Eat the Damn Cake

We go around the room, introducing ourselves and sharing how long we have “practiced.”

“Nine years.”

“Five years.”

“Twenty.”

“Four days.”

That’s me.

And that is one of the reasons I am not good at yoga. Also, I am not flexible (does this make me less sexy? I’m pretty sure it does). Also, I have scoliosis. Not in a serious way. Just in a “Your spine is a little too curved” way. It makes my lower back look especially cute, the doctor said I looked like a dancer (a dancer! I must be pretty!). It makes my upper back and shoulders look not cute at all– more like a turtle (a dancing turtle!). It’s hard for me to put my shoulders back. Which means it’s hard for me to look like a queen. Which is a major disappointment.

So the hardest pose for me is the one where you sit with your legs straight in front of you and then bend over them, from the waist. My back won’t let me bend. I’m sitting straight up, and everyone is touching their toes. Even the pregnant woman in the back. How is that even possible? Even the seventy-year-old dude in the very tight pants.

I am also bad at downward facing dog, which feels shameful. Downward facing dog is clearly the most important pose. They keep coming back to it. Everything ends in it. No matter what you do, you end up in downward facing dog, contemplating the fickle, meandering course of your life.

(have you noticed that the mats are always in soothing colors? 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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It’s been over three years since I got a nose job. Honestly, I can’t remember what month it was. Sometime during the summer.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember how much I hated my face. Enough to lie asleep while someone hacked it open. Enough to show up for the surgery even after my dad watched a live special on rhinoplasty and described it in horrifying detail to me (“and then there’s just this giant hole in the middle of your face because they flip the skin back, after they cut the piece, you know that little piece in between your nostrils? Yeah that one.”) It’s hard to remember how badly I wanted to look different. I was casual about it. I played it cool. “It’s just something I need to do, y’know?” But sometimes when I was alone, I would look in the mirror and cry because I hated my face so much. It felt unfair. So many other girls got a regular nose. And then they had regular faces. Why me? Seriously, God, what the hell?

And then I got the nose job, and, well, some of you know the story– it didn’t really make a difference.

“This has only happened to me one other time,” the surgeon told me apologetically, explaining that something had gone wrong.

Instead of my face being fantastically transformed, it was just slightly rearranged. Now my nose is a little crooked in places it didn’t use to be. It’s a little thinner at the bridge.

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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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There’s nothing like a huge snowstorm and a power outage to remind you how much you need electricity for everything. And how hard it is to feel bad about your appearance by candlelight. Which, naturally, leaves one feeling contradicted. One being me.

I performed a Bar Mitzvah service yesterday morning, at my job in NJ. It started snowing hard in the middle of it. Everyone was turning to look out the window. The kid handled it really well. He was like, “God likes me.” And by the time I got to my parents’ house in the afternoon, the car was beeping like crazy as I nearly slid off the road. Not helpful, car, I notice that I’m sliding off the road.

“OK,” I thought, as I slid. “This might be the end.” I think I’m actually very good in near-death moments. Even though I’m, in general, terrified of dying.

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I don’t have a full post today because I stayed up all night last night reading a book about Wall Street. I mean, all night. Until seven in the morning. That’s really stupid. I am dead to the world right now.

But since I am too dead to write, I thought I’d share something else. Some of the recent photos that I’ve received from readers and quietly added to the Cake Gallery without letting anyone know. I’m a bad businesswoman. Maybe I need to read even more about Wall Street. Maybe I really, really don’t.

So here are a few of the awesome cake shots I’ve been getting:

Amazing, right? Send me yours!

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Unroast: Today I love that I am too tired to look in the mirror.

P.S. Congratulations/mazel tov to my grandmother, who just received an award for all of her volunteer work at her local hospice! That woman is amazing. She never stops working. She also reads this blog regularly, so I know she’s seeing this. Hi, Grammoo! I’m sorry you have to read about your granddaughter’s awkwardness and body images issues and marital stuff on the internet!

P.P.S. There’s a version of my post about talking to other women about weight gain up on HuffPo. Just so people know I still appear occasionally on really big international forums, other than this blog Wait, can you call HuffPo a forum? That sounds wrong. Maybe if people were nicer in the comments it’d sound more right.

This made my day. And the day after that. And it will make tomorrow, too. So I wanted to share it with everyone. This is ETDC reader Laurie Skelton‘s response to my post about how the pretty princesses we’re exposed to growing up never seem to have big noses. Or flat chests and big butts. Or very much that reminds me of myself at all, actually. This princess, created by Laurie, clearly has her priorities straight:

Her blog is here. Her tumblr is here. She is fantastic and I love her forever for this.

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Unroast: Today I love the way I look in little strappy sandals. Or barefoot, vanquishing the dragons that try to keep me from my cupcakes.