humans are funny

Category: love

  • My head is a quilt.

    I saw a woman the other day who was so obviously brimming with positivity that the sun was leaking out of her pores. Beautiful skin, shiny hair, a smile that could make even Mel Gibson love Jews, she was pure radiance. I asked her secret.

    “I am grateful for everything in my life,” she beamed.

    Well, good for her.
    Good for freakin’ her.

    Since seeing the third world and meeting people who’ve never even heard of pizza (probably the biggest tragedy in poor countries), I’ve also been on a quest for gratitude. I wake up in the morning and listen to the birds and smile at all the things I’m lucky to have and know (friends, family, toast, a good brain, tea, pumpkin pie, a hot shower, etc.).

    And then I look in the mirror.

    I see stringy hair and boring. I know I’m not hideous. But it’s just how my brain works. When it comes to myself, I see the negative first. My mission for this year of being thirty is to fully and completely accept myself, mind and body. It’s so hard. Because part of being human is to be hard on ourselves. It’s how we get better.

    We can deliver a heart-wrenching motivational speech that rivals that of MLK Jr. People will cry out from the audience. Old ladies will faint in their wheelchairs. The country will finally feel united. And we’ll get off stage and say, ‘It totally sucked. I messed up two words in the third paragraph.”

    Our immediate focus is always on the negative. I can take anyone else’s situation and see the positive in it: You got pushed off a cliff by your fiance and broke your spine, but at least now you know he’s not right for you. But when it comes to myself, I’m too harsh. I’ll look in the mirror with gratitude, and my ego, Lawrence, will appear and tell me how my hair is too thin and my skin looks like that of a confused teenager. (Lawrence is a dick. You can read about him here). I’ve worked so hard this year to accept these two last parts of me. I’ve used affirmations. I’ve meditated. I’ve accepted my anxiety, my control issues, my man problems. But this whole hair and skin thing is a real pisser.

    The tragedy of how unimportant my skin and hair are in the grand scheme of things is not lost on me. This is why it’s all so frustrating. There are people in the world who have never heard of PIZZA! There are Indians who are sleeping in train stations with flies all over their faces, and all they want is a pair of clean underwear and a sip of clear water. And here I am bitching that none of the expensive cleansers in my medicine cabinet has made me beautiful like promised. Gross. I want to punch myself. But that would just be anger towards myself for not accepting myself, and that would mean even less self-acceptance.

    My friend Katie came over the other day, and we were talking about ourselves, like prima donna narcissists often do.
    “I hate my hair. It’s too thin.” she said.
    “I hate my hair. It’s too short.” I said.
    “Your hair’s great,” I said.
    “You hair’s great,” she said.

    Then it donned on us. We’ve known each other for five years, and each time we see each other, the conversation is the same (after the very important social commentary about globalization and other such paramount themes). We’ve always hated our hair. Even after accepting so many other parts of our selves, we can’t get over our hair.

    “Let’s finally do something about it,” I said.
    “Extensions,” she said.

    I am not one to get fake things. I had fake nails throughout high school. I have banished such fakeries. Yet we did research. We made appointments. We sat through pain. We now have hair.

    We have hair! We have hair that’s long and silky. And we can look in the mirror and love it. But it’s fake! And it’s sewn into our scalps.
    That’s right. We can only look in the mirror and love ourselves now that we have another person’s dead hair painfully sewn onto our heads. How odd is that? Humans are so strange.

    After looking at all the options, we decided that weaves were the way to go. It took us an entire Saturday in a no-frills hair specialty spot with the worst logo ever. Seriously. Why make a ‘before’ picture your logo? That’s like making an empty plate the logo for a restaurant. Or some really sweaty man the logo for an air conditioning company. Not smart. BUT… We don’t judge a hair place by the logo, so we walked in for a day of fun. It was seriously fun.


