Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)

by Mindy Kaling

  Borat on the treadmill in Da Ali G Show: a star is born.

  Michael Palin’s massive stutter attack in A Fish Called Wanda: a tour de force. Everyone doing exactly what they do best at the same time.

  Dwight Schrute capturing a bat in a trash bag around Meredith’s head on The Office: a moment of tiny, hilarious violence.

  Kristen Wiig’s Bjork impression on Saturday Night Live: so recognizable and instantly funny while being completely over the top. Makes me wish Bjork were in the news more, just so I could see more of this impression.

  How I Write

  I LIVE IN a Spanish-style house in an area of Los Angeles near The Grove. The Grove is an outdoor shopping extravaganza with a fountain that shoots jets of water synchronized to Kool & the Gang songs. People love to hate on The Grove, but it’s insanely popular. It’s the mall equivalent of the Kardashian family. So, that’s my neighborhood, and I have a cute little house in it. I really love it.

  I bought my house during the famous writers’ strike of 2007. You of course remember the strike because it was over the hot-button and nationally polarizing issue of percentage of Internet residuals accrued from online media in perpetuity. Doesn’t thinking about it now just make your blood boil?! Obviously, no one outside of a small group of professional writers really gets what was going on there, but the point is I had a lot of time to do nothing but not work and hemorrhage my savings. When I wasn’t Norma Rae-ing it up on the picket line, I spent the rest of my time decorating my house to look like something out of Architectural Digest—a kind of Santa Barbara meets artsy old lady vibe. I think I did only an adequate job, but I did manage to avoid some typical L.A.-house pitfalls: I’m proud to say I don’t have a single vintage poster of some old-timey French product, or a statue of Buddha.

  But what I’m most proud of is my beautiful office:

  I built it and decorated it, and then I promptly never used it. It’s important to me to have a museum-quality office, so when people or potential biographers come over they think that’s where I write.

  No, where I really write is here:

  As you can see, when I write, I like to look like I’m recovering from tuberculosis. I sit in bed, my laptop resting on a blanket or a Notre Dame sweatshirt on my lap. I got the sweatshirt when I was there doing stand-up in 2006. (Where I bombed, by the way. Those kids hated me and my long, matronly rants against low-rise jeans. I did a three-college comedy tour with my Office costar Craig Robinson, who is hilarious, and a pro at performing at colleges. He plays the piano in his act, incorporating medleys of hit pop songs and then does a rendition of an original song he wrote called “Take Your Panties Off.” I don’t need to tell you that it’s very funny and all the college kids wished he’d partnered up with a different Office cast member.)

  The blanket/sweatshirt keeps the laptop from getting too hot and radiating my ovaries, which everyone knows makes your children come out with ADD. I almost always write alone in my house. I never have music on, because I can’t concentrate with Nelly Furtado remixes thumping, and, unfortunately, I have only dance music on my iPod, which is how I got to be such a great dancer.

  The main reason I enjoy working on a writing staff is because of the social nature of the job. To put it kindly, I am a very talkative, social person. To put it less kindly, I’m a flibbertigibbet, which is what my frenemy Rainn Wilson calls me. 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). I also have a nice office at work, but I use it primarily as a messy closet.

  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!

  My high school newspaper interviewed me a few years ago and wanted a photo of me writing, so I had my coworker Dan Goor take this of me looking polished and writerly at my work desk. It is so fraudulent it makes me laugh.

  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.

  The Day I Stopped Eating Cupcakes

  VERY RECENTLY I was out on script for The Office for a week. “Out on script” refers to when writers are sent off on their own to write a first draft of an episode of the show.

  It is an amazing time, basically paid and sanctioned hooky. This means that instead of showering, dressing, and coming into work every day, I’m allowed to laze around my house in a giant T-shirt and no pants, or go shopping, or attend trendy cardio classes with my fun unemployed friends. Obviously this is the best time ever.*

  This time when I was on script, I stopped by my favorite cupcake place, which I will call Sunshine Cupcakes. (Sunshine Cupcakes, while a ridiculous name, is actually a restrained parody of cupcake bakery names. You have no idea. In Los Angeles, cupcake bakeries are as pervasive as Starbucks. They are the product of a city with an abundance of trophy wives, because trophy wives are the financial engines of cutesy commerce that makes Los Angeles like no other American city: toe jewelry, doorknob cozies, vegan dog food, you get it. If I am sounding mean, I should tell you how envious and admiring I am of these trophy wives. I’d marry a partner at William Morris Endeavor and start a cat pedicure parlor m’self if I were so lucky.)

  So, yeah, on my fourth consecutive visit to Sunshine Cupcakes, I was paying for my cupcake when the female manager (cupcake apron, Far Side glasses, streak of pink hair: the universal whimsical bakery lady uniform, as far as I can tell) approached me.

  FAR SIDE: You’ve come here a lot this week.

  ME (mouthful of a generous sample): Yeah, I love this place, man.

  FAR SIDE: We know you’re on Twitter. (Leaning in conspiratorially) And if you’re willing to tweet about loving Sunshine Cupcakes, this cupcake (gesturing to the one I was buying) is free.

