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- "The Girl with No Tattoo"
- I can’t speak any non-English languages, knit, ski, scrapbook, or cook. I have no pets. I don’t know how to do drugs. I lost my passport three years ago when I moved into my house and never got it renewed. Video games scare me because they all seem to simulate situations I’d hate to be in, like war or stealing cars. So if I ever lost weight I would also lose my only hobby.
- In the early 1980s, when my family was fixated on the Celtics-Lakers rivalry, I sat in front of the TV with them, thinking Larry Bird was the handsomest man in the world.
- Unlike other athletes, Frisbee people won’t let it go. My theory is that this is because there’s a huge overlap between people who are good at Frisbee and people who do Teach for America. The same instinct to make at-risk kids learn, which I admire so much, becomes deadly when turned on friends trying to relax on a Sunday afternoon in the park. They feel they have to corral me into learning this useless sport. The afternoon becomes “unlocking Mindy’s passion for Frisbee,” instead of letting me lie on the grass reading my chick lit book.
- Morses Pond in Wellesley, MA. I didn’t like Morses Pond because there was no snack bar or gift shop like at Walden Pond. Where it had a significant leg up over Walden was that at least it didn’t have a scary ghost haunting it, which is who I assumed Henry David Thoreau was, and why everyone made such a big deal about him. A few years after I swam there as a kid, they made Morses Pond off-limits to swimmers. Apparently, it was saturated with contaminated soil from an abandoned paint factory. Then, a few years after it was condemned, a rich physician hired a hit man to murder his wife there. This really happened. I know what you’re thinking. Morses Pond? More like Remorses Pond! But now it’s open again.
- At the age of six, the criteria for handsome was, simply: “Is he not related to me?” and “Have I seen him on television?” That was it. By this standard, Larry Bird, Dick Clark, Andy Rooney. All handsome guys.
- It wasn’t until I was sixteen that I even knew marijuana and pot were the same thing. I didn’t even learn this from a cool friend; I gleaned it from a syndicated episode of 21 Jump Street.
- The Cheesecake Factory played a major role in JLMP’s social life. We went there every Friday after school. These were our wild Friday night plans. Remember, this was back in the ’90s, before the only way to be a cool teenager was to have a baby or a reality show (or both). We’d stay for hours chewing on straws and gossiping about boys, and collectively only spend about fifteen dollars on one slice of cheesecake and four Cokes. Then we’d leave and have our regular dinners at our respective homes. Obviously, the waiters loathed us. In a way we were worse than the dine-and-dashers because at least the dine-and-dashers only hit up Cheesecake Factory once and never showed up again. We, on the other hand, thought we were beloved regulars and that people lit up when we walked in. We’re back, Cheesecake Factory! JLMP’s back! Your favorite cool, young people here to jazz up the joint!
- We both lived by a weird code: Mavis and I might be friends on Saturday afternoon, but Friday nights and weekend sleepovers were for JLMP. If it sounds weird and compartmentalized, that’s because it was. But I was used to compartmentalization. My entire teenage life was a highly organized map of activities: twenty minutes to shower and get ready for school, five-minute breakfast, forty-five-minute Latin class to thirty-minute lunch to forty-five-minute jazz band rehearsal, etc. Compartmentalizing friendships did not feel different to me.
- One friend with whom you have a lot in common is better than three with whom you struggle to find things to talk about.
- Jocelyn is willowy and half-Asian, and while fitting the bill technically for a model, has no interest in modeling. She’s just that cool. Me, on the other hand, whenever I lose, like, five pounds, I basically start considering if I should “try out” modeling. When the three of us walked down the street together, I looked like the Indian girl who kept them “real.” I don’t care. After all these years with friends who are five ten or taller, I have come to carry myself with the confidence of a tall person. It’s all in the head. It works out.
- My boss, the script coordinator, greatly disliked me. Not only because I was bad at my job, but because hating everything was one of her personality traits. You know those people who legitimize their sarcastic, negative personalities by saying proudly they are “lifelong New Yorkers”? She was one of those. Her favorite catchphrase was “Are you on crack?” On my last day, she shook my hand limply and said a terse “Bye” without looking away from her J.Crew catalogue.
