Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me_ (And Other Concerns) - Mindy Kaling [50]
The blanket/sweatshirt keeps the laptop from getting too hot and radiating my ovaries, which everyone knows makes your children come out with ADD. I almost always write alone in my house. I never have music on, because I can’t concentrate with Nelly Furtado remixes thumping, and, unfortunately, I have only dance music on my iPod, which is how I got to be such a great dancer.
The main reason I enjoy working on a writing staff is because of the social nature of the job. To put it kindly, I am a very talkative, social person. To put it less kindly, I’m a flibbertigibbet, which is what my frenemy Rainn Wilson calls me. It’s always been incredibly challenging for me to put pen to page, because writing, at its heart, is a solitary pursuit, designed to make people depressoids, drug addicts, misanthropes, and antisocial weirdos (see every successful writer ever except Judy Blume). I also have a nice office at work, but I use it primarily as a messy closet.
The Internet also makes it extraordinarily difficult for me to focus. One small break to look up exactly how almond milk is made, and four hours later I’m reading about the Donner Party and texting all my friends: DID YOU GUYS KNOW ABOUT THE DONNER PARTY AND HOW MESSED UP THAT WAS? TEXT ME BACK SO WE CAN TALK ABOUT IT!
My high school newspaper interviewed me a few years ago and wanted a photo of me writing, so I had my coworker Dan Goor take this of me looking polished and writerly at my work desk. It is so fraudulent it makes me laugh.
I’ve found my productive-writing-to-screwing-around ratio to be one to seven. So, for every eight-hour day of writing, there is only one good productive hour of work being done. The other seven hours are preparing for writing: pacing around the house, collapsing cardboard boxes for recycling, reading the DVD extras pamphlet from the BBC Pride & Prejudice, getting snacks lined up for writing, and YouTubing toddlers who learned the “Single Ladies” dance. I know. Isn’t that horrible? So, basically, writing this piece took me the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Enjoy it accordingly.
The Day I Stopped Eating Cupcakes
VERY RECENTLY I was out on script for The Office for a week. “Out on script” refers to when writers are sent off on their own to write a first draft of an episode of the show.
It is an amazing time, basically paid and sanctioned hooky. This means that instead of showering, dressing, and coming into work every day, I’m allowed to laze around my house in a giant T-shirt and no pants, or go shopping, or attend trendy cardio classes with my fun unemployed friends. Obviously this is the best time ever.*
This time when I was on script, I stopped by my favorite cupcake place, which I will call Sunshine Cupcakes. (Sunshine Cupcakes, while a ridiculous name, is actually a restrained parody of cupcake bakery names. You have no idea. In Los Angeles, cupcake bakeries are as pervasive as Starbucks. They are the product of a city with an abundance of trophy wives, because trophy wives are the financial engines of cutesy commerce that makes Los Angeles like no other American city: toe jewelry, doorknob cozies, vegan dog food, you get it. If I am sounding mean, I should tell you how envious and admiring I am of these trophy wives. I’d marry a partner at William Morris Endeavor and start a cat pedicure parlor m’self if I were so lucky.)
So, yeah, on my fourth consecutive visit to Sunshine Cupcakes, I was paying for my cupcake when the female manager (cupcake apron, Far Side glasses, streak of pink hair: the universal whimsical bakery lady uniform, as far as I can tell) approached me.
FAR SIDE: You’ve come here a lot this week.
ME (mouthful of a generous sample): Yeah, I love this place, man.
FAR SIDE: We know you’re on Twitter. (Leaning in conspiratorially) And if you’re willing to tweet about loving Sunshine Cupcakes, this cupcake (gesturing to the one I was buying) is free.
I did not know it