by Aisha Tyler
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tyler, Aisha.
Self-inflicted wounds : heartwarming tales of epic humiliation / Aisha Tyler.—First edition.
pages cm
Summary: “On the wildly popular podcast ‘Girl on Guy,’ comedian and actress Aisha Tyler asks her guests to recount moments from their lives when they’ve done something boneheaded, ill-conceived, dangerous, or just plain stupid . . . to themselves. In Self-Inflicted Wounds, Aisha turns the lens on herself—recounting her most egregious mistakes—to hilarious result. Laugh-out-loud funny and totally relatable, Self-Inflicted Wounds highlights a new comedic voice on the rise”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-06-222377-7 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-06-222378-4 (paperback) 1. Tyler, Aisha—Anecdotes. 2. Women comedians—United States—Anecdotes. 3. Podcasters—United States—Anecdotes. I. Title.
PN2287.T89A3 2013
792.7’6—dc23 2013013538
EPub Edition July 2013 ISBN 9780062223791
13 14 15 16 17 DIX/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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1 This book may help you figure out where my yellow banana-seat cruiser is. If you find it, please let me know. I really miss that bike.
1 Other than H.N.I.C, which is a very easy degree to get.
2 It’s not that I don’t like talking to strangers, I just prefer to do it on a stage where they have assembled into a group and are visibly intoxicated. One-on-one interaction? Ick.
3 Resistance is futile.
4 A wholly unscientific method first successfully pioneered by Oprah.
5 Tyler’s Razor felt a bit derivative.
6 Or more relevant, “I know I was caught tickling another man’s foot with my pants down in a bathroom notorious for being the locale of homosexual trysts, but I just have a wide stance and a twitchy extremity. I was in no way soliciting gay sex!”
1 This is more like a thought and a feeling smashed together. A theeling. A fought? No, a theeling. Definitely a theeling.
1 People have called me a lot of things, but one word they have never used is depressed. I am, fortunately or not, depending on your perspective, nauseatingly upbeat, disgustingly cheery. Please, withhold your disdain. This is a genetic condition. Much like synesthetes or people who love musical theater, this is just how I was born.
2 Along with kids riding the bus, doing their homework without parental “assistance” (read: “doing it for them”), using a kitchen knife or an open flame before the age of seventeen, or anything else that builds character, instills mental toughness or makes kids into actual people.
3 I was a five-year-old girl. I still had a “chest.” If you think it was inappropriate, you need therapy. Also, you may need to look out your front window and see if Chris Hansen from To Catch a Predator is lurking in your bushes waiting to strike.
4 And needing desperately to show a certain neighborhood boy who was fond of picking up dried poo and throwing it at me that I wasn’t afraid of anything, not dogs or alleys or least of all, poos. Yes, that is the plural of poo. Poos.
5 This did absolutely nothing to diminish the appeal of this toy to us, but made it feel like we were riding some kind of death metal narwhal. The fact that it made the thing potentially deadly was just an added level of awesome.
6 No fair cutting! I wasn’t done!
7 Fun, back then, as now, is a powerful enticement. It is why we jump out of planes, drink too much, drive too fast, fake illness to skip work, wake up in bed woozy and pants-less next to people we have just met. And no matter how mature or responsible we become, fun is always there, just out of sight, trying to lure us from our responsibilities—a nude and voluptuous siren holding a bottleful of bourbon and two tickets to Vegas, reeking of jasmine blossoms and cookie dough and doom. She is a foxy evil bitch queen, that Fun. She is not to be toyed with.
1 The loss of this Mustang is one of the great stinging regrets of my life. This car was powder blue. It had pleather bench seats. It had an 8-track inside, in which a cassette of Bootsy’s Rubber Band’s Ahh . . . The Name Is Bootsy, Baby! was permanently lodged. This was not a problem. This made the car perpetually funky. Riding in this vehicle to and from Montessori made me feel like a tiny, brown, female Bullitt.
I do not know where this Mustang finally came to rest—my mom eventually traded it in on a much more practical and family-friendly powder blue Volkswagen Rabbit. Thinking of it being slowly crushed into scrap makes me die a little inside. In my fantasies, it is living on a farm, gamboling in green pastures alongside the cars from Streets of San Francisco and Christine.
2 Hostage negotiators would be driven screaming from the dinner table of a family in the throes of divorce. There is nothing as frostily off-putting as two adults trying to act as if things are fine for the sake of their kids, who in all probability can totally sense the complete bullshit being slung across the dinner table. Kids aren’t stupid, and their bullshit meters are much more highly calibrated than adults’. Grownups aren’t fooling anybody.
3 When you are a kid, you don’t really have a sense of what adult happiness looks like. As a result, you kind of don’t care. As long as they aren’t yelling and you get stuff like money and toys, shit is good.
