Is You Okay? (18 page)

When I returned not two minutes later, there was a man in my seat. I was
not
having it. I was, like,
This man has got-ta move!
I'd had it with men. They were either lying mama's boys, or stanky homeless, or IHOP-ordering big timers, or they didn't get why
plantation
was a bad word. I was not about to let this brother take my seat. I had an attitude, I didn't care. I was at my wit's end.

“Don't you want to meet your congresswoman,” I said to him. It was not a question, it was an accusation.

He barely looked up and said, simply, “No.”

Okay, then. I had to figure something out quickly here, because it was hot and my goal was to get him up out of that seat. If I had to bug him or threaten him, I was going to do it.

I'm exasperated, so I take a step back to look him over. He had his head down, and I could tell he didn't have a girlfriend or a wife because there was no ring on his finger and there was no way a woman would have let him out of the house the way he was dressed. He wasn't a raggedy mess, like Shaqkobe, but his stuff wasn't put together the way it could have been. Then he started talking.

“So do you work here or something? What do you do?” Oh, now Mr. Cement Cheeks thinks he can ask me all sorts of questions?

“I'm a comedian,” I reluctantly said. “I live in Los Angeles.”

“I like comedians,” he says, and finally looks up at me as he scoots over a little on the bricks. I squished in next to him, practically on his lap.

The next thing I know, it's five hours later, and we haven't stopped talking once. People are coming up to us saying,
Y'all make such a cute couple,
and I'm, like, “I don't even know this man!”

His name was Kevin Simon. He was an engineer and a retired sergeant in the U.S. Air Force who had just moved back to Florida after a divorce from his wife to be near his last living parent—his dad.

Eventually, it was time to go. Ms. Sanders wanted to head back and hang out with her friends after they got home from their “prayer meeting.” On the ride home, I told her about this man I had just met. She told me if I dropped her off at the house, I could use the car to go out to dinner with him as long as I returned it to her at the end of the night. I was grateful; it was very kind of her.

SK and I went to dinner that night, and again we talked for hours. It was a long night, and it was late when I finally returned the car. SK followed me to Ms. Sanders's house in his car so he could give me a ride home. We pull up happy and excited about this connection that was building quickly, only to find two squad cars in her driveway and two police officers in her living room. Ms. Sanders had called the police and reported the car stolen, knowing full well I had it! I was completely embarrassed. How do you tell the police, in front of your new bae, that the old lady who used to take care of her dad was losing her marbles? I knew that if SK still wanted to talk to me after this, things were probably going to work out between us.

I went back to Los Angeles a couple days later, and wouldn't you know it, we kept on talking. I still had my blog back then, so I would write about him, telling my readers all about this new guy I met named Kevin and how special he was. I started calling him “Special K” because I like giving people nicknames, which I quickly shortened even further to “SK” because I'm lazy when it comes to writing.

I still had plenty of attitude with him, don't be mistaken. I hadn't gone head over heels, like I might have when I was
younger. It was more, like, “I live in California, I'm not moving back to Florida, no matter how special you are.” SK was cool with that—he understood what I was trying to do out here, and we agreed to start visiting each other.

When I visited SK the very first time, I could tell he wasn't really feeling Florida. His dad had remarried and was doing his own thing, and he still didn't have that many friends in Orlando, which left him to just sort of twiddle his thumbs between his workday and our conversations on the phone.

Before I left to go back to Los Angeles I casually said, “You know, you should move out to California.” I didn't exactly mean move to California
with me
. . . but that's what ended up happening. SK came out to Los Angeles, moved in with me in my tiny, not-even-a-one-bedroom guesthouse attached to the owner's garage, and we started dating IRL.

It was a modern-day fairy tale except instead of living in a castle, the princess lived off the garage of another house, and instead of a luxurious four-poster bed, she slept on the floor and cooked on a hot plate.

Still, we made it work, despite the difficulty SK had in finding work. It was the middle of the Great Recession, and good jobs
were hard to come by. That didn't stop him, though—SK took a job as a bagger at the Veterans Administration store to help pay rent and bills, and it wasn't just to carry his own weight. It also helped me as I continued to pursue my entertainment dreams.

