Eat the Damn Cake

This is a guest post from someone I like a lot. She described herself this way when I asked for a bio: “Jess is a teacher and occasional writer who lives in Brooklyn. She occasionally writes here: therealmsmanners.tumblr.com.” She is also ridiculously smart and has unfair hair. Unfair because when I cut mine off, I was imagining it looking just like hers, and then it didn’t. 

I am not a naked person.

I am not the kind of person who gets out of the shower and wanders around, air-drying at my leisure. I grab a towel. I am not the kind of person who casually carries on locker room conversations in the nude. I get in and out of there as quickly as possible.

Which is why, when a couple of weeks ago, my husband and I got an email from our friend inviting us to a place called “Spa Castle,” I immediately responded with:

“Um…maybe? Exactly how disrobed would I have to be?”

Despite my hesitation, and despite the fact that we aren’t the kind of people who typically go to spas (or castles, for that matter), my husband and I figured that the beginning of a new year is probably a good time to branch out and try different things, and besides—how bad could it possibly be to spend a few hours imagining you’re in a tropical paradise resort instead of Queens in the middle of January?

Which is why we found ourselves riding the 7 train to the end of the line that Saturday. While we were watching the stops roll by, our friend nudged my husband.

“So, uh, we’re going to have to make a decision pretty soon.”

“About being naked or not, you mean?” my husband asked.

“Yup!”

“Yeah, I dunno. We’ll see…”

I exchanged looks with my friend’s beautiful blonde girlfriend, as if to say, “men! So childish! So weird about being with each other!” but underneath my knowing smile, panic was beginning to set in.

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Note: Argh! I’m trying to get the weight-loss ad removed from the blog. It popped up before I had time to banish it. Don’t read that book! Eat some cake! You’re gorgeous!

We act like we have a couple different bodies. There’s the one you’re in now, and then there’s the one that’s your real body.

It might be from the past or the future. It’s mysterious, but thoroughly detailed. The real body gets obscured by the obnoxious, floppy, hungry, unflattering  current one. The real body is like a place you really, really want to go. Where life makes more sense. Where it’s sunnier and you can wear a bathing suit without even thinking about it.

I caught myself thinking like that when I gained 20 pounds in college. My new body wasn’t really me. It was a costume I was trying on for a while. A slightly scary costume. A slightly daring costume. With an unfamiliar soft little belly and squishy thighs. Sometimes I caught myself staring at my new thighs. They took up so much space! They felt nice. They weren’t my real thighs. But they were OK.

(source)

My body never regressed gracefully into its precollege state. My weight went up and down, and my shape shifted, so that I tucked fat into new, creative spots. My face changed. My hair changed. And eventually I cut my hair off completely.

But sometimes I feel like I am looking through someone else’s eyes at myself. This isn’t me. There is a different, better, streamlined me in there, somewhere, but I can’t quite get to her.

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I want to dress like a pirate queen. The urge hit me the other night after watching “Original Sin.” Halfway through the movie, Bear got up and left.

“Honey?” I called after him, my eyes glued to the screen.

“This is too disturbing,” came his voice from the other room. “You can watch it without me.”

Bear can watch horror movies and not be disturbed, but when someone’s wife has been abused (or a rape is implied), he cannot handle it.

It sounds terrible in a way to say that I can handle it, but honestly, I was kinda watching the movie for Angelina’s face and her clothes. And also her jewelry. The last image, of her face, with the red jewel and gold choker— above the floating, pure white dress– GOD. So beautiful. So graceful and mysterious and magical and otherworldly.

“Come on, honey,” I pleaded. “I’m skipping this scene where– oh, yeah, I think this is a brothel– I’m skipping it! We’re going to watch the ending, where they’re happy!”

Bear wasn’t interested. “There can be no happy ending to this story,” he said, refusing to come back to the couch.

I watched the last scene, which is mostly about her face, alone. And then I felt inspired. I wanted to wear gowns. I wanted to wear flowy things. I wanted to be mysterious and graceful and otherworldly. I went to the closet and started pulling dresses off of hangers and combining them with filmy scarves and gold hoops. The short hair didn’t seem to fit (I looked more like a servant girl than royalty) so I put it under a scarf. That didn’t work either. I decided I wasn’t going to be a princess– I was more of a pirate queen.

