Eat the Damn Cake

I keep not publishing this piece because it’s really just a big list and I’m a little embarrassed that I wrote it. But I wrote it anyway, and now I’m sharing it, because it’s the new year, which is about change, and I want to know how wherever you live changed you and didn’t change you. 

Things that people apparently do a lot in NYC, and I still don’t: 

See celebrities on the street (This is supposed to happen to people all the time. It happens to people even when they don’t live here and are just visiting for the day. I have lived here for over four years and I only JUST FINALLY saw Anne Hathaway in my grocery store. And that’s only because I go there a lot and so it was probably only a matter of time.)

Go to clubs where there are celebrities (I went to a club when I was 21 and I danced with a guy who was there with his parole officer. I told him my name was Ari Gold, because I thought that was the sexiest name a hot Jewish girl could have. Or, you know, a fifty-year-old Jewish guy. I think the hot clubs in NYC might be in the meatpacking district, but that’s only because one person told me she went to a club there. That’s how much I know)

Know the names of chefs  (I will get there. And then I will be cultured, at last. As far as I can tell most of them start with “Daniel” or “David.”)

(one of them founded Shake Shack and changed my culinary life forever in doing so. I should know. source)

(I basically just take every opportunity to post this picture. source)

Work out a lot and maybe even have a personal trainer (Yeah, that just doesn’t seem to happen for me. Here’s a post about it.)

Go to lots of parties, sometimes in some really rich person’s penthouse, sometimes where there are models (Maybe I just don’t get invited….Although I was once at a book party looking really out of place I’m sure and like halfway through this group of models came in and then they stood in the corner together looking uncomfortable and tall and shiny. I think that someone maybe paid them to come? Or something? But that was the only time. I actually ended up talking with one of them, and she had this thick accent– Swedish? Danish?– and she had to bend down to talk to me. She was nice.)

Get hit on on the subway (Once a guy on the subway said to me, “You Jewish?” and I said “Yes,” and then he said that he was Puerto Rican but his sister married a Jew, and he was OK with it, and we nodded to each other in kinship. But I don’t think he was hitting on me)

Continue Reading »

I was really excited to see this famous comedian* perform. I bought the tickets a long time in advance and it was the first time I ever did something that I first saw advertised on a subway poster. I don’t do a lot of “going out” type things. When I first came to the city for grad school, my mom would call and beg me to please just get a life.

“Go out!” she’d say. “You’re in New York City!” And then, always, she’d have some suggestions that began with “Go to a museum! Go to the opera!” And she’d already done the research. “You can get a student discount if you show up early!”

She never said “Go to a bar!”

I sort of wanted to see an all-male stripping act, but I was too shy and I didn’t know where to find one.

(although the opera can also be quite scandalous! source)

Out of guilt, in the middle of the winter, I took a cab to the Guggenheim. It was the first time I’d ever taken a cab, even though I’d been in the city for months. Students don’t take cabs—they walk or take the subway. But I was being adventurous and a little lavish, so I took a cab. It cost about $6 and I paid him mostly in change and didn’t know to tip, but he didn’t say anything. I’m still viscerally embarrassed, remembering. Who doesn’t know to tip? What did he think of me?

It turned out that most of the Guggenheim was closed that day, for renovations or rearranging art, or maybe for vacuuming. I got in for free with my student ID and I walked very slowly around the base level of the rotunda, the only open area, trying hard to carefully ponder each of the fifteen or so pieces of art. I was going to make the most of this damn museum. For a while, a cute guy stood next to me in front of a painting with one black line on it. My heart beat a little faster, but then he walked away.

I walked across the street to the iced-over reservoir and looked at the world as my face froze. It was peaceful. I was glad I’d come.

The point is, when I bought tickets to see the famous comedian at the Barclays Center that just opened in Brooklyn, it was kind of a big deal.

And then I didn’t think he was funny. And then I got a little offended. 

Continue Reading »

“What made you decide?” said my friend Brenda, on the phone.

“Um,” I said. I thought for a while. “I should figure it out,” I said. “I should try to think of the moment.”

It eluded me.

