Home Remedy

There was a period in my early thirties that I had a lump behind my right ear. Maybe it was there for a year, maybe 5 years. But right at the base of my ear where my lobe dangles near my neck, there once lived a small lump. It was nothing to worry about at first - no bigger than a pimple, but over the years it grew larger until one Sunday, I reached back absentmindedly and felt it as I was having lunch with my friend, LeeAnn. She and I have been friends since middle school, and she has seen my emotions run the gamut from slight upset to full on hypochondria-induced terror.

Maybe I was more likely to consider my lump that day because of how I had been spending my time. In the weeks proceeding that Sunday lunch, I had been absolutely addicted to the TLC reality show Dr. Pimple Popper. It is an hour-long television show that features three to five cases of folks at their wits end, suffering under the weight of unsightly growths with nowhere to turn. Except with this show, they do have somewhere to turn – dermatologist Dr. Sandra Lee, also known as Dr. Pimple Popper.

One middle aged flight attendant with a thick New York accent declared that no doctor he had seen in twelve years was able to cure him of the unsightly purple grapefruit that had taken residence above his right knee. It wobbled when he walked and banged the armrests of seats as he strolled the aisle during beverage service. The B-roll footage showed him shimmying into jeans, wincing as the softball on his leg pressed tight against the fabric, not unlike the way I cram myself into my skin-tight Spanx jeans (Yes, Spanx makes jeans, and they're FABULOUS!)

Another patient, a handsome, blue-eyed personal trainer with a rock-solid body, felt self-conscious and was even dumped by a prior girlfriend due to the grape-size red protrusion growing just at the top of his nose. It had finally begun to jut into his eye socket, and I imagine made left turns tricky.

In both cases, Dr. Lee greeted the men like she does all her patients, chipper and warmhearted, with a dazzling smile and a friendly pat on the shoulder. “I think we can take care of this,” she tells seemingly everybody, putting to ease these lump-covered dejected souls who had so far encountered nothing but rejection. This beautiful doctor would make them beautiful, too. And the results speak for themselves. Dr. Lee suits up, grabs her trusty Sharpie, and gets to marking guides for herself where she'll eventually insert her scalpel.

“We’ve got to make sure to get the whole thing,” she tells each of them. Cysts, internal sacs full of discarded skin cells, grow and stretch the skin, creating these lumps. If you leave the sac behind, it can re-fill. With both the personal trainer and the flight attendant, she sliced ever so carefully on her pre-drawn Sharpie line, squishing and poking and draining until the lumpy beige liquid dribbled into a waiting bed pan.

“Looks like oatmeal,” she told the flight attendant, who then declared he probably wouldn’t be eating any more oatmeal any time soon.

The hottie with the grape smashing into his eye was a slightly tougher case. The grape was located in what Dr. Lee called “the triangle of death,” an area on the face home to several blood vessels, serving as direct routes to the brain. An infection in this area can lead to paralysis or even death. Luckily, Dr. Lee mashed on the little red lump long enough to get all the chunks out, using tweezers to pull the sac alongside it, and sewed him back up with no signs of issues.

“We don't want our friend coming back,” she said, dangling the empty translucent sac from the end of her tweezers.

I had my lump for so long I actually started to forget that it was there. Sometimes when I would put in an earring, I would graze it. It never hurt but had grown bigger and bigger without my noticing. A season deep into Dr. Pimple Popper, I began to worry.

Sitting with LeeAnn, our empty plates of chicken shwarma before us, our conversation lulled from upcoming travel plans, so I took my chance and came out with it. “I've got a lump,” I told her. I hadn't told anyone yet, having succumbed to the irrational theory of if-I-don’t-acknowledge-it-then-it-is-not-there.

“What kind of lump?” she asked.

“I don't know. Probably cancer,” I said. She scrunched up her face and shook her head. I relented, “Or a cyst. Or lipoma.”

“Let me look at it,” she said. I leaned forward and folded my ear down, pulling back my hair so she could see. I imagined it was a round little pink thing, like a baby’s finger pressing through from the other side of my skin.

“It's black,” she said. Then she stifled a laugh, and I saw her eyes move as she looked over my shoulder. We were sitting in a new Mediterranean restaurant near my house with clean lines and white tables. At the table behind us, two women were holding hands, their heads down and eyes closed, mumbling prayers. LeeAnn got tickled. “They're praying and I’m over here checking out your lump.”

I wasn’t sure what they were praying about, but it should have been me.

“What does it look like?” I asked.

“It’s black,” she repeated. “I mean the tip is black.”

My stomach turned — black on the top. A sure sign of a tumor, definitely a malignant one, and so near the base of my skull and my brain. All the good things I had planned for the next few months - trips, concerts, seeing my nieces grow up, watching another live action remake of a Disney cartoon - all disappeared in a blink. I frowned.

“You should try to pop it yourself,” she said. I thought for a minute about asking her to do it, testing the bounds and limits of our friendship. Do you love me enough to press on my skin until goo oozes out?

“Maybe I'll just go to a doctor,” I said, so flippantly it sounded even more pretentious than I actually am. Sure, I'll just cruise right into a doctor’s office! It’s easy! I’ll go right after my champagne bath!

For me, it would have been easy, at least back then. Not the champagne bath but going to the doctor. I was lucky then that my job had good health benefits and paid me a livable wage to afford them, a rare privilege among my friends.

Whimsically deciding to go to the doctor was actually a new deal for me. I grew up with no health insurance. My dad was an independent contractor for the Dallas Morning News, delivering newspapers from their production plant around Garland, a crumbling suburb north east of Dallas.

When we got sick as kids, we were told to “suck it up” or “get over it.” Not so much in an effort to make us tough - if that were the goal, then my parents failed miserably. I yelp and wail at the slightest bit of pain, and if I am ever lucky enough to get sick, I drag it out for days or weeks, milking every sympathetic hug, back rub, or ice cream pint I can for as long as possible.

The “suck it up” family motto was borne of necessity and a lack of health insurance. It worked fine, too, at least for bumps and scrapes. We guzzled Triaminic, ace-bandaged and gauze-wrapped our way back to health dozens of times. But when something more serious happened, that’s when it was time to hit the ER.

One of these “more serious” incidents happened on a summer day when I was nine. My dad worked nights, so he stayed home with my older sister, Shannon, and me while my mom visited her mother, our Mam-Maw, in the hospital with a broken neck.

It sounds worse when you say it like that, but Mam-maw had osteoporosis, which meant any small bump or fall could break a bone. This time she cracked a few upper vertebrae which the doctors corrected by drilling four industrial screws into my grandmother's skull. These screws held in place a metal halo, which then attached to her shoulders via a plastic vest resembling medieval chest armor. It was, in medical terms, a whole ordeal. My grandmother took it like a champ and even let us decorate her new metal exoskeleton with glittery butterfly stickers.

While mom was away, Shannon, Dad and I spent the day like any normal summer day. That morning, unsupervised, I watched the movie musical Grease for the twenty-third day in a row. I'm not sure if I was just feeling extra helpful or if it was the way John Travolta and Jeff Conaway shined their “pussy wagon” Greased Lightning, but I decided to wash my dad’s car.

At that time, my parents had two cars — one was a white 1992 Dodge Caravan. We used this for road trips, general getting around, and in the mornings, when my mom would rush me off to school still in my pajamas, I used it as a dressing room.

My dad drove the other, a 1986 Jeep Cherokee, which, at ten years old, still maintained its shine. It was a gorgeous cherry red with a sleek looking chrome bumper and matching hub caps. I knew it was chrome because Daddy told me. And not just me, he told anyone who would ask, and lot of people who didn't ask. He probably also mumbled it in his sleep.

Snore

Exhale

It's all chroooomeeee.

My dad was not a prideful man with the exception of three areas - his children, his car, and his beard. Of these, he was unabashedly proud, boastful almost. Growing up in Detroit in the early 1950s and 60s, his father worked at the Ford plant before the family moved to East Tennessee in 1967. The family never had much money. My grandfather spilt his paycheck between supporting his five children and his tab at the local bar.

