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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Rachel Bloom
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December 12 - December 15, 2020
As a mature adult, I’ve come to learn that trauma is real for everyone and just because someone had it worse doesn’t mean you didn’t have it bad.
However, when I occasionally dip my toe back in the game of middle school trauma one-upmanship, I do have this story: When I was in seventh grade, the popular kids paid the most popular guy in school to ask me out as a prank. Haha, trauma checkmate, motherfucker!
In 1999, I was a seventh grader in Manhattan Beach, California, at the creatively named Manhattan Beach Middle School. And I went to school with some real dumbfucks. Dumbfucks with no sense of culture, introspection, or the difference between plural and possessive.
And now we come to me, a real-life Todd Solondz hilarious uggo. I was a pale kid with transition-lensed glasses and a rolling backpack, with lopsided bangs that I, for some reason, cut myself. I was so naturally scrawny that there was a rumor going around that I was anorexic but also a rumor that I wasn’t cool enough to be anorexic. I sang show tunes under my breath and used words like “parlance.” My favorite outfit: sweatpants, Payless zipper shoes, and an oversize T-shirt that featured Betty Boop dressed as all of the Spice Girls, the caption of which said, appropriately, boop world.
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If only I could say that my personality in hindsight was awesome and no one “got me,” but this is disproved by the seventy-two DVDs’ worth of home movies that my mother gifted me on my thirtieth birthday. Thanks to these DVDs, I have concrete proof my personality was pretty insufferable.
A teensy-tiny fact to add to the mix: This whole time, I was wrestling with a darkness in my mind that I later realized was obsessive-compulsive disorder. I’ll go into this later (it’s a fun beach read!), but for now let’s just say that it was a shadow over my life that colored everything I did. Get excited!
There’s always that one shitty spot in every school that feels as if the architect said, “Hmm, I need to design someplace secluded and moist for the uncool kids.”
Let’s face it: If you’re a person of substance, you are going to get bullied in school.
Even the meanest bully thinks that they’re the hero of their story. Unless your bully is a true psychopath, every human on earth wants to believe that they are fundamentally good at heart.
Look a female bully dead in the eyes and say, “Your pussy stinks like garbage. Everyone can smell your garbage pussy all the time. Your friends will say that I’m lying, that I’m crazy, but they know it’s true.”
This singular moment will ruin your bully’s self-confidence for the rest of her life because every woman worries at some point that her pussy stinks like garbage.
So that is why I vividly remember the first time I shit in the toilet.
QUICK ASIDE TO LIST THE TURNING POINTS OF MY LIFE IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE: • Shitting in toilet • Barbies suddenly not as compelling to play with, first existential crisis ensues • Trying for an hour to put in a tampon the day I get my period for the first time because I want to be like my mom • While riding Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion realize that I, too, will die someday; second existential crisis ensues • 9/11 • First French kiss • Successfully put in a tampon • Finally GET Monty Python and the Holy Grail • Lose virginity • Grandma dies • Give up on trying to read The Things They Carried •
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Most children would have taken these toy offers and just dropped a deuce into the crapper already. But I was an only child, and a real spoiled fucker of one at that. I knew I could wring more out of these people. So I began to intimidate them, mafia-don-style. “You come to me on the day of my Barbie’s imaginary wedding asking me for a favor. You want me to poop in the toilet and, in exchange, you offer me a toy car. But you do not think to offer the toy gas station that comes with it? How do you suppose I get around in a plastic car with no imaginary gas?” My parents got on their knees. “Okay,
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There’s a few more minutes of tearful pleading, me saying I’ll never get on the toilet for as long as I live, and then, SMASH CUT TO ME ON THE TOILET! Great edit, Mom.
Then, a warning: NOTE: If anyone (besides me) reads this in the next 9 years, they must die! Don’t worry, it’s been longer than nine years, you’re safe.
When you’re going through your first bout with a mental health issue and don’t know any better, the aloneness is the worst part.
Whatever those thoughts were, they were gone and never to return again in any other form. If this sentence seems ominous, that’s because it is!
Absence can make the heart grow fonder, but, when you’re twelve, it can also make the heart go, “Oh right, how’s that guy doing?”
Thankfully, this fucked-up obsession with Ethan in no way set an unhealthy pattern for me in future relationships and hahahaahahahaha I can’t even finish that sentence
The witch replied, “Well, to be fair, it’ll be a mix of this curse and all of the natural causes of romantic obsession. See, romantic obsession, also known as ‘limerence’ as coined by the psychologist Dorothy Tennov, naturally feeds off the thrill of the chase, so anything with a ‘forbidden’ element is especially appealing. Limerence also makes your serotonin plummet and your daughter already has low serotonin due to mild depression inherited from both sides of the family so she’ll be even more reliant on the dopamine surges caused by romantic love. BUT THE CURSE STILL PLAYS A BIG PART IN THIS
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One time, they did go a little further in a movie theater on Christmas while watching the Paul Giamatti hit Sideways, but the duke wanted to stop a few minutes in because “this movie is really interesting.” There were many other signs that the duke might not have been into women—his believable turn as the Emcee in Cabaret, his “notes” on her kissing technique, and the fact that everyone said, “Hey, you know your boyfriend’s gay, right?”
