Why Not Me?

by Mindy Kaling

  * * *

  3:14 AM

  SUNDAY

  From: Mindy Kaling

  To: Jim Dufault

  Subject: Hello

  Date: Sun, Sep 11, 2005 at 11:13 AM

  Dear Big Jim,

  I don’t know how to tell you this, but, I just woke up, and while cleaning up my utterly trashed apartment, I noticed the unthinkable: two of the three trash cans you lent me are missing, presumably stolen.

  You are not the only person who has suffered a loss—my piñata was also stolen, and yes, after it was stuffed with candy. It never occurred to me that someone would do something like this in my own home. Although, a lot of strange things happened last night, so perhaps it’s just par for the course. First, a close friend didn’t show up with a potential guy I might like. Then, while I was reeling from that disappointment, and picking up plastic cups from on top of my toilet tank cover (honestly, who leaves plastic cups in the bathroom of someone’s home?), a man kissed me out of nowhere. It was pretty confusing because a week ago this man was someone I might have blocked on Facebook, if he was the type of person who had Facebook, which he isn’t. Suffice it to say, I have a lot to think about, and I’ll reimburse you for the trash cans, and please don’t tell Headmistress Resnick-Klein. She has a PhD in being an old crone.

  Yours truly,

  Mindy

  P.S. please don’t repeat that old crone comment to anyone.

  Mindy Kaling

  Latin Teacher, High School

  The Dalton School

  108 E 89th St, New York, NY 10128

  (212) 555-1445 (work)

  (617) 453-8688 (cell)

  Tumblr: aromeofonesown.tumblr.com

  AIM handle: LatinLover1979

  —You can also catch me on Facebook—

  “Don’tcha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?” —Pussycat Dolls

  * * *

  7:02 PM

  7:03 PM

  7:04 PM

  7:04 PM

  UNLIKELY LEADING LADY

  I WAS BEING INTERVIEWED at a restaurant for a flashy, nationally circulated magazine. It started out well enough. The journalist met me for brunch at a restaurant near my house. He then almost immediately began writing down everything I ate. This was a little odd because this wasn’t a fitness or food magazine, but I didn’t think too much of it. Maybe those kinds of details make the general public fall in love with you: “Ms. Kaling ate her omelet with a dedication I’m sure she applies to her career.” I began to put jam on my toast.

  “Not too careful with the calories, Mindy?” the journalist asked with a mischievous glint in his eye. I was taken aback.

  Did he seriously just ask me that?

  How do you answer such a question? Why would someone ask such a question? I mumbled something about liking jam and moved on. Later though, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Clearly what he meant when he said I wasn’t “too careful with the calories” was: “Shouldn’t you be more careful with the calories, Mindy?” I seriously doubt he would have said that to a slender woman. And there’s no way he’s saying that to a man. Because a man would respond: “Are you seriously writing down what I eat and, like, criticizing me about it? Fuck off, dude.” The strangest part was the journalist didn’t think this was a weird question. In fact, if you read the interview, he includes it in the article.

  If that had been an isolated incident, I would’ve ignored it and filed it away in my mental file cabinet of “people who have bad manners and must have been raised by criminals.”

  But the thing is, he’s not the only person who’s interested.

  I have a complicated relationship with my body. Or rather, I have a complicated relationship with my stance on my body. It is new and strange to me that I am now a person who has to have a “stance” on her body, since before I was on television I felt pretty detached from it. I thought of it as the vehicle that carried me to and from places my brain wants to go, like my car. In the past few years, however, I have found that people are preoccupied with it. So I decided I should try to reflect on it in some (hopefully smart) way.

  Young women often approach me and excitedly tell me how much they appreciate the way I look. They like that I am not a skinny twig, because it shows that I refuse to change who I am and makes them feel like they don’t have to either. I really love that.

