Eat the Damn Cake

It’d been a long time since I saw my beautiful blond friend with the very put-together life. My friend who always knows what to wear, and always has the earrings that match it. My friend with the grownup life and the baby.

She looked great, of course. She was sparkling. The collar of her little dress sparkled. Her clean, contemporary diamond ring sparkled. Her eyes sparkled, too. Since I’d last seen her, a lot had changed. They were moving. To Connecticut. They were looking for a house now.

Whoa.

Connecticut? But– we used to think Brooklyn was too far away! I haven’t even been back to the Upper West Side since we moved down here. Wait. A house. That means you’ll have more than two rooms? And a car? And a yard? Impossible. A washer and a dryer? Amazing. More than one bathroom? Ultimate luxury! Unimaginable.

I tried to picture her new life. She was wearing pearl earrings in my imagination. But then, she does that sometimes anyway. She looked so grown up. So complete. She would drive her kid (her KID!) to school in her car. She would drive to the supermarket. She would return to her house. Her entire house. Her husband would commute into the city for work.

“What’s your plan?” she asked. “What are you thinking, for the future?”

I stared at her. I looked down at my plate. I looked up again, and I still hadn’t figured out what to say.

“Bear,” I said, later that night, “Do we know what we’re doing with our lives?”

“Um,” he said, “Maybe?”

“I don’t think we do.”

“Yeah, maybe not. But who cares?”

“We’re kids.”

“That’s what’s so cool about us.”

“I guess.”

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You know what I’m not? Cool. I care too much.

Being cool is all about not caring. It’s been that way since someone invented coolness, back in, like, the late fifties, I think. Wait– I feel like there were a few cool people in the Great Gatsby, so maybe it goes back a few decades farther.

There are a lot of variations on not caring. Kids are really obvious about it. They’re constantly standing around in mall parking lots rolling their eyes, going, “Whatever…” People in their twenties show how little they care mostly by wearing slouchy shoes. And then later on you prove your coolness by getting drunk the way you used to get drunk when you had less responsibilities.

I’m pretty sure.

(these should do it. source)

Sometimes I worry about myself, because I want to impress people. I want them to like me. It’s a little pathological. It’s a sign that I will not succeed at things. I am always hoping that I’ll grow out of it, and so far, that hasn’t happened, so I’m concerned that it might be permanent.

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First, I just wanted to point you guys to this really interesting post about what women want from work by Virginia at Beauty Schooled. In it, she gives the people who commented on my post about babies a shout out!

(me and my brothers and grandmother a while back, celebrating Chanukah)

This will be my first Christmas with my new family.

With Bear’s family. Who are also my family now. Isn’t it funny how you can sometimes just acquire a family?

Bear said, “It might feel weird. Someone might offend you by accident.”

We’re going to be in California with his family for about a week surrounding Christmas, which this year also happens to be the week of Chanukah (it starts tonight). So…Christnukah?

(source)

People always wish me a merry Christmas. And then I’m not sure what to say back, since I don’t celebrate it. Usually I just say, “Merry Christmas!” Sometimes I say, “Actually, I’m Jewish, but Merry Christmas!” Sometimes I sort of want to say, “Happy Chanukah!” but I never do, because that feels mean. Sometimes it’s obvious that the other person isn’t Christian either, and then we both kinda look at each other and then quickly walk away.

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Sometimes I think there’s an invisible baby in my life. It follows me around, waiting, gurgling and cooing in pointed judgment.

I measure stuff against it. “So if I can get this damn book published by the time I’m twenty-seven. Twenty-eight, maybe. Then I’d maybe be ready.” It reminds me that I’m getting older, faster,  all the time. “What are you, thirty-nine? Oh, twenty-five! Not so different…Your eggs are already shriveling and growing more diseased and lopsided by the second. You’re not a kid anymore. Which is too bad, since you hit the peak of your fertility when you were, like, sixteen, or possibly even younger, when you still had those braces that ultimately didn’t even make much of made a difference. You thought it was cool to get the bands in holiday themed colors. YOU WERE MOST FERTILE THEN. And now look at you! Scrambling around, trying to find yourself or something, as time runs inexorably out. The clock is ticking, woman! Don’t think the clock isn’t ticking, just because you’re covering your ears.”

(source)

People ask me, “So are you guys thinking about kids?”

That’s what happens when you get married. Even in New York City, the land of not-having-to-think-about-kids-until-you’re-30.

“I think I’ll have a baby when I’m thirty, man or not,” said one of my friends at a group event.

“What?” the other twenty-something women cried. “Thirty? That’s too young! How about thirty-five?”

The land of not-having-to-think-about-kids-until-you’re-35.

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First, writing-related things that are happening to me:

I’m on The Hairpin! I’m talking about getting mistaken for a contestant on America’s Next Top Model, in Times Square.

And the amazing Rachel Rabbit White talks about Bear and me in this piece on the Frisky, and it makes me feel really special and slightly famous.

And I’m on Mamamia, the big Australian site. You guys might have already read this piece, since it was on the blog first. It’s about how annoying it is when people tell women to just get confident.

Why do good things always happen all at the same time? I’m not just saying that because it’s a thing people say. My life works like that all the time. It annoys me. It makes savoring hard, and I’m already bad at savoring.

But here’s what I’m really talking about today:

Fancy, fancy New York City.

A friend of mine got invited to Esquire Magazine’s  78th birthday party in the Esquire Penthouse, which happens to be here in my neighborhood, in an apartment called “the clocktower” that I know about because my mom sent me an article about how it’s the most expensive apartment in Brooklyn. $25 million. Wow. Seriously? Who knew I was so close to something so rare and precious?

The apartment is literally a clocktower, with multiple floors and four massive working clock faces. It looks like this:

(except dark and sexy and bigger than this picture I found on the internet lets on. source)

It is not really Esquire Magazine’s penthouse– they’re just renting it. But “just” is probably the wrong word. God knows how much it costs to rent. In any case, my friend asked me to go as her plus one and of course I went, because I really wanted to see this place. But of course I was scared of everyone else who was going, because I was pretty sure they were going to be really fancy people.

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Things are looking up, from yesterday. Bear has referred to Minute/Minnow/Minette and I as “my girls” several times. He calls her Minna, so there’s yet another name.

I’ve also made myself incredibly annoying–both by taking lots of cellphone pictures of the cat sleeping with her paws over her head (probably in an effort to hide her face from the camera) and by trying to think of common phrases with the word “minute” in them.

“Just a minute!” “It only takes a minute!” “Give me a minute!” “Minute Maid!” “Minute to win it!” Is that a common phrase? It doesn’t sound like one. Whatever. And Minute Maid is orange juice. Whatever again. I’m clearly not very good at this.

Thank you, commenters, for the cat thoughts and advice. You always help me out. And make me less afraid of dying of horrible parasites.

But this is not another cat post. This is a post about a weird thing I learned about the world this week:

It is really hard to give big things away (in NYC).

We moved a little over a month ago, and since then, I have been dragging this giant black Ikea shelving unit from room to room (there are only two rooms, so it’s not as much dragging as I guess it could be). In our last apartment and the one before that, there wasn’t enough space for two dressers, so we got this thing and some cloth bins and put Bear’s clothes in/on it. It’s like six and a half feet tall. And then there’s the pretty almost-oriental rug (what exactly makes something an oriental rug, anyway?) that my uncle, an auctioneer, got at one of his sales and gave my parents who gave it to me. It feels nice, looks nice, and is 8×10. We are using another rug, also from my uncle through my parents, that matches the couch more and there isn’t enough space for two. I’m sorry, that was boring.

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