Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation

by Aisha Tyler

  11 I have done this more times than I care to remember. Until you have constructed a breakfast sandwich out of Pop-Tarts, hard-boiled eggs, and margarine, you have not lived.

  1 Don’t lie. You’ve had this fear/fantasy. Stop being coy.

  2 The vision of a marlin gaping for air on a slick schooner deck is a prime trigger of night hysteria. I have heard.

  3 I guess people might have also assumed I was on my period and was adjusting my undercarriage. This, I don’t have to point out, would not have been good either.

  4 And much like that shark, once seen in all its mechanical glory, would be both terrifying and deeply disappointing.

  5 This also happens to professional athletes, schoolteachers, and rock stars. Although in rock stars’ cases, they just go pee right there on stage. Rock and roll, baby. Rock and roll.

  6 Sometimes the brain needs reassurance.

  7 OCD. I can’t help it. Besides, who sits bareback on a public toilet seat? Half the time I have to resist the urge to get out a lighter and a can of hairspray and firebomb the entire joint. How Britney Spears could walk into a gas station bathroom barefoot I have no idea. I can barely enter fully clothed and holding my breath like a champion free diver.

  8 For the last time, it’s TY-ler. Like Steven, or Perry, or one zillion suburban white kids. How can so many people get my mystifying first name right, and then call me Aisha TAY-lor? It severely boggles.

  9 Yes, I admit that my worst nightmare really isn’t that bad. Parsing minutiae is what gives me joy.

  1 This is the explanation for why all women wear outfits that look absolutely terrible on them. We all think we’re Naomi Campbell. Except for Naomi Campbell, who knows no one else is Naomi Campbell, and will hit you in the head with a phone to prove it.

  1 I love to talk to myself. I am a scintillating conversationalist, and, sometimes, I am the only person that will put up with my bullshit.

  2 My only solace is that I can watch Law and Order (because some iteration of Law and Order is always on) and eat muffins off my chest while lying in bed in a hotel robe. All of these things are very soothing on their own; combine them into one grand action and you can recover from almost anything.

  3 Beeteedubs, it wasn’t.

  4 Beeteedubs, he did.

  1 Most people are not cut out for salsa dancing. This is just a truth. You think you are, but you aren’t. Leave it to South American lotharios and international spies.

  2 Literally on my back, gasping for air, choking on the green bile of my own mortification. Literally.

  3 Lots. Lots of terrible things can happen. There is a bottomless cornucopia of bad occurrences waiting for you at the other end of this hypothetical. Nonetheless, excelsior.

  4 I am not advocating this.

  5 I actually cannot speak to what it is like to touch your tongue to the tip of a battery. I have never done this, because I am not a four-year-old boy.

  6 I like a little challenge in my life-sustaining elements.

  7 This has often been my solution in times of crisis. It has only not worked like half the time.

  8 Which was even more painful as I didn’t have much material to begin with. It wasn’t a bonfire of the vanities; it was a tiny campfire of the sadnesses.

  9 Mostly sweat though. A lot of sweat. Ick.

  10 Okay. That got a little weird.

  1 I realize that none of this is an advertisement for coming to one of my live shows (which are hilarious, in my very humble opinion). But I am dedicated to telling the truth, no matter how painful. Or no matter how likely it is that the truth could give you a cold.

  1 But bacon? Seriously. So good. Worth the injury.

  2 Man, did cross-country suck. Do you know they run like a zillion miles? Blech.

  3 Never Die Alone, alongside the lovely David Arquette and the great actor, rapper, and police impersonator Ja Rule.

  4 I was all about toast at the time.

  5 Even there I might be able to give him a bit of a run for his money.

  6 It is my moneymaker, after all.

  7 I will get him.

  8 This is us at our most affectionate.

  9 Although my elbow can tell you if a storm front is coming in, and not just my elbow, but also my butt bone, which I broke snowboarding in college. I am like a walking Doppler 5000. Yes, upon reflection, maybe I should stop snowboarding.

  1 Because this is one of only three reasons one goes to Miami: for a photo or music video shoot, to attend a party thrown by Kanye West, or to find a hot gay Latino man to have sex with. Oh, and to eat fried plantains. So, four.

  2 I have Lucky Peach and Saveur and Cook’s Illustrated sitting in my bathroom just waiting for me to get a good hour alone to sit there and let dirty, dirty, gravy-laden thoughts run through my mind uninterrupted. This may be sick. I do not care. I am thinking about food in the bathroom. I don’t need you to tell me it’s problematic.

  3 Or as much “accomplishment” as you can feel after having had your picture taken. It’s not like I ended world hunger or anything. What a self-important asshole I am.

  4 Which it may very well be, should it ever come to that. You can’t have that many people sporting man-thongs and not expect some kind of cosmic payback.

  5 Are those not the technical terms?

  6 Thanks WebMD! Also, why is it that I seem to break only uncastable bones? What’s next, my cochlear bone?

  7 Not as fun as it looks. I feel terrible for old people. How they don’t pee a little bit while being pushed around the airport in those bumpy jalopies I have no idea. I did.

  1 If you do not know what “MVP of the party” means, just search the next soiree you attend for the person who is really giving it their all—drinking, eating, talking, but most of all drinking—with gusto. They care not for the morning, the feelings of others, or their own self-respect. They are there to win that party. That is the evening’s MVP. They will accept their trophy lying down on the lawn, or perhaps wrapped somberly around a toilet or a jumbo bottle of ibuprofen the next day. And strangely, in the morning, it will not feel at all like winning.

  2 Maybe one guy was in the bathroom, but he still heard it.

  3 No mention of the fact that you suck your thumb or were curled around a dog-eared teddy bear that you found somewhere in the house. The neighbors’ house.

  4 I am exaggerating wildly, of course. I can think of a million other people more unfortunate. But none more likely to have their faces written on in permanent marker.

  1 Yes, goddammit. Ovid.

  2 It’s a great song. There is no disputing that.

  3 I don’t have grandchildren. At this rate, I never will. I spend too much time on Twitter to raise babies.

  4 No one cares THAT much about what is #np’ing today, lady.

  5 A 9,550-year-old Norway Spruce. That tree is old.

  6 Okay, maybe not as forever as the universe. But you get my point.

  7 Or pictures of you doing shots off a stripper’s torso, or of you dancing on the back of a fire truck in your bra, or you with your arm around a woman who is not your wife, or your half-mast erection pressing against your robin’s egg-blue boxers, or . . . well, you get my drift.

  1 And how many times do you get to do that in a lifetime?

  2 Why did I use a sports analogy here? Because I can.