- I had placed a lot of faith in Woody Allen’s belief that 80 percent of success is just showing up. I said to myself: Are you serious? 80 percent? Sure, I can just show up. Here I am, New York! Give me a job!
- Jocelyn fashioned herself a sort of bohemian-chic burrow out of the last bedroom, which, while it was the only room with true privacy, was also the size of a handicapped bathroom. She installed a twin loft bed and hung a batik tapestry over the lofted area, where she would read books and magazines for hours. Jocelyn is the kind of person who goes into any room, sizes it up, and immediately tries to loft a bed there. To this day, she lives in an apartment with a loft bed.
- This was a good arrangement because Jocelyn has hoarding tendencies, and some degree of containment was crucial. (Hoarding has pejorative connotations now, but you have to understand this was before the show Hoarders depicted hoarders as gruesome loners with psychological problems. Joce is a hoarder of the cheerful, social, Christmas-lights-year-round variety.) Jocelyn would save stacks of six-year-old magazines because there might be a recipe in one of them for jambalaya, which she would need someday if we threw a big Mardi Gras–themed dinner. (This wasn’t crazy, because we would occasionally do things like that.) People who visited our apartment and saw her curtained lair probably assumed Jocelyn was a gypsy we had inherited as a condition of getting the apartment.
- In the summer, feral cats in heat clung onto the screens of our living room, meowing mournfully until we threw a glass of water at them. When it got cold, the roaches migrated in and set up homes in every drain. Sometimes, when I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, I would feel a disgusting crackly squelch under my foot, and I’d know I’d have to rinse off a roach from my heel. That was our apartment. We took the bad with the pretty good.
- Everything I learned about trying to get hired as a comedy writer came from the Film and Television section of the Lincoln Center Barnes and Noble. I didn’t have the money to buy many of the books there, so I spent hours sitting in the aisle, copying down sections in a loose-leaf notebook. I was not the worst offender. There were aspiring screenwriters sprawled all over the place there. They’d nurse a single coffee for hours. One kid I saw there all the time frequently brought a large pizza with him and ate the entire thing slowly while handwriting inquiry letters to literary agencies. (footnote: It is interesting to note that this Barnes and Noble no longer exists—perhaps no one was buying books there?)
- They were so happy I made it out there? Why not just hand me my start paperwork? On the subway I started planning what I would do when I got the job. First I would go to Dean & Deluca and buy some tiny marzipan candies in the shape of fruit, an expensive treat I noticed a lot of fancy-looking older white women buying. Next I would pay for an exterminator to come to our apartment to kill the cockroaches. After that I’d take Bren and Joce out to dinner at Le Cirque, like I was a creepy Wall Street sugar daddy and they were my pretty arm candy.
- One good thing about New York is that most people function daily while in a low-grade depression. It’s not like if you’re in Los Angeles, where everyone’s so actively working on cheerfulness and mental and physical health that if they sense you’re down, they shun you. Also, all that sunshine is a cruel joke when you’re depressed. In New York, even in your misery, you feel like you belong.
- To me, the person with the best fame is Conan O’Brien. When I interned at Late Night, I thought, Wow, this is the guy who has totally nailed being famous. Nobody cared what he wore (some kind of dark-colored suit), his hair was famously always the same, and he got to sit at the same desk every episode.
- I was at Benefit Cosmetics picking up some lip glosses and trying to scam some free samples one Saturday a few months ago. While I was there, I saw two adorable ninth-grade girls getting makeovers for their semiformal, which was that night. They both had torn-out reference pictures of Emma Watson. When I was their age, I had done the same with pictures of Meg Ryan. I was obsessed with her edgy shag from the otherwise forgettable movie Addicted to Love. The edgy shag did not suit my face.