Grandpa would drink most of his paycheck away and come home in the dark, looking for a fight. Finding my granny and the kids asleep, he would bang around, hollering. If my dad heard the bedroom door beside his opening, where his four little sisters slept inside, he would get up, head to the hallway and knock something over. This would set Grandpa off but also redirect his rage away from the sleeping girls to my father. And when Grandpa slipped out and abandoned the family before my dad's sophomore year of high school, leaving my grandmother alone with a teenage son and four little girls to feed, my dad headed to Texas to work with his uncle and send money back home to Knoxville.

So it's no wonder that, when he had the opportunity to raise kids of his own, my dad spoiled us. Whenever I was struck with a cold as a child and needed to take cough medicine, my mother would try to come at me with a big silver tablespoon of sour liquid once or twice. When I refused, she'd shrug and tell me, “Well I guess your throat doesn't hurt that bad.”

My dad would then sit me up on the counter and ask me to take the medicine. When I refused, he would first beg, then bargain.

“If I juggle these oranges for 30 seconds, will you take your medicine?” he would ask.

“Yes,” I would lie. After the one-man stage show, I would get a look on my face. A protruding lip, welled up eyes, and he couldn't bring himself to force me to take the medicine. He would put his hands on his hips, standing exasperated on the yellow linoleum and regroup like a jester standing before a petty toddler queen.

Eventually, I would take the medicine, but mostly after being promised a treat as a reward, usually cookie or, my favorite, a Mrs. Baird’s fried pie.

In addition to being proud of us kids, he also loved his beard. When we were grown ups, he would look on the beard with reverence in photos, even years after he'd shaved it off: “Look at it. Full coverage. No patches. That deep chestnut color. Gorgeous.”

“Dad, we're in those photos, too,” we would remind him.

“Yes, yes,” he would say. “That was a great trip.” But the line of his eyes was trained on his beard.

And, finally, he was proud of his cars. The one line he drew in his spoiling of us kids was drawn at the cars. We were never ever allowed to touch the cars. Ever. Initially, I took to this rule with jealousy and a little annoyance. Did he love the cars more than me? Of course not; I know that now. But at the time, I felt a little hurt.

I later learned a family down the street had two of their children hospitalized after a parked car accident. The kids, who weren't much older than me, had climbed into the family’s station wagon, parked on their steep driveway. Somehow in their roughhousing, the kids kicked the car into neutral and rolled backward into our busy street. An oncoming car t-boned them.

When I heard that, I knew my dad’s strict car rules were born, not out of some preference he had of the cars over us, but out of abject terror that something bad may happen to us. It's what really drives all parental decisions, which, as an unmarried, childless woman in my thirties, I am obviously fully qualified to comment on.

So that summer day when I was 10, considering this rule, I decided not to tell him that I would be washing his car. I found myself excited at the prospect of a pleased father, that chrome bumper he so fawned over, shiny enough for him to look into and admire his own beard.

The first major obstacle was the Jeep’s location – it was parked inside our garage, a solid 50 feet from the nearest water spout. I could have tried to use the kitchen sink, but there were two problems with that plan: first, it would have drawn too much attention to me, and even worse, I would have committed another cardinal McKinney Family Sin: “Do not leave the door open in the summer: we are not trying to air condition the whole neighborhood.”

Instead, I rifled around beneath the kitchen sink where Mom kept her cleaning supplies and took out a bottle full of store-brand blue window cleaner. I snuck the paper towels off the mounted rack beside the stove and headed outside. To wash a whole Jeep. Using off-brand Windex and paper towels.

I got to work. I started with the bumper, the most precious part, spraying the chrome, careful to avoid the front-mounted license plate. It jutted out, ugly and out of place, its sharp edges, rounded off but not covered by any sort of plastic bumper.

Next I washed the grill, pleased how easily the crusted bugs went limp under the onslaught of the window spray and crumpled into the paper towel. After the headlights were nice and shiny, I moved on to the hood.

That was a more of a challenge, considering my height at age 10. I wasn't the small fry in class, but also not quite tall enough to reach to the upper edge of the Jeep’s hood. I sprayed a nice coat on the bottom half of the hood that I could reach. Then in an effort to reach the top half and adjacent windshield, I put my little bare foot, blackened by garage floor, onto the glinting chrome bumper.

I made it. Balanced on my knees on the hood, I began spraying the windshield. But each time I reached forward to wipe, I would find my hand just far enough away to reach the glass. I tried to shimmy but still, by the time I had sprayed and tried again to wipe the glass, I found myself slipping down, down until I found myself sprawled on the concrete floor with a grunt.

I looked down to grab my spray bottle and saw it lying on its side just beyond the small but growing pool of blood.

That's when I looked down at my right leg. Just south of my kneecap, on the outside of my leg, there was an open wound. Inside I saw a substance that resembled pimento cheese, although slightly less orange. There was also something red oozing out. But the catch was, nothing really hurt. I just couldn't figure out what I was seeing. I screamed, “DADDY!”

And I kept screaming it, over and over, a helpless little siren in a heap on the hot garage floor.

He cracked the garage door from inside the house, ever cognizant of the self-imposed A/C rule and asked what was wrong. When he got a glimpse of his pathetic youngest child lying, leg outstretched and bloody, surrounded by a mountain of paper towels, he threw open the door without hesitation.

“What happened?” he asked. A quick look around told the story. A child. A damp car. A license plate, jutting out and dripping with blood.

The shock had worn off of me, and by this time, I was weeping. The bleeding had picked up even with both of us pressing on my skin. The wound still sat open like a pair of hands cupping red water under a faucet. He began hollering for my sister.

She emerged from the door, at first flippant, which then turned horrified at the crime scene she saw in front of the Jeep.

“Get a cup towel!” Daddy commanded. Shannon came back with a ragged terry cloth hand towel, yanked from the handle on the front of our old yellow stove. He wrapped up my leg and applied pressure while Shannon called 911.

“My...uh... my sister is bleeding and my dad, he...uh... he's trying to....” she tried describing the scene to the 911 operator. The real story, “My sister fell off of a slippery Jeep that she herself had covered in a thin layer of Windex only moments before” sounded too stupid. Shannon stuck to the facts - Kid bleeding. Dad trying to stop bleeding. Send ambulance.

In quick succession, an ambulance of EMTs came and, after wrapping my leg in gauze, left almost immediately. Later, I would hear my parents discuss the decision for Daddy to drive me to the hospital in the very Jeep that had caused my injuries, my blood still drying on the front bumper.

“An ambulance ride would have cost THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS,” they would say, claiming later that it would have cost “FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS” then a thousand, then a kidney.

We sat in the waiting room while my mom drove from one hospital to another. She sped from downtown Dallas and met us in the dark and crowded hospital lobby, just past the library in downtown Mesquite, Texas. The Mesquite Hospital has by now changed hands several times, being bought and sold, improved and run down. But when I was there, it looked like the hospital out of a horror movie. A bloodied teen could run up, yelling, “He's chasing us, he's chasing us!” and the uninterested woman behind the front desk, trifold paper hat on her head, squeaking shoes beneath her feet, would say, “Take a number, kid.”

That is how I came to sit with my gaping leg wound dripping redness onto the gauze, for twelve hours before a doctor would finally see me.

When they took me back to a large open room, I was told to lie down on a gurney, separated from other moaning wretches by only the thin curtains that hung from shower hooks from the stained tile ceiling. I looked first for Hawkeye then Radar, feeling certain I had been transported to the military hospital from all those episodes of M*A*S*H I had watched with Mam-Maw.

“We've gotta numb it,” the doctor announced to no one in particular. My mother stood vigilant at the foot of the bed, wringing her hands and watching for any sign of error from the doctor. Meanwhile, Daddy walked to the head of the bed and put his face close to mine.

“Ok sweetie,” he started, searching my crying face with his piercing blue eyes. “They're going to poke you and it may hurt for a minute, but only for a minute,” he lied.

I nodded and felt better, at least for having him there. The doctor then began to work. It started with what felt like dragging the sharp end of a needle up and down my leg bone and ended an eternity later, with the doctor making a knot, finishing off a row of about 15 stitches.

“Come back in a month or two, and we'll take them out,” he said. We later learned from my cousin, a pediatric nurse, that the stitches should have come out much sooner. She actually slid them out of me herself a few weeks later, leaving just one behind that had grown into my skin.

I believe if it had been possible, my parents would not have taken me to the hospital that day. An ER visit couldn't have been cheap, and although we weren't living off scraps, money was tight back then. But they did what they had to, insurance or not.

