“You smell nice” “I washed my hair for you”

Dear Ladies, Unicorns, and others,

Gosh!  I just realized that I’ve been a jerk and forgot to write all about how that Cherpumple turned out!  I’m a terrible scientist, it’s true.  So, um, yeah, it wound up looking something like this:

So, one thing that I hadn’t bargained on is that my oven is terrible.  It is bad.  It heats unevenly, it is too small, it is all kinds of ungood things.  Because of this, we ran into a small problem with the batter not cooking all the way through.  In and of itself, this is not a huge issue, as god knows gooey cake is good cake.  The problem is that the uncooked batter added a lot of weight to each individual cake layer.  So once they were stacked on top of one another, an event of geological proportions took place, and we all stood around in awe as the Cherpumple collapsed upon itself.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that means we didn’t eat it.  Obviously we ate it.  I had to serve it with a ladle, but dammit, we ate that cake.

We ate that cake so hard.

I’ve been working too hard these days.  I think it’s becoming a problem.  I remember a time, long ago, when it was the weekend and that meant that I didn’t have to do any work.  Now I’m at a point where I am literally on a two-day-workweek schedule – I only have to go to campus Tuesdays, for seminar, and Wednesdays, to teach – but my resultant five day weekend is really more like five days of neverending busywork with not much to show for it.  This seems somehow unfair because I worked really hard to get to the point where I could have five day weekends, didn’t I?  The point was that I’d be able to spend them doing things, like, I don’t know, actually doing things that don’t involve sitting at a computer developing repetitive strain injuries.  I’ve also gotten really bad at feeding myself.  I get home from school and I’m like, oh, I’ll just work on this lesson plan for a half hour and then eat dinner, and suddenly it’s 12:30 at night and I’m eating a tuna sandwich.

I’m also having an identity crisis because I’m teaching the first class that I’ve designed myself, and my personal politics (of the feminist, pinko, commie variety) are front and center, and I feel like I constantly need to justify those politics, for some reason.  Like, I know why it’s important to teach this class about 1960s girl culture.  But I feel that no matter how many times and how many different ways I explain that it’s important, my students are all sitting there thinking “you’re just talking about this stuff because you’re a man-hating feminist and also you don’t know anything about real music, like the White Album or Pet Sounds, or whatever whiny white boy rock we’re deifying today.”  So I have these really great moments where I’m like, “hey, think about it, The Beatles were basically the Jonas Brothers in 1964, so maybe we should stop hatin’ on the tweens?” (only more eloquently, and also with the internal logic of that statement explained) and they seem to get it, but then I go home and I’m filled with self-doubt and I feel like I need to start the next class by explaining that just because this semester we’re learning about things that teenage girls liked doesn’t mean that boys haven’t also made worthwhile contributions to society.  Which is stupid because the entire university is about boys’ contributions to society, but it’s just so normalized and invisible.

But at least somewhere, in the world, there are layer cakes with pies in them.  Also, I want a kitten.

The title of this post is an actual exchange that takes place between Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue in “A Summer Place.” God bless 1959.