You're Not Doing It Right
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praise for you’re not doing it right
“All these years, Michael Ian Black has not gotten enough credit for what a good writer he is. This book is charming and good company and—best of all—amazingly honest. And really, really funny, of course—though you probably already guessed at that part.”
—Ira Glass, This American Life
“Memorable and funny…. An amusing look at masculine insecurity and confusion.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“This book is so frank, so full of amusingly embarrassing confessions, I should probably be giving Michael Black a hug instead of a blurb.”
—Sarah Vowell, New York Times bestselling author and essayist
“It’s no surprise that Michael Ian Black’s book is hysterical. But I was surprised by how heartfelt and touching his memoir is. It’s true: Michael Ian Black has emotions!”
—A. J. Jacobs, New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblically and The Know-It-All
“I loved My Custom Van. But I loved You’re Not Doing It Right even more. Reading this book felt like taking a long road trip with Michael himself—which I’ve done. And I actually recommend the book more. Touching, hilarious, and truthful all at once. What else do you want, America?”
—Mike Birbiglia, New York Times bestselling author of Sleepwalk with Me
“Dear Michael Ian Black: Please stop writing things in books that I wish I had written myself, it’s starting to make me feel bad. Also, would you like to be friends someday? I sure would.”
—Samantha Bee, senior correspondent on The Daily Show and author of I Know I Am, But What Are You?
“Michael Ian Black is one of the finest comedy minds of our generation and a master at assembling words in a hilariously pleasing way. You would have to be a vapid crapsack not to enjoy this book.”
—Chris Hardwick
“You’re not doing it right.”
Michael Ian Black has been hearing these five words all his life. And now—on the eve of his fortieth birthday—he is finally beginning to wonder why….
As a husband and father living in the suburbs, Michael asks the question so many of us ask ourselves at one point or another: How did I end up here? (And also: If Fat Kevin Federline succumbs to his own wasted potential, what does that mean for the rest of us?) The answers to these questions, and others that you probably would have never thought to ask, are painstakingly detailed in You’re Not Doing It Right, Michael Ian Black’s debut memoir.
Darkly humorous and told with raw honesty, Michael takes on his childhood, his marriage, his children, and his career with unexpected candor and deadpan wit in this funny-because-it’s-true essay collection. He shares the neuroses that have plagued him since childhood and how they shaped him into the man he is today. Stories include: How his lesbian feminist mother raised him to be a tough but sensitive New Seventies Man like Alan Alda; how his camp girlfriend dumped him for a guy nicknamed Taco; how he backed into marrying his wife by breaking up with her first; how he is completely undone by hearing a Creed song on the radio on the eve of becoming a father; and how he learned to use Santa Claus as a “Bad Cop” threat to control his kids year round.
From the comedian who brought you Stella and The State, Michael Ian Black says the kinds of things you’re afraid to admit. Here he is: naked, exposed, a little chilly, and understandably shriveled.
Michael Ian Black is a writer, comedian, and actor who has created and starred in many television series including Michael and Michael Have Issues, Stella, and The State. He also starred in the NBC television show Ed and on Vh1’s I Love The… series. He wrote the screenplay for the film Run, Fatboy, Run and wrote and directed the film Wedding Daze. Michael regularly tours the country as a stand-up comedian, and is the bestselling author of the book My Custom Van (And 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays That Will Blow Your Mind All Over Your Face) and the children’s books Chicken Cheeks, The Purple Kangaroo, A Pig Parade Is a Terrible Idea, and the forthcoming I’m Bored. Michael lives in Connecticut with his wife and two children.
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you’re not doing it right
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All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Gallery Books hardcover edition February 2012
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Black, Michael Ian
You’re not doing it right : tales of marriage, sex, death, and other humiliations / by New York Times bestselling author Michael Ian Black.—1st Gallery Books hardcover ed.
p. cm.
1. American wit and humor. I. Title.
PN6165.B645 2012
818'.602—dc23 2011038913
ISBN 978-1-4391-6785-4
ISBN 978-1-4391-6795-3 (eBook)
“Once in a Lifetime”: Words and music by David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison, Tina Weymouth, and Brian Eno. Copyright © 1980 WB Music Corp., Index Music, Inc., and E.G. Music LTD. All rights on behalf of itself and Index Music, Inc. Administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
for martha
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contents
PROLOGUE: i don’t know
CHAPTER 1: a girl problem
CHAPTER 2: meredith wants to give you a blowjob
CHAPTER 3: you need to go
CHAPTER 4: fuck you, alan alda
CHAPTER 5: i love you two
CHAPTER 6: engaged
CHAPTER 7: you’re not doing it right
CHAPTER 8: terrified because it’s terrifying
CHAPTER 9: dead dad kid
CHAPTER 10: i hate my baby
CHAPTER 11: baby jail
CHAPTER 12: a little hard work
CHAPTER 13: a perfect date
CHAPTER 14: pills and booze
CHAPTER 15: antivert
CHAPTER 16: fag
CHAPTER 17: i am a demographic
CHAPTER 18: nibbles
CHAPTER 19: i hope he’s nice
appendix
acknowledgments
And you may ask yourself,
What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself,
Where does that highway go?
