we'll find a cathedral city

i have a little over three weeks left to go before i fly north, and i've officially started my hunt for a home in new york city. it's something everyone should do once: try to find a decent, affordable place to live in new york. sort through all of the offers to sleep in the living room, or worse, in the same bed. dodge other-shoes-dropping like "railroad apartment," "no window," and "i hope you like cats." often, the craigslist post from your potential roommate will tip you off if this is someone who might end up eating all your food, smoking crack in the living room, or walking in on you in the shower a few too many times to get away with calling it an "accident." you start to get an ear for it.

i suppose this is universal. while i had extraordinary luck in finding a place in melbourne (and a flatmate i would marry), i think we've all experienced at least once the terror of realizing how many headcases are looking for someone to sleep in their spare bedroom.

but i think anyone who's done the apartment hunt in new york can agree that the sheer volume of people, and the general level of insanity present in the city, yields a higher rate of fearing for your life while getting a tour of the place.

to say nothing of the job hunt. while the process of getting employment in melbourne was "let's throw shit on the wall and see what sticks," the process of getting employment in new york is like "let's throw shit in the fan and see what doesn't come back to hit me in the face." i have started tugging at the connections i have in the city, but i haven't quite leapt into the hunt yet. maybe it's denial, but i keep expecting, perhaps after all the bullshit in finding a job here, that i'll get back to new york and ease right into something in the first week. i'd like to think life will reward me at some point for my troubles.

obviously, i am looking ahead and always keeping at least one eye on post-february 15th life, but mostly because i'm not doing a hell of a lot here. and that's kind of by choice. i could have kept working a few more weeks. i could be out absorbing everything there is to absorb in melbourne, so i can toddle home overstuffed with stories and pictures and experiences.

but for once, i want to be allowed to do absolutely nothing. i'd like to think that's a genuine feeling, and not just laziness or some sort of strange depression about being so groundless and purposeless setting in. essentially, i think i'm relaxing, but the more i think about it, the more i worry that i'm not relaxing. and i think it's quite obvious the snake begins to devour its tail here.

i go to the gym and go to yoga and go to the beach and read and i think i will be writing more, i'm getting my inspiration back. i finished "prozac nation" and found it entirely depressing. i'm going away for the weekend, where i have no intention of doing much of anything other than more reading, sitting on the beach, and not having a single responsibility.

i miss having a life though. i know australia will go down as this experience i didn't appreciate as much as i should have at the time, but to be honest, i don't even think i care anymore. who's to say what i was supposed to do here? when people ask me now why i came to australia, i laugh and say, "oh, i don't know!" and that's that.

you can get caught up in owing people a good story about your life. that dinner party panic of "what will i talk about with strangers?" the truth of the matter is that if you just told people, "i just hung out," they'd accept it. they'd still be a little jealous, because i think we all wonder what it's like to have no accountability in the day to day workings of life. so long as i pay my rent and don't push anyone in front of a bus, i'm basically free to roam. to go from a life in new york where thousands and thousands of dollars in advertising money relied on me getting my shit together every day, to a life where i could lay on my bedroom floor all day and not make a huge dent in the world, is a lucky opportunity really.

but i miss being relied on, to be honest. it's all fine and good to lay on your bedroom floor all day, except it gets incredibly boring. maybe that's my bigger concern. not that i'm not relaxing, but that i'm getting bored of relaxing. you get hungry for a little bit of stress. the only thing i need to do today is go to yoga at 7:45. or maybe 6. that's the big decision i need to make. i should also probably go to the supermarket and do some laundry. i ought to finally get back to work on my play. but it's a quarter to noon on a friday right now, and if instead i thought, "nah, i'm going to youtube movie trailers for three hours and then order chinese food," that would be okay too.

new york would hardly recognize me.

and panel by panel and piece by piece this all fits together but its not what you think

where have i been?

no "new years resolution" post? no reflection on where i was a year ago, as 2007, a year that was the rockiest of roads, finally came to a close? no thoughts on how 2008 had panned out, how it peaked mid-year like a heartbeat after something of an across-the-board flatlining (how wonderfully melodramatic! i'll explain why in a moment) before what was unfortunately a total heart attack in the second half of the year? (really? yeah, maybe a little bit) no thoughts on what 2009 could bring? (because it's gonna be a really interesting year, i can tell you that)

i guess not.