4 This is the first of the primary and immutable truths about kids, followed by 2) they never want to go to sleep, and 3) some part of a child will always be sticky.
5 Maybe the potatoes.
6 But especially while engaging in fire- and/or grease-related activities.
7 I don’t know why. Sometimes a girl gotsta get her floss on. And yes, I do immediately regret writing that.
8 “Forgotten. Who forgets money in the pockets of their clothes?” scoffed the six-year-old me. “Obviously this woman is extremely wealthy and profligate enough to cast good money after bad without regard. It is also abundantly clear that her admonitions about ‘money not growing on trees’ are a pile of lies she peddles to get out of sharing her immense fortune with me. This woman is not to be obeyed or trusted. On the bright side, this is just enough for a Popsicle shaped like Ms. Pac-Man and four packs of Now and Laters, so the lady can’t be all bad.”
9 It puts the lotion in the basket.
10 Smoke! Dude. Smoking grease. If I saw a seven-year-old doing this now, I would put them in a straitjacket and call the authorities. Looking back, I was clearly out of control from the first grade onward.
11 Remember those? Yeah, neither do I.
12 This rule probably has larger metaphorical implications, but even taken literally, it is still pretty good advice.
13 And also probably chip a tooth. What’re you gonna do? That’s what veneers are for.
1 Because somehow movie weirdos are still socially adept enough to have an actual group of friends, one of whom is hot enough to have sex with. If they are female, she wears colored tights and dances on the lawn at night without shoes. If they are male, he is emotionally tortured and rides his bike through
the city in the pouring rain. These people are not real.
2 Not my nails. Nail biting is for amateurs. Cuticle biting is where you draw real blood. That’s what separates the simply odd from the truly and desperately compulsive.
3 I don’t know why I am using words like “podia” and “librarian.” And “books.” Like anyone’s ever heard of that stuff nowadays. If you are struggling with these concepts, just imagine the Internet was really heavy and you had to carry the whole thing around in your hands and there wasn’t any porn or videos of cats in toilets inside it, just words and a few scant illustrations. That’s what going to the library was like.
4 It’s hard enough being a minority in the regular world, without actively choosing to be a minority within an even tinier minority of people who danced around airports asking for money. Way to self-isolate!
5 Oh, who am I kidding? I was standing by the fence biting my cuticles and reading The Left Hand of Darkness.
6 In real life, Sujata was a pretty awesome chick. She brought the Buddha a bowl of milk rice when he was starving to death after six years of extreme austerity. In doing so, she helped him distill the concept of “The Middle Way,” which is a pretty important principle among Buddhists to this day. So I suppose there’s that.
7 Which is hard to do for a second-grader. Mordancy is a pretty difficult concept to grasp at seven, or any age for that matter. I doff my hat to them.
8 And clearly is some shit I haven’t been able to let go.
1 My problems are not real problems.
2 See Judy Blume’s infamous “We must . . . we must . . .” borderline limerick-couplet.
3 Also not much sex, but hey, something’s gotta give.
4 It’s all about proportion. I was a big kid, so even my starter rack dwarfed the efforts of others. My breasts were the Manute Bol of boobs: maybe not the best compared to others, but most definitely the biggest.
5 I know this is well-trodden ground, but when you are a kid, your particular crisis is the worst thing that has ever happened to anyone in the world ever. The fact that plenty of women everywhere seemed to be managing their boobs without much difficulty was completely lost on me. I was in torment. Torment!
6 Well, my mom would drop little sugar nuggets like that. My dad had more of a “fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke” approach. Which was pretty inappropriate language at the time, but still, surprisingly effective.
7 Seriously not her real name, but somehow it just oozes mean girl, doesn’t it?
1 This led to a dramatic riddle for me as a child. I loved to eat butter. My mother would open the butter compartment to find two child-sized finger marks dug ferally through the stick, as if a tiny werewolf had mounted a dairy attack. I would often steal sticks out of the fridge for furtive ingestion later; I was hooked. But this was not even real butter, but soy margarine, a terrible trick played on me by my parents and the world at large. The first time I had real dairy butter, I was like a methadone addict getting a first taste of black tar heroin. They found me in a glistening heap, reeking like a dirty theater lobby popcorn machine, weeping quietly for redemption.
2 This was like telling a panhandling hobo you don’t have any money, and then climbing into your Maybach filled with gold bars and freshwater pearls. I mean, you don’t owe the guy anything, but there’s no need to rub his nose in it.
3 My father once took me to work with him to show me how disgusting the meat production industry is, how bloody and dirty and shot through with the stench of death. This only made me want meat more. I don’t know what that says about me, other than that I am impervious to lesson learning and have a highly developed ability to sublimate.
