Eat the Damn Cake

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You know that sense that you’ve done absolutely nothing with your life so far, and probably won’t end up doing anything particularly commendable for the rest of it? What about the feeling that everything you thought you were pretty good at turns out to be irrelevant, as though some administrative-type recently called down from the sky in a bored but official tone, “Painting: Unnecessary! Poetry: Campy! Writing: Come on, no one makes it as a writer! Music: See writing. Grilled Cheeses: Delicious but not very impressive!”

I feel like that a lot. I don’t have enough evidence to support the social worthiness of grilled cheese making. I can’t prove what I’m giving back to society, or that I’m giving back anything at all. In many ways, I’m one of those quintessential twenty-somethings.

Remember that article in the New York Times about us?

We’re driving everyone crazy. We don’t fit in. We seem undecided. We can’t pick one thing and stick to it. Continue Reading »

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I tried on my wedding gown for the first time since I picked it, ages ago. I wore the bra. You know, the strapless bra from the post I called The Girl Without Any Breasts. I’m standing there, in my massive wedding gown, which has nearly swallowed me whole, and this tiny seamstress comes up to me, edges around the hem, and touches my chest.

“Why are you not wearing bra?” she asks tersely.

“I am,” I say. “I am wearing bra.”

“No,” she says. “No bra.” She gestures at my chest.

I pull back the bodice to reveal the bra. “See?”

“Oh.” She bustles out of the room and returns a moment later with two huge pads.

“Wait—“ I say. “Do you mean I should have those AND the bra?”

She shrugs. “Maybe.”

My friend Liane starts laughing. I start laughing. The seamstress is very serious. Continue Reading »

I’m on the edge of insanity, with a list of things to do that’d be as long as the DNA in one of your cells if you could somehow pull it into a straight strand. Make that like three cells-worth.  Doesn’t sound very long? Well, look up DNA! Who would’ve thought we had that much of it? What’s it all doing? It’s making my nose super Jewish, that’s what it’s doing. And some other stuff.

Anyway, because I’m about to lose my mind, I’ve decided to give myself a break in terms of writing, and share a story. I’ve mentioned here how I used to, as a little unschooler, spend a lot of time writing stories. They were fantasy stories. I didn’t understand then that fantasy was for hopeless nerds, who also LARPed, unless it was about vampires, in which case it was for frustratingly squealy preteen and teenaged girls, their mothers, my youngest brother, and the men who “try to understand how women think.” (I’m not kidding, my fiance told me about a prominent Wall Street guy who read Twilight with this explanation. Upon finishing the series, he declared that he finally understood what women want.) Anyway, I failed at fantasy writing, because I didn’t think of Lord Voldemort, or vampires. But it’s storytime….and here’s a little story about….

The Merman:

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I don’t know how smart I am. And not in an ordinary way, either. As a kid, I never learned where I fit into the hierarchy of intelligence.

There is a lot of debate about intelligence. Remember that book The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray? It is really, really thick. It has a big rainbow lump on the cover. It’s all about intelligence, and how a person’s success is pretty much determinable by how smart a standardized test says they are. As it turns out, according to The Bell Curve, Jews are definitely, on average, smarter than black people. Or at least, that’s what I got out of the section on race. Stephen Jay Gould wrote a book called The Mismeasure of Man about fifteen years before Herrnstein and Murray came out with The Bell Curve, but, laughing sadly to himself, Gould stuck a few more chapters on Mismeasure and republished, saying, “Seriously? We’re still talking about this?” He also said something along the lines of, “One of the big problems here is that people think intelligence is only one thing, and that thing is measurable by a single method.”

People think that intelligence is quantifiable. Well, I’m sure parts of it are. But the whole thing? Isn’t that a little too complex to summarize in a number?

I didn’t take any tests as a kid. None. Continue Reading »

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I just painted my nails blue. Turquoise, really. They shimmer. The area around my nails shimmers too, because my aim is really bad. How does anyone paint nails neatly? I knew girls who had mastered it by the time they were twelve. But not too many. Because I didn’t really know that many girls.