Faced with my lump, I was grown. I didn’t have Daddy around to juggle oranges for me or bribe me with fruit pies to take my medicine. I was 33, living alone. It was up to me to handle things like a lump.

When I got home from lunch with LeeAnn that day, I decided to take a look for myself. I stood in my floor length bathroom mirror and folded my ear down, turning my head and straining my neck so I could see it. LeeAnn was right. It was a round, white bump, slightly larger than a pea, with a big black dot in the center.

I could hear LeeAnn: Just pop it. Part of me was afraid, scared that it wouldn't pop, that it was in fact a tumor. The other part was hopeful that, much like those poor bastards on Dr. Pimple Popper, I would feel the satisfaction and relief of draining thick white goo out of myself.

I shut my eyes, took a deep breath, and pressed down on it. Jackpot. An off-white custard oozed out and I pressed and pressed until nothing was left. No lump remained. Just the smooth surface of the back of my ear.

It sounds irrational, but now that it’s gone, I sort of miss my bump. I put my finger back where it once was and feel nothing but flesh. I had gotten used to it, reaching back when I was nervous or feeling it absentmindedly when working on a project. Now it’s just plain, smooth skin

As I stood in the mirror that day, pinching the bit of goo between my fingers, I felt proud. There I was, standing in my own house, having lanced my own lump (yes, I continue to refer to it as “lump” because substituting the world “pimple” in a sentence like, “I really miss my pimple,” doesn’t net a person many friends). But I had handled it myself, no one there to force or cajole me. No need for the promise of a fried pie.

I was a little sad, too, much in the way I was sad when I first began living on my own. I would jolt awake from a nightmare at night with no adult to come in and check on me. I put myself back to sleep, having learned to take care of myself. But ever missing those days when, having fallen in a heap on the garage floor, someone would come running when I call.

***

This piece first appeared in Sunday Morning Hot Tea. Subscribe so you don’t miss another piece.

Showing Up

It’s after midnight, eastern time. I am sitting in a hotel room in Philadelphia, listening to Bo Burnham’s INSIDE. Kolchak: The Night Stalker is muted on the TV. I am going to send this out to you all in the morning.

I usually like to draft this newsletter during the week. At the very worst, I write it early on Saturday then spend the day editing. Still, it gets done on time. I like sending something out every week because it feels like a nice way to connect with you.

Some pieces I write turn out better than others. Some turn out worse That’s the nature of anything we create – half of the product will be below average. That’s just a fact. I’ve come to terms with that. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.

There are times the words flow like water. I have to turn on the faucet and get some rust out, but still they come.

Other times, I feel like a character in that movie/TV trope where the person types something on the typewriter, pulls the page out, crumples it up then throws it in the trash. The problem with laptops and traveling is I don’t have the dramatic gesture of crumpling up a sheet of paper and tossing it out. Instead, I can only highlight and press the delete key – a much less impactful action. I guess I could drag the file to the little virtual trashcan. Just doesn’t feel the same, though.

Today is one of those paper-crumpling days.

So, here we are. I am writing to you with nothing to say. That’s pretty scary. You may think, Why are you sending anything then?  Because I said I would. I gave this little thing a name that had a due date in it so I would have a date to shoot for each week.

It seems like a dying concept to do something just because you say you would. This can be good. You say you’ll do a thing, then you do it. It’s called Sunday Morning Hot Tea, so that’s when you’ll get it.

I also like to believe we as a society are becoming more understanding. We’re all trying to be kinder to each other and to ourselves. If someone cannot physically do something that they said they would, I hope we give them a little space and a little grace. For instance, sometimes I send y’all a note saying there will be no newsletter because I got engaged or because I baked myself in the sun on July 4th weekend.

This week, there was no reason for me not to do this. Sure, I’m on a short vacation to Philadelphia, but that’s not the problem. There have been a hundred and sixty-some-odd hours between last Sunday and right now. I spent a lot of those hours working on the show. I went to Pure Barre. I did some fun stuff, like having lunch with my mom, going on a dinner date with Paris, and getting my nails done with LeeAnn. I also watched Loki and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills season one (have y’all seen “The Dinner Party From Hell” episode? Unreal!)

What I didn’t do? Work on this. At least not directly. I did my morning pages some days, but not every day. Then I flew to Philadelphia to see my friend, Elyse. I tried working on this a little during the trip, but things got in the way – like visiting with her, meeting her family and friends, enjoying a classic Philadelphia sandwich called the Schmitter, and taking a satisfying hotel nap.

That left me with a choice – should I tap out, send you all a message saying, “Sorry, y’all! I’m on vacation!” and go to bed? A part of me wanted to. The other part – that driven part of me that keeps the train moving forward at all costs – said no. It told me to grab a La Colombe draft latte and crank out a meaningful and thoughtful piece for you.

Well, that didn’t happen. I had a few ideas, but I crumpled up everything I started and threw it into the virtual trash can. Still, I decided to send this because of that driven part inside me that won’t let me not.

Here’s the question I keep coming back to: is that driven part a good part of me? Is that what we want – to do what we said we would do no matter what? On the one hand, it makes us reliable. People know we’ll be there for them when we say we will. On the other hand, is it ok to tap out if we just want to? Where is the line between obligation and selfishness?

I don’t have an answer yet, but I’ll keep thinking. Maybe I’ll figure it out somewhere over the next hundred and sixty eight hours. If it comes to me by then, I’ll send you a note and let you know.

***

This piece first appeared in Sunday Morning Hot Tea. Subscribe so you don’t miss another piece.

As Seen on TV

Today I found myself in a place I often am – the Starbucks drive through. While we waited for my drink, the barista in the window and I made small talk.

“Did you do anything fun today?” she asked.

“I just woke up from a nap because I went to a kid’s birthday party earlier.”

“Yikes,” she said. “Anything else fun planned for today? Just going back to sleep?”

“I’ve got some work to do, actually,” I said, referring to the research notes I needed to type up for the next Patreon minisode on the #FreeBritney updates.

“What do you do?” she asked.

“I’m a comedian,” I said. It felt weird and impostery coming out of my mouth. Should I have said podcaster? Writer? Lawyer? What even am I now?

Last week on our crossover episode with the podcast And That’s Why We Drink, I announced that I had given notice at my day job to focus full time on Sinisterhood. My last day at legal aid will be July 9. I will still have my law license, and I plan to do pro bono work with whoever will let me, but it’s going to feel different not lawyering every day. While it feels weird, at the same time, it feels inevitable.

On the first grade page in my school memory book, it asked me to check a box next to a profession under the heading What I want to be when I grow up. I checked the boxes for both TV Star and Lawyer. I also hand-wrote the words “house wife” because I had my eye on the real prize.

When I graduated from law school and passed the bar at age 29, I eagerly posted an adorably cropped photo of the checked box beside lawyer and said something like, “Childhood dream come true.”

The problem with that photo is that it omitted an integral part of the photo – the checked box beside “TV Star.” Now, over five years into my law practice, I realize those were not two boxes to be considered separately but were instead a conjunction to be read together. The whole housewife thing was really prophetic, like somehow I knew I would also do those things while working from home. THE DREAM!

My ideals of law practice and being a lawyer were shaped by the only lawyers I intimately knew as a child: those on TV. We talked last week of the family friend who represented the ephemeral ideal of a lawyer, with her pants suits and Lexus.

The TV lawyers I admired never really mentioned their cars. They lived in places like Boston and New York City where they got around in cabs and on subways. I loved all the characters on Boston-based Ally McBeal. I particularly loved the man they called Biscuit, John Cage, the eccentric partner obsessed with clean toilet bowls who screamed out uncontrollably. 

Despite it being wildly inappropriate for kid to watch, I became obsessed with Ally McBeal. I liked seeing her and other female lawyers. They also had a gender-neutral bathroom, which seemed normal and unremarkable to me. Though, looking back, it was regarded as incredibly progressive and outrageous for the late 1990s.

The best person on the show was the Biscuit, played by Peter MacNichol. He had a remote control switch on a bathroom stall that would automatically flush the toilet before he got there, thereby avoiding remnants as he “liked a fresh bowl.” Who doesn’t? If that’s what being a lawyer was like, sign me up! I wanted a remote control to handle the unsavory parts of my life.

