Eat the Damn Cake

There are all these lists of college subjects you might have foolishly majored in that will eventually lead to your starvation in a gutter. The ten majors that will cause you to starve the fastest!

There are all these lists of things you can do wrong, by accident, just because you thought it sounded interesting, that will end up ruining your career prospects and your life and probably your chance at ever seeming sexy.

There is also a very short list with the three majors that will result in happiness. Or at least enough food to keep you alive.

That list never contains my major. But at the time, I really thought I was being practical. I was going to be a professor, after all. 

(Ha! I can’t remember anything! How was I going to be a professor? You need to know FACTS for that)

Actually, by the time I got to grad school, I was so focused that I only took one class that had nothing to do with what I was studying. And that was the class that changed my life. 

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Bear snuggled against me, wrapping his arms around me. “I love how soft you are,” he said.

This is one of two compliments I get from him on a daily basis. The other is, “I love how warm you are.”

I know they are serious compliments because of the tone.

I used to make fun of him. “So, basically, you love the fact that I’m not dead?” I’d say, when he talked about my warmth. “That makes me feel so special. I’m so unique!”

When he said, “You’re so soft…” I’d feel uncomfortable for a hint of a second. “Softer now than I used to be,” I’d say, wondering if maybe he was thinking that too. I’d make a poorly structured joke about my thighs.

It has not been easy for me to be soft. To get soft, and to admit how soft I already was.

(source)

I remember, in college, this guy I was dating kept saying, “You definitely work out,” in this admiring way, looking my body up and down.

“Nope!” I said, proud.

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I am a writer now, but when I was a little girl, I thought I would grow up to be a painter. After all, I painted nearly every day. And when I wasn’t painting, I was drawing. Mostly princesses. Sometimes their stepsisters, who always turned out not to be evil in the stories in my head. The princesses also always had brown hair. That was important.

Sometimes I drew cats, because I secretly wished that I was part cat, or at least would end up being able to communicate with cats psychically (at eight or so, I finally had to admit that I still couldn’t understand cat thoughts, but to this day, I have dreams with cats in them more than I think the ordinary person does, soo…just sayin’).

I started drawing as soon as I could hold a pastel, and I didn’t stop until I was maybe seventeen.

When I was fifteen, I put a bunch of my canvasses in an enormous plastic carry-case and went to New York City, to an art school fair at Pratt, where schools had set up booths and for the first few minutes, it seemed like I was the only person there not wearing black.

“You are really talented,” I was told by several schools. “But you’re too young. Why are you here?” 

I was there because I painted all the time.

(rejection makes me feel like this)

It’s been almost a year since I last played keyboard. My senior year of college, I played nearly every day. I had a beat up, sized down silver keyboard on a stand, and I wrote music constantly. Song after song about the parking lot that my dorm room looked over, and what it might symbolize about life. Song after song about the guy who acted like he liked me back and then seemed to change his mind. Occasionally I wrote about both things at the same time:

“All the cars in the parking lot are waiting, waiting, but they play it cool/ I know, I know exactly what I want/ but there are so many rules…”

See what I did there? It’s like I’m the cars! I’m so clever. So very clever.

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I want to be a woman who doesn’t care. One of those women who doesn’t notice. A woman who doesn’t pay attention to girly stuff. To the stuff that women are supposed to care about.

I saw Marissa Mayer, one of the original Google employees (so now she’s insanely rich), talk about her life. She described herself as oblivious. As a girl, she wasn’t thinking about boys. She wasn’t thinking about clothes. She told a charming story about her time at Stanford, when she was the only girl in a sea of computer science guys. She loved computer science, and, by her own account, she barely noticed that she wasn’t one of the guys. Because, maybe, she thought she was. Someone made a comment about the “one blond girl in the computer science lectures,” and she thought, “Who is that?” and then, laughing, realized it was her.

Ha! Adorable! We all laughed along with her. She has that famous laugh.

(here’s Marissa Mayer, being…just one of the boys?)