  But what they don’t know is that I’m a big fat fraud. I’m completely not at peace with how I look. I don’t wake up in the morning, look at my naked body in the mirror, and say, “Good morning, body. Once again, you’ve nailed it, you gorgeous imperfect thing. That wobbly patch of cellulite? A miracle. Each stretch mark? A Picasso. Holy crap, I look good! Who can I sext? Somebody else has got to see this!”

  Most mornings, I wake up, rub the sleep out of my eyes, walk past the mirror, stop, and mutter, “Yikes,” then quickly shuffle off to the shower.

  I AM SO REAL

  This is an example of the kind of thing that is most often said about me in the media:

  “It’s so refreshing that Mindy Kaling doesn’t try to conform to any normal standards of beauty. She is just so real. I love that about her.”

  And my knee-jerk reaction is: Wait! I don’t want to be real! When I think of things that are “real” I think of income taxes and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Real is bad! I want fantasy!

  My guiltiest example of this is: Once, at my dentist’s office, I read a magazine article with the title “Curvy Celebs We Adore!” which featured a pretty photo of me. I loved it. Then I turned the page. The next bunch of photos were of actresses who were much bigger than me, probably weighing fifty to a hundred pounds more. My instantaneous reaction was, Whoa, whoa, whoa. I’m not that big! They’re kind of being liberal with the term “curvy,” aren’t they? Then I really panicked: I don’t look like them, do I? I can buy my clothes at regular stores! I can still fit into one economy seat on a plane! These porkers would have to buy a row! I was considering asking the dental receptionist her opinion on the matter when I came to my senses. I realized how absurd and gross I was to want a magazine to have stricter criteria for their empowering piece about non-skinny celebrities. I’m not proud of that moment, but sometimes I fall victim to my own insecurities. I never want to be part of the problem. I want to always be as body-positive as girls hope that I am. And yet I occasionally use the word porkers. I’m trying, guys.

  I think the reason that such a big deal is made of how I look is that women who are my size are so rarely seen on TV and film. Most women we see on-screen are either so thin that they’re walking clavicles or so huge that their only scenes involve them breaking furniture and eating whole pies. There are exceptions, of course: my friend Lena Dunham, the wonderful Allison Tolman from Fargo, and … I sadly can’t think of a third, even though it would be great to be able to list three here.

  The conversation about me and my show is so frequently linked to the way I look that people who are deciding whether or not to watch my show must think subconsciously, Oh, that’s that show about body acceptance in chubby women, because that’s all they seem to hear about it. And my show is about so much more than that! It’s about the struggles of a delusional Indian thirtysomething trying to scam on white dudes!

  My deep dark secret is that I absolutely do try to conform to normal standards of beauty. I am just not remotely successful at it.

  A VERY SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS OF MY BRAIN

  I can’t for the life of me not eat something that I want to eat. You know how if you turned on a faucet in your sink to wash your hands, the idea of leaving the bathroom without turning it off is insane? That’s how I am about ignoring delicious food. I can go five years without taking any kind of vacation, but I have never once refrained from eating a Girl Scout Tagalong cookie if someone brings in a box to work. The very idea of not taking one (OK, nine) seems crazy to me.

  The truth is, if I were going to lose weight successfully, I would have to think about what I eat constantly. I cannot imagine
a life more boring and a more time-consuming obsession than being preoccupied with watching what I eat. I mean, maybe being in a coma would be more boring, but at least then you’re free to dream about all of your favorite foods. And the fact of the matter is, I don’t have that much brain space to use thinking about it. Here’s a diagram that shows what’s usually on my mind:

  I suppose I could give up thinking about Bradley Cooper a little, in exchange for being ten pounds skinnier, but honestly: Who wants to do that? Would that even be possible? Did you see what he looked like in Hangover 3? Remember him in Limitless?

  JUICE CLEANSES

  Healthy people are always saying that diets shouldn’t be diets; they should be thought of as “a new way of life.” Well, that is just the worst thing I have ever heard. That’s why I like crash diets like juicing.

