Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Easy Bake, Easy Break

The other night I was sitting on the metro after an hour of zumba (another First!) following a night of yoga (I had to leave halfway through), when I found myself sitting in a near empty car with four teenagers, two girls and two boys. The girls were American, but the boys turned out to be foreign exchange students, one from Russia, one from...possibly also Russia, but he sounded different. Maybe Nordic. At one point in their conversation about America, Easy Bake Ovens came up and one girl found herself in the position of having to explain the concept to someone who had never heard mention of such a thing.
"It's this oven....box...plastic box, and inside is a light bulb and you have packets of powder that you mix with water and you put them in little pans and you put the pans in the...oven, and you cook them...the light bulb inside bakes them...and...stuff."
Very accurate, but the exchange students were baffled. It really is a baffling concept. and it brought me back to a tumultuous time in my childhood....

The year was 1993, the year after my new sister was born, a year I was spending trying out new life choices and career ideas, the year after I realized I would never be a veterinarian after all.  I was looking for a niche, and at some point I realized that this, for me, was baking. I was going to be amazing at baking. But I wasn't allowed to touch the stove, or the oven, or really even the microwave.  This was when the Easy Bake Oven appeared on the periphery of my awareness. It was the solution to everything--an oven I would be allowed to touch, with items that were easy to bake (even then, in the throes of my baking phase, I think I knew deep in my core that at my center I was lazy and filled with hate for food-making) and looked AMAZING on the television.  Everyone was SO HAPPY eating these very small and fantastically decorated cakes.  If only I could make my parents very small cakes they would be proud of me! And then I could eat cake whenever I wanted!

I knew I had to have one.
I went to my parents, who, at the time, were still struggling with the aftermath of both having only just finished their PhDs and needing to pay everything off, having bought their very first house and having just borne a second child....so they were not super into the idea of buying me what they referred to as "stupid crap" for the astronomical price of 29.99. 
They said, "Danielle, if you want that stupid thing, you can save your money and buy it for yourself."
In 1993, to a girl with a 25 cent allowance per week and who had already started displaying what would turn out to be a life long spending-in-the-search-for-immediate-gratification problem, $29.99 sounded  back then more or less what $100,000 sounds like to me right now. Quite out of reach.
I was a dreamer, though, and once I had something like that in my head, it was impossible to shake. So for exactly one year, I saved every single cent of my allowance, conned my parents out of quarters for picking up sticks and leaves, hoarded my birthday money, and I seriously wouldn't have put it past myself to start stealing nickels from my 2 year old sister towards the end.
I clawed my way up to $30 and when I finally had it triumphant in my neon green plastic wallet, my mother agreed to take me to Toys R Us, where I bought my long awaited prize and learned some valuable lessons about what it feels like to work towards something and achieve your goals.
For a few amazing weeks, I baked many tiny cakes and covered them in sprinkles and fed all of them to my parents. By which I mean my father, who told me they were indeed the most incredible desserts he had ever come across in his years of cake eating. I could not have been happier.

Then my grandparents came to visit, and my grandmother, in an attempt to bond with me I imagine, wanted to play with me and my Easy Bake Oven and managed to melt the plastic panhandle right in the center of my oven, jamming up the entire thing and destroying it beyond repair.
I learned a valuable lesson about what it feels like to work towards something and achieve your goals and then have every moment of sweat and toil and despair thrown back at you in a feeling much like when someone throws a snowball at you and you discover the snowball had a rock inside, by using your deductive reasoning and your face.

It was a bitter, bitter blow, but I was a happy well raised child so I knew that justice would be done, everything would be righted, because no one could let such an atrocity actually take place and that my parents would buy me another one because they knew how hard I had worked, how much it had meant to me, and how unfair it would be to let my hard work go to waste. The world wasn't LIKE that. Right?
VALUABLE LESSONS WERE BEING LEARNED ALL OVER THE PLACE because no one replaced my Easy Bake Oven. No one. Not my grandmother, not my parents, and not even God. It was out of the question that I buy myself a new one, because coming up with ANOTHER $29.99 was not going to be possible. I'd lost everything. EVERYTHING.
So, I did the only thing I could do.
For THIRTEEN YEARS I brought up my Easy Bake Oven disaster at least three times a week to my parents, to my parents' friends, to our neighbors, to all of my friends, to everyone and anyone I met, I would tell them the story of heartbreak and injustice and my mother would roll her eyes and my father would not pay any attention and my sister would tell me to get over it.

But I would not get over it!!! FOR THIRTEEN YEARS.
Until one day, when I was 24 years old and living with my parents as everyone had expected, I came home annoyed at things from work and started to stomp up the stairs when I tripped over a large box.
"GODDAMN IT!" I said and glared down at the box and realized.....
"A MOTHER******* EASY BAKE OVEN??????!!!!"
My mother came out of the kitchen. "I was hoping now you'd shut up about the Easy Bake Oven."
THE LIFE LESSONS CONTINUED ALL OVER THE PLACE! It turns out, if you whine and complain for MORE THAN A DECADE and annoy EVERYONE YOU LOVE, eventually you get what you deserve!!

