Why Not Me?

by Mindy Kaling

  So I have had to learn some drastic ways to get rid of my zits. Only one thing has ever worked, and I have come to depend on one device, a special wand the size and weight of a remote control that shoots hot blue light into my skin.

  I bought this wand, the Tria Acne Clearing Blue Light, from my dermatologist’s office. At one point I was spending so much time with the device that I started calling him Wall-E. He looks like a fancy sex toy from Japan. His job is to “eliminate acne-causing bacteria deep beneath the skin’s surface,” and I have to hold him pressed against my face for twenty minutes every night. The little whirring sound he makes when I switch him on is comforting.

  And what does Wall-E feel like? Like a tiny white-hot iron you are pressing against an already-sensitive pimple. It’s hellish. But it’s very effective at squashing and destroying pimples, so you don’t care. Also, I think I have a pretty high pain threshold, because one time, after a very long day of shooting, I was using Wall-E while I was watching TV and fell asleep. When I woke up, I had a rectangular burn mark on the side of my chin. But no zits underneath!

  YOUR BOOBS MUST BE ON FLEEK. (OK, NOW I KNOW IT’S NOT COOL. I’M SAYING IT AS A JOKE.)

  I have never had any breasts to speak of. In high school I wore the same white cotton Jockey 34-A bra for three consecutive years. It wasn’t that I didn’t have other bras; it’s just that I barely needed one anyway, and it was comfortable. I did this until one day in the locker room after field-hockey practice, Annie Devereaux asked me in a worried (secretly bitchy) tone, “Why do you only have one bra?” I lied and said I had several exquisite bras at home but I read that underwires give you breast cancer, so I never wore them. Annie was dubious, but the conversation had taken such a depressing turn that she let it go.

  Soon after, I made my mom take me to Victoria’s Secret, and I saw what I was missing out on. I didn’t have to wear my stretchy white bra that looked like it was for someone going through physical therapy. My bra could be fun, sexy, and an outrageous color, like neon-pink. And that wasn’t all; they had thongs that had your astrological sign in little crystals over the pubis! Underwear didn’t have to be utilitarian; it could be a topic of conversation that announced your whole deal. My mom was supportive of this because I think she knew there was little to no chance any boy would ever see them anyway, so hey, why not? I asked her why she never wore underwear like this. She smiled and said kindly, “These aren’t for serious people.” I think she was right, because I have been wearing crazy bras ever since.

  For events, I wear a moderately padded bra. I’ve found that a well-fitting padded bra can transform me from a pear-shaped woman to an hourglass-shaped woman. Okay, maybe not hourglass-shaped, but definitely, say, an egg-timer-shaped woman. For me, it’s not about being busty; it’s about evening out the proportions of my body. The reason I only wear them to events and not in my everyday life is that a padded bra can look a little excessive on me. One time I wore one to work when my regular bras were in the wash, and my friend and coworker Ike Barinholtz stopped in his tracks. “I’m sorry, why are your boobs so big?!” he asked in a legitimately concerned tone. This reaction was so much more offensive to me than if he had said, “Hubba-hubba.” I suppose my modest-size breasts are a constant that the people I work with have come to depend on. So, I will keep them that way.

  LEARN TO LURK IN SHADOWS

  Who is the beauty icon that inspires you the most? Is it Sophia Loren? Audrey Hepburn? Halle Berry? Mine is Nosferatu, because that vampire taught me my number-one and number-two favorite beauty tricks of all time: avoid the sun at all costs and always try to appear shrouded in shadows.

  Lighting in television and film is the real key to always looking beautiful. It’s also the biggest mystery to me. I hired my cinematographer, Marco Fargnoli, based on one thing and one thing alone: his impressive and serious-sounding Italian name. As luck would have it, he also turned out to be a very talented DP, which means director of photography. Marco can take a foot-long square of orange cellophane—the kind they wrap cookies in at the bakery—and tape it in front of a light, and somehow I go from looking like Ving Rhames to Freida Pinto. It’s remarkable. In addition to his other feats (making the San Fernando Valley look like the West Village in Manhattan), he regularly makes me look like this:

  Eavesdropping, the most alluring way to be nosy.

