Eat the Damn Cake

“My drive from work is too short for me to decide what to listen to on Spotify #firstworldproblems” was a recent tweet from the Twitter account First World Problems. The tweet reached over 50,000 people, and it was only one in a long list of mildly amusing little complaints about an easy, well-fed, upper-middle class life.

The idea of first world problems has recently become a meme, with inspired tweeters hashtagging the phrase on the back of every observation that doesn’t seem world-changing or ring out like a strangled scream from the depths of oppression. It’s kind of a fun trend. Maybe it serves to remind us all of what we already have. It offers a little dose of perspective. And when it first appeared, I was totally on board. But then I started seeing the hashtag cropping up a lot more when women were talking about all those things that get labeled “women’s issues.”

(she might be about to say something, not just display her red lipstick. source)

I started seeing it in the comments section under painfully honest essays about weight discrimination or reports about the billion dollar cosmetics industry. “First world problems” was being tacked on women’s conversations everywhere I looked, often by men who sounded like they wished these women would just shut up. Sometimes by women who went on to state that they themselves had much bigger, more serious problems. Before I knew it, “first world problems,” was looking a lot like “shut the hell up, no one cares,” in a lot of contexts.

Continue Reading »

I began to feel dim, suppressed. The kind of feeling that sneaks up on you and you can’t trace it and it hangs around your neck for a while, staring up at you with glazed, bleary eyes until you have to excuse yourself to sit down and mope.

Everything has been good. And I am one of those frustrating people who isn’t particularly good at good, so this is more like awesome. I attribute it to my baby. I think she’s playing with my hormones, and the result is this creeping, stealthy peacefulness. I sometimes just stare into space and feel content. What the hell.

And then, abruptly, I was slipping, my arms windmilling in slow motion. I toppled into a dark pool of insecurity, and the first thing I hated was my stupid, stupid uncooperative hair. But that was only the beginning. Why haven’t my breasts gotten bigger? This is their ONE CHANCE, damnit. All of these pregnant women are being all delighted about their poofy, voluptuous new breasts, and mine are sulking against my ribs, just friggin’ determined to spite me. There is some ancient grudge here, I can sense it.

(source)

Anyway, I knew things were bad when I started thinking about my nose. It’s like a bright red, wildly waving flag now. This little thought comes up, all evil and subtle, like, “What’s one more surgery…” Yeah, like that. “You need it…The surgeon said you need it…” That’s bad. That means I’m already feeling bad. Something is going stale in my head. Something is fermenting.

I was sitting and moping and thinking about how I am unattractive in every way and also I have a shitty career that I should be embarrassed about and also I probably have a lame, unfixable personality. I am probably only rarely truly funny. It went like that. And then it kept going.

“What is going on?” said Bear, a little baffled, as I moped from one room to the next, turtling, tucking myself into my shell in the evenings and poking my head out only to watch some bad TV.

I started trying to explain. It might be this or this other thing or I’m just really tired right now or I need to take a long bath or something else. It’s the pregnancy. My back. Oy vey! My sciatica! And then I said something without thinking about it and I knew that’s what it was. It was this guy, and the way he talked about women.

Continue Reading »

Don’t get me wrong, I am a sucker for the message “seriously, though, you’re beautiful.” And I agree with the viral clip, so many of us get distracted by all of our perceived flaws. We get caught up in criticizing our appearances and miss out on our own beauty. We are often more generous toward strangers than we are toward ourselves.

I like that the Dove Real Beauty Sketches campaign is pointing all of this out. I hope it starts a bunch of conversations. And I hope that my reaction is interpreted as a continuation of the conversation, rather than nitpicking criticism. Because I really don’t want to nitpick, I just want to point out some things I noticed as I was watching.

In the clip, some lovely, thin, mostly white women who are all pretty young describe their appearances to a forensic artist, who sketches them without looking at them. And then other people describe these women, and the artist starts all over again, based on the new description. At the end, the women are shown the two portraits of themselves, and they can see how differently the sketched faces turned out, based on the descriptions. They realize that they’ve been unnecessarily critical of their appearances.

