I posted the link to my Facebook page at 7:15 p.m. and went to bed. My heart fluttered and blood rushed through my body. It felt like the night before the ACTs. The anticipation of what was to come was too much to take.
Ten minutes later, I got out of bed and checked my computer. Seven likes on Facebook. I considered deleting the post. “Whoa, this is gonna go so viral,” an old resident from my RA days, wrote. Instead of deleting the video, I sent it to Gawker’s tips email with the subject line, “This is how I quit my job yesterday.” While I was typing, a message popped up on my screen. It was from Jerry: “Resignation accepted.” That’s all he wrote. It was over. I got back in bed and waited for the construction in the apartment above me to start.
At 4:42 a.m. Taiwan time, 4:42 p.m. New York time, Gawker posted the video on their page. Soon after, the Huffington Post posted it too. Which meant my video made the digital news cycle, the same one I checked every morning for my stories. I wasn’t able to go back to bed, so I sat at my computer and watched the internet devour my video. My YouTube page showed the view count at 301-plus. It was the magic number we were always trying to hit at work: 301-plus meant there were so many people watching that the analytics system couldn’t keep up.
I got up and started pacing. “Don’t mess with me, Jerry. I SAID, DON’T MESS WITH ME.” My pace turned into a hop and I began chanting, “Don’t mess with me. Don’t mess with me. Don’t mess with me.” I am not someone who talks to herself, but on this morning, I needed to share my news with someone, even if that someone was a wall. My chanting was so loud that my neighbor filed a noise complaint. The apartment above me was getting demolished with jack hammers, and I’d earned a noise violation for my first expression of elation in a year. Whatever. I was done being quiet. I’d finally gotten the attention I wanted, and all it took was emotional manipulation, a hospital stay, and a little bit of dancing.
Jerry messaged me again at nine a.m. asking if we could get together. “We should meet to discuss a few things, away from the office.”
A chill ran through my body. In the years that have since passed, I’ve thought about those four words a lot. “Away from the office.” Where did he want to meet? A restaurant? His apartment? An abandoned parking lot so that he could slit my throat and hide my body? I still don’t know, although I’m deeply curious. Jerry, if you’re reading this, were you going to kill me?
We agreed to meet in the cafeteria of our office building. Before I left, I grabbed the coin from India, with Ganesh on it, and slipped it into my pocket. You will go through a bit of a tough period, but after September, everything will be perfect. It was September 30.
This time, a manager was there to moderate the meeting, the same one who didn’t want to get involved in our “lovers’ quarrel.” We stood at the elevator in the lobby and waited for Jerry to come down. When Jerry arrived, we got in the elevator with him and I simply said, “Hi.” It was probably too cheery, but whatever.
“Give me your ID,” he responded. I pulled my lanyard out from under my shirt, over my neck, and handed it to him. Snipped the umbilical cord. Tears of exultation welled up in my eyes. But I did not cry.
“Please don’t fight,” the manager pleaded to what felt like nobody. The three of us silently rode the elevator to the bottom floor and picked a table in the corner of the cafeteria.
As soon as my butt touched the seat, Jerry launched into all the reasons I’d failed the company. He told me that I had squandered all the opportunities he’d given me. I thought about the time we’d almost kissed at his elevator. He told me I’d ruined my future. I thought about the time he cried in my arms. He told me that I probably wouldn’t get hired anywhere ever again. I thought about the time we slow-danced to techno. I let his words wash over me, tumble off my skin and onto the table.
That moment launched the development of an impenetrable wall that I’d keep between myself and my bosses, managers, superiors—all of them—for the rest of my life. Jerry handed me a stack of resignation papers (all in Chinese) and leaned in. “I don’t ever want you setting foot on my floor again,” he seethed. I nodded, signed the paperwork, and handed it back. He stood up and walked out of my life, and back into his own.
