I Know What I'm Doing (29 page)

Max sent me a text later asking if I got back to my hotel safely. (If I hadn’t, he was about an hour too late in asking.) He said that he had fun and that if I’m ever back in Stockholm we should get together again. If I’m back in Stockholm it will be because I married a hot blond Swedish woman just to keep her from stealing any more available American men.

As I brushed my teeth before bed I felt like my left leg had just completely given up. I had a major cramp in my calf. Jesus. I couldn’t even have one day as a forty-year-old without
feeling
forty? I diagnosed myself as having a blood clot from too much traveling. I called my doctor back in Los Angeles. (Thank God for the nine-hour time difference. It makes it possible to have a hypochondriac moment in the middle of the night and still reach someone.) She told me to immediately go buy full-strength aspirin. I spent the last minutes of my birthday at a 7-Eleven hunting for Bayer to thin my blood and begging God to spare my life. I promised Him/Her that if He/She let me live through this blood clot I would never again think my life wasn’t meaningful unless I found another divorcé to share it with and that I would just enjoy life itself. I would no longer be impatient that I don’t have all of life’s answers. I would just enjoy the questions. After an hour the “blood clot” went away. (It was later officially diagnosed as a recurring charley horse from walking in heels.) I stayed up way past midnight in my hotel room reading Internet message boards where people like me were asking if their charley horses could be blood clots. These people’s lives were a mess. They didn’t even use periods at the end of their run-on sentences about how they know that they shouldn’t smoke cigarettes while on the Pill. Reading their stories was life-affirming. I don’t have a blood clot. I don’t have a lot of extraneous drama in my life and I am smart enough to know that “charley” in “charley horse” isn’t spelled “Charlie.”

There’s no reason to stress out about what to do for your fortieth or whatever-ith birthday. It’s not about doing something one night to make memories for the rest of your life—it’s about looking at the rest of your life and saying, “Am I going where I want to go? Am I who I want to be? Am I defining my personal success based on other people’s morals or goals? Can I only achieve happiness with outside validation or would I be truly happy just sitting in a pile of wood chips, being me? How can this year not be a repeat of last year’s mistakes and patterns?”

I saw my fortieth year as a calling to be awesome. The number isn’t scary but it’s a challenge. Forty means no more fucking around. Do what you’ve always said you’ve wanted to do. And remember, you can’t stop the waves but you can learn to surf, and you don’t need to almost drown in a surfing class to learn that.

I
. Quick story: I tried to surf. I took a lesson once. I can’t swim without holding my nose. I’m petrified going under water and I’ve never actually swum in the ocean. I’ve only stood in the ocean. I figured my first surfing lesson would cover the basics of swimming and that maybe we would take a boat out to the waves where I would be placed on my board and lowered into the water somehow. I was dismayed when my instructor asked me to paddle out into the waves. The problem is that the waves that seem so tiny when you’re standing on the shore seem gargantuan when you’re on your stomach paddling head-on toward them. It’s the same kind of bait and switch that a baby pulls when she reaches her tiny little hand toward your hair and when she yanks it she’s got the strength of an MMA fighter. I couldn’t quite get the hang of jumping up on the board, relaxing while jumping, tuning in while zoning out, or keeping my balance long enough while standing up to ride out a wave. Halfway through the lesson, I was convinced that a jellyfish had stung me in the chest through my wetsuit. It was just an asthma attack brought on by actually having to breathe heavier than I do during my only other workout—mild power-walking. I did my version of “swimming” back to shore to grab my inhaler. I tried to end the lesson early on account of this mild asthma attack and the fact that I no longer had any interest in risking my life by trying to conquer the sea with a board. My instructor looked me in the eye and said, “You can try to stop the lesson but you’ll never stop surfing. Surfing is life, whether you’re on a board in the ocean or not.”

“Cool. So I think I’ll do that one. The one where I surf without the board and the ocean.”

“You don’t respect the ocean by avoiding the ocean. You respect the ocean by joining the ocean. Join in the knowledge that the ocean is controlled by the moon and you have no control over either.”

