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

by Mindy Kaling

  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.

  A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS SOUNDTRACK ALBUM

  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.

  JONI MITCHELL’S BLUE

  I know every single word to this album, but you would never know that, because I blubber through the entire thing. Also, I find it extremely impossible not to cry when I hear Stevie Nicks’s “Landslide,” especially the lyric: “I’ve been afraid of changing, because I’ve built my life around you.” I think a good test to see if a human is actually a robot/android/cylon is to have them listen to this song lyric and study their reaction. If they don’t cry, you should stab them through the heart. You will find a fusebox.

  IF MY MOM CRIES

  It makes absolutely no difference what it is about, but if my mother is crying, I will start to cry. I think it mostly has to do with the fact that my mom never cries. She is so cool. Me, on the other hand, I cry like five times a week. My mom and I went to go see The Help, and during the movie I noticed her start tearing up. It was such a rare sight, I started to as well. Soon we were both weeping so hard it was as though we’d been black maids in Jim Crow–era Mississippi and the movie had hit too close to home. People were weirded out.

  Jewish Guys

  FIRST, A disclaimer: I know many racist people say: “But some of my best friends are black!” before they go off on a long, racist rant. This does not count as an excuse for racism anymore. I get it. However, I think I have a different circumstance. All of my best friends are Jewish. Doesn’t that let me say whatever I want? I sure hope so, because I have a lot to say.

  DON’T BE SUCH HYPOCHONDRIACS

  What? I have a cold. Don’t get a look of terror on your face. The worst that could happen is that you’ll get a cold, too. You don’t have to theatrically Purell a thousand times a day and look all panicky every time I come into the room.

  Also, in the unlikely event that you do get sick, you do not have to give everyone a play-by-play, as though none of us has ever been sick before, or as though there were some suspense in the story of your cold, with twists and turns. (“I woke up this morning feeling pretty good, only to take a terrible turn for the worse after lunch!”) I know this story. You get better. It works out.

  BUT WHAT IF IT’S MORE THAN A COLD?

  It’s not. It’s just a cold.

  HIRING SOMEONE TO HANG UP A PICTURE ON YOUR WALL

  Is it as bad as hiring a guy to have sex with your wife? No, it’s not as bad as that. But you get my point. I’m sorry I said that. Fine, hire a guy to hang up a picture on your wall. Fine, fine, fine. I don’t know how to get it exactly straight, either.

  THANKS FOR BEING SO INTO INDIAN FOOD

  In college all the non-Jewish guys would treat Indian food as though it were an exotic anomaly to be greeted with “ooohs” and “aaahs.” I like that when we go to an Indian restaurant you don’t look over the menu pleadingly and ask if I will “just order for both of us?”

  LARRY DAVID

  I get mad about your perceived special connection with him. Like when you give that knowing chuckle and say, “Oh, Larry,” like he’s some incorrigible friend of your dad’s from temple. We both know him from watching him on his show, which we watched together, at the same time.

  ISRAEL

  Israel is interesting, but every time we talk about it, it has to be for, like, two hours. I want to talk about it, but it can’t be for two hours!

  I HAVE A MOM TOO

  Hey, look. I know you talk to your mom twice a day on the phone, and I talk to my mom only once a day. That doesn’t mean your mom beats my mom. Also, I know your mom is an amazing cook. I feel like you think my mom cooked us Hamburger Helper growing up.

  When you talk to me about your mom and how great she is, I listen respectfully and say, “Wow, she really does sound great.” But when I talk about my mom, you kind of glaze over, like I’m some delusional kid talking about how I’m going to be president someday. You can’t muster up even the slightest bit of acknowledgment that anybody else’s mom could come close to being as funny, artsy, nurturing, and irreverent as your mom.

  EXCEPT EZEKIEL, RAHM, AND ARI EMANUEL’S MOM

  We both agree. She’s incredible. She can do whatever she wants.

  NATALIE PORTMAN

  I know a small part of you thinks you could’ve ended up with Natalie Portman if you had played things a little differently. That’s nice. You can have that. That’s not hurting anybody.

  Men and Boys

  SOMETIMES I bring a script I’m working on to a restaurant and sit near people and eavesdrop on them. I could rationalize it—Oh, this is good anthropological research for characters I’m writing—but it’s basically just nosiness. 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.

  Once, at BLD, a restaurant where I was writing, I saw two attractive thirty-ish women talking over brunch. They had finished eating and were getting seconds on coffee, so I knew it was going to be good.

  I heard the following:

  GIRL #1 (pretty Jewish girl, Lululemon yoga pants, great body): Jeremy just finished his Creative Writing program at Columbia. But now he wants to maybe apply to law school.