well, to sum it up, i was in new york last year thinking, "i don't know how much more of this i can bear," but with nowhere to go, i just threw myself into my vices and managed to distract myself a little bit longer. this year, i was in australia thinking, "i don't know how much more of this i can bear," and secretly, i knew that in fact i was going somewhere else soon. as for those vices...well, other than a couple civilized glasses of champagne, they were nowhere to be found.

okay, maybe that's not fair to australia. let me cut to the chase, and then explain: i'm leaving. it's official. and as i had flirted with originally, i'll be leaving on february 15th. (i'm very particular about dates.) i know maybe this should be announced with a bit more fanfare, but the fact of the matter is, i'm torn on how i should act about it. to set the record straight, this is not because i can't bear to be in australia anymore. it's the opposite. i want to be back in new york. six of one, half a dozen of the other? not so much.

there's a certain guilt, there's always been a certain guilt, about volleying between australia and new york. when i was leaving last year, i was excited to come over and reconnect with old friends, make new ones, experience a whole other version of my own life, etc. and so forth. but by choosing australia, i was not choosing to stay in new york, to stay with the friends i'd made, the life i'd created, the possibilities of my future there at that time. the day i told my boss i was quitting, i remembered recently, was the same day she was broaching the topic of "where do you want to go from here?" and what my next steps would be in the company. our conversation essentially went like this:

"where do you want to go from here?"
"i'm leaving."
"oh."

and we've been through it all before, the scores of fantastic people i had to say goodbye to, the way the glue in my life had finally dried and everything had really, truly, come together, all the romance of july. going to australia went from the easiest rabbit hole to slip down to a sort of obstacle course to the other side.

so leaving australia means i'm choosing new york again. and i'll admit, i'm entirely excited about going back. going home. i've missed new york since the day i got here, which is like a dirty little secret, i know, but i think you can miss one thing and still experience another fully. but it's hard to be so outwardly excited here, when it feels like you're dumping everyone and saying, "it's not you, it's me. and it's a little bit you. but it's mostly me with you."

anyway, i'm trying to lighten up a little, because i know things can get heavy sometimes on this blog (i have been told directly, this is not just me judging me), but that's been slightly hampered by my latest endeavor in reading, elizabeth wurtzel's "prozac nation," a memoir about, as she puts it, being "young and depressed in america." it's basically like the beginning of "eat, pray, love," where liz gilbert loses her shit over and over and can not pull it together no matter what she does or who she fucks, except, so far, halfway through the book, there is no petition, no food fest in italy, yoga in india, or may-december canoodling with a hot brazilian sugar daddy in bali. the book literally starts with her crying on the bathroom floor, but unlike liz gilbert, she never gets up.

now, those who know me, or even read this blog every once in a while (even just skimming the paragraphs for anything interesting to jump in on) know that i love crying on the bathroom floor, crying in the supermarket, crying on public transportation, crying just about anywhere. not me literally--i can't cry in front of people--but i love reading about it, watching it in a movie, hearing a story about it. i take heart that oscar-nominee julianne moore (the nom gives her street cred, y'know?), in an interview about a classic "women losing their shit" movie, "the hours," said something along the lines of, "i hate having to cry in movies. but i'll run to a movie with women crying in it." amen, jules.

but lizzy wurtzel needs to get her shit together.

i am only halfway through, but this is already the singlemost melodramatic book i have ever read. she doesn't just cry in this book; she wails, sobs, bawls, heaves on the floor in great, aching distress. her sobs can crescendo into screams; in one key scene, a fight with her mother descends into something that would put greek tragedy to shame for not reaching the trenches of despair that these two women hit. the book is crying scene after crying scene, often accompanied by cheap booze, hard drugs, and terrible decisions made the night before, but really, anything can make this girl cry.

it amazes me that anyone would call "eat, pray, love" self-indulgent. liz gilbert may spend night after night crying on the bathroom floor, but she manages to step back and say, "okay, i know, i'm totally losing my shit, it's kind of bananas, but bear with me, okay?" she has a sense of humor about it all. once again, i think she and i are the same woman, because we both have a habit of romanticizing the past, even if it was pretty terrible.

but ms. wurtzel is a mess, and if elizabeth gilbert and i had a tree house, we would not let her in.

the point of all this, other than that i just wanted to talk about "prozac nation" for a while, and will probably continue to do so in future posts, is that i'm making efforts these days to not be that mordant. in fact, that was my new year's resolution, in case you were wondering. it came to me only minutes before midnight, as i sipped champagne and thought, "yeesh, i can't believe i don't have a resolution. not even to lose weight!" i stopped trying to think of one, actually, gave in and thought, "ah, fuck it, i don't need a promise i won't keep." it slid into my mind quite gently, though, and i said, "well, okay, that i could do."

my resolution picked me.