  I can always count on Marco to make me look luminous and adorable, like that kid who is fishing from the moon in the DreamWorks logo. So my advice to you is: try to befriend a cinematographer and have him or her light you wherever you go.

  SCARY MASKS!

  When I was fifteen, I would wake up, wash my face with the same bar of Lever 2000 I used on my body, wash my hair with an all-in-one shampoo, and be done with it. Back then, we all thought Lever 2000 was the best because the number “2000” seemed so impressive. Were there 1999 formulas before they landed on this one? That sounds really well researched. I’m in!

  Oh, how I miss that charmingly low-maintenance version of myself. Now when I wake up, if I haven’t gotten enough sleep, it shows. You know how on The Walking Dead when a human gets bitten by a zombie, there’s that fifteen-minute window after they are infected when they are transforming into a zombie, and their insides liquefy and their eyes turn into milky goo? That’s what I look like.

  But no one in America will ever know that, because on those bad-sleep days, my makeup artist Cindy applies a beauty mask to my face. It can be any calming mask. I keep mine in the fridge, because there are two things Mindy Kaling likes cold: beer and beauty masks.1 The mask also makes me look like Hannibal Lecter, but at least he was a human, after all. After the potions from the mask seep into my skin, Cindy peels it off and I look like a woman you might want to be friends with. At least acquaintances with. Or at least a woman Michonne wouldn’t stab in the brain with her katana.

  You can’t hear me, but I’m muttering, “You’re next.”

  ARMS ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS

  The most valuable thing I learned from Kim Kardashian is that your arm must never lie flat against your body. The second most valuable thing is how to do this sex move called the Armenian Strangler, but that’s for another book. I remember hearing her say that when you put your hand on your hip, it makes your arm look thinner and draws attention to your waist. I tried it and I loved it! So I started doing it whenever I was getting my picture taken.

  I guess I was doing it a lot, because a blogger decided to write about it. This blogger had been semiregularly writing mean stuff about me, and this snarky post was called “Mindy Kaling Sure Likes to Pose with Her Hand on Her Hip.” The post contained a bunch of photos of me from separate red-carpet events with my hand on my hip. When I first saw it, I felt so bad and embarrassed. What does this observation mean about me? It must mean I’m vapid or, like, really lame or aspirational or something.

  Then I realized it meant absolutely nothing at all. This person was desperate for a new way to dis me, and when he (that’s right, he, men can be catty mean-os too!) couldn’t find anything substantive, he chose this, because he figured, well, people probably resent actresses anyway for getting to get dressed up and pose for photos, so readers will love to mock her for this.

  And then I thought, Wow, this poor sad guy. I pictured all the time he must have spent scouring through photos of me to find the ones where my hand was on my hip. And when he spotted one, Eureka!, he thought, excitedly dragging the image to his desktop while his wife was probably in another room, watching TV by herself, wondering when he was going to come out of the den. Why doesn’t he ever have time for me, she thinks. Next time my boss asks me to get happy-hour hurricanes with him, I’m going to say yes! This was a grown man. And that was his job. Which brings me to another thing I learned from Kim Kardashian: haters are just more people paying attention to you. And guess what? I looked great in all those photos he compiled.

  There, I’ve spilled all my beauty secrets and it feels really good. Like, benevolent even? Maybe
I will count this as my charity thing for the year. If you found this helpful, then great, and I am more than a little bit surprised. If this all sounded ridiculous and you are laughing at what an idiot I am, that too is great. Because talking about looks isn’t important. It’s just supposed to be fun.