(that’s my sexy pose. sorry, parents! Being sexy on the internet! But I can’t help it– pirate queens are sexy)

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Guys– not to bug you, but ETDC’s sneakpeeq giveaway is ending on the 13th, and since you get 20% off your next purchase just for entering, plus a chance at a $25 gift card, it’s definitely worth it. Also, this time there are lots of winners. Check it out here!

I noticed it when I was fourteen or so, and I started making a semi-regular effort. I had this great outfit, with a short skirt, and it perfectly matched the butterfly clips I wore in my hair. My mom was driving me to meet some friends, and there was this cute guy who distinguished himself by having a few muscles, and he was supposed to be there. So obviously I’d doubled the number of butterfly clips, and I’d shaved my legs immediately before leaving, so that they would be freshly smooth. I was hoping they might gleam a little.

Getting out of the car, and walking towards my friends, who were hanging out by an ice cream place in a strip mall (New Jersey!), I happened to glance down. I stopped in my tracks. Blood was trickling down my legs. It looked as though I had been shot, many times, by a tiny soldier– like one of those little guys from The Indian in the Cupboard. There were bloody tears all over my legs. It was a war zone. It was horrifying. I ducked for cover behind the car, licked my hands like a crazed animal, and began trying to rub the blood away. I got most of it, but my legs were left looking raw, agitated, and generally unfriendly. I hadn’t felt the cuts in the shower. I thought there was probably something wrong with me. Do I not feel pain? Am I superwoman? No, probably just a freak who will never have sexy legs. Yes. That’s the truth. I know because it’s the worst possibility.

I’d like to say I got a lot better at shaving my legs over the years, but that would be a lie, and I’m bad at lying (my mom caught me too many times in too many lies as a child, and I’m traumatized).

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I have a giant pimple on my face. It is on my chin, positioned above a slightly smaller pimple.

I have decided this is a blessing in disguise. Blessings in disguise are always decisions. It can go two ways: it’s a blessing in disguise or it sucks a lot. I’ve decided it doesn’t suck a lot.

It’s a blessing in disguise because when I got up and checked the weather report to decide how much clothing to wear, it said, “INCREDIBLY FRIGGIN’ COLD. YOU WILL PROBABLY DIE.” At least, that was my interpretation. And I still don’t have one of those giant down coats because I don’t like the way they look (this is a terrible reason not to have the only article of clothing guaranteed to save your life during a New York winter). So it was either look cute and die or put on every piece of clothing I own. I looked in the mirror.

“Goddamn it, that is the biggest, meanest pimple in the world.” It wasn’t even the popping kind. Those at least are satisfying. Nope. This is the deep-under-the-surface, angry-red-mountain-rising, will-take-weeks-to-subside, maximum-surface-area, painful kind. The worst. It occurred to me that no cute outfit could save my face. The pimple was too dominant. It was controlling the situation.

So whatever– I put on a million things and waddled out the door.

(I was wearing a little more than this much clothing. source)

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This is a guest post.  Sarah is a first-year graduate student, getting her PhD in philosophy. She and I have been writing back and forth for around a year now. When she talked with me about her hair, I begged her to write a guest post for me. Here it is (begging works). She is awesome: 

I am bald, I am 22, and I am female. Sometimes I think that this is an unfortunate combination of traits; but other times, I feel differently.

To make a very long and painful story rather shorter: I had just turned fourteen when my hair began to fall out. It was the beginning of eighth grade. It started innocently enough with a few extra strands left behind in my comb after I showered. At first, I thought nothing of it, but it quickly became very apparent that what was happening was something I needed to think seriously about. Because it was all gone before I turned fifteen.

The year my hair fell out was the worst year of my life. Maybe this is biased, but I contend that eighth graders are the cruelest creatures to inhabit that awkward chunk of life known as ‘adolescence’.  To be fair, it’s a tough time for everyone. We want people to acknowledge that we exist, but not as much as we want to blend inconspicuously into the background. To say that it is difficult for a rapidly balding female to go unnoticed in this environment is a laughable understatement. My middle school morphed into a freak-show and I was the main attraction. My classmates pointed and sneered and snickered and laughed; I tried my hardest to escape their piercing stares, but found myself trapped in a nightmare that had become my life.

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