“Right. But I do have control over taking off this wetsuit, paying you in full, and going back to my car.”

My instructor did some weird thing with his hand and put it between my eyes. “Jen, you can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”

Either he had successfully hypnotized me or inspired me to try just one more time, because I found myself back in the ocean with a board twice my height and weight strapped to my ankle. After catching a mouthful of salt water, I finally caught a small wave for three seconds before I freaked out and jumped off of the board. Later, I posted pictures of my surfboard and me on Facebook with my newfound spiritual philosophy that we can’t stop the waves of life. My friend Heather McDonald pointed out, “You’re acting really newly divorced right now.” Ugh. She was right. I wasn’t a surfer. The only ocean I can really get into is Billy Ocean and even then I only like one of his songs.*

*
“Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car.”

23

EVERYBODY’S WORKING FOR THE WEEKEND (EXCEPT FOR ME. I WORK
ON
THE WEEKENDS.)

Diamonds are nothing more than chunks of coal that stuck to their jobs.

—MALCOLM FORBES

B
ack in 2002, I was waitressing by day at a fancy Beverly Hills country club (that only started letting Jewish and black people in in 1982). I waited on important humans like astronaut Buzz Aldrin and former secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, Caspar Weinberger. One time, while waiting on his table at a wedding, Buzz slapped my hand as I tried to refill his water glass. He snapped, “How much hydration do you think I need?” I wanted to say, “A lot, you dried up old moon rock.” But I didn’t. I needed that 15 percent tip.

I was often the victim of unsolicited consolation by the affluent, WASPy members who were distressed at seeing a nice white girl waiting tables. One time, a woman with too much sambuca on her breath pulled me aside in tears and said, “Honey, why are you a waitress? That’s fine for the Korean women that work here, but you? You could at least be a catalog model or something, can’t you?”

I was technically a stand-up comedian back then too. I just didn’t get paid for it. But I got to perform at comedy clubs in Los Angeles for five minutes here and there. Those unpaid showcase spots are how every comedian has to start out. But back in those days when people asked what I did for a living, in order to honor the tenets of
The Secret
, I considered every answer a “manifestation” and always said, “I am a stand-up comedian,” instead of “I am a waitress who performs comedy for free as a side ‘job.’ ”

Folks would usually follow up with, “Oh? Do you travel the country? Where do you perform? Do you make a living at that?” And I’d reply with shame, “No. Right now I’m serving multiple glasses of chardonnay an hour to unhappy old-money women who pretend to enjoy the sport of golf. But I do pursue stand-up a few nights a week.” Usually that comeback was not good enough for whoever asked and they would look at me with pity and say, “Well, good luck for however much longer you pursue this. At least you can say you tried, right?”

Comedy seems to be the one job where people don’t seem to understand just how many hours on the job comedians have to put in before getting their first paid gigs. It’s not just massage therapists that have to practice on people before they move up from chair masseuse at an airport to someone in command of pricey essential oils and nude bodies at a fancy spa.

“Career” is often written about as some kind of albatross around a woman’s neck. It’s the thing that keeps her from fully committing to her family, or it stops her from having a family altogether. It allegedly intimidates male partners or gets in the way of her having time to spend with that special someone. Women who are career-focused are often seen as missing out on “life”—but I never wanted the kind of career where I drive home from work and then forget about what I did all day. I know I’m not Picasso, but I see myself as an artist. I’m writing, traveling, thinking of material, performing, tweaking, and dreaming. I somehow turned this into a job, and a life that includes travel that I don’t have to pay for. (And if you’re an aspiring comedian, please don’t offer to take me to lunch and ask me how I got here. I’ll save you the cost of two Cobb salads and iced teas: it just happened . . . over nearly two decades of sacrifice and putting in my ten thousand hours, as Malcolm Gladwell theorizes about in his book
Outliers
. But don’t go read one of his books right now. Stick with me.)