- I read that Michael Jackson used to have prescriptions for Demerol under the alias Jack London. So much about Michael Jackson’s life was tragic and strange, but that detail is just so cool. I like thinking that Michael Jackson was like, “Let’s see, let’s see. Who do I want to commemorate in my request for drugs? You know what? I always did love White Fang. Jack London it is.” My alias for hotels and stuff would be Gwendolyn Trundlebed, a nonsense name I’ve always loved that my friend Mike Schur came up with during the third season of The Office.
- WITH THE EXCEPTION of Japanese businessmen, no one likes karaoke more than I do. When I graduated from college, my aunt Sreela and uncle Keith gave me the single best present I’ve ever received: a professional-level karaoke machine. I don’t know if they were aiming to become my favorite aunt and uncle for all eternity, but that was the result. When I arrived in Brooklyn with Bren and Jocelyn, we set that machine up to our TV before we had a bed or couch. We’d just take turns belting Whitney Houston in an empty room, while the others sat Indian-style, impatiently waiting their turn.
- Stray observations I would like to add: I like when small people sing big brassy songs, like, say, if my friend Ellie Kemper sings “Big Spender” in a booming voice. I also like when guys sing girls’ songs, but not in a campy way. Like a guy earnestly singing “Something to Talk About” is wonderful. Guys sometimes do this thing where they sing a Britney or Rihanna song and do a campy impression of the singer, to be funny, and it’s painful. An amazing thing to do is to pick a song that has lyrics in another language. That’s why I tend to always sing Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita” for karaoke. I would die if a guy sang a Gipsy Kings song. Die in a good way, obviously.
- It was October 2001 and I lived in New York City. I was twenty-two. I, like many of my female friends, suffered from a strange combination of post-9/11 anxiety and height-of-Sex-and-the-City anxiety. They are distinct and unnerving anxieties. The questions that ran through my mind went something like this: Should I keep a gas mask in my kitchen? Am I supposed to be able to afford Manolo Blahnik shoes? What is Barneys New York? You’re trying to tell me a place called “Barneys” is fancy? Where are the fabulous gay friends I was promised?
- The greatest source of stress was that it had been three months since I’d moved to New York and I still didn’t have a job. You know those books called From Homeless to Harvard or From Jail to Yale or From Skid Row to Skidmore? They’re these inspirational memoirs about young people overcoming the bleakest of circumstances and going on to succeed in college. I was worried I would be the subject of a reverse kind of book: a pathetic tale of a girl with a great education who frittered it away watching syndicated Law & Order episodes on a sofa in Brooklyn. From Dartmouth to Dickhead it would be called. I needed a job.
- They hire only seventy or eighty pages a year, out of something like forty-two million applicants. I decided the odds were stacked against me, which strangely made me feel like I was going to get the job even more. Sports movies had brainwashed me into the belief that when the chips are down the most, that is when success is the most inevitable.
- Still babysitting, with no health insurance, I began to become a germaphobe, because I could not afford to get sick and go to the hospital.
- Gail was forty, single, and loved the world created by Sex and the City more passionately than any other person I knew; I think she would’ve disappeared into the show if she could have. (Let me take a moment here to stress again just how pervasive the Sex and the City culture was in New York in 2002. You could be an NYU freshman, a Metropolitan Transit Authority worker, or an Orthodox Jewish woman living in a yeshiva: you watched Sex and the City.)
- Without knowing me at all, Gail nicknamed me Minz. I respond very well to people being overly familiar with me a little too soon. It shows effort and kindness. I try to do this all the time. It makes me feel part of a big, familial, Olive Garden-y community.
- Sarah Silverman could make jokes about rape because, the fact of the matter was, she was much funnier and cuter than us. This was the problem of living in a post–Sarah Silverman world: lots of young women holding the scepter of inappropriateness did not know how to wield it.
- One stipulation to my borrowing your clothes is that you have to have worn the item at least once before I borrow it. I’m not a monster.
