Everything Is Awful

by Matt Bellassai

  3. It’s only really necessary to clean your bathroom once over the course of a year, because, think about it, the cave people didn’t clean their bathrooms at all. They just shit outside. And they could kill, like, whole mastadons. Not cleaning the bathroom made them stronger.

  4. A window basically half-belongs to the person on the other side of it, which means you only have to clean windows half as often as you think you should, and the rest of the time is someone else’s problem.

  5. Sweeping the floors and/or mopping is unnecessary if you wear the right kind of socks.

  6. If you can’t see the mess, it doesn’t exist, which is why baby Jesus invented shag carpeting, closets, and the space between couch cushions.

  7. Clothes can be reworn as often as the wearer can stand his own stink, which means laundry is basically always optional as long as you can convince yourself the smell of your own waste is less offensive than the idea of walking to the nearest washing facility.

  8. If you leave the garbage sitting in one spot long enough, it’ll eventually be able to take itself out.

  9. All dishes are like cast-iron skillets: if you don’t wash them, each use adds a new layer of delicious seasoning to your next meal.

  10. Don’t listen to what the “experts” tell you. Sponges last forever.

  ON NOT BEING THE PEOPLE’S CHOICE

  When I was a child, being on TV was the greatest possible thing that could happen to a person.

  One summer, while I was at my aunt and uncle’s house, a drunk driver drove into a house down the street, directly through the wall and into the living room. We heard the crash from a few blocks away and went running to see what happened. Everybody was safe, except for the living room set, I imagine, but it was a big enough disaster to attract the local news community, and soon enough, vans with satellites started rounding the corners, parking along the curb, and hauling out cameras and tripods. It was a spectacle. This was the suburbs, after all. Nothing exciting happened here to begin with, and now there was something besides a television set or bonfire for all of us to stand and stare at. There were lights, and microphones, and local news reporters furiously dabbing makeup on their sweaty foreheads. All to look at a car that was sitting motionless halfway through a brick wall. But still, whenever one of the camera’s lights went bright, my cousins and I would walk aimlessly behind the reporter, far enough away to seem innocuous, but close enough so our faces were clearly captured on screen. Even then, I knew how to find my light.

  That night, we taped every eleven o’clock news program—who the hell knows which station’s cameras we were standing in front of—and the next morning, we went through every tape until they got to the segment about the car, and while the reporter droned on about the damage and how the car would be removed and what hospital the driver was spending the night in, we looked for a hint of ourselves in the back corner, a wisp of hair or even a shadow. In the end, none of us made it on air. Television cameramen are well equipped to crop out menacing children like us. But still, the prospect of getting our fifteen minutes of fame was tantalizing. We could’ve been stars!

  I never quite understood this desire to be on television, at least in this way. This was before the Internet was anything beyond instant messaging and chat rooms, when “going viral” meant you needed to see a doctor. This was before some buffoon grabbing a local news reporter’s microphone and shouting something obscene into the camera would end up on YouTube and get a bigger viewership than the news station had gotten that entire year. Even now, I don’t understand the urge to go viral this way—not that there’s a desirable way to go viral, let’s be honest. But then, standing behind a news reporter meant, at the very best, you’d get twenty seconds of uninterrupted airtime blurring into the background.

  But I suppose the idea of being on television was titillating, especially to a young, impressionable nerd like myself. Everybody watches TV! Being on TV automatically means you’re famous! And being famous is basically the coolest thing in the world. It’s the reason those annoying people at baseball games lose their shit whenever the camera pans to them for five seconds. It’s the reason the entire city of Los Angeles exists. The magic of television.

  • • •

  I never thought I’d be on TV after that. In high school, I had a reputation for being a ticking time bomb of embarrassment. Whenever I’d raise my hand to answer a question, or more accurately, whenever I was called on to answer a question—I tried to avoid the spotlight as much as possible—it was only a matter of seconds before all of my blood rushed to my face and my cheeks turned an ungodly combination of beet red and fire. It would take at least another ten minutes for my face to return to normal. And this lasted well into college. In discussion sections—designed, I’m fairly certain, just so insufferable bros in beanies can philosophize about a book they’ve never read—I stuck faithfully to the minimum amount of participation required, and certainly never engaged in anything close to discussion. Honestly, I was sparing everybody the discomfort of having to be in the same room as someone who could turn as hideously scarlet as I could.

