Last week was my turn to bring cake.

At my job, you see, everyone in the Finance and Human Resources departments puts their names and birthdates on a list. Whenever someone has a birthday, the person who had the previous birthday brings cake to share, and everyone stands around in the breakroom eating cake off of little paper plates and pestering the birthday boy or girl about what he or she plans to do that evening to celebrate the prolonging of his or her existence for 365 additional days. Lame jokes are made about diets. Additional japery is made if an age has been reached that ends in zero.

There are about fifteen people on the list. To clarify: there are fourteen women on the list, and me. This sort of thing seems to occur frequently in my life. Your cooperation in not using this fact as a basis for speculation about my sexual orientation is appreciated.

Anyway, my birthday was earlier this month, so last week it was my turn to bring cake for the next person on the list. I decided to bring cheesecake -- homemade cheesecake. So I dropped twenty-five dollars on ingredients and went over to G-Dog's place, where I spent several hours abusing his girlfriend's KitchenAid mixer, grating lemon peel, packing cookie crumbs mixed with melted butter into springform pans, fretting over whether the cakes were still raw in the middle, fretting still more over whether the cakes were overdone, and washing dishes.

I should point out that this was completely unnecessary. Most people take the safe 'n' easy route here and bring cakes from Safeway, (accompanied always by the stale wisecrack, "I was up all night baking this!"); or pies from Country Kitchen; or, on my birthday, cupcakes from Cakes by Karen. The one or two women who bring homemade cakes are the grandmotherly sort who, one suspects, can simply summon baked goods into being by using ancient spells and incantations.

On Monday afternoon I unveiled my handiwork: a chocolate-chip cheesecake and a raspberry swirl cheesecake, both with an Oreo crust. The Finance and Human Resources departments broke into ooohs and aaahs of varying types and degrees:

"Wow -- that looks homemade."

"This looks really good."

"Oh, Kilgore, this is really rich!"

"This is so good."

"I can't believe you made this, Kilgore. Did your mother teach you how to bake?"

And so on. I should have been pleased by the praise, of course, but in fact the compliments left me feeling self-conscious and strangely isolated. I was pretty sure that I had overdone it, as if I had worn a tuxedo to a frathouse toga party. I had spent more time and money than I could really afford baking cheesecakes in a straightforward attempt to impress my coworkers, and now they were impressed, and all I had gotten out of it was a heaping helping of anxiety with a side of disappointment, hold the satisfaction.

Right now you are pursing your lips in a wry smile. "You were trying to impress your coworkers?" you are saying. "Are you certain this wasn't a transparent attempt to impress a certain coworker, on whom you have had a desperate, pathetic crush for nearly two years now? Perhaps your lack of satisfaction from this episode stems from her failure to give you anything more than a standard-issue smile and a 'This is good, Kilgore.' Disappointment is a function of expectations, you know. What were you expecting, fellatio?"

Fuck you.

+posted by Lawrence @ 1/25/2004 12:35:00 PM