"be happier."

i think going back to new york on february 15th is a big step towards that resolution. i think australia revealed to me to a lot of ways in which i'm not happier, in which i don't pursue my happiness more. of course, these revelations, in and of themselves, were somewhat unhappy, but totally invaluable. michael said recently, "i haven't been keeping up with your blog. it's just been all 'i don't like melbourne' lately." and i thought, "yeesh, maybe, yeah."

well, let it be known, i don't hate melbourne. i just fucking love new york. and when you know you've got true love, you don't let 10,000 measly miles stand in your way of being together. you do what you have to do to be happy.

to be happier.

but you're still the one pool where i'd happily drown

i think maybe a year ago, if i'd found this song, it would have hit every nerve on my body. yet i'm glad i didn't find it until i'd fallen in love with new york and then left it to have an affair with australia.

and i love the title. "new york i love you but you're bringing me down," by lcd soundsystem. don't worry, jay, this isn't another music post, i know how you love to skip them, but i am entirely in love with this song, and the handful of "video tours around midtown" clips on youtube that accompany it, like this one:



it reminds me of the truth, that yes, of course, i do love new york, but like any good marriage, there are days where i don't know how we ended up together. it's not a good relationship if you wonder, "how did we ever become so unhappy in each other's company?" but it's something more entirely to know that, even if you are questioning the entire sociopolitical practice of monogamy, you're in this one together. i think that's what new york and i have together.

i miss the old girl, even if i've never been fond of her times square tourism, or the wet garbage on the subway tracks (why should i care? except that i have to stare at it when waiting for a c train to finally come), or the teeming douchebaggery of the meatpacking district or bleecker st on a friday night. it is what it is, because there's always cedar hill, unlimited mimosas at brunch, the ray's pizza on 8th, and a new issue of "time out" in the mail every wednesday. we have fights, but we never go to bed angry.

back in august, i questioned leaving my good marriage with new york for the one who that wouldn't go away, australia. and as i've started talking about coming back, hopscotching around ideas like, "why did i come to australia?" or "should i have just stayed in new york?" the resounding response from an assortment of supportive friends has been the same, essentially: i came here to find out what could happen.

for the record, despite the life crises that have met me along the way--and maybe this is a speech i should be saving for some post at the end of this chronicle, but it's christmas and it's a time to be grateful--i absolutely had to come to australia. i'm writing this play right now--would i have done this if i stayed in new york? maybe not--and there's this resounding theme of just "sitting with it." i found a lot of ways to avoid my pain in new york, and then i figured out a plan to flush out my pain. but i always had somewhere to go, something to do, some way to tend to whatever wounds.

in australia, with little to no work to distract me, not a whole lot of people to run off with, and a lot less noise to block out the silence, i finally learned how to just sit with everything. to sit in my life and do absolutely nothing about it but let it be.

in australia, i stopped running.

how can i catch up when i don't want to?

in lorrie moore's brilliant collection, "birds of america", a series of stories all about people whose lives have somehow veered off the road, she's got a story called "real estate," about a woman who, regarding the mess she's in, recognizes somehow how funny it is too. maybe i'm not remembering it correctly, i don't have the book with me and can't quote it words for word, except that for the next two and a half pages, she can't help but just laugh. i mean "ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!" over and over, until it looks less like lines of a story and more a brick wall of hysteria. maybe that's the point.

i certainly get it.

now i think i've indulged myself enough in past posts with the dire dramatics, so we're gonna try to not hunker down and sniffle and cry about this. maybe it's the yoga, but i'm not that fussed anymore. you see, for the past few weeks, i was banking on a job that, by all intents and purposes, was perfect. and i had, it seemed, a really good chance of getting it. i put all my energy towards the belief that i could get it, that it was coming my way, that the job was, essentially, mine. these would be the tried and supposedly true tricks of some of those self-help books, once they get around to ideas like "the power of positive thinking" or "the law of attraction." yes, i sort of believe in all that stuff, because it doesn't hurt not to.