- The show went up at P.S. 122, a beautiful theater in the East Village that at one point had been a public school. There’s a special level of cool for buildings in Manhattan that have at one point been something else. Someone might say to you, knowingly, “Oh, did you know this theater used to be a zipper factory?” or “You obviously know this discotheque used to be church, right?” or “We are eating in a restaurant that at one point was a typhoid containment center.” That’s what I love about New York. If Rikers Island ever goes under, I know André Balazs will have that place turned into a destination hotel for urban metrosexuals within a month, tops. People will sit in their cell/hotel rooms and say, “You know a convicted sex offender used to live in this cell, right?” The solitary confinement unit will be the honeymoon suite.
- Aspen is one of those places that looks rustic but where everything is actually sickeningly expensive. This was on a whole other level from New York, which was just plain old grossly expensive.
- Marc was passionate, young, and did charming things like disappear to Costa Rica and send us bottles of hot sauce in the mail. He could also switch from making small talk to becoming fiercely intense about our careers, making unwavering eye contact with his blue eyes. He’s the kind of guy you could see successfully carrying off an Aaron Sorkin monologue in real life. If he ever quits show business he could be a leader of a successful cult. It goes without saying he was a killer agent.
- The only other thing I had keeping me in Los Angeles was that I’d been hired as a staff writer for six episodes of a mid-season NBC show that was the remake of a British show called The Office. (footnote: Notice how I laid in all that dramatic irony here? Like in Titanic, when Kate Winslet’s character loved those weird paintings by a little-known artist named Picasso? And in the audience of the theater you were laughing to yourself because you knew Picasso turned out to be kind of a big deal? I’m trying to tell you that I’m Picasso.)
- The smart and funny writer Nathan Rabin coined the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl to describe a version of this archetype after seeing Kirsten Dunst in the movie Elizabethtown. This girl can’t be pinned down and may or may not show up when you make concrete plans. She wears gauzy blouses and braids. She decides to dance in the rain and weeps uncontrollably if she sees a sign for a missing dog or cat. She spins a globe, places her finger on a random spot, and decides to move there. This ethereal weirdo abounds in movies, but nowhere else. If she were from real life, people would think she was a homeless woman and would cross the street to avoid her, but she is essential to the male fantasy that even if a guy is boring, he deserves a woman who will find him fascinating and pull him out of himself by forcing him to go skinny-dipping in a stranger’s pool.
- There are like nine people in the entire world who are architects, and one of them is my dad. None of them looks like Patrick Dempsey.
- I will throw a salad across the room if there are chickpeas in it, I swear to God.
- Things Kelly and I Would Both Do: Cry at work occasionally; Memorize our credit card numbers to shop online with ease; Drive with our parking brake on; Spend hours following a difficult recipe, hate the way it tastes, and throw it out to go to McDonald’s; Go on trendy and slightly dangerous diets.
- A third frequently asked question is: “Girl, where you from? Trinidad? Guyana? Dominican Republic? You married? You got kids?” This is mostly asked by guys on the sidewalk selling I LOVE NEW YORK paraphernalia in New York City.
- A bored twentysomething guy greeted me at Reception. Actually, he did not greet me. It took him a full minute or so before he looked away from his computer game to acknowledge me standing nervously in front of his desk. When people show a lack of excitement to see me, I compensate by complimenting the hell out of them. It always exacerbates the problem, but I cannot stop. I focused on his tidy work area.
- Friendless, I celebrated the best way I could. I went straight to Canter’s Deli, sat in a booth, and ordered a huge frosty Coke and a sandwich called the Brooklyn Ave. (a less healthy version of a Reuben, if that is possible), and gabbed with my best friends and mom on the phone for two hours. An elderly man who was eating with his wife at a nearby table came over to my booth. “You’re being very loud and rude,” he said. “Your voice is so high-pitched and piercing.” (-) I started work in July. At that time, I lived alone in a small, damp apartment I found on Fairfax Avenue and Fountain Boulevard, which I did not know was the nexus of all of transvestite social life in West Hollywood. I did not even have the basic L.A. savvy to ask my landlord for a parking space, so I parked blocks away from my house and enjoyed late-night interactions with strangely tall, flat-chested women named Felice or Vivica, who always wanted rides to the Valley.
