Eat the Damn Cake

Yesterday, while Bear was at his conference all day, and it was raining, and my cell phone didn’t work because Verizon hates the beach, or something, my brother was going through a bad time, and I called him from the room phone and it cost $73. Which was truly shocking to discover and made me hate everything. I also read two articles about marriage, in honor of my anniversary. One was in The Atlantic. It was about the ways marriage is changing, and has become increasingly optional. The woman who wrote it is in her late thirties and single. It was good. The other was about getting married young. It was on Slate. The woman who wrote it was in her late twenties and had been married for a while. Both of them had my name. Almost.

I don’t often think about marriage. I didn’t think about it very much when I got married, either. I got the sense that I was supposed to. I was supposed to ask “what does it all MEAN?” I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s book “Committed.” I read “Against Love: A Polemic” that argued that monogamy was oppressive and awful. But mostly I just, you know, did my thing. For such a huge life change, marriage felt like an easy choice when I met Bear. The truest thing that people had said to me about it my whole life was “you just know when it’s right.” Which often makes me feel like I can’t really participate in the whole marriage conversation, because I think that one is more about working to keep your relationship strong and dealing with hard times. We might get there in a bit. But we’re not there yet.

Actually, I think my voice in the marriage conversation is totally lame a lot of the time, because I’m so happy with Bear. Like I said in the panic attack post (I’m sorry to keep bringing it up, I’m annoying myself, too), I’m not great at happiness. So it’s strange that I’m so happily married. And suspicious. Is something going to fall on my head soon? Something really large? Should I just shut up?

No! I won’t be silenced! Instead, I will write a list, now that our marriage has existed for an official amount of time. Reasons why I like it:

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A year ago today, Bear and I got married. It was amazing. And then I threw up. But you all know that story.

A little over two weeks ago, Bear and I remembered, almost simultaneously, that it was going to be our 1 year anniversary. And Bear said, “Wait, I have this conference in Miami–”

And before I could get really nervous about coming up with a good gift and tell him “you just go then!” out of sheer avoidance, he said, “Maybe you should come with me? It probably won’t be romantic, though.”

“OK!” I said. Because I am really more into things that promise to be unromantic than things that are supposed to be romantic. And because I’d never been to Miami.

And here I am, in a hotel in South Beach, where they charge extra if you want to sit on one of the beach chairs. Bear is at his conference.

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Since my almost panic attack, I’ve been fine. My mom called me, though, and was really concerned. Ah, blogging. Sometimes I wonder about us bloggers. What makes us like this? Is there a gene for it? “We have located the gene for Needing To Write About Your Life On The Internet! We are in the process of developing suppressors.”

I’ve been getting a lot of emails, since the Salon.com piece, from people who are upset by the comments I received. Even though I still haven’t read any of the comments myself, they’ve been described to me in great detail. Apparently there’s been a lot of talk about the Stockholm Syndrome. Right. Like, my parents abused me by keeping me out of school. And now I’m in major, major denial. I go around thinking my childhood was fun, when really it was— THE WORST THING EVER.

Well, I’m going to tell you a little story about how delusional I was as a kid. And please forgive me if I’ve already told it. I think I have, actually, a long time ago, but my memory isn’t great. It’s all that repression…

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Penelope Trunk keeps telling me to write shorter posts. She yelled at me (over email) about how long the Salon.com one was. That was not my fault. But this stuff is, so I’m going to try:

I think I almost had a panic attack the other night. Which is lame, because it wasn’t even. It was just almost. But almost, for me, is pretty bad.

I don’t know what happened. That’s the thing. I really don’t know.

The Salon.com piece had just gone live. My bio wasn’t on it, and I upset, because WHY WASN’T MY BIO ON IT? There were only fourteen comments so far. WHY WEREN’T THERE MORE? I wasn’t even reading the comments. I knew they’d mostly be angry and mean. But I wanted them anyway. What if it flopped? What if no one read it?

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It’s not all about confidence.

I am tired of people saying, “Just feel good! It makes you look good!”

It might be true, but I don’t like it anyway, because it’s too much pressure.

I know the confidence people have good intentions. They want to make beauty more accessible. They’re trying to do what I’m trying to do with this blog: point out that beauty is available to all of us, all the time, we already are it. But since I’m not already glowing with self-esteem, I have to find another way.

(source)

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Yesterday I looked in the bathroom mirror and I thought, “I want to be like that girl.” It was sort of an out of body experience, because obviously, I am that girl. How could I even have that thought? (I spent the day before fasting and singing from sundown to the next sundown, so that might have something to do with it.)

“Cool!” I thought, a millionth of a second later. “I am her!”

And then I felt proud of myself.

Good job– you thought such a nice thing about yourself. As though my subconscious is a kid who just shared her favorite toy with another kid.

She snatched it back again.

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Through the world of body image blogging/tumblring, I met a woman named Erin who just came out with a book called How Much Do You Weigh? The book features pictures of women, posing,  with their weight listed on their images. I thought the project sounded interesting. I asked its creator to talk about it with us here. This is Erin:

I know a lot of people.  I have quite a few close friends, and nearly all of my family lives close by.

I have no idea what any of them weigh.  Even my oldest and dearest friends, because this is just not something we’re supposed to talk about.

I only know what I weigh, because the experience of stepping on the scale is an isolated moment,and  my eyes are the only pair present.  And I never see anyone else’s scale during the moment that they step on it.

So I have no gauge.

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