It was a joyous moment where the entire world righted.
I immediately baked a very small yellow cake and covered in sprinkles and took it with overflowing joy to my father, who was sitting in the computer room programming things with names like routers and nets.
"DAD DAD DAD DAD LOOK WHAT I MADE YOU!! A TINY CAKE! JUST LIKE YOU LOVE!"
My father visibly turned ashen and scooted his wheeled chair away from me. "OH NO. NO NO NO NO. NO. Please do not do this to me. I cannot eat that."
"What? But you LOVED my tiny yellow sprinkle cakes!"
"No, Danielle. I loved you.  Those cakes are disgusting. Truly disgusting. They are possibly the worst tasting things in the world."
"That is ridiculous," I said. "I ate them too and I remember they were amazing. Watch." I took a forkfull of my tiny yellow cake. "MY GOD," I said, choking on horror, "THIS IS THE MOST DISGUSTING THING I HAVE EVER EATEN."
"Yes," said my father.
I started to see why my parents did not buy me a replacement when I was 9.
So I guess the final lesson of the Easy Bake Oven is, sometimes, even if you can't see it, terrible events happen for a reason. The waxy death of my Easy Bake Oven may have broken my 9 year old heart, but it surely saved my parents'.  And because they were not forced to eat tiny cakes cooked by light bulb for more than a few weeks, they didn't grow to resent and hate me and so my childhood continued on, more or less happy.
To this day, every time I see $30 in my wallet (which is most days, because I'm a baller--and thanks to Rachael I know what that word means), I think about how I could buy myself an Easy Bake Oven any time I want. And that feeling gives me confidence and power. Easy 

Monday, August 12, 2013

Internet Strangers

We got The Internet when I was twelve years old. It came on a gigantic square computer and it made all the exciting beeping sounds. AOL was Supreme Ruler, and chatrooms were the thing to do if you were young and bored and left in the house for a few hours with your 1 year old sister who would spend those hours trying to eat the ear off a stuffed rabbit.
"DO NOT TALK TO INTERNET STRANGERS," cautioned my parents, 80 times a day for 3-4 years of my life. "There are some terrible people out there," said my father. "40 year old men masquerading as 15 year old boys will lure you into coffee shops, kidnap you in a van, rape you,  murder you, hack off your limbs and store your body in pieces in a freezer in their basements," said my mother. "Or they will show you photographs of their penises," said the world in general. I was given the general understanding that pretty much every middle aged man in the world was on the internet pretending to be a 15 year old boy, just waiting to show off a a photo of his genitals.
At 27, having now seen more photographs of penises than necessary, I do wonder how on Earth anyone expects those to lure any young girl anywhere. But parents were worried.
"DO NOT LOG INTO INTERNET CHATROOMS!" They would repeat at intervals. "INTERNET STRANGERS ABOUND. THEY WILL TELL YOU THEY ARE 15 YEAR OLD BOYS."

The very first thing I did when I was left alone with the internet was take the 20 minutes to dial up AOL and log directly into chatrooms where I soon met someone who told me he was a 15 year old boy.
This is it! I thought. What intrigue! We discussed all kinds of things, our little sisters, our schools, our interests, and eventually, our travels. I enjoyed talking to this "kid" whose screen name is long forgotten, though I'm sure it was terrific.  I was NiteshadeD. Or maybe Juniper25. Names fraught with meaning from fantasy novels which made me pretty awesome.

In any case, we were probably talking every few days for about two weeks, for an hour or two at a time and I felt dangerous, living life on the edge, entering a tangled web of lies. I obviously had no intention of ever meeting this potential penis photographer, but the rebellion made me feel interesting and exciting. And finally, one day, it happened for me.
"my famly took a trip 2 ireland last summer that was definitaly the most beautiful place ive ever been," he wrote me. Middle aged internet predators can't be expected to have much care for spelling or capitalization. 
"I've never been to Ireland," I wrote back. 
"ill send u a pic," he wrote, and started to load a picture.
IT'S HAPPENING! I thought. I WILL EXPOSE HIM FOR THE MIDDLE AGED INTERNET GIRLSTALKER HE IS! I WILL HAVE THE BEST STORIES AT SCHOOL TOMORROW.
But what ACTUALLY loaded on the screen was a photo of a 15 year old boy with a red face next to a little sister in what I can now tell you did indeed look exactly like Ireland.
He clearly was just a 15 year old boy with no sketchy motives and I lost interest and that was the end of our internet relationship.
I had completely forgotten about this until a recent conversation with my mother.
"You need to sign up for JDate. Your father and I agree. Your grandmother too. We'll pay for it. You need to do this. This is where everyone finds people."
"What if....no."
"Yes. I will give you my credit card."
"How about....no."
"Yes. This is happening."
"I've been down this road.  There are WEIRDOS on the internet. You have no idea."
"There are plenty of nice men on the internet! My friend's husband's sister's second oldest daughter met her fiance on this site! So did....all of these other people I've heard of."
"There are not as many nice men on the internet as you think. They all just send me photos of their penises."
"Oh Danielle, what? You are probably putting something weird in your profile information. You always attract the crazies. There are plenty of nice men on there, all the other women see to find them."
"You say that because you're not the one with the inbox filled with really strange sexual propositions."
"You just need to revise your profile. I'll take a look."
So basically my parents have gone from NEVER TALK TO INTERNET STRANGERS EVER to WE DEMAND THAT YOU TALK TO INTERNET STRANGERS AND WE WILL EVEN PAY FOR IT. And I have gone from never receiving any sketchy photos to finding nothing but.
This is growing up.  What was once new and exciting and edgy is now old and dull and painful.