    You know those stereotypical black barber shops where all the men sit around and talk about life? This was the female version filled with women getting weaves while watching ‘The Best Man’ and commenting about Morris Chestnut’s private life and Hugh Jackman’s abs. I felt very welcomed into the weave community. And what a community it is. Holy mackerel. The women told me how to spot a weave, and man alive, so many women have weaves! I have been comparing my shitty hair to the luscious locks of plenty of women for so long and it was all for naught because so many are fakes.

    What exactly is a weave, you ask? Well, besides a shortcut to self-acceptance, it’s a bunch of human hair that’s been dyed to match yours. D’Lisa, the weave specialist who only books appointments through text messages, finds the perfect spot on your head for the weave. She marks it with a Sharpie and then twists your own real hair into a tiny braid. Once that’s finished, she takes a thick, curved needle and sews the hair onto that braid. Like she’s making a quilt. Like your head is a big fucking Afghan blanket. And then it’s done. Then you have long hair that you can love for at least 6 weeks.


    It sounds great. There’s just one tiny drawback: you have hair sewn into your scalp! It feels like I’m wearing a bathing cap made for a 3-month-old. Sometimes I want to rip it out of my head, but I saw her sew that shit in there and I know I’d be pulling out scalp skin and possibly exposing brain matter. So I suck it up and leave it in. Just so I can have long hair.

    Just so I can have long hair!

    One day I will get to the point where I don’t need this hair, the point where I can look at bare me in the mirror and love everything about what I see, including every single one of my real and short split ends. It will be a glorious day and sunlight will shine from my pores. And then Lawrence will come around and say, “Man, you have a lot of pimples.”

    I’m not only the president, I’m also a client!

  • Thanks, Annie and Danny

    I’ve been crying a lot lately. Not because I’m pathetic (maybe because I’m pathetic). Not because I’m drinking wine alone (maybe because I’m drinking wine alone). But mainly because I’m a cheeseball and I can’t get enough of this video.

    You may have seen it already. Watch it again.

    It’s a real love story, and I love that it exists. This stuff really exists.
    Phew.
    I’ve been holding out for this kind of love, and it looks like it’s not for naught. If Danny and Annie could find it, I can find it.

    People may think it’s weird to be in your thirties and single. Many more traditional types might consider me to be a dragon or an alien or perhaps an old maid because I’m thirty and I don’t yet have three kids and a large ass. But I’d rather wait for this than be mediocre married early. Thanks for reminding me, Annie and Danny.

    Danny & Annie from StoryCorps on Vimeo.

  • As long as they laugh, it’s all ok.


    When I was 13, I was deathly embarrassed of my mom. Not because she wore puke green dresses and too big eyeglasses (she did). But mainly because, no matter where we went, she talked too much. It wasn’t just that she brought up the weather in every single elevator or complimented someone’s shoes in every line for popcorn. She also told strangers all of our business. Someone would comment on how we were dressed up, and she would tell them all about how I had just graduated from junior high with a 4.0 GPA and that my grandmother was in town and that we deserved a treat and we were going to get pineapple shakes right after the car wash and the video store. She told every detail to surely uninterested strangers. I would cower. I wasn’t a comic book nerd, but I still pretended to put on an invisibility cloak. How. Embarrassing.

    The other day I told the story of my first blowjob to a room full of strangers. And I write this blog where I recently wrote a story about how my dead father’s rotting body smelled like Korean leftovers. I have clearly surpassed my mother in the lack of discretion department. My 13-year-old self would be mortified. And have braces.

    Now I’ve found a way to be even more revealing, even more honest, and even more embarrassing to any future children I may have. It’s stand-up comedy. And I think I love it. It’s like welcoming hundreds of people inside the chamber of the brain that holds all the secrets. And damn, it’s liberating. I’m seriously hooked. I walked off stage Monday night, and I wanted to immediately walk back on.

