And Off She Goes..

A mere three days from now my little sister Maggie is tying the knot. My bridesmaid's dress is being tailored, the airline tickets are booked, and the rental car is ready. And yet! There is a little part of me that expects to get to the airport in Oakland, and someone will tell me that the ceremony is called off, because Maggie is still a toddler. The one I babysat all the time. Or the five year old on videotape who runs onto the screen and yells make-up! and socks my other sister in the face with a big white pillow. She's still the eighth grader who would eat big bowls of Cheerios and talk about guys she liked. She's the captain of the cross-country team. The Berkeley sorority girl. The single lady in San Francisco.

The baby my mom brought home from the hospital. The little one with all the dark hair.

Please stop being in love with me.

Look, Amanda Mull, I really need to ask you to stop loving me. I know that I am super lovable. Everybody wants to be with a size-twelve-on-a-good-day, semi-employed lady with questionable hygiene, but this has got to stop.

I got your love letter, and I'm a wee bit embarrassed at the gushing.

Listen, I am married. Let's just be the kind of lovers in The Bridges of Madison County or The English Patient or that movie with Julia Roberts. You know, the one where they make pizza and the chubby one does it with Ed Begley, Jr. Our love will be the sweeter for never having been consummated.

Always,
Wendy


How can I blame you for wanting this?

Lady-blogging.

Usually, I like to make the ha-has. Or at least the rueful smirk. Or at the very least the eyeroll and the click away to another site.

But this whole Silda Spitzer thing, which seems to be garnering as much attention as the whole prostitute thing, has gotten me thinking. And by "Silda Spitzer thing," I mean her decision to go to the press conferences and stay with her husband and not imbed the heel of a shoe into that crazy fuck of a husband's face. And what a face it is. Scrunched up, gleaming with pleasure at his own cleverness, bobbing on that lanky body like the dot on an upside-down exclamation point. He looks harmless, law-abiding, do gooder-ish. No one that looks like Don Knotts zipped inside a Paul Scheer suit could possibly be so, well, gross.

And maybe it is his look that reminds me most of my own cheating-boyfriend-past. Mine was also tall and lanky. He was baby-faced and kind-looking. His face was scrunched, although handsomer because he was, after all, an aspiring actor.

And I was shocked to find out that he had slept around on me -- not because our relationship was good. It was broken from the start, we split up every three or four weeks. I had the feeling he was embarrassed to have me meet his friends, and then that feeling was replaced by the creepier notion that perhaps he essentially had no friends.

And the brokenness was also my fault. I was young. I had low self-esteem. In the reverse of Alvy Singer, I wanted to belong to ANY club that would take me as a member. I instructed my partners in the ways they could be cruel to me. "You don't really like me but you want to sleep with me? Okay! I am so cool with that."

The only thing surprising about the fact that this guy cheated on me was that I was surprised by it. But whenever we hit a rocky patch, he would say something like, "I know we're having trouble, but I haven't even held hands with another girl since we started dating."

I took that at face value because, you know, why not?

And then, and here's the part where I finally get to the point, after finding out about the cheating with numerous girls, including friend-ish types, I stayed with him. For three months. And here's as close as I can get to an explanation. I think I wanted to stick around to see him sweat, to see him grovel, to see him squirm. I thought the cheating was a reflection of me, and I wanted that image to go away. I wanted it to be replaced by something else. I wanted him to tell me what I was worth. I wanted him to say he made a terrible mistake. And he said it over and over. And you know what? That really did make me kinda feel better. Later in life, I would learn how to do that myself --but not yet. And I hadn't had that ah-hah moment where you realize guys like that are just guys like that.

The light started peeking through when I asked him, on another long night of harangues and tears, why he had really broken up with the girl before me. Having lately learned the art of confession, he said that he had cheated on her too.

And then I could see sweeping behind him a long chain of pretty and serviceable girls, each tossed aside for the next, each to him the same -- perfectly okay but not quite perfect. He was like a kid walking down a beach collecting shells. Selecting and abandoning them on a whim when his hands got too full.

We broke up for good one afternoon. I had told him I thought we oughta split. He begged me to reconsider. And I mean begged. I finally said fine, come over and we can talk about it.

I was met with a long silence and then, "Well, I can't right now. The Laker game is coming on."

Really, honestly, as far as break-up stories go, you have to admit that's a heck of a great exit line.