- I will always remember Chappelle’s Show very fondly because besides being one of the funniest shows ever, it served as my good friend at the time. I’d watch every episode, and then watch them again later that day to hear the jokes again. Sometimes on a Saturday night I would fall asleep watching it on my sofa, like Dave Chappelle and I were best friends chatting until we fell asleep. I was twenty-four.
- I won’t say anymore about them, because none of them are lacking in confidence, and honestly, they’re like three compliments away from becoming monsters.
- This was taken between takes of “The Dundies,” the season two premiere, which I wrote. We shot from dawn until late at night in a former Chili’s restaurant in the deep San Fernando Valley. I am taking a ladylike nap on the floor while Paul Lieberstein writes notes on a script.
- What do we fight about? I wish I could say they were big, smart, philosophical issues about writing or comedy, but sometimes they’re as small as “If we do that cold open where Kevin dumps a tureen of chili on himself, I will quit this show.” We did that cold open, by the way, and it was a hit, and I’m still working at the show. I can get a little theatrical.
- “I know you get upset, Min. But you have to be professional.” I am still trying to follow this terrific advice, only somewhat successfully, five years later.
- I’ve always found Steve (Carrell) gentlemanly and private, like a Jane Austen character. The one notable thing about Steve’s niceness is that he is also very smart, and that kind of niceness has always made me nervous. When smart people are nice, it’s always terrifying, because I know they’re taking in everything and thinking all kinds of smart and potentially judgmental things. Steve could never be as funny as he is, or as darkly observational an actor, without having an extremely acute sense of human flaws. As a result, I’m always trying to impress him, in the hope that he’ll go home and tell his wife, Nancy, “Mindy was so funny and cool on set today. She just gets it.”
- Getting Steve to talk shit was one of the most difficult seven-year challenges, but I was determined to do it. A circle of actors could be in a fun, excoriating conversation about, say, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and you’d shoot Steve an encouraging look that said, “Hey, come over here; we’ve made a space for you! We’re trashing Dominique Strauss-Kahn to build cast rapport!” and the best he might offer is “Wow. If all they say about him is true, that is nuts,” and then politely excuse himself to go to his trailer. That’s it. That’s all you’d get. Can you believe that? He just would not engage. That is some willpower there. I, on the other hand, hear someone briefly mentioning Rainn, and I’ll immediately launch into “Oh my god, Rainn’s so horrible.” But Carell is just one of those infuriating, classy Jane Austen guys.
- Interspecies Friendships: Have you ever seen that YouTube video where the elephant is friends with the collie? Or the one where the turtle and the hippopotamus are best friends? I could watch those for hours. These are the buddy comedies people crave. I actually think I might create Interspecies Friendships. A smart, small observational show about two animals who are friends against all odds. It’ll be a tough sell at first, but by season two it’ll really come into its own. But it’ll never be as good as the original British version, Interspecies Chums.
- I always wanted the reboot of Ghostbusters to be four girl-ghostbusters. Like, four normal, plucky women living in New York City searching for Mr. Right and trying to find jobs—but who also bust ghosts. I’m not an idiot, though. I know the demographic for Ghostbusters is teenage boys, and I know they would kill themselves if two ghostbusters had a makeover at Sephora. I just have always wanted to see a cool girl having her first kiss with a guy she’s had a crush on, and then have to excuse herself to go trap the pissed-off ghosts of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire or something. In my imagination, I am, of course, one of the ghostbusters, with the likes of say, Emily Blunt, Taraji Henson, and Natalie Portman. Even if I’m not the ringleader, I’m definitely the one who gets to say “I ain’t afraid a no ghost.” At least the first time.