  This is all to say that I never imagined myself on television, however enticing I found the idea of it, least of all as a nominee for a People’s Choice Award for a series of videos I’d made for the Internet, and least of all as the unceremonious winner.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the beginning.

  • • •

  In the summer of 2014, I was working at the Internet company BuzzFeed, often characterized as a factory of lists, quizzes, and cat videos, which is not an entirely unfair portrait of what working at BuzzFeed was really like. It was a quintessentially millennial workspace, with all the clichés you can possibly imagine: a snack closet stocked with gluten-free candies and granola bars, a row of refrigerators full of seltzer water and beer, iced coffee on tap, visits from Internet-famous cats and one particularly adorable mini-horse named Mystic, and rows upon rows of young, talented, creative people.

  My job, for better or worse, was to make stuff people would find funny and share with their friends. I wrote hundreds of lists and quizzes, and even curated my fair share of cat videos. At one point, I was officially listed as a senior editor on the Animals masthead, an accomplishment my journalism professors surely found worthwhile. About two years into my job there, I asked my boss if I could get drunk at lunch and review a One Direction album—trust me, I’ve had worse ideas—and she said yes. The drunk-at-work barrier officially broken, it was only a matter of time before I proposed getting drunk in the middle of the day and capturing the whole thing on camera.

  Now, you might be wondering how someone who hated public speaking to the point of turning into a living beet-human would find himself in front of the camera, and the truth is, like all terrible things in life, because of karaoke. I’d never been a fan of karaoke. I found it terribly unpleasant. My first week at BuzzFeed—and my first ever week in New York City—there was a party to celebrate the launch of some new section of the website, and we all went to a karaoke bar near the office. I’d been to karaoke before, but always as an unwitting bystander, mumbling the words along with everybody else at an undetectable volume.

  But this time was different. It was a small private room—one of the rooms where you can scream as obnoxiously as you want, only disturbing your closest friends instead of complete strangers. This night, everybody was wasted. Everybody was screaming along. Nobody could sing. Halfway through the night, the part of the night when everybody’s eyes sort of glaze over, one of my new coworkers was on the tiny stage at the end of the room, crooning away, when another coworker got up behind him and started gyrating sensually to the music before taking something out of his pocket—a Mexican wrestling mask, it became apparent, as he unfolded it—and placed it on his head. “Weird,” I thought, “but OK. I’m drunk. I can go along with this.” And then, still gyrating to the music, he took off his shirt, and underneath, he was wearing a leather Princess Leia
bra. It’s unclear to me whether he’d slipped this on in the bathroom sometime in the last hour, or if he’d been wearing it the entire day, or if this was something he wore every day. I still have no idea. But what I do know is that I was utterly and completely baffled by everything I was seeing, and how normal everybody else considered what was happening.

  Oh, that’s just Gavin, someone explained when I asked what the hell was going on, as if that should somehow satisfy my curiosity. But that night, I had one of those end-of-a-rom-com kind of moments, when time sort of slows down around you and the lights all fade together and you just kind of sit back and smile at how everything’s played out, while everybody slowly dances around your head, gyrating in Princess Leia lingerie and lucha libre headgear. I don’t even think I got up and sang that night, but it was one of those moments where I felt like I was among my people, where I could do anything and not feel embarrassed or ashamed.

  After that evening, karaoke became a main staple of my idea of New York City nightlife. It took a while before I got comfortable enough to get onstage, but watching everybody else, how confident they were even when they could barely sing, was inspiring. When I finally did sing, I performed a stirring rendition of “And I Am Telling You” from the soundtrack to Dreamgirls, and the applause that I got after was one of the greatest feelings ever. Karaoke changed my worldview. “What’s the worst that can happen, besides disappointing Jennifer Hudson?”