Something felt a little off. And I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. I was getting slightly teary over the women getting slightly teary on camera as they realized that they had been too harsh, describing themselves.

Interestingly, even the sketches based on the self-descriptions weren’t actually particularly unattractive, and I was faintly annoyed with the idea that one sketch was supposed to represent unattractiveness and the other beauty, when the distinctions between the two seemed to lie in characteristics like a mole, shadows under the eyes, slight roundness in facial shape, or a few wrinkles.

Looking at the two portraits of herself, one woman described the one meant to be prettier as looking “much younger,” which seemed to be true of all of them. The more “beautiful” facial representations seemed to all be thinner and younger-looking. If that is the crux of beauty, then I guess we’re all pretty screwed by that obnoxiously inexorable bastard called time.

Continue Reading »

I had been feeling really terrible. Actually, I’d been throwing up every day for three months, and I had long since forgotten why I’d thought it would be a good idea to get pregnant. But that evening, I had to put on a gown and go to a work event. An actual gown. It was twilight blue and clingy without losing elegance, with long sleeves and a cinch at the hip, where a sparkling faux diamond bangle nestled. I had gotten it on sale, during a miraculous day of minimal nausea. I felt ridiculous in it, riding the elevator down to the street to hail a cab. Everyone else was wearing normal clothing, and I was unsure of my thickening body—not obviously pregnant yet, but not my familiar shape.

A woman was looking at me. I looked away.

“What a wonderful dress!” she said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You look beautiful,” she said.

(I kind of wish I had more occasions to wear a gown… source)

I was smiling when I walked out the door. A twenty-something woman on the street paused as she passed me. “You look amazing!” she said.

“Oh, god, thanks,” I said, awkward and caught off-guard.

“Love the gown!” called another woman as I frantically waved at an approaching cab, running late as always. “Where are you going?”

“A work thing!”

“Enjoy!”

I was queasy in the cab, but I felt awesome. I looked beautiful! I sat up a little straighter. I felt sort of queenly, a little glamorous. I imagined myself for a moment as someone leading a fabulous, high-society life, rushing off to expensive benefits and romantic penthouse soirees. As far as anyone knew, I might be doing those things. A woman in a twilight blue gown might have a life like that.

It’s funny, what a compliment can do.

Continue Reading »

Sandal giveaway winner results at the bottom!

Well, of course, someone had to take some photos of me at a party, wearing my favorite dress (should I just stop wearing the clothes I love to events where there might photos taken?), bulky, lopsided, unfortunately proportioned, and my pregnant beauty bubble, so to awkwardly speak, was popped.

Shit.

No matter how many times I tell myself patiently, firmly, “NO. Don’t pay attention, the photo is lying!” there’s that part of my mind that goes “But this is the truth! THE TERRIBLE TRUTH IN A RANDOM, IMPERSONAL UNIVERSE WITHOUT A GOD.” My new tactic is better, I think. I tell myself, “So what? So what if I’m ugly?” And that is always more helpful. But at that particular moment there had been much talk of beautiful women, much instant evaluation around me of women as either pretty or dismissible, and it seemed as though it did matter, at least enough. Because even if it’s out of sheer laziness or habit or nothing important or just in passing, people seem to talk about the way women look first, and constantly, and always.

Anyway. I had been previously feeling glorious in all my pregnant majesty—belly outthrust, butt and thighs cushioning, the breasts, well, you know, they never cooperate, but whatever. But I had been liking how my new bigness feels essential, necessary, and full of purpose. I am carrying a baby human. I am holding the trump card. Kiss my goddamn pregnant belly, Victoria’s Secret. I don’t know. Something like that.

But the frightening thing is that somehow, some of the same obnoxious rules from before seem to apply. There is no escape.

