Rejected by Brevity, accepted by Thought Catalog, and yes, I'm a fucking snob: "What is Kale?"

So I was doing this thing that I thought was semi-productive by blogging my rejections from journal-I-really-really-wanted-to-prove-something-to-myself-by-being-published-in Brevity, "Wannabe Housewife" and "Pill Popper." Then I realized even more productive would be to...send them somewhere else. Somewhere that doesn't even charge a fee! That even has cache. Of course I still want to be published in Brevity but I also have come to accept that that's highly unlikely and I am okay with that. I embrace my lack of whatever it is and I am now coming out as a snob in "What is Kale?" It was a snobby reject kind of day and yet I feel happy. Imagine that. Thanks, Thought Catalog! You rock.

Cupcakes and toner and writing goals and belated sex diaries links

Crazy busy these days but you can always keep up with me at Cupcakes Take the Cake, and on Twitter and Tumblr. If Blogger worked on the iPhone...well, who knows? I'm not holding my breath.

I found cupcakes at Sweet (see below and stay tuned to CTTC for a review) this weekend in Cambridge and Boston. And at Lush, where I got the incredible toner you see below; I guess by now I expect, somewhat, to turn around in a store and see cupcakes but it's still a bit surprising, like they are following me or something. I am normally a take-it-or-leave-it toner girl, but my skin is really dry and this feels super refreshing. One of my will-finally-feel-like-a-real-writer goals is to break into the journal Brevity, where all the cool kids are published. It's, perhaps, a slightly petty goal, but fuck it: I'm petty. Full disclosure. I've also decided that in light of last week's awfulness, I'm gonna write whatever the fuck I want, and if you don't like it, I really don't care. That might sound bitchy but it's either that or carry around so many fears way heavier than my bags will ever be. I'm so over that. I'm also planning to submit to Salon's excellent Mortifying Disclosures section, where Lena Chen wrote "I was the Harvard harlot" and Taffy Brodesser-Akner, who I can't believe I haven't been keeping up with (Google News alert was immediately activated after a search of her, who I remember from back in her Mediabistro days, and her excellent essays, who wrote, "Tales of a recovering blabbermouth."

And I owe you a post highlighting the individual sex diaries, but I'd love for you to click on over and check them out (one is coming today, in lieu of yesterday). Some I personally relate to more than others, but they are always an interesting look at someone's sex life in an unfiltered way that stirs up discussion. Working on them has made me realize how rarely many of us get to have those discussions. I'm lucky in that I have them with my close friends and once in a while with strangers, but I too have plenty of things I feel fearful or ashamed of or confused about regarding my sexuality. I'm excited to return to writing fiction after a way-too-long-lazy-loser hiatus. I feel plenty ashamed about that and am hoping this is a productive week; it better be with two books do and submissions flooding in!

The sex diaries run every Monday and I'm the editor and the info is at the bottom of the diary but if you know a New Yorker bold enough to anonymously document their sex life for a week (and get paid for it), have them email me at sexdiaries at nymag.com with their basic story.

Rejected from Brevity: "Pill Popper"

Here is rejection number 2 from Brevity, the second in a making-lemons-from-lemonade blog series I'm apparently doing until I learn to write better. Trust me, I am gonna keep submitting. I know it doesn't pay; in fact, it costs $3 to submit, but if it kills me, I am going to crack this market. My pride is at stake here. And yes, it's a good opportunity to work on myself, work on my writing, improve, blah blah blah. I know that, but right now, I just want a yes. That is my truth; maybe I'll write about it in my shame essay (for a 2012 anthology I'm SO excited about, more on that, uhh...in 2012). Lately I've been so hellaciously slow and I need to step it way the hell up. That was my little don't-fuck-up pep talk to myself. 750 words: on it. Must brainstorm ASAP.

Pill Popper
by Rachel Kramer Bussel

I open my brown suede purse and there, nestled amid the various items that add up to twenty pounds when I hoist it over my shoulder, is a baggie containing four pills. The baggie is clear, pills are white and orange, and, when they catch my eye right, seem to match my multicolor heart-covered iPhone case.