  I did not know it was possible to be triple offended. First of all, Manager Woman, if you notice that a thirty-two-year-old woman is coming to your cupcake bakery every day for a week, keep that information to yourself. I don’t need to be reminded of how poor my food choices are on a regular basis. Second, how cheap and/or poor do you think I am? A cupcake costs two bucks! You think I’m miserly enough to think, like, Oh goody, I can save those two bucks for some other tiny purchase later today! And third, even if I were to buy into this weird bribey situation where I endorse your product, you think the cost of it would be one measly cupcake? The implications of this offer were far worse than anything she meant to propose, obviously, but I hate her forever nonetheless.

  This is why I never eat cupcakes anymore. The connotations are too disturbing. Lucky for me, the mighty doughnut is making a comeback. No one better ruin doughnuts for me, or I will be so pissed.

  *The other best time ever is lying on my back eating licorice, watching hours of a serialized sex-crime drama—oh, don’t get all offended. It’s an actual genre now; I didn’t invent it—with my head resting on the sternum of an unwilling loved one.

  Somewhere in Hollywood Someone Is Pitching This Movie

  A FEW YEARS ago I sat down for a meeting with some executives at a movie studio that I will call Thinkscope Visioncloud. Thinkscope Visioncloud had put out some of my favorite movies and they wanted to hear some of my ideas, so I was naturally very excited. All television writer
s do is dream of one day writing movies. We long for the glitziness of the movie world. I’ll put it this way: at the Oscars, the most famous person in the room is like, Angelina Jolie. At the Emmys, the big exciting celebrity is Kelsey Grammer, or maybe Helen Hunt if she decided to play Emily Dickinson or something in an HBO miniseries. Look, Frasier Crane is awesome, but you get what I’m trying to say. It’s snobby and grossly aspirational, but it’s true. So, I left work at The Office early one afternoon with a “See ya, suckers!” attitude and headed to my destiny.

  The junior executive’s office at Thinkscope Visioncloud was nicer than any room in a fifty-mile radius of The Office studio. The stuffed chair I was sitting on was expensive leather and looked like the one a judge would sit on in his private chamber on a TV show. I was so nervous the sweat from the back of my legs was making me stick to it. Oh yeah, I was wearing shorts to this meeting. What? For a television writer, this was a classy business casual outfit. After I finished sharing one of my ideas for a low-budget romantic comedy, I was met with silence. One of the execs sheepishly looked at the other execs.

  EXEC: Yeah, we’re really trying to focus in on movies about board games. People really seem to respond to those.

  For the rest of the meeting we talked in earnest about if there was any potential in a movie called Yahtzee! I made some polite suggestions and left.

  I am always surprised by what movie studios think people will want to see. I’m even more surprised how correct they are a lot of the time. The following movies are my best guess as to what may soon be coming to a theater near you:

  • Bananagrams 3D

  • Apples to Apples 4D (audiences are pummeled with apples at the end of the movie)

  • Crest Whitestrips

  • Sharks vs. Volcanoes

  • King Tut vs. King Kong

  • Streptococcus vs. Candidiasis (Strep Throat vs. Yeast Infection)

  • The Do-Over

  • The Switcheroo

  • Street Smart

  • Street Stupid (Street Smart sequel)

  • Fat Astronaut

  • The Untitled Liam Neeson “You Took My Female Relative Project”

  • The Untitled Jennifer Lopez Sonia Sotomayor Project

  • Darling (Peter Pan from the point of view of the Darling family’s alcoholic dad)

  • The Bear from Those Toilet Paper Ads Movie 3D

  • Gross Catastrophe

  • Hate Fuck

  • Fat Slut

  • Sex Dude

  • Bad Dog Walker (You can see the poster already, can’t you? Heather Graham in booty shorts, pulled in eight different directions by dogs on leashes and smiling a naughty grin.)

  • Grandpa Swap

  • Stepmom Finishing School

  • Human Quilt (horror movie)

  • I Ain’t Yo’ Wife!

  • You Ain’t My Dad!

  As much as it may seem like I am mocking these movies, if any movie studio exec is reading this and is interested in any of the above, I will gladly take a meeting about them. I have an almost completed outline for Crest Whitestrips.

  The Best Distraction in the World: Romance and Guys

  Someone Explain One-Night Stands to Me

  I HAVE NEVER had a one-night stand. According to every women’s magazine and television program ever made, this is super-unforgivably lame, and it behooves me to go reclaim my groove on an all-girls party trip to an unincorporated island territory of the United States. Every romantic comedy I watch depicts our adorable heroine walking sheepishly back from a stranger’s place in the morning, with bedhead and her eyeliner all sexy and smudged. She might not yet have found Mr. Right (this is only the beginning of the movie), but she’s having fun looking!

  I just don’t understand any of that at all. Here’s why:

  In my mind, the sexiest thing in the world is the feeling that you’re wanted. The slightly nervous asking of your phone number. The text message asking you to dinner. The simple overture of wanting me can satisfy my ego for a good long time. The sexual situation that could come of it? Well, that’s just less appealing to me. I don’t mean to say I don’t enjoy sex; I’m a properly functioning mammal and everything. I just think, like, who is this guy? Don’t you need to know some more about a guy than an evening’s worth of conversation at a bar to make sex appealing?

