unlike many others in the fitness business, she won’t be doing any Triathlons anytime soon!

I took a yoga class a few weeks ago during which the instructor talked to the class about finding relative perfection from within and not looking for approval from outside.  “There is no perfect” she said calmly as we began our Salutations to the Sun.  “You must be at peace with who you are and what you have.”  Before plunging into some more advanced poses, I thought about these words and wondered if anyone else in the class was listening.  The words sounded so true and so relevant to our lives today.  Yet why is it that today people are more competitive with each other than ever before?  What are we striving for?

How often do you hear about someone who was just a nice person? Nice as in someone who loves to read to children or volunteer at a homeless shelter. Sounds good, but let’s face it, nice doesn’t have a sexy ring to it.  Usually we tend to compare ourselves to people who do so much more.  We admire and envy people who make a lot of money, excel at a sport or an artistic endeavor and do everything bigger and better than everyone else.   Women secretly or not so secretly long to be beautiful like a film star or super model, believing that beauty is one key to success.  It’s almost a given that rich, successful men marry flawlessly beautiful women, giving them a status unattainable by most people.

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I think it’s kind of funny and cute that everyone is still trying to figure out what makes men and women different. I mean, now that boys are wearing pink nail polish, maybe people are starting to think, “What if we’re not that different after all?! Oh my god!”

The Wall Street Journal recently published a piece about porn. That was a fun sentence to write. The piece is about desire, really. About how it’s different in men and women. Women tend to read romance novels and sexy fan fiction and try to learn more about Orlando Bloom’s personal life. Men tend to watch porn. One of the reasons the study is so interesting is that it shows how much the internet age has added to sociological inquiry. And how easy it is for researchers to find out exactly what you’ve been googling. Which is a little embarrassing for me, because mostly I’m googling really obvious words that I’ve forgotten how to spell.

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But it’s true, men and women are different. I know. Because I sat next to a couple on a first date yesterday.

This is how it went:

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The AOL/HuffPo merger has been in the news a lot. Especially if you read Mediabistro and other news about the news. All sorts of big, important editors are being brought on to manage huge, new swaths of territory. Reporting is forever being reshaped! Revolutionary tactics are being developed!

And I am being laid off.

I feel a little left out.

It wasn’t personal. All of the MyDaily.com (the AOL site I wrote for) freelancers have been laid off. It’s possible that all of the AOL freelancers have been laid off. I can’t tell. We’re not in the news about the news.

It was totally impersonal, in fact. Which felt bad. We got a mass email from someone we’d never heard of, who began, “Hey All!” She went on to cheerfully inform the group that our contracts were now formally dissolved.

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I look amazing. No photo will ever capture it. I will probably forget about it by tomorrow. But right now, I look amazing.

Bear forgot his test strips (that’s a new one– usually he forgets his insulin), and I had to run down to his office with them. I hadn’t taken a shower, and I didn’t have time to pick an outfit, so I put on shorts, an old red shirt I never wear, and big leather boots. No makeup. No jewelry.

Apparently this was the sexiest outfit in the world. The guys on the street kept saying things as I passed. I pretended to be looking at my phone.

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