They look pristine, shiny, bright, like medicine, even. They are medicine, for my friend with the prescription, anyway. She had to stop taking them and offered me some and I took them, even though I promptly forgot what they are called (I texted her to ask: Vyvanse). They sound like just what I need: a way out of the hell that is a blank page, a blank mind, or worse, a scattered one, bouncing from website to website until I fear I’m testing my browser’s capacity to keep opening them.

The pills are so small, seemingly delicate, even though they feel like hard plastic. I can rotate them, unscrew the orange and the white to reveal a substance that looks like a cross between baking powder and sprinkles. They have writing on them, in this case, numbers and letters: S489 and 30 mg. But I wonder what else they might contain, where some mad scientist to personalize them just for me. “Courage,” perhaps. “FML.” “Get over yourself.” I imagine every self-help mantra I’ve ever wished upon inscribed in the tiniest of fonts with words that would dissolve on my tongue, work their way into my bloodstream.

I know, though, that words are limited. I have one, “open,” inked in purple on my back. It’s beautiful, my tattoo, and sometimes, when I slow down enough to reach behind me and stretch for it, I will walk my fingers along where I think its loops exist, let those four letters talk to me, tell me the message I thought so important I needed a permanent reminder. Yet that one word did not magically transform me from cynical to sunny in the half an hour it took to get it etched onto my body. I got it precisely because staying open-minded, privileging optimism over my innate pessimism, is the harder path to walk down.

As I contemplate whether I will take the first of the four pills, I know what I wish they could give me: freedom. Though I’ve never taken pills recreationally before, I know I’d take as many as I could acquire if they were guaranteed to give me what feels missing in this moment. Right now, it’s a plan--for my overdue novel, for my messy apartment, for having children. If I had instructions, guidelines, a map to follow like one does a recipe, I’d feel safer, saner. I’d know that even when a day or week or month or year is hard, there is a logical next step, a way out of here and into there. Obviously, that is a lot to ask of thirty milligrams of anything, and yet I want to ask. “It never hurts to ask”--isn’t that conventional wisdom, or perhaps just a cliché, right up there with “There are no stupid questions?”

I like the idea of talking to the pills; maybe if I were a different type of person, I’d be more into talking to G-d. I still spell those three letters like that, with the hyphen I learned in Hebrew school, even though that entity, whoever he/she is (or isn’t), is not on my top 5 list of non-humans I want to question. I also talk to my Hello Kitty pillow, ask her things that even if she did have a mouth she surely couldn’t answer. Sometimes, I’ve discovered, it’s truly better not to ask.

Ultimately, whether I swallow the pills or not, whether they help guide and focus me or not, there will still be questions, many of them so big and overwhelming I half wish for a pill to make me the kind of person who doesn’t have questions, ever, who’s accepting, accommodating, easy. Or maybe one that could talk back, respond, even if I didn’t like its answers. If that were ever invented, I’d be big pharma’s bitch in a heartbeat. Until then (or I find that personal mad scientist), I’ll have to write the words I want to swallow to make them part of me, make them real. That’s nowhere near as easy as simply opening my mouth, but maybe the long way out is the ultimate freedom, the mythical shortcut simply a mirage.

Rejected by Brevity: "Wannabe Housewife"

I still have a very love/hate relationship with posting personal, revealing things here, but if I'm ever going to be a writer (I guess I already am, but I mean, in a bigger, better way), I have to stop caring about the judgments. So I submitted this to the journal Brevity, a venue I'm determined to crack and learn how to write succinct essays. It got rejected, but since it's set in LA, on the trip before the last one, I thought I might share it here. I didn't go back and re-edit it for this blog, or even reread it. I am grateful for the rejection for forcing me to study and analyze the writing there and try to come up with something that will work. I have a few essays and stories lurking on the edges of my mind.