  * * *

  1 I’m testing out a persona. Is she cool?

  SOME THOUGHTS ON WEDDINGS

  I HAVE BEEN LARGELY silent about my attitude toward weddings. Anyone who knows me even slightly will recognize how unusual that is, since I am notorious for making impassioned speeches about things nobody cares about. Like, I think it’s a federal crime parking meters won’t accept pennies. Yeah, government, we know pennies suck. But you made them! You have to accept them! Parking meters are literally one of the three things anyone uses coins for and you decide you don’t want to deal with them?

  OK, I took a couple hours off to cool off and now I’m back. People assume I must love weddings, and that is understandable, since the character I play on my show, The Mindy Project, has all but picked the DJ for the fantasy wedding in her head. And as a kid, I actually really loved the idea of having a fancy Judeo-Christian wedding. I remember lying in bed at night when I was eleven and dreaming about walking down the aisle with Dana Carvey, my biggest crush. All his Saturday Night Live friends would be on one side of the aisle, and my fifth-grade friends would be on the other. And somehow my parents were fine with me being a child bride, because the Church Lady was so funny and Dana Carvey seemed like a sweet and decent guy. Now that I think about it, if I had married Dana Carvey at eleven, that probably would’ve been a pretty good life.

  But the truth is, I really, really don’t like weddings.

  Here’s what I do like: love stories. Romance. In fact, most of my favorite books employ the “marriage plot.” What is the “marriage plot,” besides the most interesting-sounding movie Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant never made? This is how I’d explain it. You know how all those movie adaptations of Jane Austen books end with Kate Winslet or Keira Knightley standing outside a chapel in the English countryside in a wedding dress with the man of their dreams? That’s the marriage plot. A man and a woman are very attracted to each other but there still seem to be lots of reasons why they can’t be together. Sometimes it’s logistical (he goes off to war), sometimes it’s situational (she’s engaged to someone else), sometimes it’s emotional (he calls her family tacky and she thinks he’s a dickhead). Whatever it is, the audience knows in the back of their heads that these two dum-dums will eventually figure it out and get together and, if we’re lucky, there will be a funny sex scene along the way. But that’s why I usually love the marriage plot. Because you see everything except the wedding.

  I find that when I want to take an unpopular opinion about a controversial subject, it’s useful to be really organized. The rest of this essay will discuss the various mild injustices that I have experienced at the many weddings I have attended and explain, hopefully compassionately, why I dislike them so much.

  There are so few nonreligious rituals we have with our best friends. We can marry our boyfriends and we can baptize our children, but we can’t do anything “official” with our best friends, except get matching tattoos of clovers, which no one actually does because who would let a friend do that? So the only real ritual we have is asking each other to be maids of honor or bridesmaids.

  Asking your friend to be a bridesmaid is one of the modern paradoxes: no one actually wants to do it, but everyone would be offended if you didn’t ask.

  And why doesn’t anyone want to be a bridesmaid? Because what women who have never done it before don’t realize is that, when you are a bridesmaid, you are required to be a literal maid for the duration of the wedding. You are in charge of the practicalities and logistics of the ceremony, and not the fun parts, such as providing emotional support, making music playlists, offering fashion advice, and gossiping about which people from college got fat. The only difference between you and an actual maid is that you aren’t getting paid and you are supposed to love every second of your job. You even have to wear a uniform: a dress in the same color as the other maids so everyone at the party knows whom to ask when someone is looking for a fridge in which to put her breast milk.

  This is particularly outrageous because the groomsmen do absolutely nothing. And I mean nothing. Being asked to be a groomsman means you get to give an incredibly inappropriate two-minute speech and every woman there will still want to sleep with you. As a bridesmaid, on the morning of the wedding you will be unfolding the rusty metal legs of a banquet table and in the distance you will see a useless groomsman playing Frisbee with a dog. To rub salt in the wound, he might lightly ask, “Is there anything I can do to help?” knowing full well no self-respecting bridesmaid will task him with any job because he will do it too slowly.