    It took 12 weeks of class with 8 other students under the direction of Gerry Katzman (who teaches the best stand-up class in LA) in order to get our sets in order. On the first day, Gerry asked us to come up with a personal topic around which we would write 16 jokes. I thought the fact that I drive a scooter was interesting. No. That’s not what he meant. He was more interested in the fact that I only date unmotivated men who don’t have jobs and make me pay for them and how I do so willingly because I feel like I have to take care of them.
    Oh, that.
    Then, he wanted to know why and when and how. And THAT’s when the jokes got funny. The deeper you dig, the better you get. I was into it. A scooter? Ha.

    After that first day, I knew I’d love peeling off more and more layers of myself in order to get to the jokes. It was easy for me (the being honest about myself part) since I grew up with a mom who talked too much and have a blog where I already share everything. This blog made it easy. Thanks, everybody. I wrote jokes about dead dads and trying to be spiritual, and how it’s hard to be single and/or masturbate, and my mom, who has since stopped buying clothes in puke green (for the most part).

    After writing and rewriting every tiny part of every joke, it all came out on stage on Monday night in 9.5 minutes. There’s a silence you can feel while you’re telling a joke where you realize that you’re holding a microphone and everyone is waiting to hear what you have to say. And then you say something important about your life. And it’s out there. And it’s accepted. And it’s ok. You can admit anything up there, and it’s ok. Because you’re on a stage. And because even the deepest darkest secrets find other people in the audience who can relate. That’s what comedy is all about: Saying things that other people feel but are too scared to admit.
    Once the people laugh, it’s all really ok.

    So I’m hooked. And excited. And ready to do it again.
    But I’m not so sure how I’ll feel when I get up there and share my secrets and nobody laughs. I know that’s going to happen. Any day now. Probably as soon as I start performing without my friends in the audience. And that’s going to be hard. And painful. But probably still pretty liberating. We’ll see. If anything, I’ll just quit and be that lady who unloads information on strangers in elevators. Whatever the case, I still won’t be like my mom. Because I do not wear puke green.

    Stand-up class 2010 in post-show bliss. We know everything about each other now.
    We can only become either best friends or sworn enemies. We’ll see. Not so sure I trust the Koreans.

  • Sex at the Salad Bar


    Thanks, friends, for your concerned emails and for looking at me with that signature head tilt as if I’m a Haitian orphan. It’s sweet. I get it. I sound lonely and pathetic. Two weeks ago I admitted to trolling the Craigslist Missed Connections and last week I wanted someone to hold my hand while I fell asleep. If I’d read this blog, I would have been barfing all over the place and then weeping for pathetic old me.

    Sigh.

    It’s true that I want to be in love. I said it last week, and I can’t take it back.
    But you know what’s worse than NOT being in love?
    Dating.
    It’s much, much worse.

    Dating has so much potential to be amazing– the excitement of this new person who could possibly end up playing a huge role in your life. But then there are the smiles that melt into pained grins. And the guys who arrive an hour late. And the same conversations about siblings and birthplaces and parents. And the fake offering to pay the check. And the men who let me. And the texting afterward.

    It’s all so gross.
    And although I do want to be in love, I don’t want to be a dater. In fact, I’d like to announce that I’m done dating. I’m out-dated. I’m a Dater Hater. I hereby declare that I am retiring from the dating scene until 2011. No more no more no more.

    This means, of course, that I should probably stop shopping at Whole Foods.

    Shopping at the Whole Foods in Venice beach is no ordinary grocery experience. This particular Whole Foods is a meat market. And it also sells meat.

    There are more single people in this place than produce. And the cornucopia of promiscuity is obvious with every squeeze of a cantaloupe. There are skinny girls in daisy dukes, tan yogi men in scarves, salty surfer boys, and hipsters in V-necks. They’re all dripping with sexual tension as they measure out the bulk flax seed. Scooping peas from the salad bar is the new porn. You can’t pick out a bok choy without someone complimenting your pink aura or saying, ‘You must be tired because you’ve been doing downward dog in my mind all night.’

    It’s just disgusting.

    And also really fucking exciting. Because there’s nothing like the hope that fills your whole being when you spot that man with the smoldering eyes in the freezer section.