I will say I spent so much of last year lamenting missing people, lamenting the things I did wrong in so many relationships. I think there is a value in figuring out where I can be a better person, where I've hurt people, but I also think there's a way that can become an endless loop that just makes you feel awful. So I was trying to capture a moment I still remember so well - I wrote my tattoo essay in that hotel room - where I was really happy and hopeful. And I still am, I just am trying not to focus all that hopefulness outside of me and onto other people, and onto the parts of my life I can control and have a say in.

California is such a weird state for me; the Bay Area is like the ex capital for me (more on that later, but let's just say, I'm so glad I'm single), and weird things happen to me in Los Angeles. Hopefully not this time around!

Wannabe Housewife
by Rachel Kramer Bussel


I’m shopping at a Vons at a strip mall in Burbank, California. It’s the middle of the day, and we’re in the middle of a heat wave, the kind where simply crossing the street makes you forget everything you ever liked about the sun and think of it as an evil force you must escape from by any means necessary. In this case, that means a grocery store, plus, I need water. Everything about this is surreal; I live in Brooklyn, I have a 9-to-5 job. Most salient, though, is the fact that I don’t cook, yet suddenly, surrounded by endless aisles of foods I didn’t even know existed, along with some I did, I have this urge to cook⎯not for me, but for him, the boy who’s hotel room I’m borrowing for the day.

I say boy but really he’s a man, of course, but I like saying boy. His hands remind me of a boy’s, small and soft and sweet, unlike the rest of him. He can be sweet, but he can also be tough, prickly, hard to read. Even though he has one of the biggest penises I’ve ever seen, his hands are my favorite part of his body. I held one in mine as we fell asleep the night before in the giant hotel bed, the best kind.

As I stroll past the industrial size packages of beef jerky, I start to think about what he might want to eat, what might be helpful after a long day. I start to imagine myself rushing home to him with groceries, spending the day in an apron, in a kitchen. Not a specific kitchen, not his, or mine, but a fantasy one, in a big suburban house, not either of our Brooklyn kitchens.

Maybe because I’ve never spent a day, or even a night, whipping myself into a frenzy to cook anything, I find this image sexy. I like the idea of him off working and me home, alternating writing and cooking as seamlessly as one might cracking one egg, then moving on to the next⎯if one were good at cracking eggs.

Even though I’m going back home tonight, I say yes when asked if I want a Vons club card. You never know; maybe I’ll be back, right here, in this very same strip mall. Maybe I’ll even be staying with him.

I wind up buying the giant bag of beef jerky for myself, and a gallon of water for him. It’s hot out there, even though we’re in a luxury hotel. I don’t want him to get dehydrated.

We don’t have that kind of relationship, one where we worry about each other’s health, at least, not officially. I feel like such a girl, but, well, I am one, even at 34; maybe I’ll always be. I want to be the girl to his boy, no matter how many women’s studies classes I took deconstructing those notions. I want him to want me to feed him, comfort him, love him. That is what Vons makes me think about, when I’m not marveling over things like s’mores Goldfish crackers and Scrabble Junior™ Cheez-It®s, and wondering when the last time I actually shopped in a supermarket was.

Later that night, on my way to the airport, I ask the cab to drop me off. I was given five sandwiches for free, and, while delicious, even I can only eat so many spicy cold cuts. I’ve saved the spiciest one for him. This is my version of being a housewife; I rush out of the cab and tell the clerk his name and room number. I’ve scrawled my name on the label so he knows who it’s from, texting him to let him know I’m dropping something off. I leave as the clerk is picking up the phone to dial, slipping into the backseat, thankful we’re mere minutes from the airport.

I never hear back from him as to whether he got the sandwich, whether he liked it, and I’m too prideful to ask. “Maybe he never got it,” a friend suggests, and I picture the clerk, who’d seemed kind and professional, putting the phone down the moment I’d departed and helping himself to the soppressata.

I don’t ask in part because I don’t want to ruin the fantasy, to release myself from all I’ve invested in that sandwich. I still don’t know how to cook, despite an hour in the air-conditioned grocery store. Maybe it’s time I learn.