4 Oh yeah, my parents also didn’t believe in TV. Our house was a barrelful of awesome.
5 “One small step for me, one giant leap for mankind, you jive-ass sucka.”
6 No. I did not know, before Googling it, that in 2011 Adam Dunn (.159) was on his way to beating Billy Sullivan’s record for lowest batting average ever (.170). But now I do, and I am marginally richer for it. Just marginally, though.
7 Boston Baked Beans is the worst name for a candy since Nut Milk. Yes, there is a candy bar called Nut Milk. Let it wash over you. Well, not literally. Ew.
1 Even as a child, I was very exacting. Some might call it anal. I might call it go fuck yourself. Yes, even back then I would have called it go fuck yourself.
2 Why are kids so freaking dramatic? Nothing’s even happened to them yet!
3 This is one of the unsung joys of childhood: being able to give people the finger and having it be seen as at once both shocking and cute. There is no way an adult can get away with shocking and cute at the same time. Russell Brand thinks he has this dialed. He does not.
4 By the time I was in high school, my father had owned, in succession, three different and progressively larger and more intimidating Kawasaki Ninja bikes. This made him very popular among my male friends, and in defiance of all his efforts to the contrary, I am confident got me laid more than once. This was wholly unintentional and supremely disappointing. For him.
5 Not that any little kids knew who Blaxploitation film superstar Dolemite was. But they could sense the badness blowing off my dad.
6 No. At no point did my father consider not riding bikes anymore. This was no more an option than him becoming a dairy farmer or joining the priesthood—he would sooner have lain down to die. We would be cool at any cost. Children be damned!
7 My dad was extremely loving, but very, very straightforward.
1 It does not matter who “them” are. Bullied people know who “them” are. And “them” are gonna pay. “Them” are going to let us into their club and be nice to us and give us the respect and the cookies we deserve.
2 This seemed to me a very heroic breakfast.
3 This behavior has not diminished in my adult life. My car is a wonderland of food bars and portable water. My purse is so stocked with first aid implements that EMTs could use it as a triage kit. As the Preppers and Millenialists and doomsday obsessives proclaim hysterically, when the shit hits the fan (WTSHTF), I will be ready. And as my friends have pointed out—partially in awe, partially in alarm—no paper cut, stubbed toe, or other pedestrian injury obtained at a dive bar or elsewhere has ever gone untreated in my presence. Got a boo-boo? I got some ointment for your ass.
4 This sounds fancier than it was. My father and I moved around a lot, based on how his work was going. This place was high in the hills but trust me, no Hearst castle. It was more like the place where the people who shined the shoes for the people who occupied Hearst Castle lived—Bootblack Manor (murky racial overtones completely intended).
5 I had a germ thing when I was a kid. It has matured into a pretty fun, full-blown neurosis as an adult. The greatest moment of my life was when they invented that liquid hand sanitizer. Seriously. It was like my Diamond Jubilee.
6 I was far too young for Kegels.
7 Black + Nerd = Blerd.
1 And this is why I don’t have kids, because I would be one of those moms who dressed her daughter in adorably inappropriate miniature versions of her own clothes and forced her to attend her alma mater without a droplet of remorse. I would be mad with power, my child forced to dress in pencil skirts and power suits while delicately sipping bourbon-based cocktails, which would be especially objectionable if my child was a boy, or a natural scotch lover.
2 Looking back, I can see that this might have something to do with the obsession with mental preparedness I mentioned previously. Interesting how that works.
3 The requirements of parenthood have changed profoundly. In the olden days, if your kid was fed, relatively clean, and had all their digits, you had done your job. Nowadays, if your child is not dressed like a silvered butterfly and eating gluten-free cupcakes with an ice-cold glass of organic almond milk for breakfast, you are fodder for CPS. I occasionally long for the days when your mom’s arm, flung in front of your chest as she narrowly avoided a collision, was
seat belt enough. Those were heady days. You could feel life in the center of your marrow.
4 This was his answer to almost everything. I never complained.
5 Most men don’t encourage their daughters to date at thirty. My dad has a unique mind.
6 Ruh-roh, Raggy.
7 Adjusted for inflation, my dad had given me a golden hubcap and two Franklins. I was rich, bitches.
8 Left to my devices, with spending money and no supervision, I would purchase and eat as much meat as I could obtain legally. To assuage any feelings of guilt, I would eat all of the plant matter out of a dish first—say, the veggies in a stir-fry or the parsley garnish on a steak—so as to demonstrate at least a nominal commitment to vegetarianism.
9 In retrospect, it may be relevant to mention that this boy was Japanese, and I had asked him out to Chinese food. This may have been my first and most fatal mistake. It wasn’t racist, just thoughtless. In my defense, at the time, Americanized Chinese food really was my favorite thing to eat.