i also recently read this book called "the wishing year," only because it vaguely resembled "eat, pray, love." it was, ostensibly, nonfiction chick lit, but that hasn't stopped me in the past. the short of it is this woman decides to turn to wishing and, to whatever extent, greater forces outside of herself, to draw things into her life that had, in the last few years, fallen away or never appeared, for one reason or another. for the most part, i just liked the idea of this working, i liked the possibility of it. i can't entirely shake my skepticism, but "the artist's way" had some basis in these ideas as well, so i had some experience in giving it a go anyway.

lest we forget my petition, which was answered, so i also have some experience in it working.

anyway, one of the points the author made, which sticks with me particularly now as, much of what i, let's say, "wished for," has not really come true, is that when our wishes are not granted, it is often illuminating of what we really want in life. apparently, i didn't really want this job. i hardly wanted to believe that. of course i wanted this job! i wanted the money, so i could take classes and see theatre and travel and...and...

well, so i could stay. so i could make australia "work." (put in quotes because who knows what the hell that means.)

i'd also decided that if i did not get this job, then it was a sign. i do fully believe in getting signs. maybe i'm less of a skeptic than i claim. maybe i just don't want to sound like a total kook. before you know it, i'm running away with a rogue group of crystal therapy practitioners i met at the "mind, body, spirit" festival, to play the triangle in their new age jam band, "amethyst dawn."

i guess i consider these signs to be something of a comfort. no one wants to feel totally untethered in life. that seems to be a great appeal of religion. i totally get that. it's nice to feel like someone's got the map, even if you don't.

i didn't want to show my cards too early about this, because you never know when the universe is going to throw you a bone, and i suppose there are still a few employment leads out there, but the point is, i've thrown in the towel when it comes to actively pursuing a job any better than sumo salad. if some of these other opportunities come through, fantastic. i'll gladly take them. but not for classes, not for traveling, not for much else other than saving.

my heart's not here. it hasn't been for a while. the truth of it is, it really is funny how little has gone according to plan. then again, i never had a plan. i never wanted a plan. i just wanted to figure it out as i go. i think i needed to have that untethered feeling for a while. i remember saying the very first day i got here, "no one's looking for me here. no one has any expectations. i could do anything i want." that freaked me out, and the next few months i spent learning how to live with so few borders.

so that decision i mentioned in the last post is put on slight hold till i find out what's happening with these other opportunities, but if nothing comes of them, i'm buying a plane ticket home. it means i'd be back in the states sometime in early february. this gives ivy (flatmate of dreams) a chance to find a replacement, and me a chance to do a few last things there. it gives me a chance to make peace, much in the way that i did before coming here, so i return home with as little baggage as possible.

it gives me a chance to say goodbye.

so it'll be interesting to see where we go from here. i could come back in a few days with great news, and hopes of returning to new york with a sizable financial shield against the awful job market, or i could come back with a return date and dusted hands.

i'd sigh myself to sleep if it wasn't so fucking funny...

baby, you're sailing away

my body is coated in a sweat like some sort of subhuman slime, dripping into my eyes and hitting my feet with a sort of cartoonish plop. i reach my arms up high over my head, my biceps aching, my triceps tearing, and bend down slowly, vertebrae by vertebrae, watching myself in the mirror until i have no choice but to look down and just keep breathing.

i haven't been this peaceful since some balmy new york night in july, when it seemed everything finally made sense.

ladies and gentleman, meet bikram yoga.

no, this is not something else i signed my life away to at the "mind, body, spirit" festival a few weeks ago. i've actually flirted with the idea for a few years now, romanced by the idea of all that sweating and stretching and finding zen in the third ring of hell. i remember thinking, sometime in ithaca, probably during the nate-fueled nervous breakdown of senior year, that it might be a nice christmas present. that was two years ago, about this time.

now i'm here, and while i won't deny that i was a legitimate mess after nate, i also knew that that was just practice from some greater life crisis, an assembling of tools of tricks and experiences for when it really felt like i was circling the drain.

ladies and gentleman, meet australia.