At the time, I thought that show was the coolest thing on television. Weird people like Santa Claus came to the firm for help. And Ally, like myself, was plagued with intricate mental fantasies in which she seemed to relish. All the characters hung out together at a bar with a cool jazz pianist. They wore sexy skirt suits. They sang karaoke. Most of all, Ally got to fall in love with Robert Downey, Jr., a major childhood crush of mine which, again, for a kid was not super appropriate.

No matter their wacky situations, they were all problem solvers. And as a kid who created a lot of problems, I looked with admiration on these people who seemed to solve them so easily.

Jackie Chiles was the next TV lawyer I loved. All of his plots and plans seemed destined to end in riches but for the meddling idiocy of Kramer. Ever the terrible client, Kramer would either take a deal too early (always wait to hear what comes after “coffee for life” when considering an offer) or who would put the balm on (nobody told him to put the balm on!) I had no clue Jackie was a parody of Johnnie Cochran or that the cases were parodies of real-life big-ticket litigation that was happening at the time. I just thought he was a clever foil for Kramer.

Before there was Ally McBeal or Jackie Chiles, Judge Harry Stone was the first fictional lawyer I wanted to be like. Not only was he a judge, he was a magician and made jokes to the people in his court room. When arguments arose, Harry solved them with a sleight of hand or a laugh. The people in his court room loved him and all left happy, except for some of the ones who were taken into custody. 

I also saw non-fictional lawyers on TV. My dad worked nights, so during the OJ Simpson trial, he would be glued to the TV, commenting on the performance of the lawyers. To me, a nine-year-old kid, it was another set of lawyers on TV for me to admire and study. My dad wasn’t in the legal business. He worked as an independent contractor for the Dallas Morning News, mass-delivering newspapers across the DFW metroplex. He filled red metal racks with thick newspapers seven days a week, with no time off, no weekends or holidays.

Things like the OJ trial and crime in general were good because they sold papers. Daddy would buy the papers from the printer for about 10 cents each, then sell them in the stores for 50 cents to a $1.50 on weekends. The more papers that sold meant more quarters for him to collect and bring home to my mother to count out and deposit in the bank.

I was unabashedly a daddy’s girl growing up. He thought anything I did was the absolute greatest and praised me for my accomplishments. He also praised the skills of some of the lawyers at the OJ trial and criticized others. My impressionable little mind put all the pieces together: Lawyers like Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden are good and smart. Lawyers like Ally McBeal and Harry Stone are funny and smart. Dad respects lawyers. I must be a lawyer. Also, bonus, Ally McBeal gets with Robert Downey, Jr. Done and done.

But the other part of me, the deepest part of me, wanted to be a comedian and a writer. Just as I thought Jackie Chiles was great on Seinfeld, I envied that Jerry himself was a comedian. He seemed to do nothing during the days except hang out with his rag tag group of friends then kill it on The Tonight Show. Well, except when his Charles Grodin BBQ sauce was destroyed.

I also deeply loved and obsessively watched The Dick Van Dyke Show. It aired originally from 1961 to 1966, but the re-runs came on via syndication. My mom recorded them each day for my dad to watch later in the evening. He would sleep during the early morning hours, until about 11am, right when the re-runs would air.

She’d pop a cassette in the VCR and record them, giving me a chance to watch an episode not once, but twice when my dad would want to turn it back on after dinner. It followed Rob Petrie, a professional full-time television comedy writer. He got to write jokes for money! He worked alongside a woman named Sally Rogers. She was a girl like me who also got to write jokes for money!

With the purchase of our first home computer, I learned that all the weird fantasies I had in my head could be translated onto the page. I could write them out just like Rob and Buddy and Sally.

I wrote my first novel at 11 years old. I like saying it that way because it sounds fancy and pretentious. What I actually wrote was a very long and convoluted piece of Backstreet Boys fan fiction. All the main characters were either Backstreet Boys or my fifth-grade classmates. We lived together in an enormous house in Florida because obviously when you earn multiple millions of dollars in a world-famous boy band, you pool all of your money together for one single house like some sort of sad Tampa reality show.

Inspired, I am sure, by the hours of All My Children I had absorbed during the summers, the story included dramatic twists and turns. Two of my classmates were Nick Carter fans, so a love triangle formed where he was forced to choose between them. Yes, in reality we couldn’t drive a car, hadn’t learned algebra and hadn’t yet gotten our periods, but on paper, all bets were off.

I, of course, was paired up with Howie D., the self-described Latin lover of the group. But to juice up dramatic tension, I had to throw a wrench in. I decided that the best thing for the plot would be an illness. People in soap operas were always hovering over the hospital beds of loved ones, lamenting that they should have proposed sooner or said “I love you” earlier. 

So I did a little poking around on Alta Vista and gave my fictional self Mosquito-Borne Encephalitis. It seemed serious enough to put me in a coma, but not terminal enough to kill me. I was, after all, the star of this great work of art. I wasted all the ink in my parents’ inkjet printer to “publish” my manuscript, which I then bound in a three-ring binder. Much to my horror, both my mother and sister found the finished work and reviews were not great.

I didn’t write as much after that, just made up stories in my head. Then in seventh grade, I met Mrs. Shurtleff, my English teacher. She hosted a creative writing club that met mornings before the first bell rang. Anything was fair game for us to write – fiction or non-fiction, poetry or prose. Once per semester she hosted a reading event where we could share our pieces aloud.

In my internet scouring for further information on my favorite Backstreet Boy, Howie D., I came across some unsettling information. My betrothed, the man who sat by my beside and mourned me as I suffered from my bout with encephalitis, was “said to be dating a woman named Minda.” I was crushed and felt completely powerless. How could I compete with this woman, given that I was only 13 years old and lived thousands of miles away?

I sought my revenge the only way I knew how – on the page. Driven by an urge to kill, I did just that. To be fair, I had also read American Psycho for class earlier that year, so I had violence on the brain.

Side Note: That book is FILTHY! I went back as an adult and tried reading it. It was overwhelmingly obscene. I felt like a complete prude, but I had to put it down. It made me sick, and my job is actually studying and talking about crimes. When I read it in seventh grade, I felt like I was generally unphased by the subject matter. Judging by the violence in my Minda story, that was not entirely true. I was very phrased!

It came time to read our stories out loud for our friends, our parents, and the faculty. I had printed my piece out, adding the title in red dripping font that looked like blood. My story centered around a man named Howard (excellent cover, McKinney) and his wife, Minda. Very early in the story, Minda is killed in a bus accident. By that I mean, I graphically described her being run over by a bus. I read this. Out loud. In front of everyone. And honestly? It got some laughs.

Without knowing what I was doing, I employed the rule of three – I had three different spouses get hit by the same bus. No one in the audience asked why there was not an investigation into the rash of bus crashes on this particular route or the negligence of the city’s bus operators. I guess they were just being gentle since I was only in seventh grade.

I ended up reconnecting with Mrs. Shurtleff as an adult, and we’ve struck up a friendship. We go out for breakfast or lunch once a month, and she’s truly a guiding light in my life. I asked her why she didn’t report me to the counselor for writing about violent death-by-bus. She said because we write about things as a way to process our feelings.

I wasn’t really plotting to kill a woman via municipal transportation. Rather, I was angry and felt powerless and writing it out was the only way for me to regain control. Super cool of her to (1) not judge me at the time, and (2) agree to meet with me knowing my little demented mind wrote that all those years ago.

Now feeling as I have - a bit powerless and out of control - I think is why I have been writing so much. Some days working in a “profession” like the law can feel like you’re on a moving sidewalk at the airport. You could get off in the middle. It wouldn’t be easy. You would have to heave your legs over the glass partition. Maybe you’ll stumble, lose your luggage, make a scene. It’s not easy, but it’s also not impossible.

The alternative is staying on, being hurtled to the destination that you may have changed your mind about.

I think it’s fair to hop off the sidewalk if you feel like it. Just because we wanted to step on back when we were in first grade or in our teens or twenties or even thirties, doesn’t mean we should trudge dutifully toward that end. It’s ok to change your mind and head where you want to go instead.

After graduating law school and passing the bar, I started looking around for ways to maybe get off. When my mom asked what she and my dad should get me for a law school graduation gift, I told her I wanted a gift certificate to take comedy classes.