Moments later, a manager came down with a cardboard box (just like in the movies!) of my things—a bag of tampons delicately balanced on top. The image of this married, polite British man gingerly collecting my stuff, making sure to grab my loose tampons, entertained my buzzing mind for months to come. Back in the daylight, a sense of ease washed over me. I put “Gone” on my iPod and walked to the bus stop with my cardboard box in tow.
Meanwhile, my video had taken on a life of its own. Everyone was watching me, but no one was looking at me. I faded into the background of Taipei. Without a job keeping me there, I was just another traveler, passing through. The video metastasized into a huge story. Reporters I’d never spoken to wrote long speculative articles about who I was and why I made that video. Some places reported that Taiwan had abusive work environments. Not true. Other places reported that I was an entitled twenty-two-year-old who came from money. Not true, but thank you. People hailed me as a hero and as a cunt. My weight, face, nationality, hopes, and dreams were all dissected in comments sections and think-pieces.
This experience is pretty standard for anyone who goes viral, but the odd thing about my case was, as you know, I didn’t have a smartphone. It added this game-changing layer of mystery to who I was. I couldn’t run my mouth, or tweet about my experiences, or do anything that would ultimately make me look like an idiot. I watched from the outside—a spectator to the madness of my own virality.
As a spectator, I began to see things about fame that I deeply disliked. It turns out, if you want fame, you have to hand over control. Control of your image, tastes, desires, because it’s simply impossible to control how everyone consumes you, millions of people’s opinions, and their perceptions. That control is handed to producers, managers, journalists, bloggers, whose job it is to shape you into a digestible snack.
The reason I always loved stand-up comedy so much is that you get to control how the audience perceives you. “Look here,” you tell them as you raise your right hand in the air. Their gaze goes to your right, and you steal their money with your left. But once you reach a certain level of notoriety, you become an object to consume—which is a dream for any creator, but when you’re a twenty-five-year-old who still hasn’t quite figured out who she is, it’s scary to hand those powers off to the internet.
Going viral ultimately made me feel alone. The internet kept using my name without my permission, which drove me crazy. Marina Shifrin was used on the Yahoo! landing page and placed into an article about why millennials are the worst generation. It was added to the dark web where trolls bragged about knowing my address. Little bits of me were strewn through the internet at an impossible pace. I felt helpless, a little cockroach scuttling around exclaiming, “I’m not a kike-bitch!”
I needed attention to “sell myself” but didn’t like the labels I was being handed. What can I say? I’m a broad who’s hard to please. It became clear that fame and control have a contentious relationship and I could only choose one.
Things started going downhill after a girl from my past, who had once told a handful of our fellow eighth graders that I smelled like farts, friended me on Facebook. “Wanted to see how you were doing!” she wrote. The immature part of me felt satisfied that she wanted to hear from me, and the logical part felt infuriated. All these unwanted people coming into my life. I deleted my Facebook (a process which took an unnecessarily long time) and felt even more disconnected.
I retreated into a shell of self-doubt and worry. I didn’t want to say or do the wrong things and risk disappointing everyone around me. I didn’t want to leap into another job, because I was still shaken from my last one. I was in decision-purgatory, passing up opportunities left and right—all the while getting daily emails from reporters asking for exclusive interviews. “What�
�s next for you?” or “We just want to understand millennial culture.” As if I had the keys to unlocking questions facing our generation. Fame sucks. It sucks big, unwelcome dick pics.
“I hate people who want to be famous,” my comedian friend Daniel once told me. I was indignant. A comedian who doesn’t like fame? It didn’t seem possible, but then again, Daniel is a weirdo whose diet consists mainly of sugary cereals and fried chicken, also he doesn’t drink. He is an enigma.
“How do you mean? Don’t you need fame to be a successful comedian?”
“I don’t begrudge anyone who wants to keep working and wants to be successful at their job. It’s people who indiscriminately crave fame/attention/notoriety/whatever, and don’t really care how they get it that drive me nuts,” he told me. His words stuck to my brain. Is there a difference between wanting fame and stumbling into it?
