Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me_ (And Other Concerns) - Mindy Kaling [66]
I laughed out loud. Even at this fancy photo shoot, we could not escape the angry, immature graffiti of a mad little kid smearing shit on the wall. I loved this tiny, disgusting rebellion. I don’t know why, but it made me feel better. “This photo shoot is bullshit,” I thought, and went back to the room of gowns.
They were steaming the navy gown in anticipation of my arrival. I walked past the stylist and over to the other gowns. I picked my favorite one, an ornate dusty rose pink gown with a lace train.
ME: This is the one I’m going to wear.
STYLIST GUY (gently, as if to a fragile idiot): Zees will not fit you.
ME: Oh man, then we’d better get the seamstress to make this one fit, huh? We don’t have too much time!
STYLIST GUY: She is only here for zee small alterations, not zee large-scale reworking of zee gown.
That’s when I decided to just pretend as though I somehow had the power (in this weird situation, where no one was boss) to end arguments and make decisions.
ME: Well, I don’t know what to say, because I just don’t think I’d feel comfortable in anything but that.
When I played the “I don’t feel comfortable” card, he knew it was over. “I don’t feel comfortable” is the classic manipulative girl get-my-way line. It’s right up there with “I don’t feel entirely safe.” Was it fair? Nope. Was it cool? Absolutely not. But it also wasn’t fair or cool for him to have brought three dozen size-zero gowns to my photo shoot.
In the end, the seamstress literally cut open the back of one of the gowns and quickly added about a foot of canvas material to the back, pinned it together, and put it on me. The stylist was near tears at the destruction of the gown, but it fit like a glove—er, a glove that is kind of ugly and makeshift on the back. But on the front? Perfection. I love you, canvas. I love you, safety pins. If I ever do a voice in a Disney movie where I’m the princess whose friends are a bunch of inanimate household objects who come to life, I hope mine are a swatch of canvas and some sassy safety pins.
Later, in our gowns, I took Ellie to the bathroom and showed her the shit-stained graffiti. Ellie loved it, as I knew she would. I spent the rest of the shoot having a blast and posing goofily for photos with my pal, like the awesome, Most Beautiful, and Least Dressable, Girl that I was.
These Are the Narcissistic Photos in My BlackBerry
I WOULD RATHER have someone read my diary than look at my iPod playlists. It’s not because I have embarrassing playlists called “Setting the Mood for Sex-Time” or whatever. My playlists are humiliating because my workout mixes have dorky titles, like “Go for It, Girl!” and “You Can Do It, Mindy!” You might also see that some of my playlists are simply two songs on repeat fifteen times, like I’m a psycho getting pumped up to murder the president.
My BlackBerry photos, on the other hand, make me laugh. They are all horribly, horribly narcissistic. My BlackBerry camera has proven to exist primarily as a mirror to see if my makeup came out okay. The other ones are my favorite people who I want to look at all the time. I thought I’d share them all, uncensored.
1. I was on my way to a taping of The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and I wanted to see if the zit I had on the center of my forehead had shrunk. This is a different zit than the one I had when I was twenty-two, which was in the same spot and which I wrote about earlier in this book, but perhaps it was a descendant of that zit? It was so huge that Rainn Wilson advised me not to do the talk show appearance. I really wanted to go on The Late Late Show, though, because I love Craig Ferguson, so I popped it with a safety pin sterilized with hot water in the women