but this time, i did the yoga. i signed up for an introductory ten days of unlimited use for $19, which i could have easily just spent on a couple vodkas back when drinking seemed like a good idea. i think my ten days end sometime next week, and then i'll probably fork over (on credit, considering my current cash flow situation) another couple hundred for twenty more classes.

i need this class. i need that feeling, after ninety minutes in a room that teeters just barely on becoming unacceptably hot, pushing my body and my mind way past both their respective comfort zones (a theme, really, of my time in australia), of absolute peace, immobilizing calm. by the end of every class, i'm laying down on my towel and mat, drenched through with sweat, staring up at the ceiling, feeling somehow at peace with the heat, with my job situation, with my entire life. last night, i was laying there, thinking, "i could just stay here, and none of it would matter."

but i was really fucking thirsty, so i got up after like five minutes.

i need this kind of, well, therapy, to be honest, because somewhere in the next few days, depending on certain factors, i'm making a pretty big decision. i'm not getting into it here yet, except to say that it's time. once i know, i'll post something about it.

so a few things until then:

tassie was good. of course, i've come to realize that i hate having to tell people about my vacations. jay astutely noticed this when i went to thailand in '06, and admits he still doesn't acually know how it was, because my response was always a weary "oh god, it was fine, i don't feel like talking about it." so tassie: it was fine, the weather was nice, the scenery was pretty, the people were fun, i'm happy to be back in civilization. i know, i'd make the worst travel writer, which isn't good, because i plan on stretching the truth when i return to new york with possibly no relevant job experience since july '08 and say that i've been working on some travel writing project while in australia. (read: i wrote a blog every week about how insane i was going.)

but i promised pictures, so i'll put up a picture or two. or maybe not.

also, i will still be writing up a fine review of that "mind, body, spirit" festival at some point in the near future. i promise to limit the number of references to crying in public to a minimum, only because i didn't.

that might be all i have in me right now. i have to dash to work soon--for two hours. don't even get me started, i'm stressed about it enough as it is and i don't know if my body can handle another night in a row of yoga.

who am i kidding? i'll totally be there.

she never let on how insane it was

i'm leaving for tasmania tomorrow morning, so while i have a few fun stories to tell, they're going to have to wait until i get back. y'know, because i've been updating so feverishly as it is, a few quiet days on old "boy flies into a ditch and lays there for a while" are really going to cramp people's daily reading.

i know this is very "hello, god, are you there? it's me, margaret" but is anyone still reading this? not like my self esteem is relying on an audience, because i'm still going to keep writing; if anything, it's a backlog of material when i finally write my own version of "eat, pray, love." i haven't decided on a title, but for a while, i've been toying with using the expression, "wait, i'm sorry, what?" as the title for something. "i know, right?" is also an option, because i've been accused of saying it far too often here (cue awful impression of me with brutally butchered american accent).

of course, i could just call it "boy flies south".....

brief tangent: i didn't know what i was going to call this blog until i opened up the blogger template and started typing in all the "oz"-related or "traveling to australia"-related things i could think of and seeing if the url's were available. i'd already used one of my other ideas for the last blog (which will continue to remain anonymous, thank you), and my first choice this time was "return to oz," which is also the name of the brilliantly freaky 80s sequel to "the wizard of oz," but that was already taken. i think i also considered "yellow brick road," for like two seconds. "going down under" was probably an option, though awkward to share with mixed company, and a bit too cheeky of a title for a blog that would eventually consist of many posts chronicling life crisis on top of life crisis on top of drinking problem.

anyway, i've realized now that this tangent has no point. i do wonder if i'll keep blogging when i get back to new york, and what will i call it? i've grown attached to getting undressed in front of a partially open window, so to speak.

anyway, anyway, anyway, when i get back, i'll get my cookies together and put together a more picture-heavy post of my tassie adventures (i know how murky it can be to slough through all this text, particularly when it's laced with such despair), plus another fun tale in my employment saga (which, please cross all your crossables, could be taking a turn for the amazing, but i don't want to jinx anything, so just forget i said anything), and finally, a thorough review of my day at the "mind, body, spirit" festival this weekend. i wish i had the guts to bring a camera. but i did grab fistfuls of information packets, gave my contact information out quite liberally (expecting a series of phone calls about life coaching, a 30 day detox program, and a board game that helps make your wishes come true!), and narrowly escaped an induction into a cult at their workshop in conference room b.