After experiencing a taste of fame for myself, I can say this: No one should desire fame; they should desire the pursuit of success. Sure, the two can exist on the same planet of aspirations, but focusing more on your integrity than on fame is what will ultimately lead to your happiness. Striving to be famous is like striving for a body made out of candy—it’s a nebulous goal that shouldn’t be on your list of things to want.
I began to cringe every time someone called me famous. “I told my parents a famous person is coming to my wedding,” a friend told me after my video went viral. I wanted to shake her and yell, “I’m not famous! That’s not fame!” But her eyes were so earnest and her spirit so supportive. I smiled through clenched teeth. “It’ll be great.”
I’m sure some of you are reading this in a crappy apartment, eating a can of Sriracha-soaked beans, and praying for fame. If that’s your situation, I bet hearing someone (who used to be in your position) complain about going viral is straight up annoying. I’d be annoyed. But I’m not completely writing off the concept of fame. Fame can be very beneficial and life-changing, but also, it should not be anyone’s aspiration. My heart breaks when I see infantile YouTubers baring their souls to the hollow abyss that is the internet, hoping, praying that someone notices. The magic is in your voice, not how many people hear it.
If I haven’t deterred you from craving fame, then at least make sure you’re ready for all that attention. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, so you need a neck strong enough to support it. Make sure you’ve spent the last few years focusing on your art and why it makes you excited. Make sure your posture is right and you can answer any question asked. Make sure your samples and confidence are ready to be shoved through that cracked door. And also make sure that you know what you want to do once the fame has subsided. If it’s doing what got you all that attention in the first place, then you’re in pretty good shape, my friend. At the end of the day, you will only have what you put out into the world, regardless of who recognizes it.
I’ve learned that fifteen minutes is the exact amount of fame that’s useful for most level-headed creative people. That’s the exact amount of time needed to make strong connections without ruining your personality or private life. Fifteen minutes lets you hold on to your voice and your ideas, while still navigating who you are.
My only mistake when inviting fame into my life is I didn’t specify the type I wanted. (NPR-level fame where people know my voice more intimately than my face.) I got more attention in those fifteen minutes than I could ever need in a lifetime. It cured me of my addiction, like a child forced to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes.
Moving my concentration away from fame opened up space for me to figure out exactly what my next steps were. About a year after the buzz from the video died down, a year after it was posted, I washed my hair, made my bed, and invited good work into my life.
15
MEET ROE CONN
Middle school was the first time I had a locker. Well, that’s not quite true; there were lockers at East Prairie, an enormous K-8 school I attended until the fifth grade. But the hallways were anarchic territories, rife with opportunities to get your face shoved into one of those metallic deathtraps. Lockers weren’t your friend; they were cold and unrelenting surfaces into which you’d get body-checked. I stand corrected—middle school was the first time I had a locker in the suburbs. The hallways of Sherwood Elementary were overflowing with spindly, weak-wristed Jewish kids who didn’t physically bully you, but preferred the emotional kind.
In my new middle school, lockers were a safe-space of creativity. How you decorated the inside dictated who you were as a person. Did you choose Backstreet Boys or N*Sync? Britney or Christina? B*Witched or Spice Girls? My locker was papered with photos of Roe Conn and Garry Meier.
Roe and Garry, a WLS 890 AM radio duo, were my tween obsession. Garry was a radio personality behemoth, on the air for twenty-two years before he and Roe got together. Roe was the rising star of talk radio, debuting on WLS a short six years earlier. Unlike their cheesy counterparts on FM radio, Roe and Garry were quickly cementing legend status with their charming chemistry and sharp perspectives.
My favorite photo depicts them standing together, Roe a little bit in front of Garry. Roe is wearing a leather jacket and a black undershirt. His arms are crossed, and he’s scowling into the camera like he’s disappointed with you. I love the look of disappointment. It pushes you to try again, harder this time. Garry is behind him in a white shirt and black blazer. He wears a supportive smile; he seems a little gentler, brotherly even.
Roe and Garry’s voices provided the soundtrack to my childhood. From two to six p.m., Monday through Friday, their words echoed through the house, bouncing off the walls and into the furniture.