“How about a briefcase?” she asked.

It’s not easy to shift gears at any point in our lives. It can feel a bit like admitting we were wrong. Because I am humble I can say – I absolutely was not wrong. I am glad I went to law school. I have had the privilege of helping a lot of people in the past five and a half years. I hope to still help plenty more through all the pro bono opportunities Dallas has to offer. I’ll still be a lawyer. I just won’t be mostly a lawyer. Being a lawyer has made me a better podcaster, writer, and thinker in general. I’d never tell somebody to go to law school to get into comedy, but it sure worked for me.

We live in a label-driven society. If I am not a (insert profession here), then what am I? You still are you. Even if you’re doing a thing that feels like everyone expects you to do, it’s never too late to change. Only you know what you want to do. Somewhere quiet deep inside you, you can see yourself doing it, whatever “it” is. And if you open your eyes and find that you’re not doing it, then by all means, try and chart a path towards it.

Charting that path will not be easy, but the alternative - not moving toward what you truly want - is death. Waiting for each of us at the end of any moving sidewalk is the great city bus ready to take us all to the same place. It is better that we don’t hurtle toward it kicking and screaming and miserable but instead move gladly on the path made for each of us. After all, the moving sidewalk is ending.

***

This piece first appeared in Sunday Morning Hot Tea. Subscribe so you don’t miss another piece.

The Biggest Kid in Class

(tw: body image)

If you have seen me in person recently, you may have noticed a difference. No, I still haven’t cut my hair. No, I haven’t invested in that face tattoo I’ve been considering. The change you should notice is my receding hunchback. My hunchback and I have been close for years, pretty much since August 2011 when I started law school. It developed from a combination of crunching forward to type on a laptop, hanging my head down to read books, and carrying an enormous backpack on my back (before I switched to a rolly bag like a fricken DORK).

It got slightly better after graduation, but then took a turn in March 2020. That’s when I started working from random areas of my home instead of my work office, where I had my ergonomic standing desk and yoga ball chair. Working from home the past year, I spent time on the couch, in a fluffy chair, on the bed, in the dining room, behind our living room wet bar, and at the breakfast nook.

I eventually fell into a rhythm after turning the guest room into my home office, but still, I slouched. Even on my ball chair, I hunkered. I crumpled. I drew my shoulders up like Richard Nixon while I banged away on my keyboard.

But, due to some recent life changes, I have begun walking up right. If we’re going off the old March of Progress chart, I started as a solid Oreopithecus (which sounds way more delicious than it is) and have progressed to at least a Cro-Magnon. This is the result of going to Pure Barre. I started going last week to the Preston Hollow location and already I feel taller as a result.

For those unfamiliar with Dallas, Preston Hollow is an extremely wealthy area where the median home prices hover around $3.2 million. It’s where important people like Dirk Nowitzki, former President George W. Bush, and future president Mark Cuban all live. In fact, W is known to frequent a restaurant called Royal China whose door opens adjacent to my new Pure Barre home. I am tourist in this neighborhood, driving nearly a half-hour each way, give or take, to get to each work out.

Up until last week, I had only visited bars without the extra R or E on the end. I stayed away from barre studios, mostly because of the marketing materials. Their websites and billboards feature lithe, dancer-bodied women with more abs than I’ve ever seen in my life. Some of them are doing the splits. Others hold their hands aloft, airy and light. I look nothing like these women.

This isn’t a knock on Pure Barre, or any barre studio for that matter. It’s basic marketing. You are supposed to see the models in the photos and think, “If I do barre, I, too, will be able to do the splits” or gain abs or hold my hand above my head for that long. The feeling it should engender is, “That could be me, too.” Instead, all I thought was “That looks nothing like me. Therefore, it is not for me.”

I stayed away from group exercise classes, preferring instead to run alone where I can grunt and groan and vomit in solitude. Not only that, group exercise classes tend to clash with my huge ego. It is not enough for me to do a thing. Nike’s slogan is meaningless to me. Just do it? No, I have to do it AND do it better than anyone else. This is, of course, ridiculous and operates as a great excuse to keep me from trying new things.

Ridiculous or not, that’s what I thought. Why would I sign up for a contest I was destined to lose? Stack me up against any one of those frozen faces in the advertisement and I’m toast. Actually, I’m probably eating toast. You ever tried toast with a thin layer of almond butter and a dollop of blackberry preserves right in the middle? Game changer.

Anyway, the point is I told myself I was out before I even walked through the door. Nobody had banned me from class (yet). No one told me not to come. There was no red circle with a slash over my photo up at the register. The only bouncer stopping me was me.

A second reason I stayed away, aside from my irrational competitiveness, was my obsessive need to please authority figures, particularly teachers. How could I come to class and disappoint a spunky gal in a headset mic, counting down from ten and telling me to hang in there on a move I could not possibly hold? “You can do it,” she would tell me when I could do no such thing.

I was sure that my failure to stick it out in the face of an instructor’s enthusiasm would ruin their day and make them feel like failures, too. What did I tell you? I have quite an ego. I actually thought that somehow my lack of fitness would make a complete stranger feel inadequate.

I also felt pre-guilty about not being able to do the moves. I like mastering new skills quickly so I seem smart. Neither body control nor the ability to micro-move muscles are easily acquired skills. Not to mention planking. Did I tell you they make you plank? Honestly I didn’t know this going in or I may not have signed up. I’m locked into a contract now, so I guess I’ll stick with it, but they really should put that on the door or something. Or maybe not. If they did, people may egg the building.

At the moment, I am an awful planker. I say “at the moment” because I believe if I keep doing it, maybe I will be able to plank someday. But for now? I cannot plank for the life of me. I could walk the plank, sure, and honestly when I’m down there, that’s what I am wishing for. The sweet release of death. The depths of the ocean. A ship of pirates sailing off in the distance. Instead, I open my eyes and it’s my sweaty face, balled up into knot, staring back at me from the full walls of mirrors.

That’s another thing. There are mirrors all up and down that place. If you ever think, “Hey, this tank top isn’t bad on me at all,” go stand in front of some barre mirrors. Within seconds, you’ll toss it in a barrel with some lighter fluid along with nearly every other piece of clothing you own.

I figure if I keep going, I will get stronger. I’m already able to do a few more things now than I could at first. Tiny progress. But please know, I didn’t kick all this off because I am brave. I did not look up the best Pure Barre location in the nicest, fanciest neighborhood on my own and smash that sign-up button. I went because my friend, Suzy, just bought the place. Then after I signed up for the newbie class, I learned another friend from the comedy world, Tori, would be my teacher.

These are two of the most welcoming women I’ve ever met. You know when you talk to someone, and they instantly feel like home? That’s them. So I wasn’t all that brave. I cheated. I went where I knew people, figuring if the frozen-faced models from the ads were there, they would have to be nice given they rolled with these two.

Before that first class, I had done some due diligence on barre workouts in general. Didn’t seem too culty off the bat, so put a check in that column. No need for shoes during the workout – double check there. I am down to wear socks-only because I don’t particularly like shoes. Required clothes are yoga pants and a tank top or t-shirt? This is what I wear every day of my life already. Check, check, and check. What really sealed the deal – the moves are based in dance.

Y’all may not know this about me, but I am a repressed ballerina. When I was little, around eight years old, I announced to my mom that I wanted to be a ballerina. I wanted to dance like the characters in Grease and Singin’ In the Rain and The Dick Van Dyke Show.

“Sure,” she said. “Be anything you want to be.”

The only thing stopping me from being a ballerina was hard work, passion, dedication, drive, and talent. Also weight. I was a chubby little kid and drew parallels between myself and that Disney hippo in the tutu. I Googled it, and apparently her name is Hyacinth Hippo. She is in Fantasia and some other Disney shorts.

I am not here to body-shame Hyacinth. She is a great dancer. She holds some poses that I still dream of trying to hold. I had just experienced too many kids crack too many jokes about my weight to tee them up for such an easy comparison. To add to my paranoia about being too big to dance, one time I kicked a hole in my parents’ garage wall trying to do that run-up-the-wall move that Donald O’Connor does in Singin’ In the Rain. So after that, I shelved my dancing career, though I never stopped wanting to dance.

