From the Back Cover:
Mindy Kaling has lived many lives: the obedient child of immigrant
professionals, a timid chubster afraid of her own bike, a Ben
Affleck–impersonating Off-Broadway performer and playwright, and,
finally, a comedy writer and actress prone to starting fights with her
friends and coworkers with the sentence “Can I just say one last thing
about this, and then I swear I’ll shut up about it?”
Perhaps
you want to know what Mindy thinks makes a great best friend (someone
who will fill your prescription in the middle of the night), or what
makes a great guy (one who is aware of all elderly people in any room at
any time and acts accordingly), or what is the perfect amount of fame
(so famous you can never get convicted of murder in a court of law), or
how to maintain a trim figure (you will not find that information in
these pages). If so, you’ve come to the right book, mostly!
In Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, Mindy
invites readers on a tour of her life and her unscientific observations
on romance, friendship, and Hollywood, with several conveniently placed
stopping points for you to run errands and make phone calls. Mindy
Kaling really is just a Girl Next Door—not so much literally anywhere in
the continental United States, but definitely if you live in India or
Sri Lanka.
***
My Thoughts:
I simply LOVED this book! Its a full on laugh riot! Mindy Kaling is smart,
funny, pretty (yes!), and she writes really well, her writing style is
very smooth and easy. While reading it, I actually felt like she was
sitting right next to me, yapping away!
I first came across her in
The Mindy Project, which I think is a hilarious show! Wikipedia then lead me to
The Office, which has now topped my list of funniest TV shows of all time, tied off course with
Scrubs!
After reading
Bossypants,
this was obviously the next book in my list, and I liked it better than
the former, which was more sarcastic and mature. This book is simple and smart and young,
and reads like a bound collection
of a funny newspaper column. I wish she did write a daily column, but till that happens, I have twitter!
***
A few excerpts from the book, given below for everybody's convenience. Also read
this.
Revenge is a dish best served cold. But it feels best served piping hot,
straight out of the oven of outrage.
There is no sunrise so beautiful that it is worth waking me
up to see it. (I totally agree!!)
The laws of bullying allow you to be cruel even when the
victim had made strides for improvement? This is when I realized that bullies
have no code of conduct.
I’m the kind of person who would rather get my hopes up really
high and watch them get dashed to pieces than wisely keep my expectations at
bay and hope they are exceeded. This quality has made me a needy and theatrical
friend, but has given me a spectacularly dramatic emotional life.
Thank you, Teach for America! Luring away America’s finest
minds so that the rest of us can snatch up their jobs.
Our cheapness was the recurring source of our creative
decisions.
When people show a lack of excitement to see me, I
compensate by complimenting the hell out of them. It always exacerbates the
problem, but I cannot stop.
I’ve always found Steve gentlemanly and private,
like a Jane Austen character.
When smart people are nice, it’s always terrifying, because
I know they’re taking in everything and thinking all kinds of smart and
potentially judgmental things.
SOMETIMES I
bring a script I’m working on to a restaurant and sit near people and eavesdrop
on them. I could rationalize it—Oh, this is good
anthropological research for characters I’m writing—but it’s
basically just nosiness.
I’m pretty sure my parents have gazed into each other’s eyes
maybe once, and that was so my mom could put eyedrops in my dad’s eyes.
When I was a kid, my parents smartly raised us to keep quiet, be
respectful to older people, and generally not question adults all that
much. I think that's because they were assuming that 99 percent of the
time, we'd be interacting with worthy, smart adults... They didn't ever
tell me 'Sometimes you will meet idiots who are technically adults and
authority figures. You don't have to do what they say.
In psychology (okay, Twilight) they teach you about the notion of
imprinting, and I think it applies here. I reverse-imprinted with
athleticism. Ours is the great non-love story of my life.
On Hooking – Up:
Can’t we have a universal understanding of the term, once
and for all? From now on, let’s all agree that hooking up = sex. Everything
else is “made out.” And if you’re older than twenty-eight, then just kissing
someone doesn’t count for crap and is not even worth mentioning. Unless you’re
Mormon, in which case you’re going to hell. If Europe could figure out a way to
do the euro, I feel confident we can do this.
On Irish Exits:
An “Irish exit” is when you leave a party without telling
anyone (and presumably it is because you are too drunk to form words). A
“French exit” is when you leave a party early without saying good-bye to anyone
or paying your share of the bill and maybe you are also drunk.
The reason I pull Irish exits is not because I think I’m too
busy and cool to be bothered with pleasantries.
I think it’s actually the more polite thing to do, because I’m not
coercing party goers into some big farewell moment with me. Then other people
feel like they have to stop what they’re doing and hug me, too. It’s time-wasting dominoes.
Irish exits are supposed to be subtle, a way to leave
without creating a disruption, and yes, on occasion, a way to perhaps escape
notice for epic drunkenness. (Also read
this.)
On a More Serious Note:
As my mom has said, when one person is unhappy, it usually
means two people are unhappy but that one has not come to terms with it yet.
One friend with whom you have a lot in common is better than three with whom you struggle to find things to talk about.
Writing, at its heart, is a solitary pursuit, designed to make people
depressoids, drug addicts, misanthropes, and antisocial weirdos.
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