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

by Mindy Kaling

  A COUPLE OF GREAT MARRIAGES

  My parents get along because they are pals. They’re not big on analyzing their relationship. What do I mean by pals? It mostly means they want to talk about the same stuff all the time. In my parents’ case, it’s essentially rose bushes, mulch, and placement of shrubs. They love gardening. They can talk about aphids the way I talk about New York Fashion Week. They can spend an entire day together talking nonstop about rhododendrons and Men of a Certain Age, watch Piers Morgan, and then share a vanilla milkshake and go to bed. They’re pals. (Note: they are pals, not best friends. My mom’s best friend is her sister. A best friend is someone you can talk to ad nauseam about feelings, clothing, and gossip. My dad is completely uninterested in that.)

  Not to belabor the Amy Poehler of it all, but I’ve always really admired her marriage to Will Arnett. I remember at the Parks and Recreation premiere four years ago, Amy was looking for her husband toward the end of the night. She stopped by me and a couple other Office writers who had scammed invites to the party.

  AMY: Hey guys. Have you seen Arnett? I can’t find him.

  We didn’t know where he was, and she shook her head good-naturedly, like, “That guy,” and went on looking for him. I had never heard a woman call her husband by his last name, like she was a player on the same sports team Will was on. You could tell from that small moment that Will and Amy are total pals.

  C’MON, MARRIED PEOPLE

  I don’t want to hear about the endless struggles to keep sex exciting, or the work it takes to plan a date night. I want to hear that you guys watch every episode of The Bachelorette together in secret shame, or that one got the other hooked on Breaking Bad and if either watches it without the other, they’re dead meat. I want to see you guys high-five each other like teammates on a recreational softball team you both do for fun. I want to hear about it because I know it’s possible, and because I want it for myself.

  I guess I think happiness can come in a bunch of forms, and maybe a marriage with tons of work makes people feel happy. But part of me still thinks … is it really so hard to make it work? What happened to being pals? I’m not complaining about Romance Being Dead—I’ve just described a happy marriage as based on talking about plants and a canceled Ray Romano show and drinking milkshakes: not exactly rose petals and gazing into each other’s eyes at the top of the Empire State Building or whatever. I’m pretty sure my parents have gazed into each other’s eyes maybe once, and that was so my mom could put eyedrops in my dad’s eyes. And I’m not saying that marriage should always be easy. But we seem to get so gloomily worked up about it these days. In the Shakespearean comedies, the wedding is the end, and there isn’t much indication of what happily ever after will look like day to day. 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.

  Maybe the point is that any marriage is work, but you may as well pick work that you like. Writing this book is work, but it’s fun work, and I picked it and I enjoy doing it with you, Reader. It’s my job, and it’s a job I like. Tim, on the other hand, had chosen a very tough and kind of bad-sounding job, like being the guy who scrapes barnacles off the pylons of an oil rig in the frigid Arctic Sea.

  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.

  Why Do Men Put on Their Shoes So Slowly?

  I HAVE A serious question, and it is a sexist question. But it is a pretty gentle and specific form of sexist question, so I think it’s okay.

  Why do all the men I know put their shoes on incredibly slowly? When I tie my shoelaces I can do it standing, and I’m out the door in about ten seconds. (Or, more often, I don’t even tie my shoelaces. I slip my feet into my sneakers and tighten the laces in the car.) But with men, if they are putting on any kind of shoe (sneaker, Vans, dress shoe), it will take twenty times as long as when a woman does it. It has come to the point where if I know I’m leaving a house with a man, I can factor in a bathroom visit or a phone call or both, and when I’m done, he’ll almost be done tying his shoes.

  There’s a certain meticulousness that I notice with all guys when they put their shoes on. First of all, they sit down. I mean, they need to sit down to do it. Right there, it signals, “I’m going to be here for a while. Let’s get settled in.” I can put on a pair of hiking boots that have not even been laced yet while talking on my cell phone, without even leaning on a wall.

  I don’t have any real problems with it, except when you’ve done a whole snappy/sexy exit conversation with a guy leaving your place and then he tacks on an extra eight minutes as he puts on his shoes.

  My Appearance: The Fun and the Really Not Fun

  When You’re Not Skinny, This Is What People Want You to Wear

  GETTING PROFESSIONALLY beautified was all that I dreamed about doing when I was an asexual-looking little kid. That’s because my parents dressed both my brother and me according to roughly exactly the same aesthetic: Bert from Ernie and Bert. Easing them out of dressing me in primary colors and cardigans (seriously, I was a child who wore cardigans) and getting them to let me grow my hair out past my earlobes was a first huge step that took years.