I still dance a little here and there. I’ll dance in the kitchen while doing dishes or in front of the bathroom mirror while getting ready. I dance at concerts and wedding receptions. Nothing noteworthy, but I have a little bit of rhythm in me.

I was reminded how much I loved dance recently when I saw an interview with Dick Van Dyke. He has been in the news recently for being recognized at this year’s Kennedy Center Honors. He’s 95, and on a recent interview with CBS This Morning did more crunches in 2 minutes than I have in the last five years, at least until this last week in class.

He said he’s just five years shy of his goal of making it to 100 years old like George Burns. His secret, according to his 2015 book Keep Moving, is dance. In the book, he writes, “If I am out shopping and hear music playing in a store, I start to dance…If I want to sing, I sing. I read books and get excited about new ideas. I enjoy myself. I don’t think about the way I am supposed to act at my age — or at any age.” He also asked, “Why sit on the sidelines at any age?”

Great question.

So, in the face of being scared, of worrying about competition and disappointment, and of planning what I would say if I ran into George W. Bush, I went. I took the class. I followed the moves when I could. I took a break when I had to. I modified. I stopped to shake it out. But also, I pushed myself. I tucked. I pulsed. I pumped to the beat.

My muscles seared, burned, were on fire – all the euphemisms. Before I went, one blog post I read outlined “Things to Know Before Your First Class.” One of those things was, “It’s fine to make plans after barre class because you won’t get too sweaty.” FALSE. After I finished my first class, I looked like I’d been hosed down twice. I ended up sopping wet. But also – I walked out proud.

I went. I did the thing. Then, I went again. And again. I’ll keep going, too.

As for my fears, it turns out I had been fearing the wrong things. When you’re working that hard, the only person to beat is yourself. Wow, with a pearl of wisdom like that, I should be the coach to a rag-tag peewee football team in a feel-good movie.

There was also no judgment. I couldn’t even judge anyone if I had wanted to. My eyes were so full of sweat, I couldn’t look around to see any other people. I don’t know why I was even worried in the first place. Everyone is the star of their own show. I’m just an extra, sweating out of focus or out of frame in the movies of their lives. Irrelevant, only there to fill the scene.

As for the instructors, they’re there to instruct. If I did every move perfectly, their jobs would be obsolete. My imperfect moves are their job security. You’re welcome, y’all. I am also sure that as soon as I master a move, they’ll be there to help me kick it up a notch.

What I really should have been worried about was chugging frozen margaritas the night before class and feeling a little hung over during that first class. I should have worried about the rug burns I would get on my knees from all the modified planking and push-ups. I should have worried about my sore muscles and all the extra laundry I now have to do. Most of all, I should have worried about all the time I had wasted thinking something wasn’t for me.

In 2017, when he was 92 years old, Dick Van Dyke appeared dancing and singing in Mary Poppins Returns. He hops up on a table, flanked by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Emily Blunt, and sings:

So when they tell you that you're finished
And your chance to dance is done
That's the time to stand
To strike up the band
And tell 'em that you just begun

Sometimes the “em” we’ve gotta tell is ourselves. I had to stop telling myself I was too old, too out of shape, too fat. I had to stop thinking it was too late to do anything I wanted to do. Turns out, it wasn’t the models on the Pure Barre website, or the other people in class, or society, or anyone else telling me I couldn’t do it. It was just me. So now, instead, I’m telling myself to shut up and dance.

***

This piece first appeared in Sunday Morning Hot Tea. Subscribe so you don’t miss another piece.

Just the Thing

This was a great week for art in my world. First, Bo Burnham, one of my all-time favorite comics released a special on Neflix called Inside. He wrote, performed, shot, and edited it entirely on his own during the pandemic. If you haven’t watched it, just put this newsletter down, go watch it then come back. Or don’t. I mean… it’s your life.

Then my forever imaginary boyfriend John Mayer released a new song called “Last Train Home” the first single from his new album to be released in July. I don’t have to tell you I have played this song on repeat constantly since it was released on Friday.

I will avoid giving any spoilers about Bo’s special because I wholeheartedly believe it is something you should just let happen to you with no warning. I will, however, say I related deeply to a lot of the themes. One song asked whether now, amidst a global pandemic and unprecedented social unrest (to put it mildly), is a good time to be making comedy or, really, creating anything. It also addressed the feeling of wanting to complete certain feats by a certain age.

I get those feelings a lot, too. Feelings like how did I end up at this age without having crossed tasks off this imaginary list of milestones I created for myself? A silly thought, I know. My older clients, for instance, always tell me I’m a baby when they find out my age. On a grand scale, I guess I am a baby, just 34. Wow, how old am I to say just thirty-four. As a kid, anything over 30 felt like a death sentence, the punchline of jokes. “Everything goes downhill after 30!” and the audience roars in recognition.

John Mayer’s new song explores similar themes:

I’m not a fallen angel
I just fell behind
I’m out of luck and I’m out of time.

The whole song feels like a last call – get on board or get out of the way. He’s “running for the last train home.”

Funny the ubiquitousness of that feeling – like we have to accomplish X feat by Y date. The train is leaving the station. Time to go. Every one of us trying to cram it all in before the credits roll. It’s a dizzying feeling, one that can cause you to miss things if you don’t stop and take a look around a minute, like Ferris taught us.

In my mind, there’s this giant countdown clock hovering over each of our heads, ticking down till there’s nothing left. We can’t see the digits, but we know they’re going down, not up.

I get to feeling guilty sometimes for wanting so often. I want to accomplish things, to do things, to go places. The most human of emotions is yearning, yet somehow, we punish ourselves for leaning into it.

The other pang of guilt I get comes with not enjoying the get. After running for a train, when I finally catch it, it takes a lot of work on my end to sit back and enjoy the ride for a minute. Most times I just look forward to what station we’re pulling into and which train I can hop on next.

To combat this (and at the behest of my therapist), I started gratitude journaling. I use a purple, leather-bound Michelle Obama journal gifted to me by Christie. The pages are interspersed with photos of the former first lady and inspirational quotes. I write things I am grateful for on one page each night, then things I want to accomplish and manifest on the subsequent pages. It’s only now, upon reflection, that I realize there’s about a 3-to-1 ratio of the manifestation/goal pages to the gratitude pages. Gotta keep trying, I guess.

I often wonder whether I’ll ever hit a place where I am satisfied, where my thank-you pages outnumber my to-do pages. I wonder whether my restless heart is destined to operate in this constant state of insatiable hunger. If one is good, then ten is better, you know?

I hope maybe there is a place I can arrive at and rest, though I doubt it exists. Daddy would always quote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: “You just keep thinking, Butch. That’s what you’re good at.” He knew it and so do I: the wheels between my ears crank on, no matter the quantity of output.

It’s not a bad place to dwell. Sure, it can get exhausting, but I am the happiest when I am creating stuff. Working on the show, working on this newsletter, working on other stuff I can’t tell you about yet.

The other day I picked up and read a children’s book I had on my shelf. It’s called Just the Thing for Geraldine. I love this book, not just because my mom used to read it to us and do silly voices. The hero’s journey that the main character embarks upon is a lesson to us all. For those of you who have never read it, let me summarize.

We open on our hero, Geraldine, doing what she loves and what she does best: hanging upside down by her tail juggling acorns. I should clarify that Geraldine is a possum (spelled in the book without the O). By page 2, her dreams are crushed: “Her parents told her there was more to life than juggling.”

Ain’t that a bitch.

They send her to dance school, hoping it will change her, make her “more ladylike and graceful.” Spoiler alert for this book published in 1974: Geraldine sucks at ballet. Her parents then force her into weaving school, telling her she can make creations for her future children. She sucks at that, too. She is then forced to try her hand at art in a sculpting class. Being that it is not art she pursued on her own accord, she sucks at that, too.

Despondent at what she perceives as her repeated failures and inadequacies, Geraldine returns to that place she feels safest, where she feels like the best version of herself: hanging upside down from a branch juggling.

Though her siblings finally recognize her natural talents, her parents still try to rope her into something else she was not cut out for – singing. Finally fed up, Geraldine refuses the life path her parents tried imposing on her. Instead, she embraces who she is – a juggler – and sets up her own juggling school. The book ends there, but not for me. I like to imagine Geraldine went on to train thousands of other forest animals. I also imagine she recognized the students who were forced into the class by their parents, sending them home with an earful of advice and a whole lot of encouragement.