  So, when on-camera work became a possibility at BuzzFeed, I felt like I could do it, or at least try it. What’s the worst that could happen? Besides disappointing Jennifer Hudson?

  So we started filming a series of videos where I’d get drunk at my desk—an entire bottle of wine in only a few minutes—rant about one thing or another, then hastily edit a five-minute cut together, often still drunk, and post it to Facebook. In a matter of weeks, those videos got millions of views, and they soon became our very own version of must-see Internet. Karaoke on the biggest stage. Maybe not the biggest stage, but a much bigger one than I was used to. It was exciting but terrifying. Drunk moms from Minnesota started stopping me in the street. I was interviewed by a Canadian news station. It was all happening.

  And then, one afternoon in late 2015—about a year into posting videos—I got a tweet from a random stranger asking if I knew I was nominated for a People’s Choice Award. I had no idea. I didn’t believe it. People tweet me a lot of shit, and of all the shit people have tweeted at me, nobody had ever asked if I was nominated for a People’s Choice Award. I was understandably suspicious. But then I looked it up. And it was true! I was nominated for a People’s Choice Award for favorite social media star. Granted, this was only the short list, some twenty people who might be nominated if all their followers voted for them, and the other people in my category were people who, in some cases, had tens of millions more followers than I had. There’d be no way in hell I’d make it beyond the short list. And sure, like they tell you, it’s an honor just to be nominated—or short-listed—but nobody wants to be short-listed when they could win. I wanted to win.

  But I’m not lying when I tell you I have no idea how the hell this shit works. Nobody tells you anything. I didn’t even know I was on the short list until some random person on Twitter told me. They don’t send you an e-mail saying, “Hey, this is how shit works.” You just have to figure it all out yourself. But I made a half-assed effort to try to get people to vote for me. And they did.

  A handful of weeks later, they announced the finalists. Some guy from some TV show that I’ve never watched got up to the little podium and read out the nominees for my category, and he mispronounced the hell out of my name, but he said my name! I was officially nominated! Not just a short-lister, but a full-blown, actually could maybe win this shit, will maybe get to go to the show in Hollywood nominee. If I died that night, no matter how grimly, my obituary would still cite me as “People’s Choice Award Nominee Matt Bellassai.” As in “People’s Choice Award Nominee Matt Bellassai died today choking to death on an egg roll in his apartment. He was found peacefully at home, naked in bed, covered in duck sauce, watching homosexual pornography. He will be incinerated in a Krispy Kreme oven this Saturday and his ashes will be thrown at Beyoncé at her earliest possible convenience, as per his last will and testament.”

  For the weeks after that, I made a not-so-subtle effort for votes. But of course, there was no way of telling how well I was doing. One of the other nominees, a teen heartthrob with vague abs and a full head of hair, was trending worldwide on Twitter. No matter how many times my mother assured me she was voting, my efforts seemed futile. But I still campaigned till the very last moment.

  I didn’t hear anything for weeks, and I still had no idea what was going on. I didn’t even know if I’d get to go to the awards show. I didn’t know what dress I was wearing. I didn’t know if I could bring a guest, or if alcohol would be provided or if I had to bring my own from home. But finally, I got word that I’d be attending the show—all the nominees were indeed invited—and I had only a few weeks to get myself to Los Angeles, get an outfit, and figure out the alcohol situation.

  Now, I’m not a particular fan of Los Angeles as a city or as a concept. I’ve been there countless times since then, but before the awards show, I’d only been once or twice and I hadn’t gotten used to the city’s bullshit. Of course, now I understand how to navigate the city: never make direct eye contact with anybody who’s going or recently been to hot yoga, never agree to take a wheatgrass shot, and never disrespect In-N-Out, even though their french fries aren’t even that good. Overall, though, it’s too hot, there’s too much traffic, and everybody is too beautiful for society to function properly. No community can ever last if everybody in it is beautiful all the time. No matter how much I love getting my Starbucks from a barista who looks exactly like Zac Efron, we need ugly people to balance out the world. That’s just how it works. Besides, everybody in Los Angeles is certifiably insane. I had an Uber driver in L.A. who told me her ex-husband kidnapped her children, and before I had a chance to fully express my shock, she told me she was currently working on a screenplay about the entire incident, and every ounce of human emotion I had in that moment evaporated.