I hung up, and stopped taking his calls and emails. About a month later I was driving inland on the 10. I had started dating a guy who lived outside the city. My phone rang, and there was the ex, wanting to hash it all out again. I told him that I was on my way to an appointment and I had to go.

"I love you," he said hopefully. And I could have said a bunch of stuff about how false that was, but instead I grinned and just said what he wanted to hear.

Oh sure, uh huh, "I love you too," I said.

And then, from him, "I think, you know, in a couple of years it will work out between us."

I can't remember what I said, just something to pacify him. And then I hung up and kept on going.

I didn't give it much thought after that. I was already on my way to somewhere else.

Fifty things about me.

Look, a lot of women have blogs where they talk about their personal lives and their dating lives and reveal just, you know, a lot of personal information. And, you know, I need to be more like that. So, without further ado, here are fifty totally revealing and personal things about me.

1. I have six boobs.
2. I am married to a combination of Morgan Freeman and a talking teapot (long story!).
3. I like to make noises.
4. Sailboats are pretty!
5. I am in ur parliament, making ur lawz.
6. I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus.
7. I am Zooey Deschanel.
8. I played the space shuttle in Space Camp.
9. I have a cat where my head should be.
10. The calls are coming from inside the house!
11. I can't count.

I'm a douche!

Hi, here's some douchey self promotion. I got interviewed by Jon Niccum about the book by the Lawrence Journal World.

I wish I was kidding about that toe.


Link: HERE

The Wiggles, Bananas and Jack Nicholson

My friend Alison and I started posting our chats on a Tumblr blog, check it out here and let me know what you think, especially if you think, "Whatta couple-a douches!"


Alison And Wendy

Ugh

Oh dear, it looks like the strike is going to go on and on.

I'm sad about it, and angry, but there's also something sort of absurd and funny about the way it's playing out.

The kind of people who run the studios are so unbelievably rich, and so unbelievably out of touch, that their posturing has a weird, funny element to it, as if someone shipped in some 1920s robber barons to negotiate with people who actually live right now.

Most of my interaction with studio execs have been with lower-level guys. They wear suits, and one gets the feeling that they have to have their assistants log them into their AOL accounts that they signed up for back in 1997.

In one memorable meeting, we were discussing strategies for the NBC website, and one of them said to me, 'Ok, Wendy, now what would make people come to NBC.com instead of, say, CBS.com?"

And I said, and I think I'm right, the internet isn't about INSTEAD, it's about IN ADDITION TO. People who are on the internet all day (ahem, me) can visit a seemingly infinite number of sites, and visit them again and again, and the problem with how old media conceives of the internet is that they think of it like TV in 1985. Like, I'll either watch Webster OR Facts Of Life, but not both. (P.S., Facts Of Life all the way.)

I think to a large degree this kind of misunderstanding about the web is what will kill old media outright if they aren't careful. As everyone has already whispered, eventually writers will be able to take their products directly to the web, launch it through one of the major video providers (like iTunes) and then release one-a-week. People will use their Apple TV or other device to sling it onto their big screens, and that'll be it. And bye bye big studios. Of course, that means that the Apples of the world would become the new studios (here comes the new boss...), but at least the studios would understand the internet.

The reason the instead/in addition to model really matters, though, is because once you remove the time element from viewing (even a dvr can only record a couple things at once, and getting a dvd takes effort, whereas the internet is always there) then the competition model that the networks have operated on goes right out the window. In essence, then, networks will have to make ONLY good shows, because they will no longer be able to be the strongest just at a certain time, but strong compared to the entire field out there.

As it stands now, I think the moguls are banking on the writers being as clueless as they are about online content. They may spend most of their days fighting endangered tigers that their assistants smuggled into the country for them, and dining on solid-gold steaks, but the rest of us losers are wasting our time reading Perez Hilton and watching Funny or Die and hating ourselves for knowing who Julia Allison and Jakob lodwick EVEN ARE. It's hilarious that networks are saying that internet streams of shows "promote" the shows when they air on TV. If anything, it's the opposite. Or, you know, not yet, but it will be.

The networks aren't being victimized by greedy writers, they're lucky the writers aren't walking away entirely. Remember radio guys? Yeah, that's you.

You're Bad At Your Job

Let's face it, your career is going nowhere. Maybe that's because you're in the wrong job. This quiz, exclusively for career gals, should point you in the right direction.

Click to enlarge.



Design by Claudean Wheeler.

This is from my upcoming book, the link to it is in the post just below.