I relate deeply to this marsupial. Sure, I can’t juggle, and I don’t have a tail. But the sentiment is the same.

How many times have we found ourselves as despondent as she, feeling like failures not due to our own inadequacies, but because we were – for lack of a better term – putting our square pegs into round holes? Forcing ourselves to endure weaving class when we knew we should have been juggling.

If, as I believe, we are all operating beneath that great invisible countdown clock above each of our heads, are we not better served juggling till the time runs out? We can’t spend time trying to adapt to expectations we never set for ourselves.

One of my favorite podcasts is “The Moment with Brian Koppelman”. Without knowing, BK changed my life. (Quick, somebody forward this to him so he knows.) After graduating law school and passing the bar, I had an existential crisis. What was I? A lawyer? Sure, ok. What does that even mean? What did I used to be? What was I, deep down, that I never stopped being? What was my juggling?

Writing. Storytelling. Doing comedy.

The answer was there, I had just crammed it down while I tying myself up in knots in a weaving class I told myself I needed to take.

On his podcast, Koppelman talks about how he got started in the entertainment business. He was a music executive who had a repressed writer inside. He nursed that writer, named it for what it was, and gave himself a space to work.

Along with his writing partner, they created the script for the film Rounders and sold it to a studio. He had to get up early before work to do the thing each day, but he did it. In order to give ourselves permission to dedicate time to a pursuit, we can’t tell ourselves there’s more to life than our juggling. We have to name what we are and claim our space in the universe in order to feel justified spending so much time on our thing.

When I first started listening, BK said something on the show that punched me right in the gut: “Do the thing that makes you feel most alive and most like yourself.” Doing it is one thing, and it’s not easy. But maybe the step before doing it is declaring it as a space in which we belong. That is much harder. To label yourself a writer, or a juggler, or a model, or a dancer, or an artist takes great courage. It is the most vulnerable position to take: telling the whole world your deepest desire.

I just started Seth Godin’s book The Practice this week, a book inspired by his interactions with Koppelman both on and off the podcast. It’s full of gems, but one in particular caught me. He quotes the Bhagavad-Gita: “It is better to follow your own path, however imperfectly, than to follow someone else's perfectly.” It’s quite an eloquent way to say if you’re a juggler, stick to juggling.

Bo’s special and John’s music and BK’s podcast and Seth’s book all started with each of them answering that question – who am I to create something? They tell you right there in the work: Bo is a comedian, a filmmaker. John is a songwriter, a singer, a musician. BK is a writer, a creative coach. Seth is a writer. It starts with tossing off the externally imposed labels and stepping into that vulnerable place of declaring who you are to the world. It’s not easy, of course. But the alternative is never saying a word while the clock still ticks on above us.

It’s much easier to listen to those possum-parents in our lives. These are not necessarily our own parents. They can be the governors of our social norms. Those who expect us to do what they tell us we should be doing. Doing that is not sustainable in the long term. When we find ourselves failing in a class we were never meant to take, that probably means we shouldn’t be in that class. Instead we should be hanging upside down on our branches. Because even if we can’t see or hear it, that clock is there. One day it’ll hit quadruple zeros. In the meantime, all we can do is hang on to our acorns, no matter how many people tell us to drop them.

***

This piece first appeared in Sunday Morning Hot Tea. Subscribe so you don’t miss another piece.

The Beautiful Aftermath

In the moments after announcing that Paris and I were engaged on social media, we were delighted by so many lovely comments and texts. “So happy for you guys!” “Congrats!” “Love this!”

On the group chat for one of the comedy troupes I belong to, Watermelon, the messages were much the same. “I screamed!” “Congrats!” But my dear comedy pal, Austin, added “2nd time’s the charm” which made me laugh so hard and caused me to immediately show Paris.

It’s no secret that I’ve been engaged before. Details aside, it didn’t work out. I never want to try and hide this fact because I don’t want folks to feel like ending something that doesn’t serve you is something to be ashamed of. It is not. If something does not serve you or make you feel like the best version of yourself, there’s no shame in making choices to move in the direction of happiness and freedom, should that be an option.

I understand that is easier said than done. For the longest time, I was frozen in fear. I felt like I was on an unstoppable trajectory toward something inevitable.

Because the universe provides, I met Austin in the very first improv class I took at the now-shuttered Dallas Comedy House back in 2016. He and his best friend, Adam, were some of the youngest of our classmates, who ranged in age from mid-twenties to upper forties. Initially the pair kept to themselves, but one night, they invited me to a diner nearby to grab a bite before class.

After that, we were all three cast in a troupe together and started a Thursday night writing meetup. During and after rehearsals and at these writing meetups, Austin would listen to me lament about my job and my relationship. I spoke as a miserable person but one who seemed unable (or at the very least, unwilling) to make any changes.

One day at a midday lunch, I sat across from him, all long curls, freckles, and skate shoes. He’s only five years younger than me, but for a while there, I felt ancient. I don’t know that I overtly said it, but I definitely had the sinking feeling of things being “too late” for me. This was it. This misery was my fate, and I was bound to it for eternity.

As he attacked a plate of noodles before him, he looked up at me and said, “Why don’t you just quit? Why don’t you just break up? Blow up your life, dude.”

It was just that simple, but also that hard. I didn’t have it in me to head home that night and change everything. But what he said was simple and brave. Don’t get me wrong. It was more than just that sentence. He followed it up with a lot of encouragement. He reminded me I was strong. That I was a lawyer who couldn’t be bullied. That I deserved to be happy. These were all things I had known before, but by then had let sink deep down where they sat dusty and forgotten. My hopelessness deluded me into thinking any resistance to my predetermined fate was futile.

There was power in that simple phrase he gave me. It started as a little tickle in my brain. Blow up your life. Then it grew. I began to psyche myself up.

Though I was engaged, I had not actually engaged in any real wedding planning. My mom drug me to one bridal show. Rather than throw on a “I’M THE BRIDE!” sash and a white mini-dress, my best friend, LeeAnn, and I arrived with Chick-fil-A cups filled with cider and made jokes at all the booths.

At the fine china booth, they asked which of us was the bride. I pointed to LeeAnn and said, “This is my beloved fiancée. Please give her all the fineries she requires. Do you sell the pattern from the plates on the Titanic?”

Despite lugging home a sack full of brochures, I had no interest in pursuing anything further. No date was set. No colors were chosen. I never once tried on a wedding dress. A planned trip to David’s Bridal sent me into a tailspin as all that white fabric promised to swallow me whole and end me once and for all.

I was miserable. I was scared. And, finally, I blew up my life. Quit my job. Ended my engagement.

In the fallout, I rebuilt. Through a series of fortunate events, and a lot of healing, I ended up here. Engaged. Again.

This time I feel different. Just two weeks after we got engaged, Paris and I chose a venue. We’ve already hired a wedding planner. And just twenty days after being engaged, I accidentally found my dress.

My mom – the seamstress, tailor, and costume designer – was understandably focused on the dress. She’s an expert in the field and knows the jargon. She also loves a bargain. A local dress shop was having a trunk show, which she seemed excited about, though I am still not sure what that means. I was in the store. I saw no trunks! When I hear trunk sale I expect women crawling over one another to pull dresses out of dusty pirates’ chests amongst pearls and doubloons

But I agreed to go along and see what they had.

By then, I had read about a dozen local bridal magazines. In my wedding planner notebook, I made a list of eight dress boutiques, not including the trunk show place or any chains, that I planned to visit over the next couple of weeks.

Accompanying my mom and me on this first exploratory mission was Shannon, my sister and matron of honor, and LeeAnn, my maid of honor and forever wife.

We started at the trunk show place. I slipped in and out of a few numbers, but only found one I kind of liked. I didn’t love it. You know on all those TV shows, the stupid blushing bride stands up going, “This is my dress! I don’t want to take it off!” I was hoping for that level of enthusiasm. I thought the dress was ok, but I had some notes. Other dresses, I hated entirely, so at least this was something.