  But at least being a bridesmaid is a social activity and can be emotionally rewarding. What is not emotionally rewarding is a honeyfund. There are few things that I have more ideological problems with than the concept of the “honeyfund.” Hear me out: I love the idea of giving my newly married friends a meaningful present. But I don’t love being asked to be an investor in a crowd-funded honeymoon. Here is why: it’s not especially emotionally rewarding to know that I paid for three of five nights of a yurt rental in Big Sur. It’s so transactional. Sure, everyone knows all wedding registries are essentially transactional, but at least they are transactional about objects, not about people and experiences. I know you say you have too much stuff in your apartment and what you really want is a killer honeymoon in Thailand. But I feel like, if you have every material good you want, you’re probably doing well enough to plan a honeymoon that is within your means. Because a honeymoon is, after all, a sex vacation you’re giving yourself after a massive party in your honor.

  This brings me to the most common misconception I think couples have about a wedding registry. A gift registry is not about the relationship between man and wife; that’s what vows and a marriage are for. The registry is about the relationship between the wedding guest and the couple. It’s about your loved ones being able to give you a souvenir of their affection in the form of a tangible house-helpful gift. This is my long-winded way of telling you that you will take my Calphalon wire cooling rack and you will like it.

  So why do I participate in any of it? Why not RSVP “no thanks” and hide behind my very busy schedule? Well, a) sometimes I do, and b) when I don’t, the simple fact is that the brides are often my closest friends.

  With my friends, the sad truth is that our best “best friend” days are behind us. In college, we used to be able to meet each other in the common area of our off-campus housing, excited about our evening ahead, which consisted of someone making an enormous tureen of pasta and drinking wine from a box while we took turns regaling each other with details of our terrible love lives. Playful arguments would become fits of uncontrollable laughter, and, like magic, that experience would be crystallized into a private joke, and the private joke would get boiled down to a simple phrase, which became a souvenir of the entire experience. For years to come, the phrase alone could uncork hours of renewed laughter. And as everyone knows, the best kind of laughter is laughter born of a shared memory.

  In my late twenties, when I moved to Los Angeles and all my friends seemed to spread out around the country, I would tell myself, Once I am on hiatus from the show, I will visit them and everything will be the same. But the hiatus would come and go, and a movie role or rewrite job would keep me in L.A. Until I realized: this long expanse of free time to rekindle friendships is not real. We will never come home to each other again and we will never again have each other’s undivided attention. That version of our friendship is over forever.

  And when I remember this, and it usually happens in those awful, quiet evening hours on Sunday nights, after dinner but before bed, I just lie on my sofa and cry for half an hour. I slip into a melancholy that I know is somehow tied to a deep-seated
fear about not being married and having kids myself. Because, at its heart, my annoyance or impatience with my friends’ weddings stems from my own panic and abandonment issues. Why are you leaving me behind like this, friend? What am I supposed to do all by myself now that you are gone?

  It’s traumatizing to think that a best friend could become just a friend. That’s because there is virtually no difference between an acquaintance and a friend. But the gulf between a friend and a best friend is enormous and profound. And if I look at it that way, I think I can see the value of a wedding. If you’re my best friend and the only way I get to have dinner with you is by traveling thousands of miles, selecting a chicken or fish option, and wearing a dress in the same shade of lavender as six other girls, I will do that. I won’t love it. But I love you.

  MINDY KALING, SORORITY GIRL

  THOUGH I WENT to a very artsy private high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I wasn’t raised by parents with a liberal attitude toward alcohol. There was no whimsical “sip of wine at Thanksgiving” for us kids while we were still teenagers, like we were in a Noah Baumbach movie. That was for the cool Jewish kids. This was the Clinton era, and my parents were already worried about the moral deterioration of the country. So I drank skim milk with dinner, and did so pretty much every night until I was a story editor at The Office.