And you may ask yourself,
Am I right? … am I wrong?
And you may tell yourself,
My God! … what have I done?
—TALKING HEADS, “ONCE IN A LIFETIME”
&nbs
p; you’re not doing it right
PROLOGUE
i don’t know
A little while ago, I tell my wife Martha I’d like to retire.
“Retire from what?” she asks.
“All this,” I say, indicating the space around me.
“The kitchen?”
“No. Just, you know, everything.”
“If you retire, what will you do all day?”
“I don’t know. Sit around, listen to music. Do a little writing.”
“But that’s what you do now.”
“Oh yeah.” It’s true. That is pretty much what I do now.
“Besides, we can’t afford to retire.”
“Oh yeah,” I say. I go back upstairs to my computer to research how much money it will take to retire. Most financial experts recommend retiring with enough money so that you continue to earn about 75 percent of your preretirement income. This is usually accomplished through a combination of pensions, Social Security, the sale of a home, dividends from investments, and finding a bag of money on the street. After running the numbers on various retirement calculators, I determine that if I need 75 percent of my average preretirement income to retire, I am off by about 73 percent. I go back downstairs.
“Maybe we should move.”
“So you either want to retire or move,” she says, chopping up some sort of vegetable I will soon pretend to enjoy for the sake of our children.
“Yeah.”
“Where do you want to move?”
“Copenhagen.”
“In Denmark?”
“Yes,” I say. “Copenhagen is one of the world’s best cities to live.”
I know this because after researching how much money it would take to retire, I spent considerable time reading articles about the world’s best cities to live; Copenhagen regularly scores quite high on these lists.
“Isn’t Copenhagen cold?”
“That’s actually a popular misconception. Copenhagen is temperate the entire year. January gets a little nippy, but no. Very temperate … good schools,” I add.
“Is that what you did all day? Read about Copenhagen?”
“No.”
“Did you work?”
“Of course I worked. I got a lot done.”
Which is true, if you define “getting a lot done” as doing online retirement calculations, researching world’s best cities to live, and spending three hours looking at photos of Britney Spears’s ex-husband, Kevin Federline.
For some reason, I am mildly obsessed with Kevin Federline’s weight gain, which has been substantial over the past few years. A former backup dancer, he now looks like he ate a backup dancer.
I do not know why FKF (Fat Kevin Federline) holds such fascination for me. I’ve never met Kevin Federline and do not know anything about him as a person, but I project onto him all the worst fears I have for myself: fear of wasted potential, fear of failure, of losing my family, of making terrible hair decisions. When I see those paparazzi images of FKF, sometimes sporting dopey cornrows, sometimes waddling across some anonymous poolside deck with beer in hand, I imagine a guy who does not know who he is, what he is supposed to be doing, or how he wound up in the unexpected circumstances of his own life. This is how I feel about myself 90 percent of the time.
I imagine FKF handles his bewilderment with food, whereas I deal with mine by searching for answers online. Which is why I decided to take an online personality test to determine if there is another career out there, one that might better suit my temperament.
The thing I was supposed to be doing the day Martha asked if I had gotten any work done was writing this book, a book I had been struggling with, at that point, for over a year. The book was so hard to write I thought maybe I should give up. Maybe, I thought, I need a career change, and these online personality tests will help me discover a new, more satisfying profession. Maybe if I just put my trust in the mighty Internet, all will be well.
A word of background regarding my career: At the age of nine I decided to become an actor. Most people do not follow through on the career plans they made for themselves as children. If they did, the world would have an enormous surplus of cowboys and ballerinas, and not nearly enough directors of sales for companies that manufacture ceramic floor tile. But I am one of those rare people who stuck to his childhood job plan. As a result, I have spent the last thirty years of my life living out a career choice made by somebody who had not yet mastered the ability to tie his own shoes.