It would be another couple years before I got traction on YouTube, started making good money, and then made myself the number one person in my life (instead of Jacqui) in order to focus on our relationship, but those early days were when I knew SK was truly special.

Now you might be asking yourself:
GloZell, these stories are great, and I'm very happy for you
(thank you, by the way)
but why are you telling us all of this? What's the point?

The point is that God wasn't punishing me for any kind of sin by putting me through the ringer with this string of crazy guys before I met SK. Those relationships weren't a test of my faith (at least not in God, maybe in
myself
), they were just a part of life. Even when you feel like you're doing everything right, things aren't always going to go your way. You're going to have some misses. You're going to want some do-overs. Unfortunately, that's not how life works. You don't
get do-overs. Instead, what you get is the ability to learn from your mistakes.

I firmly believe that everything happens for a reason. I believe you attract what comes into your life, good and bad. In both good and bad moments—but especially in bad ones—the key is that you learn from those mistakes so you don't repeat them. This is most important when it comes to your relationships, because identifying and learning from those mistakes helps you figure out what you definitely don't want in your life and what you absolutely have to have.

My relationships with Dwayne, Tommy, Shaqkobe, and PK led me to SK. They taught me that I didn't want a liar or a mama's boy. They showed me that I couldn't be with someone who also had a big personality and might make me change in his shadow. They confirmed my suspicions that homeless cheapskates living in pee mobiles weren't for me. And they made me realize that I would have a hard time with someone who didn't understand my experiences or what made me different.

They taught me that what I absolutely had to have was a strong, honest, independent man (with no mama!
LOL
), who was most interested in supporting me on my journey instead of overshadowing it, who was self-sufficient and self-
confident, and who understood where I came from and where I was going.

My bad relationships set the path that led to SK. Being willing to learn from my mistakes opened that path in front of me. Knowing who I was and having faith in myself gave me the courage to walk it.

You are going to have a lot of moments in your life like I had on the phone with Dwayne, or in the movie theater with Shaqkobe, or in the car outside Souplantation with PK. Yours might not be related to boys or girls. They might be school or work or family related. They might be on Facebook or Snapchat or Instagram or in the comments to one of your YouTube videos. They're going to feel like big mistakes or failures. Many of them are going to feel like they're your fault, even when they're not.

Your job is not to pretend that those moments aren't hard, or that they don't make you feel bad. You're not a robot, you're a person. Your job is to embrace your true self, remember that you're the number one person in your life, and learn from these mistakes. Learn what's important to you and what isn't, what you never want to repeat, and what you need.

If you can learn to do those things, you will always find a way back onto your path toward a long, happy life, because you will be doing the things you love, with the people you care about. I can't promise it will be easy or immediate, but I promise it will happen.

     
Q:
  Why do you wear green? What is your favorite shade of green?

     
A:
  I wear green because my last name is Green. If my last name was “Neonpink” I'd wear neon pink, then I'd ask my mom where we're from because that's a ridiculous last name. I like lighter greens, not Kelly green, or forest green, or Kermit green. More like a tea green, or chartreuse.

My career as a YouTuber began unintentionally—I definitely didn't set out to become a viral video star, or an online personality, or whatever term people use today to describe those of us who create on the Internet.

At first, YouTube was just a tool for my blog, an easier way to host videos than having to do it myself. Then it became a vehicle to keep me sane after
The Tonight Show
kicked me out—the best way I knew to express myself without any restrictions or boundaries. When I got my feet under me, YouTube then became a kind of rehearsal space for my sitcom ideas, until finally it became my path to entertainment success.

It's funny how stuff like that works in life. You take a chance on something, you sign up for something not even thinking about it, and then,
BAM,
it's a huge part of your life every day for years and years. That's a good reason to take chances and put yourself out there by the way. You never know what might happen.

I owe a lot to YouTube in that regard, more than I can ever repay. Oddly though, the one thing I don't actually think I owe to it is my success. Before you get mad, and think I'm throwing shade, let me explain what I mean.

YouTube gave me the platform to be successful, and the company's invaluable support (and unlimited bandwidth!) over the years helped me build on that success, but the website was not the
reason
I became successful. The real secret ingredient was something else, something inside of
me, something that's inside any of us really:
the willingness to stand out
.