I could explain the reasons not to very easily. “Having a baby is like giving up.” I’ve never been into babies, really. Over the past couple years, I sometimes wanted to have one with sudden ferocity, but then afterwards I felt a little ill. Terrible idea! What about my life? 

She laughed. “There were a bunch of people in my high school who were pregnant—there was a class for them.”

“Yeah, girls get pregnant in high school and that means they’re not going anywhere. It’s a bad thing.”

“You’re not in high school.”

“But I’m too young for New York.”

What I mean is- I’m too young for my world. My friends. “Thirty-five is a good age,” they have been known to say. They are good at their jobs. They are going to get better, and make more money, and be more famous.

“Technically,” I said, “I’ve already waited over a decade. I’ve been fertile for a long time. I’m, like, biologically old now.”

Fertile is a funny word. It just pops into my head these days, now that I’ve decided to have a baby. Fertile. And I think of farm-y fields. And trees. I think of fruit, like on the cover of a book by Michael Pollan, not the fruit that actually grows on my parents’ trees in their backyard, which is delicious but spotty.

(boobs! source)

Continue Reading »

The owner of the tiny Vietnamese restaurant was very friendly. She spoke halting, heavily accented English that seemed not to slow her down at all.

“You spouse?” she asked us. It took me a second to catch what she’d said.

“Yes,” we said, together, “We’re married.”

She nodded emphatically, then gestured up and down Bear’s torso and squeezed his shoulder. “He very good looking. You lucky woman.”

“I agree!” I said.

Bear seemed uncertain how to react. “Well, she’s a beautiful woman,” he said, gesturing at me.

The restaurant owner looked at me. “Uh huh,” she said, willingly enough, but not as enthusiastic.

(source)

Later, she worried over him not eating his noodles and wanted to know why such a good looking man was trying to diet. I mentioned that he has diabetes, and she was suddenly sorrowful. Her father had gotten it at seventy-five, she told us. It was very hard for him.

“I’m sorry,” she told Bear. “Very sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” he said. “I promise.”

She laughed.

The food was good. I found myself automatically hoping that this little, outgoing woman with the round glasses and quick smile was having an awesome life. The truth is, not a huge amount of women have told me that my husband is good looking.

And it sort of bothers me.

Continue Reading »

I grew up really healthy. It was weird, at the time. My mom grew her own vegetables and I was forever picking basil for pesto. We got meat from a friend’s family, who raised and butchered cows, and everything else (blocks of mozzarella, knobby carob treats, the occasional bagel chip, palak paneer) came by truck from an organic co-op. We didn’t eat sugar, we didn’t eat processed foods. Store- bought milk seemed pretty special at the time. Once, when I spilled it, I cried over spilled milk.

I mean, we were just a weird family. My mom is a La Leche League leader and there was always a circle of nursing women sitting around, with cloth slings, in my living room, or at the park, or wherever we were, eating chunks of watermelon in the summer, eating carrot sticks always, but not from the bag.

(like, this was going on EVERYWHERE. source)

We were super weird—homeschooling/unschooling, liberal Jews who didn’t watch TV. Not at all. No TV.

“Do you even have a microwave?” the kids at Hebrew School asked me.

I burst out laughing. Of COURSE. Who doesn’t have a microwave? Are you kidding me? What am I, Amish?

In retrospect, it was a fair question.

Now that I’m all grown up and living in Brooklyn, it turns out that everyone wants to be like my mom. Well, not totally. I mean, they’re not gonna go so far as to give birth in an inflatable tub in the living room and not send their kids to school, of course. But they want to eat like her. It is totally, epically uncool to not care about what you are putting in your body. They want to exercise all the time.

I rebelled by eating a lot of junk food in college and never, ever exercising (I’m a badass). My whole family exercises. My dad and brothers lift weights for hours every day, my mom used to, and now she does tons of yoga and pilates. I am the only one who doesn’t do anything. I have been known to flaunt doughnuts.