Along the way, I also became a writer. In fact, the writing component of my career soon took on more importance to me than the acting. Which is how I came to be writing this book, my second. The first was called My Custom Van … And 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays That Will Blow Your Mind All Over Your Face. That book spent exactly one week on the New York Times Bestseller List (#17, not that impressive), which is why I now refer to myself as “New York Times Bestselling Author Michael Ian Black” whenever possible. But any magic I used to have with the written word seems to be gone now. I need a new career.
Fortunately, there is no shortage of career tests on the Internet. I choose one that attempts to discern the occupation you are best suited for from a series of personality questions “based on the Jung and Myers-Briggs topology.” I don’t know what that means, but it sounds authoritative. Also, the word topology sounds like “topless,” which is kind of cool.
Sample question: “You willingly involve yourself in matters that engage your sympathies. Yes or no?” That is an easy question to answer: no. Because when I am at work, that is my time to work. The workspace is not the appropriate arena for us to discuss your problems. When I am there I need to be left undisturbed to check what people are saying about me on Twitter.
Very straightforward.
But I find a lot of the questions difficult to answer. I mean, are my decisions based more on the feelings of a moment than on careful planning? Is a thirst for adventure close to my heart? I once went skydiving, which is certainly adventurous, but I cannot handle the Tilt-A-Whirl. So what does that mean?
The further I get into the test, the more insulted I begin to feel. How can the entirety of my personality be reduced to seventy-two yes-or-no questions? What difference does it make whether or not I prefer to isolate myself from outside noises? Which outside noises are they talking about? Jackhammers, yes. Birds singing, no. My children screaming, yes. My children laughing, yes. My children? Yes.
I write down “yes.”
Although I am dubious about the accuracy of such a test, I am still excited to get my results. The test reveals that my specific personality type is known as an “INTP,” which stands for “Introversion, Intuition, Thinking, Perception.” And I discover that I am in very good company. Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Jefferson were all INTPs. Huh. Perhaps this test is more accurate than I had originally thought. Surely, I too would make an excellent physicist, naturalist, or author of the Declaration of Independence. Excited, I scroll down to see which career the test believes would be best for me.
The answer: paralegal.
Paralegal? What the fuck? What kind of bullshit fucking bullshit is this?
You know how Burger King often employs mentally handicapped people to wipe down tables at their restaurants? What those people are to Burger King, paralegals are to lawyers. It’s the lowest job you can possibly get and still technically be considered in the legal profession. Consider the following sentence I found on some random job website:
So you’re finishing college and your life plans don’t extend much beyond dinner…. If you wanna kill some time before applying to grad school or just make enough money to avoid moving in with your parents, you should consider working as a paralegal.
That doesn’t sound like a career; it sounds like a pothead. If this is the job I am best suited for, I must be the biggest loser in the world.
(Note: I am not saying all paralegals are losers. I am just implying it.)
Paralegal, however, is o
nly the top suggestion. There are others. Like nurse and nutritionist. Both would be reasonable career choices, but I dismiss them out of hand because, as I said, I do not like hearing about other people’s problems at work. Not even if doing so is my job.
Surprisingly, “novelist” appears a little farther down the list, a result I find both inspiring and upsetting. Inspiring because it seems to validate my decision to write this book. Upsetting because the fact that I am having such a terrible time actually doing the thing I am supposedly predisposed toward doing makes me think that perhaps I am incapable of doing anything.
Which is how I came to suggest to Martha that I retire. Surely, that is one job I could do well. As she pointed out, I was doing it already.
I recognize that retiring and moving are different iterations of the same impulse: escape. Escape from work, escape from home, escape from tedium. It is the fantasy that if I just throw the jigsaw puzzle pieces of my life into the air enough times, eventually they will come back down fully formed into a new and better image.
Not that there is anything wrong with my life. There’s not. I have a great life. A wife, two kids, a house in the woods, a career at which I have found more success than I deserve. The confusing thing about it is that, oftentimes, it doesn’t feel like my life at all.
Two brief examples of this phenomenon:
• I am standing in a small room at the massive Toys ‘R’ Us in midtown Manhattan with a sock puppet on my hand, standing beside professional soccer player Mia Hamm, former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and the Village People. We are all sharing a hearty laugh. Any other information about this incident is unimportant. What is important is that it happened, and that the weirdness of it all nearly gave me a stroke.
• I am yelling at my son and daughter to sit correctly in their chairs because it is dinnertime. The fact that they refuse to sit correctly infuriates me because THAT IS NOT THE WAY WE SIT AT DINNER! I am suddenly unrecognizable to myself, a person who yells at other people about the correct way to sit on chairs, as if I am the snooty British judge on some terrible reality show about sitting.