Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) (23 page)

7. My boyfriend, David, doesn’t end conversations with me by saying good-bye. He says, “LTFT” or “Last Thing, First Thing,” which means I am the last thing he thinks about before bed and the first when he wakes up. Anyway, this awesome guy asked me to go see a Harry Potter movie. This is how he asked me, by sending me a photo of himself holding the ticket print-outs. I love this photo.

8. I took my friend Sophia as my date to the Writers Guild Awards four years ago, and she was a perfect date. My dress is so weird, I look like I’m a real estate agent at a bachelorette party. Gross. I was also in a bad mood because I had just broken up with my boyfriend (not David, some old, forgettable boyfriend). I wasn’t going to go at all, but Sophia made me and we had a great time.

9. I was thrilled about my pink checkerboard toenails. A whimsical toenail polish is one of the only places I believe whimsy should be allowed.

10. Ellie Kemper and I from shooting
The Office
episode “Classy Christmas,” which I wrote. Ellie is wonderful because she never balks when I want to take pictures of us. I’m cheesy, and she celebrates it. I think I did a really good job of hiding the fact that I took the photo, making it look like some dude just randomly took a photo of two smiley, pretty girls, right?

11. I did my own eye makeup one night and was very excited about it. I took an extreme close-up in the hope that I would be able to follow what I did later on. It was not helpful. I also noticed some weird scar tissue on the whites of my eye, so I called my mom up in the middle of the night to ask her about it. It turned out to be nothing. I could delete this photo.

Revenge Fantasies While Jogging

I
F IT WEREN’T FOR
my imagination, I would weigh ten thousand pounds. This is because the only way I am able to exercise anymore is through a long and vivid revenge fantasy.

I’m not talking about revenge on real-life people I know, like, “Oh, Ed Helms cut in line at lunch, so I’m going to write that his character Andy gets super fat.” That has some justice to it, since he seems to love food so much! I’m talking about elaborate
Kill Bill
–type stories, involving people who do not actually exist, where I play the lead role. Because revenge fantasies are such a big part of what I think about when I exercise, I’ve listed some of my greatest hits. Please integrate these into your own workouts, and say sayonara to calories!

MY HUSBAND IS MURDERED IN CENTRAL PARK ON AN IDYLLIC SPRING DAY

My husband was murdered by a serial killer in Central Park. We were walking by the reservoir one beautiful late-spring afternoon eating ice-cream cones and he was suddenly shot in the back of the head by a deranged man wearing an Antonin Scalia mask. “Scalia” runs away, cackling like the Joker, and hops into an Escalade and peels off. My handsome, innocent husband dies in my arms, the very night he was going to host
Saturday Night Live
for the first time. (Oh, yes, in this fantasy, my husband is a star point guard for the team that just won the NBA Finals.)

They get Jon Hamm to host a very somber
Saturday Night Live
that night. I can barely do the cameo I was going to do on Weekend Update. Yes, I still do the cameo. I’m sad, but come on—
SNL
cameo. Seth Meyers can’t muster up the cheerfulness he usually has, either. The day’s horrible events have marred everything.

After my husband’s murder, I spend a lot of time doing push-ups and sit-ups, and I cut my hair very short while staring at myself in the mirror with dead eyes. I look like Mia Farrow at her height, but Indian and crazy toned. I stop enjoying my creature comforts, like junk food and hanging out with my friends, because nothing brings me pleasure but thoughts of revenge. My best friends give me the hurtful nickname “Count of Monte Cristo, But Boring,” because I am bent on vengeance and it is getting tedious. However, because of my alienation and obsession, I am able to get in shape pretty fast, because all food tastes the same to me (like nothing), so I eat skinless chicken breasts and broccoli for every meal without complaint.

Scalia is in Miami. I find this out from a PI I hired who looks like Kris Kristofferson, but more grizzled. I go down there, hit the Kardashians’ Dash boutique for a hot outfit, then infiltrate the South Beach club where I know Scalia hangs out. I am pretending to be a lesbian trainer. (Pretty easy to believe: my body is ripped and I have no interest in men anymore.) I find Scalia snorting coke in the back room, a lair of sorts. He has framed pictures of all the people he’s murdered. I choke him to death with his own mask. When his body goes lifeless in my arms, I’m tempted to pull off the mask to see who it was. But I stop just before I do it. I don’t even care anymore.