A few nights ago, I saw Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the New York Times, interview her employee Jodi Kantor, author of the recent bestseller “The Obamas.” Abramson has this amazing voice. She sounds a little like a robot.

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I have a history of being jealous. It’s not the sort of thing that’s cool to admit. Because jealousy is really petty and everyone knows it. Also, everyone knows it means you’re insecure. People who are secure do not feel jealous. They feel supportive and happy. Their neighbor wins the $389,000,000 lottery? Good for them! We’re planting a new garden!

That was based on my mom. She is the least jealous person ever, and she loves to garden.

(source)

Clearly, I am not very secure. I mean, clearly.

I’m working on it.

For a while, whenever I went to my writing group, I got jealous. We’d all show up, being fabulous and wearing interesting shoes, preening a little. And we’d report on our two weeks apart. Who was pitching where, getting accepted where, who had this amazing new opportunity, who had gotten this crazy gig. Quick, I thought frantically, think of something impressive you’ve done! I was deathly afraid that nothing would come to mind.

And sometimes I am so jealous I feel my smile get stuck on my face and I can hear my own voice, surprisingly squeaky, as though from a great distance, saying, “That’s great! That’s really great!” and in a second I think I might laugh like the laugh track on a bad sitcom. “Oh my god! I’m so happy for you! That’s really great! Oops! I tripped over my feet!” *laughter*

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I read this piece about time. It was by a girl who has cancer.

She writes about her new relationship with time, since her diagnoses, and as she waits for the bone marrow transplant that will either begin her life again or begin the process of her death.

There is a lot of attention reserved for children with cancer, and adults with cancer have documented their experiences extensively, but there isn’t too much about twenty-somethings with cancer; people who are already at a crossroads in their lives, and are now faced with a much larger one. People who are supposed to make something of themselves, and find a job and keep a job, and find a career, and date until they know what they want in a partner, and go to dive bars deep in Brooklyn, and try to piece together who they are and what they want from life. People who get cancer at much lower rates. People who are supposed to have so much time. 

I have a shaky relationship with time. We’ve never really sat down and talked, I guess, but I get the feeling we wouldn’t get along. I’m too pushy and vulnerable, and time—time is relentless.

When I was a kid, I climbed everything that would take me high up, even when the branches got thin and bendy. I wanted to see the distance. I thought I had forever. When I got married, suddenly, everything felt shorter, and more dangerous. My own mortality was brought into sharper focus by this sickeningly strong love for another person made out of fragile skin and just the right amount of blood, and millions of cells that were all trying to do the right thing. His cells were not all doing the right thing. Some of them were broken. And he carried his life around in a little black kit, with a vial of clear liquid that needed to be constantly injected, otherwise the balance tipped, and he would plummet.

(source)

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After feeling awfully sorry for myself yesterday, and moping around for a bit, and then frantically pitching approximately three-thousand* magazines while frothing at the mouth, I took a moment to think.

I highly recommend moments like those. Thinking moments. Where you go, “But seriously, what the hell am I doing?”

(source)

I was freaking out. I am one of those people who tends to freak out. I tend to believe the worst. I tend to interpret things negatively. If someone gives me a weird look on the elevator, I am more likely to think, “Why does she hate me?!” than “Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I’m carrying fourteen bottles of diet orange soda?”

When something bad happens to me, I am likely to think, “Well, this just says it all. I know the truth now. I suck. That is the truth. Nothing good will ever happen to me. And I’d might as well accept it. Maybe I should cry a lot, dramatically, at my computer, while I’m accepting it. Yes. Definitely the way to proceed.”

And then I proceed that way.

But when I took a moment to think, after my bout of frantic pitches, it occurred to me that a lot of this probably comes down to how I think about success.

How do you think about success?

I think about it like this: GOLD MEDAL NOBEL PEACE PRIZE PULITZER A MILLION DOLLARS GIANT BOOK DEAL HOUSEHOLD NAME SUPERMODEL MOVIE STAR EVERYONE IN THE WORLD LOVES YOU MORE THAN THEY LOVE THEIR KIDS.

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