Since talking dirty to a virgin is as hot as it sounds (“What do you want me to do to you?” “I want you to … look at … my vagina and … describe it”), the princess agreed to lose her virginity to Sir Patrick.
No one will ever understand me and that’s the way it has to be. I am an underdog whose sheer talent will someday prove everyone wrong. And then they’ll all be sorry. (pause, then) Just to be clear, I mean that they’ll be sorry in an “I’m gonna be successful” way, not in a Columbine way.
The Greatest College Audition Monologue in the World IT’S NOT MY FAULT, IMOGEN. It’s not my fault that I am the BEST ACTRESS IN THE WORLD. It’s not my FAULT that I can transition seamlessly from an (do all of the following accents and dialects) Irish dialect to British to Russian to Jamaican to Australian to Southern Belle.
Instead of a broom cupboard, though, Harry found himself in what appeared to be an entirely black room. It was perfectly square, like … a box. There was nothing on the walls except for a few bright posters and magically swirling gold words snaking around the room that read, you’re always auditioning. At the foot of a raised platform sat approximately twenty students chanting a strange spell: “Black leather yellow leather black leather yellow leather.”
“Um, of course we do, talk to the hand!” said a boy in periwinkle robes. This phrase was not foreign to Harry, for they were living in the late nineties, something that strangely never came up in Harry’s internal monologue.
The last time Harry had been interrogated this much was when he talked to Rita Skeeter and he was not keen to repeat that experience. Wait a second, he realized. “Skeeter.” That name sounded just like “mosquito.” The fact she was a bug had been there that whole time? He laughed to himself. He really should pay more attention to the symbolism of people’s names in this world.
He wished there were a spell to speed up awkward moments. That would be a lot more useful than turning spoons into badgers or whatever.
He drew out his wand, preparing to say “Expelliarmus” to whoever had just walked in because that continued to be the only defensive spell he could retain since, let’s face it, Hermione was the real hero of this book series.
Harry saw this as his moment to pull a Cedric Diggory and exit unexpectedly.
He was as confused as a Hufflepuff reading The Sound and the Fury.
Harry smirked. This was gonna be easier than Ginny the night after the Battle of Hogwarts.
Growing up has shown me that beneath any meanness there’s a vulnerable, beautiful person who just doesn’t know how to properly express their emotions. Except for straight men in musical theater. Straight men in musical theater are irredeemable fuckfaces.
You sing at altruistic nonprofit galas yet delight in making AIDS and dead baby jokes. Also, those jokes are from 2003 and you’ve hung on to them because the general low standard of humor in the musical theater community means you never had to actually get funny beyond a ninth-grade level.
And then I got pregnant. Twist! The whole time I’ve been writing this book, I’ve also been gestating a child! I know! #Momspiration #Wombgoalz #Werkqween #Sunday.
Having a baby inside me just does not compute with pleasure. They are two different and disparate things. Yet, I don’t feel this cognitive dissonance regarding sex during pregnancy. Sex, after all, is what makes babies in the first place. It’s natural and beautiful and, during pregnancy, it’s the only time in my life I’ve ever been able to stomach the label “making love.”* But I don’t extend the same sentimentality to when I’m gettin’ down to a Pornhub video called “Schoolgirl slut sucks cock to get an A.” I know that all the books say that the womb’s rhythmic contractions don’t traumatize the
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Of course, sex serves so many purposes beyond that, but I can’t get over that pleasure is essentially Mother Nature’s tricky sleight of hand. Like, what a bitch.
I have certain rules for fun by which I abide and expect others to do the same. For some, it’s off-putting and intense. For others, it’s also off-putting and intense.
When entering a Disney park, you may debate Walt Disney’s rumored anti-Semitism. However, you may ONLY do it when walking down Main Street.
The actors in the Harry Potter movie series are NOT the actual characters. They are actors playing the characters in the Harry Potter books, all of whom are real, and I will meet them someday.
If English is your native language and you always mix up “their” and “they’re,” then YOU ARE NOT A RAVEN-CLAW.
Every name for an iguana is fair game except “Connor.”
The only phrase in the English language worse than “Long-Distance Relationship” is “I’m calling about your lab results. Do you have time to talk?”
Nothing happened. As minutes passed and I still wasn’t asleep, I panicked. “Oh God. What if I don’t sleep so I’m too tired tomorrow and I fuck up the pitch and it ruins my life?”
It was like this movie franchise had really gone off the rails and Jafar had fucked the Wet Bandits and it had also been a threesome with Voldemort and the baby that resulted from it was me.
On the outside I was smiling and rapping “Baby Got Back” at the surprise karaoke party thrown by our friends, but on the inside, I was screaming at myself, This is the best night of your life! Don’t feel dread! Don’t be an anxious cunt! Be! Happy!
And I learned that The Bad, The Dread, The Hungry Hungry Manson Caterpillar—again, pick whatever name you like—will never really go away. It will always be a part of me.
One time in the storeroom, a co-worker said that if he couldn’t make a woman cum with “just his dick” he didn’t feel like a man. Have no idea how the conversation segued from chocolate to that.
Susan, dear, you’ll notice that I have put the word “manager” in quotes because I later learned that anyone can in fact call themselves a manager, no credentials needed! This shed some light on your professionalism and why, after seeing me in a friend’s internet sketch at age twenty-three, you became convinced that I could pass for sixteen and become a sexy teen star.