(i mean, look at it, it’s gorgeous! source)

But I find myself drifting backward into the future, trying to remember to always make vegetables, joining a CSA to force myself to make vegetables, spending extra money on grassfed meat even though it’s so much more expensive that it pisses me off. The one thing I’m not doing is exercising. I’m not. I’m not exercising at all. And I should be. Because that is what conscientious people who respect their bodies do. That is what healthy people do. They do yoga. They go running. They go running and then do yoga. They get off their goddamn asses and do SOMETHING about their heart rate. Sex doesn’t count. Does it count? Should I do it more aerobically? How? I pace when I’m on the phone. That should count for something. Once every three or four days, I do a deep bend, all the way over, to almost touch my toes. It’s like yoga, except it only takes about five seconds and I’m not actually touching my toes, because I actually can’t touch my toes.

Continue Reading »

There was a motorcycle lying on its side in the street, but we went out anyway, which I know, I know, is stupid. But Bear was like, “I’ll go, you wait here,” and I was basically like, “I’ll die with you!” and then I just ran into the street, with the stop sign slapping frantically and the wispy potted trees next to our building bending all the way over, like they were doing yoga. The wind hit me so hard, I dove into the nook of a boarded-up building, where there’s usually a bar, dragging Bear after me.

The East River had washed up the street, all the way up past the coffee shop with the exotic roasts.

Everything was eerie and glistening wet and dark. It was supposed to be somewhere around high tide, 7:30 pm. Two dolls on a string whipped back and forth overhead, where someone had tossed them over a power line, mocking the shoe tradition or playing with it. I tried to get a picture and Bear yanked me out of the street.

A shop door was flung open by the wind, the glass shattered.

“Can you shut it?” a guy yelled from a window, and Bear stopped it with a cement block.

“You’re a good man!” the guy yelled.

“Take care!” I yelled inanely back.

“This isn’t safe,” I said to Bear.

“Should I take you back?” he said.

“Let’s just go to the bridge.”

There were other people there, hoodies pulled up, like mine. We were all lumpy shapes in the dark, with the river washing right up around our ankles. It had swallowed the park and it coursed down the road. No one said anything to each other. We just watched it. It surrounded a sign and a phone booth. Someone was smoking. An ambulance sloshed around the corner and then paused for a long time, like it was waiting for a tragedy. We were asking for it.

Continue Reading »

My therapist said people who are high on the hope scale (I didn’t know about it, but I think it’s a scale that measures how good you are at being a person) succeed more. There was this study.

I said, “Shit. I’m screwed.”

“No, no,” she said, laughing. “Your hope will just look different. It will be subtle.” I think that’s what she said.

But seriously, it is lame to be a champion worrier, and to wait and wait to check my goals off the list that runs my life. Especially because goals change so fluidly, without you even noticing. It makes it hard to trust yourself. It makes it hard to figure out what’s actually important.

For example, when I was twelve or so, my dad took me to Carnegie Hall to see Oscar Peterson play. My dad is a jazz pianist, and he loves Oscar, and so I loved Oscar, too. I played classical, then, and I took it very seriously, like I take absolutely everything because I am probably a robot. At intermission, I went up to the stage and I touched it. It was golden brown wood, maple? I don’t know my wood colors very well, and deeply scratched, which I hadn’t expected. I’d thought it would be shinier. I whispered, “Someday I will walk across this stage.” It was a vow.

(eep. source)

And I kept it, but not really. I sang in a choir once at Carnegie Hall, in college, but that didn’t count. I’d meant that I would walk across the stage to a grand piano, and then I’d sit down alone and play, like the fifteen-year-old girl I’d heard of who was already doing that and who I hated passionately for it. I am not good at keeping my vows, apparently.

But the thing is, by the time I sang with the choir, I didn’t even care who was sitting on the piano bench. I didn’t want that anymore. Not even a little. Instead, I wanted to get into grad school. More than anything, I wanted to prove that I was smart enough for Harvard (spoiler alert: I wasn’t). Recently, it occurred to me that I’m not so concerned with being that kind of smart anymore. And now I want to be this famous writer. It’s always something, isn’t it?

It all seems a little silly when I think about it for a second. Being this kind of person. The kind of person who is always rushing towards something, who is always scrabbling for a handhold, trying to pull herself up a little higher, towards something she can’t quite see.

Continue Reading »