- I shared a tiny windowless office with Kristen Wiig. This was, as you can imagine, incredibly exciting. We had no privacy, which was fine with me, because I was hoping the claustrophobic atmosphere of our shared office would be like a college dorm room, and that we’d become confidantes through our sheer physical proximity. It’d go down something like this: (Joni Mitchell’s Blue is playing on my computer.) KRISTEN: God, I love this album. ME: Me too. Doesn’t it make you wish we’d been alive during Woodstock? KRISTEN: Yes! I always think that when I listen to this! ME: That’s hilarious. Hey, do you want to go get some lunch and then hit Crabtree & Evelyn? KRISTEN (as though I’m an idiot): Uhhh yeah. I mean if we can even fit out the door of this tiny office. ME: You’re so bad. (We laugh and laugh.) KRISTEN: Seriously, I wish we could’ve gone to Woodstock together. (-) This interaction didn’t happen. As it turned out, Kristen Wiig was kind of busy at Saturday Night Live. She was almost never in our office. She was either rehearsing on set, at a fitting, or writing sketches with other people in their offices. It made sense, but it was disappointing.
- While they all talked and goofed around, I sat at the table listening and smiling and saying nothing, like an upbeat foreign exchange student who spoke very little English.
- Because even though he doesn’t affect anyone in the slightest, I simply felt Chad Michael Murray needed to be satirized!
- Everyone has a moment when they discover they love Amy Poehler.
- I first noticed Amy when I was in high school and I saw her on Conan’s first show. She was in a sketch playing Andy Richter’s “little sister Stacey.” Stacey had pigtails and headgear and was obsessed with Conan. As a performer, she was this pretty little gremlin, all elbows and blond hair and manic eyes. As a teenager, I tracked her career as best I could without the Internet, and was overjoyed when I saw she had become a cast member on Saturday Night Live.
- WHEN I WAS a kid, I was obsessed with listing my favorite things. I kept an index card with all my favorite foods folded in my wallet, just in case anyone asked me what they were. Then when people walked away, I imagined they’d say: “Whoa, Mindy Kaling is so cool and self-actualized. McDonald’s pancakes are her favorite food, and she was able to tell me right away.” I was prepared for all kinds of potential fun situations when I was kid. I kept a bathing suit in my backpack in case I went anywhere where there was a swimming pool.
- There’s a heightened style of acting that Will Ferrell and Adam McKay employ in their movies that is incredibly difficult to pull off. If done poorly, heightened comedy acting can seem like you’re watching an inadvertently campy kids’ production of 12 Angry Men. But it is Will Ferrell’s sweet spot.
- It’s always been incredibly challenging for me to put pen to page, because writing, at its heart, is a solitary pursuit, designed to make people depressoids, drug addicts, misanthropes, and antisocial weirdos (see every successful writer ever except Judy Blume).
- The Internet also makes it extraordinarily difficult for me to focus. One small break to look up exactly how almond milk is made, and four hours later I’m reading about the Donner Party and texting all my friends: DID YOU GUYS KNOW ABOUT THE DONNER PARTY AND HOW MESSED UP THAT WAS? TEXT ME BACK SO WE CAN TALK ABOUT IT!
- I’ve found my productive-writing-to-screwing-around ratio to be one to seven. So, for every eight-hour day of writing, there is only one good productive hour of work being done. The other seven hours are preparing for writing: pacing around the house, collapsing cardboard boxes for recycling, reading the DVD extras pamphlet from the BBC Pride & Prejudice, getting snacks lined up for writing, and YouTubing toddlers who learned the “Single Ladies” dance. I know. Isn’t that horrible? So, basically, writing this piece took me the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Enjoy it accordingly.
- This is why I never eat cupcakes anymore. The connotations are too disturbing.
- I RECENTLY LEARNED that an “Irish exit” is when you leave a party without telling anyone (and presumably it is because you are too drunk to form words). A “French exit” is when you leave a party early without saying good-bye to anyone or paying your share of the bill and maybe you are also drunk.
- I think Irish exits should actually be de rigueur, except the drunk part. Slipping away is basically all I do now at large parties. My version of an Irish exit has an air of deception to it, because it includes my asking loudly, “Where’s the bathroom?” and making theatrical looking-around gestures like a lost foreign tourist. But then, instead of finding the bathroom, I sneakily grab my coat and leave. Other times I say, “Oh, I think I left my lights on in my car!” or “Oh my gosh, I think I left my car unlocked.” Cars make great pretexts for Irish exits. People never doubt weird issues you have with your car, because it’s extremely boring to listen to.
