Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? Part 28

ME: This is the one I'm going to wear.

STYLIST GUY (gently, as if to a fragile idiot): Zees will not fit you.

ME: Oh man, then we'd better get the seamstress to make this one fit, huh? We don't have too much time!

STYLIST GUY: She is only here for zee small alterations, not zee large-scale reworking of zee gown.

That's when I decided to just pretend as though I somehow had the power (in this weird situation, where no one was boss) to end arguments and make decisions.

ME: Well, I don't know what to say, because I just don't think I'd feel comfortable in anything but that.

When I played the "I don't feel comfortable" card, he knew it was over. "I don't feel comfortable" is the cla.s.sic manipulative girl get-my-way line. It's right up there with "I don't feel entirely safe." Was it fair? Nope. Was it cool? Absolutely not. But it also wasn't fair or cool for him to have brought three dozen size-zero gowns to my photo shoot.

In the end, the seamstress literally cut open the back of one of the gowns and quickly added about a foot of canvas material to the back, pinned it together, and put it on me. The stylist was near tears at the destruction of the gown, but it fit like a glove-er, a glove that is kind of ugly and makes.h.i.+ft on the back. But on the front? Perfection. I love you, canvas. I love you, safety pins. If I ever do a voice in a Disney movie where I'm the princess whose friends are a bunch of inanimate household objects who come to life, I hope mine are a swatch of canvas and some sa.s.sy safety pins.

Later, in our gowns, I took Ellie to the bathroom and showed her the s.h.i.+t-stained graffiti. Ellie loved it, as I knew she would. I spent the rest of the shoot having a blast and posing goofily for photos with my pal, like the awesome, Most Beautiful, and Least Dressable, Girl that I was.

These Are the Narcissistic Photos in My BlackBerry

I WOULD RATHER have someone read my diary than look at my iPod playlists. It's not because I have embarra.s.sing playlists called "Setting the Mood for s.e.x-Time" or whatever. My playlists are humiliating because my workout mixes have dorky t.i.tles, like "Go for It, Girl!" and "You Can Do It, Mindy!" You might also see that some of my playlists are simply two songs on repeat fifteen times, like I'm a psycho getting pumped up to murder the president.

My BlackBerry photos, on the other hand, make me laugh. They are all horribly, horribly narcissistic. My BlackBerry camera has proven to exist primarily as a mirror to see if my makeup came out okay. The other ones are my favorite people who I want to look at all the time. I thought I'd share them all, uncensored.

1. I was on my way to a taping of The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and I wanted to see if the zit I had on the center of my forehead had shrunk. This is a different zit than the one I had when I was twenty-two, which was in the same spot and which I wrote about earlier in this book, but perhaps it was a descendant of that zit? It was so huge that Rainn Wilson advised me not to do the talk show appearance. I really wanted to go on The Late Late Show, though, because I love Craig Ferguson, so I popped it with a safety pin sterilized with hot water in the women's restroom. A blood blob formed and dried up, and I was able to flick the crust off for the show, but you can still kind of see it.

2. I was on my way to the GQ Man of the Year Party. There was absolutely no reason for me to be there, but I'd heard Drake might perform. I did my own hair and I wanted to see if it looked awful.

3. I also wanted to see if my dress was too low-cut. I ultimately decided it was not too low-cut, but while wearing it, I had to keep my hands hovering over my cleavage, as though I were constantly overheated, like an old-timey Southern woman from a cartoon.

4. Yes, I am with my two best friends Brenda and Jocelyn who are very dear to me, blah blah, but this photo is more significant because it is a rare time where my head looks normal size. I have an enormous head, so it is important to me to have a few flattering, head-minimizing photos, in case I ever need to use them for one of those birthday cakes that have photographic icing.

5. I wasn't positive I could pull off big, black plastic gla.s.ses, so I took this photo. If you ever need to be a well-read, artsy hipster in a hurry you should really have big black plastic-framed gla.s.ses.

6. Now I needed to make sure I could pull off the gla.s.ses when I wasn't smiling. I look so f'ing cool here. I'm basically Claire Danes.

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 "Cla.s.sy 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

IF 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 Billtype 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!