it was the best day of my life.

wish me well in tasmania, babies!

oh, sweet sorrow, let's write the book tomorrow

i know, it's been heavy lately.

sorry about that, really. sometimes i think about the blog i wrote during my last trip to australia (which i will not be linking to here, as i'm both sort of ashamed of it and find it terribly incriminating) and it was such a different experience. i've euphemistically described those five and a half months as being something of an "awakening," as in a "sexual awakening." as in i was a total whore, which i'd never even thought i'd be considered even in jest. i remember thinking i'd maybe kiss one boy and ride that high all the way home. i was not entirely inexperienced when i first arrived on these sunburnt shores in 2006. i'd had my heart broken, my virginity taken, my understanding of intimacy and of another person's ability to easily forsake that intimacy revealed to me quite unequivocally.

not that it's all about what we lose or have lost, or what scars we get out of bed with every day (or get into bed with, as is often the case when we, as it's been so eloquently put, try to fuck the pain away). but i had no idea what debauchery i would be getting into when i arrived here the first time. it was, for the most part, a lot of fun. i did, of course, get emotionally involved with a couple people, and there was some drama. i met david here, and at least for those weeks we spent together in sydney, had up until that point, attained something close to ideal. now it seems i hardly recognize those days as happening in my own life.

i had thought, coming back here the second time, that i'd be repeating my ways. or i thought it was possible. granted, i was climbing out of the great chastity belt of 2008--and really, it was so so great--and i felt like, "sure, i could be free-wheeling again in oz, but maybe this time i'll be a bit healthier about it." i think something like a week after i got here, i had already, let's just say, fucked up.

but alas, it's almost the end of november, and i've long since descended from the highs of whoredom and have, quite effortlessly, kept things monogamous.

my therapist in college once that noted, "you live at extremes, 1 or 10, no in between." i don't remember what the context was when she pointed it out, but it ended up being entirely true about something like 98% of my life. like, when it comes to relationships. when i'm single, life's a buffet and i'm stacking plates. but when i'm in a relationship, i won't even look at the restaurant, let alone what's on the menu. we could credit my father for this one--y'know, like the money thing--because of course--and those self-help books i keep flashing under my trenchcoat will back me up here--we're entirely shaped by who raised us. and being raised by a man who wouldn't know monogamy if it came up and proposed to him, i've come to view cheating in any form to be something of a criminal offense.

though let's not beat around the bush: i know what i'm better at, or maybe less afraid of. i didn't have a single "relationship" in new york, though i was rarely not seeing someone, in some capacity, until the chastity belt went on. every guy i met in new york had the shelf life of three hours to a month, i'd say. and did i actually really, genuinely like any of them? i don't remember, and that's probably a sign. i was, let's be honest, in no shape to be anyone's boyfriend in new york. i was more like an amalgamation of alanis morissette songs.

it is incredible how the recipe changes when you add "2 cups of emotional attachment" to the situation. it's like you've been baking the same cake for months and months and months, and then you add this new ingredient, and suddenly, the cake pushes its way out of the oven and it eats you. i've accepted this. i've come to settle down and say, "hey, it's okay. i'm inside a cake."

i know we're not talking about what i'm doing here anymore, but when the madness settles and i don't quite feel like i'm careening through the streets of melbourne on the edge of hysteria every day, i realize that i'm learning a lot. some days, i sigh and think, "good god, i am so tired of feeling so crazy and emotional!" but eventually i realize it's just this crash course in life. i'm learning so much about what i want out of a career, a relationship, a social circle; what i need intellectually, artistically; how incredibly important it is to stay physically healthy in order stay sane; most of all, what kind of fight i have in me.

equally, i'm learning when it's best not to fight, and to just sit. and not run.

who knows, maybe i'll even learn how to find one of those stable numbers between 1 and 10. maybe i could learn how to live at a 6 sometimes.

i could get used to a 6. i could see myself even being entirely monogamous with a 6. y'know, deleting 1 and 10's numbers from my phone, not responding to their emails. when they say, "hey, let's go do something we'll all regret on friday!" i can, "no thanks, i'm seeing 6 these days. we're going to see an art film, then go get sushi and talk about eat, pray, love. have you read it? god, it's totally my life story."

ah, now that's a cake i could get comfortable inside of.