(it’s a little like being trapped in a maze sometimes. source)

Within the world of women talking about being pregnant, there is a lot of discussion about gaining too much weight, about gaining it in the “wrong” places, and especially, about getting all of our bodies back, after.

This is very important, I’ve learned. The goal is to reclaim the former body as soon as is humanly possible. The magazines are all about it—not that I’m reading them, but I see headlines because I can’t just close my eyes in the checkout line. And it’s all over the internet, too. Tips and regimens and lists of exercises and rules to live by that will allow us to spring back, practically unaffected, pure, clean, tight as virgins.

Continue Reading »

Sometimes when we talk about beauty and body image, we end up talking almost exclusively about weight. It makes a lot of sense: the people who are touted as the most beautiful are almost always very thin. We’re bombarded by headlines and images that fixate on famous people’s waistlines and diets. Is Christina Aguilera too fat now? Is Kate Middleton too thin? Which actress looks best or worst in a bikini? Even pregnant, Kim Kardashian can’t escape the press’s disgust at her weight gain. (If not when pregnant, one wonders, when the hell is a good time to gain some weight?)

Meanwhile, the War on Obesity rages ceaselessly, often confusing ideas about health with ideas about physical attractiveness. Weight is always in the news, and the message is loud and clear: It is NOT OK to be heavy. Lose weight! Gain self-respect! Look better!

(I don’t even know what this means, but it looks ridiculous.)

So I get it. I get that beauty and weight are wrapped around each other in our heads. I get why so many people find themselves convinced that if they can only get thinner they will be better in every way. But there is a lot more to our cultural story about beauty, and when we talk about weight without talking about the rest of it, we aren’t being thorough. And more than that, we’re forgetting people. People who agonize over their acne or suffer from hair loss or are an unusual height. People with physical disabilities or differences. People who look “normal” to others but find themselves worrying about the characteristics that seem to prevent them from being more attractive. People like me, who have turned to cosmetic surgery when they couldn’t face their own faces in the mirror anymore. Who are we forgetting when we say “body image” but mean “weight”? Everyone who doesn’t fit the very recognizable beauty standard in a million different ways that they are sometimes acutely, painfully aware of, even when weight isn’t an issue for them.

Continue Reading »

I’m doing another giveaway! This one is in honor of the weather turning warm, which I know it will soon, because it has to.

I’m in Hawaii with Bear, on a “babymoon.” A little corny, I know. Planning this trip, I realized that Bear and I have only ever taken one other vacation together that was completely a vacation– not like, a few days somewhere we had to be anyway for his work or to visit relatives. So this is a big deal for us. It is also a big deal for me to be a functioning person again, after three months of severe morning sickness. I feel like I’ve been set free!

At the same time, it feels surreal, being here. Like I’ve stepped into one of those desktop background photos that come with the computer.

I am having trouble processing it, and my mind keeps going, “We should be doing something productive!” and then I remember that actually we can just sit on the beach some more. What a weird thing. And then, when I’m just sitting on the beach for a while, my mind slides into a kind of blank peacefulness, and I can’t quite recall why anyone lives in New York City, so far away from green mountains with waterfalls cutting misty white trails down their flanks. Actually, it seems sort of mysterious why anyone lives anywhere with a winter.

We went hiking at dawn, just because we were feeling awesome. Up this twisting, steep trail made out of slippery rocks that the ancient Hawaiians used because they were apparently fearless and in amazing shape. I am pretty sure my baby is convinced I am the kind of woman who does this kind of thing. On the way up, I narrated for her, in case she was wondering.

“Braving the deadly, jagged face of the most dangerous cliff in the world, your mother continues her record-shattering wilderness trek. It is shaping up to be another epic adventure in a series of death-defying feats of unmatched courage. Your mother, referred to as ‘a superwoman among women’– the New York Times, 2012– and sometimes simply, ‘The coolest person ever,’ has undertaken yet another mission that might just redefine human ability. And your father is pretty cool, too.”

Continue Reading »