  GIRL #2 (tiny Asian girl, sheet of black hair, strangely huge breasts [for an Asian girl]): Oh God.

  LULULEMON: What?

  32D: How many grad schools is he going to go to?

  LULULEMON: I know. But it’s not his fault. No publishers are buying short stories from unfamous people. Basically you have to be Paris Hilton to sell books these days.

  32D: For the past ten years that Jeremy has been out of college doing entry-level job after entry-level job and grad school, you’ve had a job that has turned into a career.

  LULULEMON: Yeah, so?

  32D: Jeremy’s a boy. You need a man.

  Lululemon did not take this well, as I anticipated.

  I felt bad for Lulu because I’ve been Lulu. It’s really hard when you realize the guy you’ve been dating is basically a high schooler at heart. It makes you feel like Mary Kay Letourneau. It’s the worst.

  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 be
en 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.

  Boys are wonderful in a lot of ways. They make amazing, memorable, homemade gifts. They’re impulsive. Boys can talk for hours with you in a diner at three in the morning because they don’t have regular work hours. But they suck to date when you turn thirty.

  I’m thirty-two and I fully feel like an adult. Sure, sometimes I miss wearing Hello Kitty jewelry or ironic T-shirts from Urban Outfitters on occasion. Who doesn’t? I don’t, because I think it would seem kind of pitiful. But a guy at thirty-two—he can act and dress like a grown man or a thirteen-year-old boy, and both are totally acceptable. Not necessarily to me, but to most people. (I can’t tell you how many thirty- and fortysomething guys wear Velcro shoes in Los Angeles. It’s an epidemic.) That’s one of the weirdest things I’ve noticed about being thirty-two. It is a lot of women and a lot of boys our age. That’s why I started getting interested in men.

  When I was twenty-five, I went on exactly four dates with a much older guy whom I’ll call Peter Parker. I’m calling him Peter Parker because the actual guy’s name was also alliterative, and because, well, it’s my book and I’ll name a guy I dated after Spider-Man’s alter ego if I want to.

  Peter Parker was a comedy writer who was a smidgen more accomplished than me but who talked about everything with the tone of “you’ve got a lot to learn, kid.” He had been a writer at a pretty popular sitcom. He gave me lots of unsolicited advice about how to get a job “if The Office got canceled.” After a while, it became clear that he thought The Office would get canceled, and on our fourth and last date, it was clear that he thought The Office should get canceled.

  Why am I bringing up Peter Parker? Well, besides moonlighting as Spider-Man, Peter was the first man I dated. An insufferable, arrogant man, but a legit man.

  Peter owned a house. It wasn’t ritzy or anything, just a little Spanish ranch-style house in Hollywood. But he was the first guy I’d dated who’d really moved into his place and made it a home. The walls were painted; there was art in frames. He had installed a flat-screen TV and speakers. There was just so much screwed into the walls. Everywhere I looked I saw another instance of an action that, if the house were a rental, would make you lose your deposit. I marveled at the brazenness of it. Peter’s house reminded me more of my house growing up than of a college dorm room. I’d never seen that before.*

  Owning a house obviously wasn’t enough to make me want to keep dating Peter. Like I said, he was kind of a condescending dick. But I observed in Peter a quality that I found really appealing and that I knew I wanted in the next guy I dated seriously: a guy who wasn’t afraid of commitment.

  At this point you might want to smack me and say: “Are you seriously another grown woman talking about how she wants a man who isn’t afraid of commitment? Is this a book, or a blog called Ice Cream Castles in the Air: One Single Gal Hopes for Prince Charming? We’ve all heard this before!” But let me explain! I’m not talking about commitment to romantic relationships. I’m talking about commitment to things: houses, jobs, neighborhoods. Having a job that requires a contract. Paying a mortgage. I think when men hear that women want a commitment, they think it means commitment to a romantic relationship, but that’s not it. It’s a commitment to not floating around anymore. I want a guy who is entrenched in his own life. Entrenched is awesome.

  So I’m into men now, even though they can be frightening. I want a schedule-keeping, waking-up-early, wallet-carrying, non-Velcro-shoe-wearing man. I don’t care if he has more traditionally “men problems” like having to take prescription drugs for cholesterol or hair loss. I can handle it. I’m a grown-up too.

  *Look, I’m not an idiot, I realize plenty of boys own houses. That’s, like, the whole point of the Playboy mansion.

