cake

Penis Cakes for Everyone!

ME Food stuffs, Overly simple thoughts , , , ,

I’m not sure where the parenting fail actually occurred, but there’s something to be said for a man who emails his daughter and says, “You have to write about the penis cakes.” Interestingly, that was my dad, and it was my mom who actually used the words (in English, even), “Lorca has to get her hands all over this penis cake thing.” Thanks, Mom and Dad. Do you remember those years when I didn’t live at home? When I was busy getting a Master’s degree in English? Just checking.

Yes, my dad sent me a link, presumably because the headline was too enticing for me to pass up. He knew I’d have something to say about this:

Mandatory Penis Cakes For ‘Homosexual Weddings’  (you’re welcome, Dad)

Sadly, “mandatory penis cakes” (while not words that I’ve ever strung together on purpose…in English) is not the worst thing wrong with that article. No, the incorrect use of single quotation marks isn’t the worst problem either, but I applaud you for thinking that. I think it might have been the words, “Orwellian concepts of ‘tolerance’ and ‘inclusiveness’,” in the actual article. Because apparently you’re a commie douche canoe if you think we should support tolerance in this country.

I’m a published author, so I can tell you with total authority that yes, George Orwell’s books 1984 and Animal Farm were totally about penis cakes. You may not realize it–and I’m sure you didn’t realize it in your eleventh grade lit class–but Big Brother was actually a porno baker and Manor Farm was actually the name of a gay night club in Orwell’s home town.

I could be way off base here, but I’m pretty sure that Gov. Brewer vetoing a bill in Arizona is not going to result in the animals overthrowing the farm and then celebrating with a penis cake. I’m also a little saddened that the Tea Party refused to acknowledge the lesbian weddings where they would actually shun all things penis, baked or otherwise, and opt for a vagina cake. There’s that Limbaughian ‘lack of tolerance’ rearing its ugly head.

Even better is the comparison some shitsnacks are making that being forced to bake a penis cake is actually like slavery. I’m gonna have to go all Princess Bride on this article and say, “I do not think that word means what you think it means.” I’m just not seeing the correlation between being shipped on a boat and sold at auction to work in the cotton fields for the rest of your now-short life, and being forced to acknowledge that the people around you are actually people, thereby rewarding them for their human status with cake.

Guess what really should result in mandatory penis cakes? Morons with verbal diarrhea who manage to offend three different groups of people (homosexuals, African-Americans, and cake fans) in one really unthought-out article. I kind of wanted Jan Brewer to veto the bill on the grounds that it was just immoral, but now I hope she did it out of spite.

Happy Birthday, Dammit!

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

I had a birthday recently, and like most of my birthdays, it was a quiet affair once the voices in my head were all silenced with large amounts of Boone’s Farm. My husband was out of town and the tax deductions had school, so I mostly piddled around and worked. Then I decided I needed cake. There’s a really profound metaphor for my life in the fact that the grocery store only had half-cakes for sale.

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But I got into this Facebook argument with someone who wanted to bitch and whine about the fact that I bought myself a cake.

Exhibit A: there’s a metric crap-ton of receipts that prove that I buy myself cake all the time. I mean, like, she-needs-rehab proportions of how often I buy cake.

Exhibit B: it was my birthday and imma havin’ cake.

Exhibit C: it was tasty, even if half of it was already missing when I bought it.

Exhibit D: you’re not the boss of me, don’t tell me about cake!

Exhibit E: Cake! Everybody loves cake! Cakes have layers!

 

Really, this person’s problem was not with the existence of cake or the eating of cake, but with the purchasing of the cake for myself. She seemed to feel that it was someone else’s responsibility to buy me cake, although I did notice that not once during the entire exchange did she offer to do it herself. Apparently, by some definition of being a girl, I was supposed to sit by and wait for someone to buy me cake.

And wait.

And wait.

And be hungry while waiting. And go totally cakeless while I waited.

There are about ninety-three things wrong with her very anti-feminist “someone should buy you cake” concept. While I am in total agreement that there should be legions of people walking behind me holding cakes for me on any given day, I have to argue that in the absence of overthrowing a neighboring government and enslaving their citizens into my own private cake army, I have two choices: not have cake, or have cake.

Not having cake is so unacceptably jacked up an option as to almost make me throw my head back and laugh at her. Having cake is…well…completely logical and the option I went with.

This pretty much boils down to a very important concept of self-love (not that kind of self-love, we’ll talk about that next week). It’s 2013, I’m a grown-up, and I have both keys to a working automobile and a debit card linked to a bank account that actually has money in it thanks to the job I have. I can sit around being sad because it’s my birthday and no one brought over a cake, or I can act like an adult and get myself a cake.

I chose the second choice.

I’ll also have you know that I toyed with the idea of having an inflatable bounce house brought over and erected in my yard, but that was really only a fun passing thought because a) I’ve never had a bounce house for my birthday and b) because the look on my kids’ faces when I bogarted the bounce house and wouldn’t let them in would have been the best birthday present ever. I could just see them fighting to storm my bouncey castle and being horribly confused when my cake army poured boiling tar on them from the ramparts. I giggled over envisioning their pitiful cries as they begged to be allowed in my bounce house only to result in my shouting, “No! This is my bounce house! You will only get a bounce house when you have a college degree and a job to pay for the four-hour rental plus delivery fee!” (Besides being an epic parent fail, I also found out that bouncey castle rentals are $400, and I realized that was a shit load of self-bought cake, so I skipped it.)

People, we’ve got to stop whining about what’s wrong with our lives and do something for ourselves once in a while. Yes, I could have bitched at my husband when he made it home from his business trip at 11pm for not making sure cake magically appeared on my birthday, and yes, I could have moped around the house generally feeling sorry for myself and my lack of cakehood. Or I could get off my ass and buy a cake. Which choice made me happier, and which choice actually resulted in CAKE?

Now, the “Happy Birthday to Me!” icing I decorated it with was actually just a fun, superfluous add-on to make people in my home feel guilty for not having bought me a cake. I said I was a self-sufficient, confident woman…I never said I was a saint.