We crowded around my parents’ white Hamilton Beach kitchen radio (which doubled as a can opener) every day to hear Roe and Garry deliver the news. Olga and Vladimir listened to practice their English, and I listened because these two men knew how to capture the attention of my parents. As I got older, I genuinely felt connected to them: Garry with his logical and witty worldview; Roe with his sardonic, self-deprecating jibes. Their individual perspectives fit together like the cogs of a sophisticated pocket watch.
Radio lends itself to fantasy. It ties up your ears and leaves your mind to wander. I imagined their office as this cool smoke-filled room filled with leather-bound books and Emeralite lamps. My favorite segments involved the clink of a glass or rustling of papers, which added a few more items to my mental picture. I yearned to be a part of their lives and devised a plan to make it happen.
Like most teenagers in the early 2000s, I eagerly awaited my sixteenth birthday because with it came the promise of a driver’s license. But unlike most teens, I wanted my license for the strict purpose of meeting Roe and Garry. I had come up with a poorly envisioned scheme where I’d wait outside the WLS building after their shift and “bump into” them. (They traveled as a pair in my mind.) I’d tell them about my years-long dedication as a fan—and they’d be amused because most of their listeners were middle-aged. Naturally, I’d ask for a tour of their studio and they’d oblige. At the end of the day, Roe and Garry would call their wives—they lived next door to each other—to explain that their Greatest Fan was in the studio so they’d be late for dinner. They might even interview me! It was going to be the best day of my life.
My suspicions that the world was a cruelly constructed mechanism created to torture and disappoint me were confirmed on the day of my sixteenth birthday when The Roe and Garry Show went off air. My idols, my friends, had thrown in the towel after nine years together on the very same day I was allowed to stalk them without the help of my mother. A few months later, Roe came back and started The Roe Conn Show. It was weird hearing him alone on the airwaves; nevertheless I took my obsession for the two of them and focused all of it solely on Roe.
My unbridled affection for Roe followed me through high school and into college, where I studied journalism. My new plan was to study radio broadcasting and do everything I could to get a job at WLS-AM. “I’ll clean the toilets!” I wrote
in my journal.
On the first day of my freshman year, I got an application for KBIA, the University of Missouri’s radio station. I neatly filled it out and never turned it in—my fear of failure impeded my opportunity for success. If achieving life goals were easy, everyone would be firefighting astronaut millionaires.
When you’re constantly scavenging for opportunities, the right ones eventually begin to present themselves. The second my resignation video went viral, I got emails from every news organization large and small for an interview. It was only a matter of time before WLS reached out. I was, after all, a Chicago native. There was a hometown angle to the story—it was too good of a hook to pass up, the producer in me knew that. I sat by my computer and patiently waited for Roe to come to me. And eventually he did, in the form of a producer writing to see if I could come on Windy City LIVE, a local morning talk show on WLS-TV.
I was in the middle of my I’m-not-a-psycho-just-a-normal-girl-who-happened-to-quit-on-the-internet-and-wants-to-be-taken-seriously-as-a-comedian-I-know-that-doesn’t-make-any-sense-more-hyphens press tour and rapidly getting bored with talking about myself. I limited my interviews to a few places: The Queen Latifah Show because I love her and the Today Show because it’s the fucking Today Show. I turned down 20/20, VH1, the Wall Street Journal, and a handful of other places. If I was getting sick of talking about myself then other people were definitely getting sick of hearing about me.
But this, this was different. This was an opportunity to finally meet Roe. I immediately wrote the producer back, agreeing to come on the show. Any chance to meet Roe Conn? I’m obsessed, I added.
That’s wonderful!!! Thank you!! You won’t regret it. We can have you on the show on Monday the 14th. Will that work? she wrote back. I told her it would work and privately wondered if she was ignoring my inquiry about Roe Conn.
The night before the show, I sent her another email: Where’s your studio? Does it share the same building as WLS-AM radio?
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