  In Defense of Chest Hair

  AS A THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD, my big celebrity crush was Pierce Brosnan. Yeah, I know. Pierce Brosnan is such an uncreative crush that it sounds like the panicked choice of a closeted lesbian teenager. But, Pierce was my guy. I was thirteen and watching Mrs. Doubtfire in the theater with all my friends. There is a scene in which Pierce Brosnan gets out of a pool, Cheryl Tiegs–style. He is manly and glistening, and I remember this one point very clearly: he has a thick swatch of chest hair. It was a minor sexual awakening. During Mrs. Doubtfire. Not a movie often cited for its idealized depiction of traditional masculinity.

  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.

  So I really don’t understand why men shave or wax their chests. I find it so unnecessary. I mean, I sort of get it if you’re a professional swimmer because each hair follicle adds a second to your time or something, but it’s every single male actor in Hollywood. When I turn on an hour-long drama and all I see are these forty-year-old men with hairless chests, I feel slightly nauseated. Why? For the same reason one might feel nauseated by a woman with too many cosmetic injectables in her face: it just shows so much icky effort to conform to some arbitrary beauty standard. And the standard in this instance is particularly insane. You want to strip your body of something that is so coolly and distinctly male? Yuck! When I see a perfectly hairless, tanned guy on-screen, I am forced to recall the Chihuahua. Or I think of the process by which the man got rid of his chest hair. How much did it cost to get waxed? Will it grow out into prickly stubble? And frankly, guys, you should be suspect of these gals who are like va-va-va-voom over your smooth, hair-free chest. She must want you to look like either a Chippendale (who are all gay anyway, as everyone knows) or a little boy.

  Look, I know the male equivalent of the person with my opinion is that creepy guy who declares he loves women to be “au natural” with a gross glint in his eye. But I’d rather be a female version of that guy than not say this at all. Besides, I’ve already revealed myself to be a bit of a creep in several sections of this book. Please leave your chest hair alone!

  Married People Need to Step It Up

  PRETTY MUCH the only thing I remember from my Shakespeare course in college is that one can identify a comedy, as opposed to a tragedy, because it ends in a wedding. (I also remember that weird play The Winter’s Tale, where a woman poses as a statue for years or something. I remember thinking, What am I reading? This is ridiculous. Take this off the syllabus!) That’s also how, I’ve noticed, most romantic comedies end. But I think the actual reason Shakespeare ended them there is because he thought the journey leading up to marriage was more fun to watch than the one that begins after the vows were said.

  Growing up, I would say about 25 percent of the kids I knew had divorced parents. It wasn’t out of the ordinary at all, and in fact, it was kind of glamorous. You never knew which parent’s house you were going to have a sleepover at, and you hoped it was the dad’s. The dad’s house always had cable TV or a pool, and he ordered out for dinner instead of cooking.

  As an adult, I’ve met an ocean of divorced
people. I might even know more divorced people than married people, because I live in godless Los Angeles, where if you’re engaged it simply means you’re publicly announcing that you are dating a person monogamishly.

  I also became familiar with an entirely new category of people: the unhappily married person. They are everywhere, and they are ten thousand times more depressing than a divorced person. My friend Tim, whose name I’ve changed, obviously, has gotten more and more depressing since he married his girlfriend of seven years. Tim is the kind of guy who corners you at a party to tell you, vehemently, that marriage is work. And that you have to work on it constantly. And that going to couples’ therapy is not only normal but something that everyone needs to do. Tim has a kind of manic, cult-y look in his eye from paying thousands of dollars to a marriage counselor. He is convinced that his daily work on his marriage, and his acknowledgment that it is basically a living hell, is modern. The result is that he has helped to relieve me of any romantic notions I had about marriage.

  What is fascinating to me is that divorced people tend to be the least depressing or depressed people I know. They’re all unburdened and cleansed, and the wiser for it. This is the case even if they didn’t initiate the divorce. I have a comedy writer friend, Sandy, whose husband left her for another woman the moment his restaurant (which Sandy had invested in and made possible) became successful. It was kind of the worst story anyone had ever heard, a betrayal that, had it happened to me, I would’ve driven slowly around downtown Los Angeles at night in my car with my windows rolled down, trying to solicit a hit man to murder my husband. After six months of hardship and going to therapy three times a week, Sandy’s now elated. She realized—as has almost everyone I know who has been left or broken up with—that, by divorcing her, her husband relieved her of the job of eventually leaving him. As my mom has said, when one person is unhappy, it usually means two people are unhappy but that one has not come to terms with it yet. Sandy hadn’t realized how unhappy she was until he was gone. She told me that her husband’s leaving her was the nicest gift he ever gave her, because she would never have seen clearly enough to do it herself. It’s not easy, of course; they have kids, and coordinating and sharing them is a hassle and a heartbreak. But she’s still better off than she was before.