Total time taken up by this fantasy: 12 minutes

Total calories burned while having this fantasy: 90

THEY KIDNAP AND MURDER MY HUSBAND ON OUR HONEYMOON

My new husband and I are vacationing in Buenos Aires. Some kind of terrorists who focus on interracial marriage (rare, I know, but terrible) want to make an example of me and my husband. They kidnap him and hold him for ransom, only to shoot him on live television the next day. At that moment, I stop speaking forever. I am a mute. But a mute who goes to the gym, for I run and do lunges and squats until I have no body fat anymore and can do fifty chin-ups and twenty-five pull-ups. Even in my revenge fantasy where all I do is exercise, I can still do only twenty-five pull-ups. Pull-ups are tough, no joke.

I race around Buenos Aires pretending to be a mute Indian tango dancer. But really, I’m trying to find the terrorists who killed my husband, which I do one late summer night. I stab them through the heart with a knife I keep hidden inside my massive hairdo.

When caught and put on trial in Argentina, I decide to represent myself. In my closing argument, I say, “In the country that saw so many disappearances in the 1970s, I’m surprised anyone cares about some terrorists disappearing from existence in the present day.” Then, I disappear.

Total time taken up by this fantasy: 8 minutes

Total calories burned while having this fantasy: 65

I GET THAT WOMAN WHO WAS RUDE TO ME AT SAKS IN TROUBLE

I’m in the Saks Fifth Avenue shoe department. I keep trying to get the attention of a snooty old-school Saks saleslady to try on a pair of Miu Miu pumps. I make the classic mistake of wearing my gym clothes to Saks, so she doesn’t pay any attention to me. I finally approach her and flat-out ask for help, and she says she’ll be right back. I sit down and wait for almost ten minutes and then find out she’s helping a rich-looking white woman who is better dressed than me around the corner in the Louboutin section. I am so pissed I go to Customer Service, on the third floor, and fill out a complaint card against this woman.

Total time taken up by this fantasy: 1 minute

Total calories burned while having this fantasy: 10

AL QAEDA TAKES NBC’S
THE VOICE
HOSTAGE

On a big sweeps episode of NBC’s
The Voice,
Al Qaeda drops from the ceiling on ropes and tries to turn it into a live terrorist competition where they kill innocent people every hour. The really sick part is they make the judges rate each murder. It’s unbelievably shocking and horrible. Little did Al Qaeda know that I was sitting in the second row, having been given VIP tickets by my close, personal friend Adam Levine. I have a gun with me in my Alexander McQueen clutch—it’s a plastic one that got by the metal detectors like John Malkovich had in
In the Line of Fire.
I wasn’t sure why I packed my gun with me when I was getting ready to go to this taping of
The Voice,
but now I know.

When Al Qaeda gets ready to shoot their first victim on live TV, we hear a shot ring out! People scream. But no, it’s not the innocent person they were about to shoot; it’s the terrorist holding the innocent person. (I’ve seen this move in movies—the confusing “shot rang out” move. It is awesome.) The terrorists scramble. Who is this invisible antiterrorist? It’s me, Mindy Kaling. I was hiding behind Cee Lo’s fur coat, and no one saw me. Slowly, over the course of the night, I assassinate every terrorist with my sniper shooting. I train a group of plucky Girl Scouts who are there on a field trip to be a distraction. Soon, the terrorists themselves are filled with terror. Pretty ironical, actually. And then, with the last one gunned down, the SWAT team pours in. I reveal myself and announce, “Song shall never be silenced by terror, only by being voted off.” They continue the taping of
The Voice,
because otherwise, the terrorists would not have won exactly, but would have disrupted our evening of fun song judging.

Total time taken up by this fantasy: 20 minutes

Total calories burned: 200

My All-Important Legacy

Strict Instructions for My Funeral

W
HOEVER IS
closest to me when I die, here are the instructions for my funeral. You might think this is presumptuous, but consider it a favor to you, because at the time of my death, you will be so distracted with grief that your ability to plan will be compromised, and I don’t want my funeral to be a thrown-together disaster.
*