Cake Made Me Question My Existence

Growing up, I was always puzzled when people would say that someone wanted to “have their cake and eat it, too.” It just seemed like one of those duh statements. Who in their right mind would have cake and not want to eat it? I guess if you were a diabetic, or had a gluten allergy, or if it was a cake made out of crap, then no. You’re right. You should not eat that cake that you have. But wanting to eat the cake that you have seemed so logical to me that for the longest time I thought people used this saying when they wanted to compliment someone. They were saying that these people who have their cake and eat it too were the smartest people around.

It did confuse me a little bit because most people seemed to use a negative tone when they said this, and I couldn’t really figure out why someone would be upset with this cake-eating person for doing what seemed to make sense. I guess I assumed that the people who used this saying were just jealous because they didn’t have any cake at that particular time or place. Or maybe they were jealous because they didn’t think they were as smart as this other person, or maybe when they had cake, they were never quite sure what to do with it? Or maybe they were jealous of this voracious-cake-eater because they ate all the cake they wanted with a Devil-may-care attitude and you know they never gained a pound. Either way, I thought that this cryptic saying meant that a person was completely logical. I thought it was a weird compliment.

So you can imagine my embarrassment when one of my high school students asked me what that saying meant. I confidently explained what I perceived the saying to mean. Within seconds I was corrected by about twenty 17 year old students who just realized that their English teacher was a part-time idiot. I started to argue, but I figured if that many of them thought I was wrong, than I probably was. Plus, it made sense...kind of. It meant that a person wanted to eat their cake and then have more left over to eat again later. I Googled it for confirmation, and sure enough, I was wrong. For 27 years.

You’d think that I’d just accept this as another one of those embarrassing things that I do only a daily or weekly basis. It’s not that much different from pronouncing the word debris as if the ‘s’ weren’t silent until my sophomore year of college. Or my ability to forget to put pants on before going in public...on numerous occassions. But let me remind you of my tendency to overanalyze everything until it hurts.

This small misunderstanding got me thinking about the idea of perception, and how vulnerable it can make us. Every day I lean upon my perception of the world; it basically dictates all of my decisions in some way. My perception of the weather affects what I decide to wear. My perception of the purpose and taste of food helps me decide what I should eat for breakfast. My perception of people determines how I communicate with them, and that communication is the basis of my relationships. Perception is responsible for the way we experience the world, and I had just discovered that mine was wrong for 27 years. Sure it was about something trivial, but it made me stop and wonder what else could I be wrong about? I only have this one perspective that I can see the world through, so there are so many things I could be wrong about and I might never know! (Suddenly my obsession with reading makes a little more sense).

When I was kid, I used to wonder how we knew something was a certain color…In elementary school we learn that apples and stop signs are red, grass and broccoli are green, the sky and oceans are blue. But when I look at an apple that is red, how do I know I’m seeing red the same way as everyone else? What if my entire color scheme of the world is completely different from someone else’s? I’d never actually know because I can never experience the world through someone else’s physical senses, even if they communicate what they perceive through language. I share the same language with many people, but our physical perceptions can never truly and directly be shared.

This idea of perception gets more complicated once you move past experiencing life with your five physical senses. When abstract thinking hits you and complicates your perception (while enriching it simultaneously), you start to realize that things can have more than just a taste, sound, touch, smell, or image. Things have meanings behind them that can’t be described or understood as easily as you could explain how they taste or what they sound like. And this is where perception amazes me in one of those "when I think about it, it keeps me up late at night and makes me feel small in that Stephen-Hawking-just-how-big-is-the-universe-and-what-is-string-theory-really" kind of way. There are over 6 billion people in our world, which means there are over 6 billion different perceptions of that same, exact world. So every day, 6 billion or so people look at and listen to the same world through 12 billion different eyes and ears (give or take a few), and create thoughts in 6 billion different brains, and interpret what is happening around them in 6 billion different ways. How do we know if our perceptions are right or wrong? Most of our perceptions remain solidly in our brains as thoughts, and if we never talk about or reflect upon them with other people, how will we ever know? (And suddenly I understand why I am also obsessed with what communication is and what it does).

Perception affects me the most when it comes to my relationships with people and how I communicate with them. If I perceive that someone doesn’t like me, I avoid communication or I communicate defensively. If I perceive that someone enjoys or values me, I seek out communication with them and I feel energized by that exchange. But how do I know that I am right? This is the thought that makes me feel vulnerable and shy. How do I know that I’m perceiving my interactions with people correctly? They might just be another 's' that is supposed to be silent, or a strange idiom that I misinterpret for 27 years.

It’s likely that I will lose sleep over this…