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

by Mindy Kaling

However, you should know I disagree with a lot of traditional advice. For instance, they say the best revenge is living well. I say it’s acid in the face—who will love them now?

My opinion? Take care of revenge right away. Push, shove, scratch that person while they’re still within arm’s reach. Don’t let them get away! Who knows when you’ll get this opportunity again?

What else should I know? (1) There is no sunrise so beautiful that it is worth waking me up to see it. (2) I would like to be friends with Beyoncé Knowles.

When Your Boyfriend Fits into Your Jeans and Other Atrocities

Sometimes You Just Have to Put on Lip Gloss and Pretend to Be Psyched

There Has Ceased to Be a Difference Between My Awake Clothes and My Asleep Clothes

“Don’t be closer to twice a friend’s weight than to her actual weight,” I told myself. This little mantra has helped me stave off obesity for more than two decades.

A nickname you give to someone you adore who has just stepped on your foot accidentally, and it hurts. Alternatively, a fat robot.

I remember when the news reports came out about Michael Phelps’s ten-thousand-calorie-a-day diet, and everyone was so shocked. But I just thought, yep, I could do that, no problem.

I’m pretty happy with the way I look, so long as I don’t break a beach chair.

“I love that dress so much I want to kill myself.”

I don’t want to learn! Let me read Shopaholic Runs for Congress in peace!

What the photo didn’t show was that after it was taken, I climbed all the way up, which took me about forty minutes. Once at the top, I didn’t like the view and refused to climb down. Also my thighs were badly chafed and I had to go to the bathroom. Eventually, my counselors had to hoist up a ladder and pull me down, much to the embarrassment of Vijay and Hondo. I’m pretty sure Vijay claimed that Hondo was his sibling and I was the cousin.

“You think it’s ja-lapeno?!” Hondo asked, incredulous. I did.

Would I eat too many Popsicles at lunch, leaving none for some other kid and leave myself open to ridicule as Popsicle Pig? Would I get a mud stain on the back of my shorts and become Shitty Pants?)

I closed my eyes and just let myself fall into the water. The sight of a fat child falling, lifeless, from a high distance into a pond is kind of an amazing sight, I’ll bet. You know when a kid’s getting a shot or a tooth removed, how you tell them that it’s not going to be as bad as they’re imagining it will be? Well, this was a hundred times worse than what I had imagined.

First of all, it hurt. I don’t know how it happened, but I got a huge cut from falling into the water. (It was on the back of my left knee; to this day, I have a four-inch dark brown scar there.) Three people, including Scott, pulled me out of the water. They rushed me to shore, to the First Aid room, which, weirdly, had injections for anaphylactic shock and an eye wash but no paper towels. Scott patted down the back of my leg with beach towels. Ultimately they got it to stop bleeding, and Scott begged me not to tell my parents. I remember him asking me four or five times. God knows what that must’ve looked like to an observer, a seventeen-year-old boy exhorting a disoriented, bleeding six-year-old “not to tell her parents” something. But this was Morses Pond, and that’s the kind of thing that happened there.

I reverse-imprinted with athleticism. Ours is the great non-love story of my life.

Teenage girls, please don’t worry about being super popular in high school, or being the best actress in high school, or the best athlete. Not only do people not care about any of that the second you graduate, but when you get older, if you reference your successes in high school too much, it actually makes you look kind of pitiful, like some babbling old Tennessee Williams character with nothing else going on in her current life. What I’ve noticed is that almost no one who was a big star in high school is also big star later in life. For us overlooked kids, it’s so wonderfully fair.

If Luke Perry had gone to my high school, everybody would have thought, “What’s the deal with this brooding greaser? Is he a narc?” But that’s who Hollywood put forth as “just a dude at your high school.”

One friend with whom you have a lot in common is better than three with whom you struggle to find things to talk about.

Me, on the other hand, whenever I lose, like, five pounds, I basically start considering if I should “try out” modeling.

After all these years with friends who are five ten or taller, I have come to carry myself with the confidence of a tall person. It’s all in the head. It works out.

Her favorite catchphrase was “Are you on crack?”