Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me_ (And Other Concerns) - Mindy Kaling [52]
• Human Quilt (horror movie)
• I Ain’t Yo’ Wife!
• You Ain’t My Dad!
As much as it may seem like I am mocking these movies, if any movie studio exec is reading this and is interested in any of the above, I will gladly take a meeting about them. I have an almost completed outline for Crest Whitestrips.
The Best Distraction in the World: Romance and Guys
Someone Explain One-Night Stands to Me
I HAVE NEVER had a one-night stand. According to every women’s magazine and television program ever made, this is super-unforgivably lame, and it behooves me to go reclaim my groove on an all-girls party trip to an unincorporated island territory of the United States. Every romantic comedy I watch depicts our adorable heroine walking sheepishly back from a stranger’s place in the morning, with bedhead and her eyeliner all sexy and smudged. She might not yet have found Mr. Right (this is only the beginning of the movie), but she’s having fun looking!
I just don’t understand any of that at all. Here’s why:
In my mind, the sexiest thing in the world is the feeling that you’re wanted. The slightly nervous asking of your phone number. The text message asking you to dinner. The simple overture of wanting me can satisfy my ego for a good long time. The sexual situation that could come of it? Well, that’s just less appealing to me. I don’t mean to say I don’t enjoy sex; I’m a properly functioning mammal and everything. I just think, like, who is this guy? Don’t you need to know some more about a guy than an evening’s worth of conversation at a bar to make sex appealing?
Also: fear is a pretty big turn-off. I’m talking about safety here. I don’t even mean sexual health safety, like STDs. I mean good old-fashioned life-and-death safety. Here’s what I can’t wrap my brain around. I barely talk to strangers (a habit that I started as a child and that has served me well through my adulthood). So the idea of going to a stranger’s house at night, or having that stranger over to my house, sounds insanely dangerous. These fears have made it so that when my female friends talk to me about one-night stands, I’m an incredibly irritating listener.
EXCITED SEXUALLY LIBERATED FRIEND: So, then it was like 2 a.m. that same night, and he knocked on my apartment door. I was in my robe and nothing else—
ME: No underwear?
EXCITED SEXUALLY LIBERATED FRIEND: No. I said “nothing else.”
ME (skeptical): I feel like you were wearing underwear. That’s how you are in, like, repose?
EXCITED SEXUALLY LIBERATED FRIEND: Yes.
ME: You really like not wearing underwear? Am I the only one who finds that totally uncomfortable? (lowered voice) Don’t you ever sometimes … excrete?
EXCITED SEXUALLY LIBERATED FRIEND: Gross. Stop it.
ME: Okay. But let’s remember to come back to this no-underwear conversation later.
EXCITED SEXUALLY LIBERATED FRIEND: So he knocked at the door—
ME: Wait! Sorry. I’m just realizing, your doorman let him up without ever seeing him before? Doesn’t that disturb you, that your doorman would just let any old person off the street up to your apartment? I would give my doorman a book of photos of accepted guests that he could reference, like a reference book—
EXCITED SEXUALLY LIBERATED FRIEND: I’m doing fine with my doorman.
ME: I would have established a different procedure.
EXCITED SEXUALLY LIBERATED FRIEND: Great, Mindy. Anyway, then I showed him around the place—
ME: The doorman? (off ESL Friend’s annoyed look) The guy! The guy! Yes.
EXCITED SEXUALLY LIBERATED FRIEND: He was into the way I decorated it. Really taking it in.
ME: He was casing the joint!
EXCITED SEXUALLY LIBERATED FRIEND: No! He was not casing the joint! He was being sexy and sweet and making cute little jokes about family photos. And then he asked if he could see my bedroom—
ME: Your bedroom, so he could rape and murder you!
Eventually, my constant interruptions make her so irritated, she stops telling her sexy story. I guess nothing puts a damper on a one-night stand as much as your friend pointing out all the opportunities where you might