    THAT is the best part of being single– the hope, the anticipation, the numbness, the excitement of walking into the cookie aisle and knowing that any one of the men eyeing the gluten-free chocolate chips could be the man you wake up to for the rest of your life (And the fact that you can eat two PBJs for dinner in complete silence while naked.).

    Was someone saying something about love? Maybe I prefer a lifetime of titillation at the salad bar. Now that I’m rethinking it, I can’t give it all up– the hope, the men, or the Kashi cereal. I think it’s about time I come out of retirement.

    Who wants to take me out to dinner? I promise to offer to pay and not really mean it.

  • I’ll take three cheeseburgers, a Coke, and a large love


    I’ve spent my career convincing people to buy things they don’t need. And in order to do this, I’ve lied. I’ve made teenagers think they had to have video games. And when I wasn’t sure if my lies would really ring true to them, I surveyed their peers and conned them into telling me what tricks I could use. Before that, I made men and women ages 18-45 believe that they could really benefit from eating tacos and ice cream from Jack-in-the-Box. And when I wasn’t sure that they’d fall for it, I spent days making those tacos and ice cream look so absurdly delicious that they had to say it: I want that.

    Many advertisers will tell you that they’re simply helping their clients get the word out about their products. Or that they’re creating art that people want to see and pass to their friends. But I think those people also believe that you can’t get a girl pregnant if you hold your breath while ejaculating. Because the amount of inventing and manipulating that goes on before a campaign hits popular culture is pretty ridiculous. And the amount of money spent on getting these campaigns to market is even more so. We could probably end world poverty for the price of two Nike spots.

    We spend months at our stale desks deciding what a brand’s stance should be. Most of the time, we make up everything or we make a huge deal about the tiniest bit of info. Volvos aren’t really safer. Proactiv doesn’t really work. And McDonald’s surely isn’t healthy all of a sudden just because it added salads to the menu.

    I’ve always felt uneasy about making this my career. Ok, more than uneasy– more like a douche bag full of puss, which is way grosser than a regular old douche bag. The yucky feeling crescendoed until I popped and left town for most of 2009. I took off and didn’t watch one commercial or even TV (except when I was lonely in Vietnam and saw Dreamgirls and an American Idol from 2005).

    But now I’m back and things are askew. This time advertising has manipulated me.

    I’m working on an account that shall remain nameless. This mysterious account won’t allow lies in its advertising. And it holds tight to the rule that every couple featured in its ads must be deeply in love. At first I scoffed. Then I laughed. Then I paced around in circles. What? This goes against everything. I was ready to jump back in and invent more lies like the one about how cows in California produce better cheese.

    But no! Instead, this client spent its ad money to fly real couples to LA for the shoot. They put them all up in hotels and even gave them care packages! These couples got the royal wardrobe treatment and took to the sets like movie stars. But they were REAL. And in LOVE. And I was shocked.

    We filmed for eight days. Eight extra long days of watching pairs and pairs of happy soul mates traipse around Los Angeles. Normally, when happy soul mates vacation in front of you, it’s maddening. I take comfort in my single bitterness. I’m just fine alone in my endeavor to spend my life with the option to rub my naked ass on the couch whenever I want and never ever clean my shower if I don’t feel like it. Single! Independent. Don’t need me no nobody.

    But that’s before I was surrounded by 52 couples who can’t live without each other. That’s 104 hearts filled with emotion and love and compassion for that perfect person who isn’t a dream but a real match who feels the same way back.

    And so I realized: I want that.

    I knew I wanted that before, of course. But now I really want it. Because I’ve seen the commercials. And because it might be nice if there was somebody to pull my socks off when I’m too tired or tell me the funny things about his day or help me cheat at Skee-ball or hold my hand until we fall asleep.

    The karma bell has rung. Making these ads has manipulated me into wanting something I don’t have. And this is much worse than all the manipulation I’ve ever created. Because you can’t buy love at a drive-thru.

    I’ve spent my career convincing people to buy into advertising. And now advertising has convinced me to buy into love.

    I hate you, Advertising. I always have.