Episode Details

I recently realized that somebody I briefly dated was trying to be better than me at my gig. For example, as a color specialist, he used to say that he saw color better than me, which I accepted, not because I believed him, but because I know that's not true. I know that men don't see color as well as women. Biologically, women see color better and most men have a blue level colorblindness that they aren't even aware of. So many times men will tell me that my hair is blue, and it is expressly not blue. That same guy, (it is so not blue) that I dated briefly— my other gig is a writer. He told me he was working on a book, that he had a book deal, and I said, okay, because I don't give a f**k about writing books. I never did, because everybody wants to write a book and that's not the kind of stuff I write. Like, obviously, I write personal essays, but really this is more of a way for me to talk about myself a lot and exercise my narcissism in a healthy and artistic manner, but I never wanted to write a book. It wasn't my gig. So when he did that, I was like, okay. And I only realized recently, that the reason he ever said that he was writing a book, which was quickly dropped from his repertoire, the only reason that he ever said he was writing a book is because he thought that it would make me feel bad that I wasn't. And this is probably the second or third time in my life that I have been upset that somebody was trying to upset me and they didn't even know how. Like, I actually cried and said, you don't even know me well enough to know what would hurt my feelings. It's like when men try to tell me that I'm fat, I say, I know, and then they don't say anything else because they can't, because it wasn't their plan that I would just say, okay. One time I cried to a guy who kept calling me fat. And I was like, I feel like you think that's going to hurt me. And that's insulting.

It turns out that it's not true that I don't want to write a book. I actually now think everybody should write a book. Everybody should write the book that they want to write. I think there is a value in everybody writing a book, even if it's not everybody's cup of tea. I think that as the world goes in a new direction, it's kind of imperative of us to all be keeping our own records of the events and our opinions on them. And who knows what kind of effect it will have someday.But so now I, now I do want to write a book. Well, you know, and then what is, what is your book about? It's about me, of course. All books are, unless they're textbooks. And even then, history is written by the winner. Every book is about the author. In fact, I would argue that fiction is one of the healthier outlets for getting through a life that you aren't happy with and perhaps manifesting a little bit along the way, which might be why I don't like to read other people's fictions: You're absorbing a lot of energy that somebody is actively putting out there.

I have actually started writing one book essays— a book of essays, because I can't write long form to save my life, which is vignettes about my life in a city that I will soon have no root or relation to, but it literally raised me from the ground up.Of course, there will be the book about dating. I haven't even gotten started on the stories of my first marriage.

But I told a friend though, that my book would be about grief. That's what underpins all of these stories. Even if I'm making a joke about how I was stood up, or talking s**t about a family member, the root emotion is always grief… at the miscommunication, at the purposeful antagonism, at the things that went unsaid that could have changed everything. I still return to grief, which sounds so bad, but grief teaches so many lessons about what's important to you and what you can do next time. Because it's not as though you can ever avoid grief, it doesn't stop. Grief at strained relationships, gri