  Cosby sweater on, lovin’ life.

  So, yeah, now that I’m an adult, getting made beautiful by a team of professionals for a red carpet event or a magazine photo shoot is heaven to me. The part that is not fun is someone picking out clothes for me.

  I love shopping and fashion, as anyone who has read more than a paragraph of this book will know. But for magazine photo shoots and things, they hire stylists for me, because they have a certain idea for how they want me to look, and it isn’t necessarily how I would style myself, which is 1980s-era Lisa Bonet.

  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.

  For the record, they’re not all bad. I’ve worked with some really badass stylists who make me look so smokin’ hot your face would melt. Monica Rose, who styled me for this book cover, totally gets my body and celebrates it. (Yes, I say things like “celebrates my body” like your old hippie aunt.) But many stylists don’t know what to do with me.

  Over the past seven years, here’s what stylists have tried to make me wear:

  Navy: Ah, navy, the thin-lipped, spinster sister of black. Black, though chic and universally slimming, is considered a boring red carpet color and is rarely featured on best-dressed lists. That’s why I get shown a lot of navy. Navy has made a comeback in the past few years, which is terrific, because before that, navy was most famous as the signature color for postal workers.

  Cap sleeves: Cap sleeves look good on no one, and yet I am given them all the time. I believe it is in an effort to hide the flesh where my arm meets my torso, which I guess is disgusting. Cap sleeves should be worn exclusively by toddler flower girls at a wedding.

  Billowing bohemian blouses billed as “Poet tops”: Skinny girls like Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen look ethereal and gorgeous in hippie clothes with lots of volume. I love the bohemian look, but when I try it, I look like a chubby gypsy. A
lso, chubby people can never truly pull off ethereal the same way skinny people can never be jolly. The only fat ethereal person I can think of was Anna Nicole Smith, and in her case, ethereal might have meant “drugged.”

  Layers of chunky beaded necklaces: Nothing makes me look like a social worker from the 1970s like several layers of colorful, conspicuous, statement necklaces.

  Muumuus: In college, I was cast in a student-written musical that was a retelling of a Greek myth. It was a very cool play with a small cast, each of whom played several roles. The costume designer, an always-frowning girl named Stephanie, had us in for a fitting. She gave tight black unitards to every other actor, so when they played different roles, they could layer simple costume pieces over them and become the new character. I loved the idea. Then it was my turn to get fitted. I was given an enormous, shapeless black muumuu held together by a wad of Velcro and tied together with gold rope. It was obvious it had been made out of the same material as the black canvas curtains of the stage. Stephanie (not a skinny girl herself, by the way) so clearly didn’t want to “deal” with my body. When I complained to the director, he talked to her. She was furious, saying I was “a difficult fit.” I did not know Stephanie would be the first of many people who would throw a muumuu on me and call it a day.

  Shawls: I routinely get shawls draped on me, as though I am Queen Elizabeth. A routine injustice done to the non-thin is to make them look like creaky old ladies.

  Sherlock Holmes–style cloaks: This I don’t mind so much, as long as I have a pipe and a monocle.

  Ponchos: Nothing says “English is not my first language” like me in a poncho.

  Billowing pants: Once, a stylist for a famous women’s fashion magazine dressed me in massive charcoal gray pants with a drawstring. They looked like something a sad clown might wear running errands. Maternity tops billed as “Grecian style” are a relative of billowing pants.

  Daisy print: I think there’s something about daisies or daisy prints that stylists consider synonymous with “cheerful, simple, fat woman.”

  Honestly, I feel like some stylists would put me in a hot dog costume and try to convince me that in Paris all the girls are dressing like the Oscar Mayer wiener, just to cover up my body.

  In 2011, People magazine named me one of the Most Beautiful English-Speaking Persons in North America, in a countrywide vote where I just fucking destroyed. But I don’t need to remind you of this; you probably have the page torn out and stuck on your fridge as inspiration. In all seriousness, it was an amazing surprise, and I was very flattered and excited. I would even say it was an honor to be singled out for my looks, but I don’t think I could in good conscience write something that silly in a book that teenage girls might read.

  In case you thought the photo shoot that produced that image in People went seamlessly—pun intended and relished—here’s what happened:

  The photo shoot took place on a Saturday at a public elementary school about an hour away from Hollywood. As I drove there, I got more and more excited, chatting with my mom and promising her I’d send photos. I was set to do the shoot with my Office costar Ellie Kemper, who is a close friend and one of my favorite people.