I truly believe that if I had not tried to stand out, I'd be just another person posting videos, and my videos would be just another collection of four-minute snippets from some random person's life.

Think about the numbers: by the end of 2014, there were three hundred hours of video being uploaded to YouTube
every minute
. That was three times as much as the year before. Today? If I didn't stand out? I'd barely be a tiny squeak in an ocean of voices. I don't mean that as an insult or in a negative, diminishing way, to anyone who posts videos for fun. I think everyone who wants to make videos should make as many as they can and post them as often as they want. But there is a difference between using something like YouTube to figure out who you are and what you want to say on the one hand, and then going out and being successful at it on the other. To me, that difference will always be the willingness and ability to stand out.

What does it mean to stand out? Most people think it means being different from everyone else. I don't think that's it, though. Being different isn't something you
do,
it's something you
are
. You can't
control
being different, and being different certainly isn't
up
to you. I had no say in who my parents were
or where I went to school, so I had very little influence over how those two things impacted who I became as a person. If all it took to stand out was
being
different, then wouldn't success become sort of a lottery? We'd be saying that only certain
types
of people can be successful on a place like YouTube. You either have “it” or you don't.

Not only is that unfair, I believe it's untrue. Anyone can be successful. The world is full of Plain Janes and Average Joes with talent or something to say, and what is holding them back isn't that they're “like everybody else,” it's that they haven't learned how to use their talent or their message to stand out.

Just take the singer Adele. Adele is an average-looking, average-shaped white woman from a middle-class family in South London. If you saw her walking down the street in 2006, you'd say “there goes an average young woman,” if you even noticed her in the first place.

To hear Adele sing, though, there is nothing average about that at all. That huge viral video from the BBC when she auditioned in disguise as an Adele impersonator is a perfect example. There she was, amid all these singers who either dressed or tried to look just like her, and the second she opened her mouth, stand-out genius talent flew out. She has a voice like God stuffed a choir of angels down her throat
and then turned the dial up to 11. She hits notes that hit you in the heart and the soul and the mind and the spirit, all at once.

But talk to any music industry person or any of the judges on
American Idol
or
X Factor
, and they'll tell you that talent isn't enough to be really successful in their business. It never is. You have to stand out in other ways. For Adele, that had to be easier said than done. Just look at all the artists “like her” who were putting out major albums around the same time she was ready to release her first major studio album in 2008: Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Fergie, Lady Gaga, Carrie Underwood, Ke$ha. How do you stand out in a group like that? I'd be freaking out if I were her. I'd be, like, “Okay, so I have to dress like Effie from
Hunger Games
but I have to sing like Christina Aguilera from the
Moulin Rouge
soundtrack, and I have to tour like a one-woman Cirque du Soleil show.” The thing is, if she had done that, she wouldn't have stood out at all; she would have blended right in alongside what Gaga and Katy Perry and Rihanna and Taylor Swift were doing.

Smartly, Adele went the other way. She went simple. She sang songs that were about things going on in her relationship and made an album whose title was just a number (
19
)—her age when she made the album. And instead of big stadium concerts with dancers and fireworks and giant screens, it was just her and a simple backing band in a theater big enough to
let her voice fill the room, but still small enough for you to see her from the back row as she blows your hair back from the front of the stage. I don't know any of them, but I bet Adele as a person and an artist isn't so different from the Taylor Swifts and the Carrie Underwoods of the music world. Yet in 2008 (and beyond) she did something totally different from all of them, and the results since then have been undeniable: her second album,
21,
set a bunch of records; and her third album,
25,
sold more copies in its first week than any other album in the history of music.

All because she stood out.

It took me years to figure this out—that if you really want to break out, you have to stand out first. I think it was because for most of the time after I arrived in California, I wasn't trying to break out, I was trying to
break in—
to stand-up comedy, to
The Tonight Show,
to television in general. I was trying to be discovered instead of trying to be distinct. I actually remember the exact day I started to get it.

The day I worked it out was January 30, 2012. The day I did the Cinnamon Challenge.

The Cinnamon Challenge was not my idea—not the concept, or the desire to do it. Both the concept and the desire came from my fans.

