Chocolate cake! (Um, & spite, indifference, faith)

The city buses started running before noon, so bink and I could meet up at The French Bakery after all. She walked and I bused.
It's a perfect day---snow mounds like meringue, blindingly bright sunshine, gotta wear your sunglasses--temps in the 20s, and the bonhomie that the city feels when residents get snow dumped on them.

On her way, bink passed a woman trying to dig her car out from a snow bank. 
She said, "I'm from California, I only have a piece of cardboard!"
Not sufficient. Snow is as heavy as water (being, as it is, water). But the woman was laughing.

I'd decided I can have bakery on my birthday, if it's worthy.
The girlettes insisted that birthday cake should be a slice of round cake:
"It must be round."

And there is was in the bakery case--a slice of chocolate almond cake! bink bought it for me.
Eeble tests the density, below.
"It is correct, this fork will not move."

It was extremely satisfying.

Girlette Kia Sorrento, above in red sweater, is holding a glass mosaic coaster of a spaceship that bink made me. L'astronave, piloted by Red Hair Girl, the girlette who left a few years ago. She's become a space pilot!
____________

I was happy to hear from Marz this morning, calling to wish me a happy birthday. She's doing such interesting work in school--I love to hear about it.
This week is midterms, and she's working on a paper analyzing a Soviet propaganda poster of Stalin.

A specialist on the gulags talked to her Soviet class last week.
He told them that spite was an emotion that helped one survive.
Spite!
Why is this weirdly satisfying to know?
Because it is free of romanticization?

Maybe this sounds contradictory because I run around posting Inspirational Prints, but I despise sentimentality.
"We are made of stars" may sound cute, but it's hard science.
Stars look nice from here, but stars are not nice.
As Neil deGrasse Tyson says,
"Earth wants to kill you. That’s one of the things you need to know."

Ah--here I found the source the gulag expert was referencing:
A list with 46 items,"What I Saw and Learned in the Kolyma Camps", by Varlam Shalamov, a Russian writer and gulag survivor who spent much of 1937–1951 in the most extreme of the forced-labor camps in the Arctic––Kolyma."

16. I learned that one can live on spite alone.
17. I learned that one can live on indifference.

Curiously, also:
8. I saw that the only group that retained a bit of their humanity, despite the starvation and abuse, were the religious, the sectarians, almost all of them — and the majority of the priests.

So--for the sake of survival, take your pick:
 spite, indifference, or faith.

And listen to this! This is for us:
6. I learned that Stalin's "triumphs" were possible because he slew innocent people:
Had there been an organized movement, even one-tenth in number, but organized, it would have swept Stalin away in two days.

The Guardian says, "Kolyma Tales contains some of the greatest writing to emerge from the gulag."
“Shalamov holds himself in severe check as an artist”, wrote Irving Howe, “he is simply intent, with a grey passion, upon exactitude.”

Shalamov's list was written in 1961.
1961! The year of my birth.
So though it is grim, it is oddly bracing, with a strange message:
If our lives are going well, it's probably because we've been lucky.

I've had a lucky life.
A strange but welcome birthday reminder for this strange time we find ourselves in.
_________________

Now I need a nap in my pink chair, to sleep off the cake in the sun.
Lovely!