Why Not Me?

by Mindy Kaling

My parents encouraged me to play field hockey,

where I eventually did end up making a few friends. I remember that time as one of the most stressful periods of my life. Every kid wants approval, but my desire to be well liked was central to my personality.

As I got older, I got craftier and less obvious, but I’ve always put a lot of energy and ef...

The truth is, it’s hard to get people to like you, but it’s even harder to keep people liking you.

I am telling you, the key to looking gorgeous is to never sit up straight. It implies you have not eaten enough to have the strength to sit like a regular person, which historically is sexy to everyone.

I’ve always loved clothes. Like any normal woman, I would see a dress, buy it, rip the tags off with my teeth, save the buttons for ten to twelve years in a drawer, and wear it to work.

wore a tailored dress from Old Navy to a wedding last summer and I was a hit. It couldn’t have been my personality; I was drunk as hell that night.

Asking your friend to be a bridesmaid is one of the modern paradoxes: no one actually wants to do it, but everyone would be offended if you didn’t ask.

The only difference between you and an actual maid is that you aren’t getting paid and you are supposed to love every second of your job. You even have to wear a uniform: a dress in the same color as the other maids so everyone at the party knows whom to ask when someone is looking for a fridge in which to put her breast milk.

This is particularly outrageous because the groomsmen do absolutely nothing. And I mean nothing. Being asked to be a groomsman means you get to give an incredibly inappropriate two-minute speech and every woman there will still want to sleep with you.

To rub salt in the wound, he might lightly ask, “Is there anything I can do to help?” knowing full well no self-respecting bridesmaid will task him with any job because he will do it too slowly.

Because a honeymoon is, after all, a sex vacation you’re giving yourself after a massive party in your honor.

It’s about your loved ones being able to give you a souvenir of their affection in the form of a tangible house-helpful gift. This is my long-winded way of telling you that you will take my Calphalon wire cooling rack and you will like it.

With my friends, the sad truth is that our best “best friend” days are behind us. In college, we used to be able to meet each other in the common area of our off-campus housing, excited about our evening ahead,

Playful arguments would become fits of uncontrollable laughter, and, like magic, that experience would be crystallized into a private joke, and the private joke would get boiled down to a simple phrase, which became a souvenir of the entire experience.

For years to come, the phrase alone could uncork hours of renewed laughter. And as everyone knows, the best kind of laughter is laughter born of a shared memory.

Until I realized: this long expanse of free time to rekindle friendships is not real. We will never come home to each other again and we will never again have each other’s undivided attention. That version of our friendship is over forever. And when I remember this, and it usually happens in those awful, quiet evening hours on Sunday nights, after dinner but before bed, I just lie on my sofa and cry for half an hour. I slip into a melancholy that I know is somehow tied to a deep-seated fear about not being married and having kids myself.

It’s traumatizing to think that a best friend could become just a friend. That’s because there is virtually no difference between an acquaintance and a friend. But the gulf between a friend and a best friend is enormous and profound.

my attitude toward alcohol was that it was a delicious and dangerous treat that, when obtained, needed to be ingested quickly in case someone tried to take it away. You know, the way a raccoon eats from a garbage can.

In Hanover, New Hampshire, a chirpy, Indian improv comedian who was constantly talking was something of a novelty to the scores of wordless men named Brian.

there was a 100 percent chance you would find a warm keg of

Bud and a glassy-eyed young man with undiagnosed depression eager to pour you some.

So much of college is girls labeling other girls terrible things when they don’t like their behavior, but using concerned language so they have plausible deniability if they get accused of being bitches:

I can actually save the magazine editors behind “Who Wore It Best?” some time. Here’s the answer 100 percent of the time: it’s always the more famous or classically beautiful woman!

No original music allowed! You know I can’t stand original music! Please stick to the hits. This is a celebratory event, not an open mike night at the Campus Events Hall.

The number of times I have bailed on something on a Saturday night with the hopes that I could be “home in time for ‘Weekend Update’ ” is in the dozens. Somehow if I made it back in time to see Amy Poehler and Tina Fey’s take on the news, the night would not have been a total bust.

Unfortunately, for me, “nothing to do but drink” tends to mean “nothing to do but get into trouble.”

I drink when I don’t know a lot of people, which is a useful habit I picked up in college. When I am a bit tipsy, I am instantly cheerful and not so socially anxious. The key is that I can drink no more than two drinks because, after that, I go from making charming small talk to slurred rants.

Thank God this was pre-Twitter, because I know I would’ve tweeted a lot of angry quotes about betrayal and then later deleted them in a worried state.

really ought to send him some money, but, honestly, he doesn’t need it. He has that sweet Despicable Me money.

For the eight years that I had been there, NBC had been like a dysfunctional African country where the president changed every eleven months or so. Actually, NBC made most African countries look pretty stable by comparison.

I drove to the Fox lot across town, parked, drank two shots from a bottle of Jose Cuervo that I keep on the floor of my passenger seat, arranged my breasts so it looked like I had filled in a solid B-cup, dissolved enough Listerine breath strips on my tongue so the inside of my mouth was burning, and raced across the lot, hoping not to run into Rupert Murdoch in my Keds (I wear Keds to every meeting and then go the restroom and change into my “slutty career woman” stilettos before I actually see anyone important).

I get nervous when I tell anecdotes! Sometimes I accidentally blurt out the ending right in the middle! Also, I’m sweating.

Do great people sweat so much their thighs stick to the leather sofas they’re sitting on?

You know when an old prewar building in Manhattan is bought by a developer and all the new tenants are cool yuppies, except there’s one old rent-control crone left over from the Depression? And the landlord really wants to evict her but because of tenant rights has to pretend like “No, we love Crelga; she’s so colorful and full of attitude. I love her Depression stories!,” but secretly they are thinking of ways to have her replaced by John Stamos?

It’s OK to drink tequila in the car if you just had a really good meeting.

Flirt with a fireman while he was fighting a fire and be miffed she doesn’t have his undivided attention

Dress like a children’s performer and think it’s high fashion • Say “Whoa” when we see a hot guy

Lie on the floor in despair a few times a year

See food poisoning as an opportunity to springboard into a new exercise regimen

That’s because my show is on a major network and you can’t show all that stuff, and also because my dad is alive and I would like to have lunch with him without feeling mired in dishonor.

No, I didn’t do a background check when I hired her at the bus station. Guys, relax! Sonia’s chill and loves God. That’s what her tattoos say.

Relaxed after-dinner games of Monopoly deteriorated into tear-soaked affairs with accusations of cheating, favoritism, and veiled death threats. Extended family had to be apologized to; desserts were revoked.

I would be dreaming about Idris Elba’s and my honeymoon. (It’s in the Seychelles, we fight on the first night, make up the next morning, and never fight again for the rest of our lives.)

Bad sport. Hurt ego. Not wanting to stay and watch while my family kept playing Monopoly after I had gone bankrupt because I kept landing on “jail”

story. One website published a piece called “Watch Mindy Kaling Keep It Together as She Announces Her Own Emmy Snub.” I loved that one because it’s basically “Watch Nothing Happen but I Have to Write Something Mean and Today Is a Slow News Day.”

Throwing a tantrum feels good because you think you are ruining everyone’s good time when you feel your very worst. But the truth is, you’re not ruining their good time, you’re just giving them another good story.

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.

“Soul mates” is what you aim for, but soup snakes is what you get sometimes.

I love seeing Broadway shows, because I get to dress up in fancy clothes, but unlike when I attend Hollywood stuff, I get to feel educated and smart while I’m doing it. I feel like a real patron of the arts when I’m flipping through a playbill.