- At that time I remember thinking, I just want to meet a guy who has not been, at one point in his life, diagnosed with clinical depression. That was my only criterion. Oh, and that he wouldn’t make me convert religions if things got serious.
- I started crying almost immediately. A remarkable thing about me is that the time that elapses between a sad thought and a flood of tears is three or four seconds.
- I sent a new e-mail to my friends, by only changing the subject heading to “HE BAILED VIA TEXT. CONSIDERING MORPHINE ADDICTION TO EASE PAIN.”
- In 2004, when I started working at The Office and had no friends, I would listen to Graceland and just weep. On the way to work, on the way home. And not just the more ballad-y songs about loss, like “Graceland.” I even cried to “You Can Call Me Al.”
- Do you guys remember the scene when Bridget is sneaking out of the horrible couples dinner, having humiliated herself in front of all of her “smug marrieds”? And when she’s at the door, Mark stops her and he says, “I like you, very much. Just as you are.” (-) It’s ridiculous that I love this so much. It’s so simple. It’s not a witty, perfectly phrased, Ephron-y declaration by our charming, neurotic hero. It’s so … plain. But the idea is the most beautiful thing in the world. So, obviously, it makes me cry.
- If I ever get cast in some Changeling-type movie where I need to cry instantly because my child was murdered, I will make sure to have Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas album ready to go in my trailer. The children’s voices and connections to the Peanuts from my childhood are just the beginning. (I always identified with Peppermint Patty, in case you were wondering—the loud, opinionated man-girl who chased around her crush without even fully knowing she liked him.) The music is gorgeous, but even the upbeat arrangements are tinged with something sad, like Joni Mitchell’s Blue.
- (About Joni Mitchell's Blue album): I know every single word to this album, but you would never know that, because I blubber through the entire thing.
- I especially like eavesdropping on women my age. Besides being titillating, it also helps me gauge where I’m at in comparison. Am I normal? Am I doing the correct trendy cardio exercises? Am I reading the right books? Is gluten still lame? Is soap cool again, or is body wash still the way to go? It was through eavesdropping that I learned that you could buy fresh peanut butter at Whole Foods from a machine that grinds it in front of you. I had wasted so much of my life eating stupid old, already-ground peanut butter. So, yeah, I highly recommend a little nosiness once in a while.
- Until I was thirty, I only dated boys, as far as I can tell. I’ll tell you why. Men scared the shit out of me. (-) Men know what they want. Men make concrete plans. Men own alarm clocks. Men sleep on a mattress that isn’t on the floor. Men tip generously. Men buy new shampoo instead of adding water to a nearly empty bottle of shampoo. Men go to the dentist. Men make reservations. Men go in for a kiss without giving you some long preamble about how they’re thinking of kissing you. Men wear clothes that have never been worn by anyone else before. (Okay, maybe men aren’t exactly like this. This is what I’ve cobbled together from the handful of men I know or know of, ranging from Heathcliff Huxtable to Theodore Roosevelt to my dad.) Men know what they want and they don’t let you in on their inner monologue, and that is scary.
- Because what I was used to was boys. (-) Boys are adorable. Boys trail off their sentences in an appealing way. Boys bring a knapsack to work. Boys get haircuts from their roommate, who “totally knows how to cut hair.” Boys can pack up their whole life in a duffel bag and move to Brooklyn for a gig if they need to. Boys have “gigs.” Boys are broke. And when they do have money, they spend it on a trip to Colorado to see a music festival. Boys don’t know how to adjust their conversation when they’re talking to their friends or to your parents. They put parents on the same level as their peers and roll their eyes when your dad makes a terrible pun. Boys let your parents pay for dinner when you all go out. It’s assumed.
- I have always liked a man with chest hair. I have only fond memories of my dad’s as a kid, peeking out of a really cool button-up shirt he wore with a map of the world on it. I think chest hair looks distinguished. It’s, like, cool—my dad’s a man.