  Also: fear is a pretty big turn-off. I’m talking about safety here. I don’t even mean sexual health safety, like STDs. I mean good old-fashioned life-and-death safety. Here’s what I can’t wrap my brain around. I barely talk to strangers (a habit that I started as a child and that has served me well through my adulthood). So the idea of going to a stranger’s house at night, or having that stranger over to my house, sounds insanely dangerous. These fears have made it so that when my female friends talk to me about one-night stands, I’m an incredibly irritating listener.

  EXCITED SEXUALLY LIBERATED FRIEND: So, then it was like 2 a.m. that same night, and he knocked on my apartment door. I was in my robe and nothing else—

  ME: No underwear?

  EXCITED SEXUALLY LIBERATED FRIEND: No. I said “nothing else.”

  ME (skeptical): I feel like you were wearing underwear. That’s how you are in, like, repose?

  EXCITED SEXUALLY LIBERATED FRIEND: Yes.

  ME: You really like not wearing underwear? Am I the only one who finds that totally uncomfortable? (lowered voice) Don’t you ever sometimes … excrete?

  EXCITED SEXUALLY LIBERATED FRIEND: Gross. Stop it.

  ME: Okay. But let’s remember to come back to this no-underwear conversation later.

  EXCITED SEXUALLY LIBERATED FRIEND: So he knocked at the door—

  ME: Wait! Sorry. I’m just realizing, your doorman let him up without ever seeing him before? Doesn’t that disturb you, that your doorman would just let any old person off the street up to your apartment? I would give my doorman a book of photos of accepted guests that he could reference, like a reference book—

  EXCITED SEXUALLY LIBERATED FRIEND: I’m doing fine with my doorman.

  ME: I would have established a different procedure.

  EXCITED SEXUALLY LIBERATED FRIEND: Great, Mindy. Anyway, then I showed him around the place—

  ME: The doorman? (off ESL Friend’s annoyed look) The guy! The guy! Yes.

  EXCITED SEXUALLY LIBERATED FRIEND: He was into the way I decorated it. Really taking it in.

  ME: He was casing the joint!

  EXCITED SEXUALLY LIBERATED FRIEND: No! He was not casing the joint! He was being sexy and sweet and making cute little jokes about family photos. And then he asked if he could see my bedroom—

  ME: Your bedroom, so he could rape and murder you!

  Eventually, my constant interruptions make her so irritated, she stops telling her sexy story. I guess nothing puts a damper on a one-night stand as much as your friend pointing out all the opportunities where you might have been killed.

  Don’t get me wrong, I love hearing about it. I don’t want to come off as prim or that I won’t go see a R-rated movie or something. In fact, I would feel sad if I didn’t have my Sexually Liberated Friend there to tell me fun, frank tales of desires fulfilled.

  I just don’t think I could ever do it myself.

  So, this is what I’m like: if you come over to my house, I need to know your first and last name. I need to have your phone number and a person whom we both know so you can’t disappear forever in case you murder me. Ultimately, it comes down to this: How embarrassing would it be for me to be talking to a detective at a precinct after you tried to rape and murder me in my home, and not be able to tell him your name or any information about you because we were having a one-night stand? I’ve seen Law & Order: SVU. I know how it works.

  “Hooking Up” Is Confusing

  THE CAREFUL reader will note that my teens and early twenties were largely without significant sexual incident. Okay, even the not-so-careful reader will notice this. All right. If you’ve merely glanced at the back cover
of this book while you’re in line at the bookstore, you’d probably come to that conclusion. This is what happens when you have friends who are more likely to tell ghost stories in a living room with flashlights than recount tales of raunchy sex encounters.

  Because of this, I have fallen way behind in my terminology. I am especially tired of not knowing exactly what “hooking up” means. Some version of this happens to me constantly:

  PSYCHED PAL: Oh, hey! I hooked up with Nikki last night.

  ME: That’s awesome! You’ve liked her for a while. Nice job.

  (We high-five. A pause.)

  ME: What does that mean? Did you have sex?

  PSYCHED PAL: You’re disgusting.

  It’s not that I’m some pervert looking for lurid details (this time, anyway). It’s just that I have no idea what you are talking about. There have been times when friends have said they hooked up with someone and all it means is that they had a highly anticipated kissing session. Other times it’s a full-on all-night sex-a-thon.* Can’t we have a universal understanding of the term, once and for all? From now on, let’s all agree that hooking up = sex. Everything else is “made out.” And if you’re older than twenty-eight, then just kissing someone doesn’t count for crap and is not even worth mentioning. Unless you’re Mormon, in which case you’re going to hell. There, I think we’re all on the same page. If Europe could figure out a way to do the euro, I feel confident we can do this.

  *Full-on All-Night Sex-a-thon is also the name of my debut hip-hop album.

  I Love Irish Exits

  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. Um, I may have found these on kind of a xenophobic website. Makes me wonder about Jewish exits or Black exits. Okay, thin ice. Too far.