Because I do stand-up shows on weekends,
my
weekend is Monday through Wednesday. I love it. I can go to the pharmacy and no one else is in line to hear me pick up my prescription for yeast infection medication. But that doesn’t mean that what I do is easy. The twenty-three hours a day that I’m not performing aren’t always totally “free” time. There is a huge administrative side to being a traveling comedian, and if you ever wonder why someone has an entourage it’s not just because she’s an egomaniac who has to surround herself with yes-men, but because sometimes there are so many details to keep track of eventually a performer gets to the point where she is too goddamn overwhelmed to hold her own sunglasses.

Anyway, the other day I was sitting in my orthodontist’s chair letting my mind wander. Mindfulness meditation teachers encourage the labeling of thoughts that won’t stop running through our minds—such as “worrying,” “planning,” and “judging”—and then letting them pass; almost like tagging a bag at the airport. Place the sticker on the suitcase, put it on the conveyer belt, and let it roll off somewhere else. If you absolutely need that thought you can always retrieve it later. My mind was working its way down the conveyor belt.

I think I left my iPhone at home.
(Worrying)

I haven’t seen it all morning. In the future I’m going to double-check to make sure I have that phone before I leave home.
(Planning)

I realize this is a lot less important or traumatic than a parent realizing that they haven’t seen their kid all morning, but then again, your kid doesn’t keep your entire calendar and contacts in his overalls.
(Judging)

I hope it’s somewhere at the bottom of my purse next to a penny, some broken sunglasses, and probably an open tube of lipstick
.
I need two assistants to keep my life together.
(Grossly exaggerating)

Then I started thinking about how even after correcting my teeth with Invisalign and then getting a few porcelain veneers, I still had to wear a retainer at night. Of course I wasn’t actually wearing my retainer every night and of course I was lying about it and
of course
my orthodontist knew that I was lying and knew that I knew he knew I was lying. “Jennifer (he’s one of the only people who doesn’t call me Jen—even though he’s ten years younger than me), I have to make a whole new retainer for your bottom teeth. Your teeth moved again and this one just doesn’t fit.” At least my incisors, bicuspids, and molars are consistent with my personality. My teeth are as restless as me. They can’t stay in one place. They love to move about freely and it’s hard to contain them.

My orthodontist and I tried to find a mutually agreeable date that I could come back to try on my new mold. My schedule was erratic and every day that he was going to be in the office I would be on the road anywhere from Oklahoma City to Stockholm. He said, “So, this comedy thing is really what you do for a living? And you have to travel?”

“Yup!” I said with a perfectly veneered smile. I took a moment to feel proud of myself. Finally a conversation about what I do for a living that didn’t leave me feeling ashamed.

After we failed to come up with a date in the near future when I could come back and make sure my chompers hadn’t moved, my orthodontist shook his head as he labeled the mold of my teeth. Then he sighed.

“I don’t know about all of this travel, Jennifer. Be careful.”

He had the somber tone of someone who was about to warn me about airport shoe-bombers or Malaysia Airlines flights that go missing.

“Careful?”

“Well, you might want to have a real life someday.”

I bristled. “Am I not in real life right now? Did you just give me some trippy laughing gas or something? Am I high?”

“You can joke,” he said, “but I’ve seen this happen to women that I’m close to. They
thought
they wanted to abandon the norm in order to live free but after a while they realized their life just wasn’t a real one.”

There was that word “real” again! “Maybe this is why none of my retainers work out,” I said to him. “Maybe I’m a hologram! Are you trying to tell me that you’re the only person who can see me but that I don’t actually exist?”

“I’m just saying that when you want to finally start a family, it might be too late.”

“Oh. I don’t need to start a family. I was born with one. And they’re quite enough for me. Also, I’m forty. I picture my ovaries like sweaters in those compression bags—just flattened and being stored under my bed somewhere.”

He said, “Well, what about marriage? Do you think a man would want to marry someone who was never home?”

“Well, I
was
married, so at least I checked that one off of society’s to-do list. Also, I know what I want. I waited a long time to get what I want and I’m happy.”