- In real life, shouldn’t a wedding be an awesome party you throw with your great pal, in the presence of a bunch of your other friends? A great day, for sure, but not the beginning and certainly not the end of your friendship with a person you can’t wait to talk about gardening with for the next forty years.
- Married people, it’s up to you. It’s entirely on your shoulders to keep this sinking institution afloat. It’s a stately old ship, and a lot of people, like me, want to get on board. Please be psyched, and convey that psychedness to us. And always remember: so many, many people are envious of what you have. You’re the star at the end of the Shakespearean play, wearing the wreath of flowers in your hair. The rest of us are just the little side characters.
- GETTING PROFESSIONALLY beautified was all that I dreamed about doing when I was an asexual-looking little kid.
- Since I am not model skinny, but also not super fat and fabulously owning my hugeness, I fall in that nebulous “normal American woman” size that legions of fashion stylists detest. For the record, I’m a size eight (this week, anyway). Many stylists hate that size, because I think, to them, it shows that I lack the discipline to be an ascetic or the confident sassy abandon to be a total fatty hedonist. They’re like: pick a lane! Just be so enormous that you need to be buried in a piano, and dress accordingly.
- When I played the “I don’t feel comfortable” card, he knew it was over. “I don’t feel comfortable” is the classic manipulative girl get-my-way line. It’s right up there with “I don’t feel entirely safe.” Was it fair? Nope. Was it cool? Absolutely not.
- This is a different zit than the one I had when I was twenty-two, which was in the same spot and which I wrote about earlier in this book, but perhaps it was a descendant of that zit?
- Ellie is wonderful because she never balks when I want to take pictures of us. I’m cheesy, and she celebrates it.
- IF IT WEREN’T FOR my imagination, I would weigh ten thousand pounds. This is because the only way I am able to exercise anymore is through a long and vivid revenge fantasy.
- After my husband’s murder, I spend a lot of time doing push-ups and sit-ups, and I cut my hair very short while staring at myself in the mirror with dead eyes. I look like Mia Farrow at her height, but Indian and crazy toned. I stop enjoying my creature comforts, like junk food and hanging out with my friends, because nothing brings me pleasure but thoughts of revenge. My best friends give me the hurtful nickname “Count of Monte Cristo, But Boring,” because I am bent on vengeance and it is getting tedious. However, because of my alienation and obsession, I am able to get in shape pretty fast, because all food tastes the same to me (like nothing), so I eat skinless chicken breasts and broccoli for every meal without complaint.
- Total time taken up by this fantasy: 12 minutes ; Total calories burned while having this fantasy: 90
- Even in my revenge fantasy where all I do is exercise, I can still do only twenty-five pull-ups. Pull-ups are tough, no joke.
- (Instructions for her funeral): Dress code: chic devastated.
- None of my exes are allowed to attend. Distracting. Weird. (Okay, the only way I would even consider an ex attending is if he were completely, horrifically devastated. Like, when he heard I died, it made him take a good hard look at his life and his choices, and he turned Buddhist or something.)
- No current wives or girlfriends of my exes are allowed to attend. This part is really, for real, non-negotiable. They’ll just use the opportunity to look all hot in black.
- People can text, but no phone calls. That’s rude. And when I say you can text, I mean, hard-core furtive texting, like using one hand and with your BlackBerry hidden in your purse.
- There should be a gift bag for people when they leave. Inside of it should include: (1) a photo of me when I was my most beautiful, put through an old-timey photo process and displayed in a heart-shaped pewter frame. It should look like the kind of photo a soldier carried around with him during the Civil War; (2) an energy bar or a trendy body spray from whichever company is sponsoring the funeral; (3) a copy of a drawing I did when I was little of what I wanted to be when I grew up, which was an astronaut. Under the drawing should be written, in cursive, “She finally found her wings” or “… and we have lift-off”; and (4) a letter from the president talking about my impact on the creative community.
- B. J. Novak was a terrific friend and editor, giving me sound notes like “Hey, Mindy, I think you sound kind of racist here. I would be really careful about not sounding racist in your book.”
jul 8 2020 ∞
jul 8 2020 +
jul 8 2020 +