  Like everyone in Southern California, I’ve attempted several juice cleanses. If you live in the city of Los Angeles, it is your legal right to be able to purchase freshly squeezed kale juice from any gas station within a twenty-mile radius of the Hollywood sign. I did my first juice cleanse during the last week of 2012 as a sort of spiritual detox to prepare myself for 2013. I was a little weird then; I was watching a lot of OWN, and trying to be my best self.

  In that week, I lost a full dress size. I only stopped because David Stassen, one of our writers, ordered French fries at lunch and couldn’t finish them. He said, “I’m throwing these away. Does anyone want any?” In our writers’ room, someone tossing a half-eaten container of French fries is like someone at a Wall Street IPO announcement party declaring that they were just going to throw away a bag of high-quality cocaine.1 I lost my mind. I lunged at him and inhaled all of his fries standing up a foot away from the trash can. No food is as delicious as food you eat standing a foot away from a trash can. Ask any possum.

  THE 21-DAY CLEANSE

  That summer, encouraged by the relative success I’d had with my New Year’s cleanse, I embarked on another one, but this one was for twenty-one days. You will not believe me, but I did not cheat once. I think I was only able to do this because of several highly motivating factors tied to my job. The first was that we were two months away from shooting season 2 of The Mindy Project, and it was written that I would appear in a bathing suit made of whipped cream, like in the classic film Varsity Blues. The second was that James Franco was going to be on the show and I was going to have to kiss him. Like every heterosexual woman and gay man in the country, I think James Franco is a very mysterious and sexy weirdo and I’d like to be invited to do a love scene with him in one of his art house movies. As you can see, the stakes could not have been higher!

  The first three days were terrible. The toughest part of juicing is that you are, well, constantly drinking juices. It’s like an endless assignment of juices, with ten to twelve trips to the bathroom a day. And then, miraculously, on day four, just when I was about to eat the leftover candy canes I kept in a box of Christmas decorations in my shed, my hunger suddenly subsided, and I was in a loopy, great mood. The physical emptiness I remembered from my last cleanse was back! And it supplied me with a manic and infectious energy. I believed I was the funniest I’d ever been in my life. The downside was that I barely slept at night. I would just lie in my bed, grinding my teeth, waiting for dawn to break, like a demon in a music video.

  I also began to have a pretty disturbing attitude toward eating. I developed a real superiority complex to people who ate actual food. I realized that this is how fashion editors at women’s magazines must feel all the time. Oh God, look at those sad piggos, munching away on their sandwiches. I’d just sit there, sipping my kale juice, quietly judging everyone as they happily ate their lunches. And yes, maybe my mouth was full of saliva and the thought of putting an onion ring onto my tongue was almost sexual, but the point was, I was better than they were. I was juicing.

  Costume fittings were, of course, the best. My jeans hung on me and everything looked so good. I could wear things I had long ruled out for myself, like jorts (jean shorts, duh) and midriff-showing tops. Basically I could dress like a slutty teenage hitchhiker and it felt great. But one thing was terrible: my social life was nonexistent.

  I could not go anywhere or do anything. One Saturday night, an Internet multimillionaire named Eric (who was friends with some of my writers) was in town from Silicon Valley. For actresses in Hollywood, the “tech millionaire from Northern California” is a mythical creature. Actresses love tech guys. The idea is that we must seem glamorous to them because they are from some girl-less forest, and they are perfect for us because a) they’re impossibly rich, b) they’re nerds with probably not that many sexually transmitted diseases, and c) they have not been corrupted by godless Los Angeles, where if you’re a guy with a car and health insurance, you don’t have to settle down until you’re sixty.

  Eric was even better because he was a tech genius who made eye contact and didn’t mumble when he talked. He was handsome and sweet and only a little boring. He had expressed to a mutual friend that he would love if I joined them for dinner. I was thrilled when I heard, and started scrambling to put together an outfit that made me seem like the classy Bay Area Trophy Wife I knew I could be. I could almost smell the musty interior of Alcatraz from the charity fund-raisers I’d throw there. Then I snapped out of it. I was two weeks deep into the cleanse. I was so proud of not messing up my spotless cleanse record by eating food or drinking alcohol, or even being tempted. I couldn’t blow it now! Miserably, I told my friends I couldn’t go because I wasn’t feeling well.