When I didn’t find “the one” at the trunk sale, we moved along to a major bridal chain up the street. The consultant buzzed around me, insisting that I was sure to find “the one” right away. I slipped on dress after dress in good faith, but each time found myself forced to add them to the discard pile. One had a slit that exposed my whole bathing suit area. Another was so thin, my entire Abraham Lincoln tattoo was visible, surely a treat for all our guests.

Finally, we headed to a boutique in the Design District of Dallas. I had chosen a few dresses from their site and emailed my preferences to them in advance of the appointment. It turns out my online taste is full garbage. While the dresses were breathtaking, I felt like I was wearing costumes. None fit right. They itched. They were too flashy. They weren’t me.

Since my choices were a bust, the consultant, Daniela, asked if she could grab some contenders she thought I would like. The first one was a no-go, too tight with off-the-shoulder sleeves that kept my arms down at my side like a penguin. As my time slot was coming to a close, I began mentally planning the visits to the other eight boutiques on my list in the coming weeks.

There was still one remaining dress on the hanger. I don’t want to describe it here too much because my faithful fiancé reads this lovely letter each week (hi babe!). But when I put it on, I heard bells ring.

Daniela pulled back the curtain of the COVID-reduced waiting room, and all three of my maximum-allowable guests gasped. It was perfect. I even said, “This is my dress! I don’t want to take it off!” just like all those idiots on TV.

With my dress on, I paraded around the empty show room, toting with me a fake bouquet until finally it became obvious it was time for us to buy. We put in the order right then and there. The dress should arrive sometime around the end of September (COVID-pending).

I had left my house that morning with no expectation of buying a dress. I fully expected to get a feel, make a list, and head out again over the next few months. I was apparently the only one with that thought.

 “I knew it,” my sister said. “I knew you would find something today. That’s why I came. I know your personality.” She was right. She always is. 

Before leaving the boutique, my phone buzzed. It was a text from Paris.

“I proposed 20 days ago, and today you’re wedding dress shopping… you want to marry me so bad.”

He’s right. I do want to marry him so bad. I’m lucky he wants to marry me so bad right back and tells me as much every day.

So Austin’s message of congratulations was right. Second time is the charm. When I stepped into each of the bridal salons last week, the chipper women at the front desk would ask who the bride was. Each time I announced without hesitation it was me. When they asked how I met my fiancé, I told them we matched on Bumble. It sounds a lot better than saying, “We met after I blew up my life.”

***

This piece first appeared in Sunday Morning Hot Tea. Subscribe so you don’t miss another piece.

New Year’s Loose Guidelines

Well, the calendar changed over to a new year, and yet things remain somewhat the same for us all. Back in 2020, I finally broke my annual January 1st tradition of years past where I would set incredibly unrealistic goals for myself. Some examples: Lose 100 pounds, run 2000 miles, invent a new slang word that finds its way into the worldwide vernacular, fit into the dress I wore to my kindergarten graduation, etc. etc. They would mostly have to do with weight, largely because society has ingrained in me that NOW IS THE TIME! YOUR BODY IS BAD! JANUARY CAN MAKE IT GOOD! Each January, gyms would be overrun by eager worker-outers, myself included, no doubt inspired by the clean slate a new year can bring. We think to ourselves, “Yeah, last year I was lazy and didn’t do shit, but THIS YEAR IS MY YEAR!”

Now is also the time of year we see those clickbait headlines promising us “ways to make your resolution stick.” Major publications will interview experts and psychologists who tell you what you should and shouldn’t do in order to succeed with your resolution. Unfortunately, those lists tend to overlap. You absolutely should tell someone your resolution, one expert may say. Post it on social media. Rent out a billboard. Include it in a chain email forward that swears a curse upon the recipients if they don’t forward it to at least 10 friends. 

Still another expert may say, like a birthday wish, if you tell another single soul your resolution it will never materialize. Keep it secret. Write it on a paper and burn it. Build yourself a basement laboratory, toil away in private, and only on December 31 should you come clean with what you’ve done.

Last year, rather than making another set of wildly unrealistic and unattainable resolutions for myself, I made what I called my New Year’s Loose Guidelines. I was trying to give myself a break from the harmful, pie-in-the-sky standards I had set for myself over the past few decades.

Was this the best way to do it? I don’t know. If you Google “how to set a goal,” the first result is not “make loose guidelines and freely pat yourself on the back for making an effort.” In fact, the first Google result is a link to the super popular goal-setting system called the SMART system. SMART stands for specific, measureable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Let’s see how my Loose Guidelines from 2020 fit that:

• Eat more vegetables.

  SPECIFIC. This was specific in that I was eating no vegetables (does pico de gallo on nachos count? If so, I was eating a few vegetables) and I wanted to eat more.

  MEASURABLE. I could measure this goal by eating any vegetables at all - done and done! Paris and I moved in together in 2020, and he started cooking for us, meaning we had things like Brussels sprouts, asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, and salads in the house, things that likely would not have been there but for him. He actually said the words, “If I left you to your own devices, you’d eat cereal or mac and cheese for every meal.” Feels great to be loved by someone who knows the real me.

  ATTAINABLE. Oh yeah, baby. I attained the heck out of this one. On many occasions, I ordered some vegetable-centric Chipotle burrito bowls on UberEats.

  RELEVANT. I mean, I think we can all agree vegetables are good, so it’s relevant to my health, I guess?

  TIME BOUND. I completed this by eating several vegetables by the end of the year. GOAL ACHIEVED.

• Run more.

  SPECIFIC. This was specific in that I meant “more” as in more miles than 2019. That sounds well and good until you realize...

  MEASURABLE. I have no way to know how much I ran in 2019 because Apple Health historical data is trash. How far was more? Who knows! In May 2020, I got a Garmin watch and ran 143 miles using it. That doesn’t sound like a lot to me, but I also walked several miles a week, too, just not with the watch. Still, I will count it as a win. For the upcoming year, I am going to be sure to wear the watch every time I go out so I can have something measurable for 2021. Gotta hit that “M” in the SMART goal!

  ATTAINABLE. Despite not knowing what number I was shooting for, I think “more” was doable and likely done.

  RELEVANT. Wanted to be better/faster at running. Signed up to run the Dallas Marathon to raise money for the Innocence Project in May (click to donate please!) Don't want to do a real life QWOP during the race, or end up in a YouTube fail compilation video (yes they still make those!), or worse. Worse = crap my pants or die.

  TIME BOUND. Yep, did it (I think probably??) by the end of the year.

• Grow the podcast.

  Christie and I put in a lot of work on the show, and 2020 really let us see the fruits of our labor. We got written up in a few magazines, got named Best Podcast by Dallas Observer, and went from 5 million downloads in January to nearly 13 million in December. Pretty incredible to see how it grew. I think this one ticks all the SMART boxes and makes me incredibly grateful to everybody who listened, shared it, recommended it to a friend, bought merch, or subscribed to our Patreon. Thank you! You made this Loose Guideline come true.

• Write more.

  I got 35,000 words into a manuscript, continued with morning pages (though they’re handwritten so no telling the word counts), and started writing this newsletter. I guess that counts that as “more.”

See what happens when you set Loose Guidelines? You can count them as achievements!

So what goals are we setting for 2021? Might as well double down on the list above and. keep doing those things I have already been doing. Turns out it was a good idea to set those kind of nebulous guidelines for myself. It kept me going even when things were tough. If I had said, “I will run 2000 miles in 2020,” and the pandemic depression sat in or my calf tore and I couldn’t run for a few months, I would have gotten really disappointed to be so behind on my goal. But instead, I could be gentle and kind to myself, saying “more” - even if it wasn’t a lot more - was enough.

In lieu of the uncompromising standards of the SMART system, I have decided to coin my own system: the DUMB system. Please feel free to use this when creating your New Year’s Loose Guidelines. The DUMB system stands for:

• Doesn’t make me feel bad about myself;

• Usually going to do it, but it’s cool if some days I don’t;

• Maybe I will finish it by the end of the year;

• But at least I’m trying!

Here’s my advice to you on setting your guidelines - do it however you want - DUMB, SMART, public, secret. Some people do better to post it online, while others thrive by toiling away in their secret underground bunkers. Whether super specific works better or more general does the trick, I recommend everyone’s loose guidelines going forward at least include believing in ourselves and being kind to ourselves. The rest will work itself out.

***

This piece first appeared in Sunday Morning Hot Tea. Subscribe so you don’t miss another piece.