  A charismatic and almost incomprehensible French stylist took me to a trailer filled with gowns. It was like walking through Saddam Hussein’s niece’s closet. Organza, tulle, and silk filled the trailer from floor to ceiling; rhinestones and feathers were everywhere. Each gown was more elaborate and gorgeous than the one before. And they were all a size zero.

  The stylist had not brought any non-samples. The only thing that came close to my size was a shapeless navy shift, which I didn’t want to wear because of my aforementioned feelings about navy, and also because it looked like what Judi Dench might wear to the funeral of someone she didn’t care that much about. I looked around for other options. There were none.

  I excused myself by saying I needed to use the bathroom, which, since we were shooting in an elementary school, was the same one the kids used during the day. I went into a stall, sat down on a kid-size toilet, and cried. Why didn’t I just lose twenty pounds so I never had to be in this situation again? Life was so much easier for the actresses who did that. Was my problem that I was this food monster destined to only wear navy shifts? Lots of stupid people were skinny, and yet I couldn’t do this incredibly simple thing they could do with seeming ease.

  I reached for some toilet paper to wipe my tears and saw that the dispenser was empty. I sighed and went to the next stall. No toilet paper. I went to another stall. In this stall there was toilet paper, and there was something else. There was a small amount of excrement smeared on the wall, and next to it, in black Sharpie pen, someone had scrawled, “This school is bullshit!”

  I laughed out loud. Even at this fancy photo shoot, we could not escape the angry, immature graffiti of a mad little kid smearing shit on the wall. I loved this tiny, disgusting rebellion. I don’t know why, but it made me feel better. “This photo shoot is bullshit,” I thought, and went back to the room of gowns.

  They were steaming the navy gown in anticipation of my arrival. I walked past the stylist and over to the other gowns. I picked my favorite one, an ornate dusty rose pink gown with a lace train.

  ME: This is the one I’m going to wear.

  STYLIST GUY (gently, as if to a fragile idiot): Zees will not fit you.

  ME: Oh man, then we’d better get the seamstress to make this one fit, huh? We don’t have too much time!

  STYLIST GUY: She is only here for zee small alterations, not zee large-scale reworking of zee gown.

  That’s when I decided to just pretend as though I somehow had the power (in this weird situation, where no one was boss) to end arguments and make decisions.

  ME: Well, I don’t know what to say, because I just don’t think I’d feel comfortable in anything but that.

  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. But it also wasn’t fair or cool for him to have brought three dozen size-zero gowns to my photo shoot.

  In the end, the seamstress literally cut open the back of one of the gowns and quickly added about a foot of canvas material to the back, pinned it together, and put it on me. The stylist was near tears at the destruction of the gown, but it fit like a glove—er, a glove that is kind of ugly and makeshift on the back. But on the front? Perfection. I love you, canvas. I love you, safety pins. If I ever do a voice in a Disney movie where I’m the princess whose friends are a bunch of inanimate household objects who come to life, I hope mine are a swatch of canvas and some sassy safety pins.

  Later, in our gowns, I took Ellie to the bathroom and showed her the shit-stained graffiti. Ellie loved it, as I knew she would. I spent the rest of the shoot having a blast and posing goofily for photos with my pal, like the awesome, Most Beautiful, and Least Dressable, Girl that I was.

  These Are the Narcissistic Photos in My BlackBerry

  I WOULD RATHER have someone read my diary than look at my iPod playlists. It’s not because I have embarrassing playlists called “Setting the Mood for Sex-Time” or whatever. My playlists are humiliating because my workout mixes have dorky titles, like “Go for It, Girl!” and “You Can Do It, Mindy!” You might also see that some of my playlists are simply two songs on repeat fifteen times, like I’m a psycho getting pumped up to murder the president.

  My BlackBerry photos, on the other hand, make me laugh. They are all horribly, horribly narcissistic. My BlackBerry camera has proven to exist primarily as a mirror to see if my makeup came out okay. The other ones are my favorite people who I want to look at all the time. I thought I’d share them all, uncensored.

  1. I was on my way to a taping of The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and I wanted to see if the zit I had on the center of my forehead had shrunk. 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? It was so huge that Rainn Wilson advised me not to do the talk show appearance. I really wanted to go on The Late Late Show, though, because I love Craig Ferguson, so I popped it with a safety pin sterilized with hot water in the women’s restroom. A blood blob formed and dried up, and I was able to flick the crust off for the show, but you can still kind of see it.

  2. I was on my way to the GQ Man of the Year Party. There was absolutely no reason for me to be there, but I’d heard Drake might perform. I did my own hair and I wanted to see if it looked awful.