For most of my life, people have asked me how I learned to socialize. Even while I’m socializing with them. They imagine that you can only learn from a lot of other people almost exactly the same age as you. I learned how to socialize the same way everyone else did. From my parents, first, from my friends, and from the people I ran into, admired from a distance, and read about.

I’ve had to pretend for a long time that I’m normal, because “normal” is proof that I am a success, as an unschooler. Which is funny. Because normal is a pretty boring goal for such a radical lifestyle. It always felt like a conflict. I was obviously really different, because I didn’t spend any time in a classroom, and I spent a lot of time in the woods. And at the piano. And, I don’t know, doing a million things in the middle of the day, when I was the only kid in sight. But then, whenever I met anyone new, I was supposed to show them just how normal I was. Continue Reading »

I feel like I should try again. I wrote that piece about not calling myself a feminist anymore, and a lot of things happened at once. A lot of feminists were offended, I was offended that they were offended, and I was abruptly introduced to a community I’d been almost completely unaware of beforehand. I didn’t know there was such a thriving group of feminist bloggers (and the feminists who read those blogs). There are plenty of women who hint at feminism in their writing and comments, or who never use the word, but are obviously interested in standing up for women. But the community I stumbled upon seems much more overt, much more directed, and much more intense. Maybe that’s just because I made them mad.

There are a few things I want to talk about here.

1. In my original piece, I referenced stereotypes about feminists (unshaved armpits, manhating, etc). Some people seemed to believe that I thought these things were true and/or despicable. I made a joke about a pedicure. Someone thought I’d traded in feminism for pedicures, for real. I have this problem a lot. Not pedicures. I’ve gotten two in my entire life.  People don’t recognize when I’m joking, even when I think it’s pretty obvious. This is both a problem of the medium and my failure to be more clear. For the record, I don’t think that the tired stereotypes of feminists I mentioned are true for most people who define themselves as feminists these days (and I wouldn’t really care if they were true), but I also don’t think that they’ve worked their way completely out of the system, as some people suggest they have. I’ve met plenty of people who seemed to believe every one of those stereotypes. But my decision not to actively call myself a feminist isn’t a result of my desire to be accepted by these people (I never will be, in any case); it’s a result of my disinterest in having one problematic word do all the talking for me.

2. Along these lines, I actually think that women should stop saying, “I don’t hate men!” so much. “I like men!” It’s annoying. It’s annoying that women have to start sentences about their feminism with a claim that they really, really love men. Because the unspoken (and too often spoken) assumption is that if they identify as a feminist, there’s a chance they don’t like men. As if that’s the most salient feature of feminism. “Men are great!” is not a solution. And we can’t look at violent crime, religious oppression, sexual offenses, or, you know, frat houses, without noticing that men, as a group, do a lot of terrible things that women don’t, in general. That is just a fact. When I walk down the street and see a group of guys coming towards me, I feel anxious. There’s a reason for that. In my opinion, there should be more feminists (and other women) out there who are willing to talk about this, without first apologizing or disclaiming. Continue Reading »

Some people say that Mother’s Day is a holiday created by Hallmark to sell more silly cards and chocolates. This is probably true, but when I waited in the NJ Transit ticket line in Penn Station yesterday behind about thirty men and women carrying bouquets of flowers, there was something too sweet about the holiday to stay mad at Hallmark. All of those people were going to visit their mothers, or the mothers who are important in their lives, and they were all celebrating motherhood. There were as many people on the train as when the Irish have a parade, or some famous sports team plays some other famous sports team. And that says something. Because people like getting drunk and watching sports more than they like anything. Except their mothers, apparently. Or at least they like their mothers just as much as they like getting drunk and watching men run around a field chasing a ball. That’s progress.

So in honor of Mother’s Day, let me tell you a little bit about my mother.

Continue Reading »