I love connecting with my fans. I've been communicating with them since I started my
glozelllovesjayleno
blog in 2006, right from the very first comment someone posted to one of my blog entries. When I moved over to YouTube full-time in 2008, most of the readers from the blog shifted over with me, and we picked up right where we left off, growing the community together.

As my channel got bigger and bigger—first with the Push-Up Bra video and the Hair Removal video, then a year later with my original song about the lady with stank breath—it got more difficult to stay connected to everyone. On top of that, I was losing myself inside “Project Jacqui” a little, so I didn't spend as much time engaging with my fans as I could or should have. That all changed in the second half of 2011 when I ghosted from Jacqui and then recommitted to my channel, and to myself.

Up until then, I had never taken suggestions from my fans for things to do in my videos. I was using YouTube as a playground for sketches, characters, and ideas that I might be able to use one day when I got my own show, so it didn't make sense to me to go to the comments section of my channel
for ideas. But once I did—once I reengaged with the most die-hard of my fans—I was amazed by what I found: a huge audience that had unique tastes, and very specific things they wanted to see. They were like my own little focus group, except not so little. If I listened to them, it could be like having my ear to the ground as the viral train came roaring down the tracks.

The Cinnamon Challenge was the first train to pull into GloZell Station. My fans hounded me for months to do it, sending me links to other YouTubers doing it, blowing up my Facebook fan page and the comments section to previous videos, like I needed to catch up or something.

“GloZell, you should do the Cinnamon Challenge!”

“GloZell, why haven't you done the Cinnamon Challenge?”

“GlooooooZeeeeeeeellll! Cinnamon Cinnamon Cinnamon Cinnamon Cinnamon! k thx.”

“GloZell1 I am Prince Agabi of Nigeria and I am in prison and need your bank account number so I can give you my money.' (Okay, maybe this one was spam. But he sounds nice. And he
is
royalty!)

As someone whose purpose is to make people laugh and be happy, I understood what the Cinnamon Challenge was
about, and even why someone would like to watch videos of it. As a performer, though, I just didn't see the appeal. You grab some ground cinnamon out of the cupboard, you pour some into a teaspoon, and you try to swallow it without coughing it up. Big whoop. Where's the fun in that? Plus, if everybody's already done their version of it, why would anyone watch mine?

If I was going to do this, one of the three elements of the challenge was going to have to change:

The form: powder

The spice: cinnamon

The size: a teaspoon

Let's take these options one at a time.

The only other form cinnamon comes in is its natural form—as a stick, from the bark of a cinnamon tree. I could have eaten that, I guess, but I figured that part of the challenge relates to the cinnamon being in its ground, powdery form. Watching someone chew a stick is boring. Plus, I had a personal rule against eating anything you might find in bathroom potpourri, especially after my experiences with PK. So it had to be powder.

I suppose I could have put my own twist on things by using a different spice altogether—say, turmeric or cumin—but I'm scared of any spices related to Indian food. I love Indian food, it's delicious, but turmeric makes it look like what comes out of a baby's behind, and cumin is what makes it
smell
like it comes out of a baby's behind. Even if I could choke those down, it wouldn't be the
Cinnamon
Challenge. It's called the “Cinnamon Challenge,” not the “Baby Tushy Spice Challenge.” So it had to be cinnamon.

That left me with the size. So what's bigger than a teaspoon? It turns out pretty much every other standard household measurement is bigger than a teaspoon. Great, that's no help. I thought about doing a tablespoon, but that's just a triple teaspoon, so it didn't seem very interesting. I played around with ounces, but it got confusing after a while because ounces are both a unit of weight and a unit of volume and I didn't have a scale or a measuring cup small enough for either. I could do a cup, I thought, but who has a
cup
of cinnamon lying around the house? Can you even buy cinnamon by the cup?

Finally, I realized I had to flip it. Instead of focusing on measurement size, maybe I needed to pay more attention to
utensil
size. All my utensils could handle one teaspoon of cinnamon, but how many utensils could handle all my teaspoons of cinnamon? Why fiddle around with one versus
two versus three teaspoons, when you can just rip off the lid and go wild?