  The week of the awards show, I had to find something to wear, and I went with someone from BuzzFeed to help me pick out the finest suit we could find at the Men’s Wearhouse in L.A., and yes, before you question whether I’m telling the truth, let me assure you, I did actually wear a Men’s Wearhouse suit to an awards show where I was nominated. Hollywood! You grow up watching televised award shows and assume everybody there is dressed in Versace that Donatella personally stitched onto each of their bodies, but the truth is, half the people at any given awards show—and there are hundreds of these things happening every week—are wearing a bargain dress from Sears and at least five layers of compression underwear. Unless you’re Lady Gaga and show up with a team of specialists who pluck, pinch, and plaster over any semblance of what makes your body a normal human body, you’re on your own. So yes, we picked out a fabulously gray Men’s Wearhouse suit, the color of zombie skin, and paired it with a black shirt and gray-and-black plaid tie. I looked like a slightly more pampered version of a JCPenney store manager. Seriously, if I could go back and change anything about what happens in this entire chapter, I would change this outfit, and we haven’t even gotten to the night of the awards show yet. It was that drab.

  • • •

  The day of the awards is an uncharacteristically gloomy day in Los Angeles, a wonderfully foreboding sign of what’s to come. It’s a Wednesday, and I assume they’re holding it in the middle of the week to get a discount on the theater. Besides, Ellen DeGeneres will be there, and you’re not getting Ellen to come out on a Friday night.

  Around 11 a.m. is when the grooming starts, which is a ridiculously early and counterproductive time to start pampering yourself—I sweat through at least three layers of clothing before lunch on a normal day, how am I supposed to make i
t to the show in one piece if we start this early? But considering that every show taped on the West Coast is recorded for the East Coast prime time audience, everything in Los Angeles has to start three hours earlier than any normal human behavior.

  Now, everybody at any event in Los Angeles is groomed to within an inch of their life. Men, women, children, dogs—half of them have their hair and makeup done just to go to Whole Foods, and frankly, considering everybody in that city is so horrifically gorgeous, I don’t blame them. Whenever I’m in L.A., I try wearing the biggest pair of sunglasses to cover as much of my face as possible, to save myself the embarrassment of being compared to the natives. On a day like this, where there’ll be cameras and lights and a red carpet, you better believe the bar is raised.

  Fortunately, I was getting pampered. It’s not my favorite thing in the world to have someone painting my face with makeup. I have a bad history with makeup. When I was five, my mother insisted on dressing me up as Frankenstein’s monster for Halloween, a costume that seemed adorable, but required that she apply a thick layer of chalky green makeup to my face every time we needed to pose for pictures. I hated the smell of that makeup. It smelled of melted Tupperware full of old chili, and she absolutely refused to let me wear the costume without the face of makeup. But every time she tried to apply it to my face, I’d start violently gagging and thrashing, and the tears would streak through the makeup, and any bit of it that she would manage to get on my face would be smeared off in seconds anyway. There is no existing picture of this Halloween that doesn’t feature my tear-streaked face.

  But it’s a lot easier to get through the makeup process when you’re twenty-five and can legally be wasted during it. And besides, on this day, I was getting the good stuff. BuzzFeed was paying for everything, or rather, BuzzFeed had to pay for everything, because I didn’t have any money. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what I would’ve done without a company like BuzzFeed—you can be nominated for an award, and you still gotta fly yourself to the city it’s in, get yourself a hotel room, get an outfit, hair, makeup, shoes, transportation to the venue, a male prostitute to keep you warm that night. It’s a whole big deal. But I guess that’s what credit cards are for.