  The next day, I was kicking myself. What kind of juice-addled state was I in to choose swamp-colored grass water over hanging out with a cute, successful dude? Was a thin elixir of lemon and cayenne pepper going to marry me or impregnate me with two brilliant mathematicians/artists who would have his ability to write code and my style? Goddamn you, juice! Eric is probably married to a Victoria’s Secret model by now or, at the very minimum, a Stanford physicist. That’s when I decided: I will never cleanse again.

  PERSONAL TRAINING

  Like any good citizen, I’ve seen The Biggest Loser, so I know that increased muscle mass means a more toned appearance and burning more calories all day. But for years I just chose to never do any strength training because it seemed hard. It wasn’t until a particularly disturbing night when I couldn’t lift myself off the sofa because of lack of upper body strength that I decided it was time to see a trainer.

  I’m going to be braggy for a second: I’m a pretty fun person to talk to. I find almost everyone fascinating and I love to ask questions. As a young teenager I was obsessed with small talk. Something about mastering it made me feel grown-up and like an “old soul.” From ages twelve to seventeen, my poor parents were constantly having to listen to me prattle on about nothing, experimenting with chitchat. This quality has continued into adulthood, such that my friends sometimes call me a “talky-talky say-nothing.” This side of me really gets turned on when I am with a personal trainer. I do it to get out of working out, obviously, but to the average personal trainer who doesn’t get to interact with chatty comedy actors that much, I’m basically a sorceress. All they end up wanting to do is gossip with me and all I want to do is completely avoid having to do any exercise. Perfect, right?

  This happened with my trainer, Joy. Every time she told me to get on the ground and do a bunch of burpees, I would distract us deftly. “ ‘Burpee’ is such a random word. I wonder where it came from. I bet it has a really cool etymology; let’s look it up!” I was like a snake charmer. Five minutes would go by while I was just lying on the ground, babbling. At a certain point I was so good at it that one day Joy arrived and I was like, “Should we just go get lunch instead of training today?” And she said, “Sure!” So we did. And then I realized that I had paid someone to have lunch with me, and I stopped seeing Joy.

  MY COOKING IS BAD

  In April of 2014 I made a resolution to cook all of the recipes in Gwyneth Paltrow’s health
-conscious cookbook, It’s All Good, daily, for as long as it took to complete. It was my attempt to get in great shape, learn how to cook, and basically do a Julie & Julia, but with Gwyneth Paltrow so one day we could star in a movie about my experiences and eventually become best friends. It was also a way to improve myself that did not require going to spin class.

  I decided to cook a salt-covered baked fish and green salad because it sounded easy and I could probably nap while it cooked. The first challenge was buying the ingredients. My entire day was devoted to tracking down branzino (a very fancy fish) and saffron (a very fancy spice) at various Southern California Whole Foods stores. Hell is Whole Foods on a Sunday. It’s hordes of moms in lightweight fleeces pushing one another out of the way to get to bins of dry lentils.

  The process of cooking my branzino was messy and difficult, and I went through about two rolls of paper towels. I found myself having to read the instructions over and over again. It was like my brain refused to retain the information because it was too bored by it, on principle. And once I had finally cooked my branzino and started to dive in, it hit me that cooking was not for me. In order to enjoy the It’s All Good food, I needed to be living the It’s All Good lifestyle. I was supposed to be eating my salt-covered branzino on a rustic outdoor table with witty dinner guests and my adorable little children bringing flowers to me straight from our English garden, like the photos in Gwyneth’s book. It was not for eating solo while I sat cross-legged on the floor of my TV room watching Access Hollywood and folding my laundry.