InnerTeub

So I’ve been rocking the Mindy Kaling book, like every other chick in America.

Look, I didn’t want to. I knew that I would likely enjoy the book – excerpts I’d read were funny and I enjoyed Bossypants enough to know that I’d likely dig Bossypants 2.0, but I just finished a memoir for book club and frankly I wasn’t really in a first-person-memoiry type place. So much so, in fact, that I picked up The Great Gatsby from the library to immerse myself in and yes I know The Great Gatsby is written in the first person but shut up that is not my point. I’m in the mood to get swept away by a story, not over identify with a lovely and funny but still unknown to me individual.

HOWEVER. THRWARTED. I completely won the library hold system contest by apparently being the first person to request this book. I am the FIRST PERSON in Douglas County to access to Mindy Kaling’s new book, and what am I supposed to do? Not read it? Come on, there are kids in Arapaho County who don’t even HAVE library hold systems, GOD.  So, I reluctantly put aside my Great Gatsby and dove into “Is Everybody Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)”

(… I do understand my library system probably bought more than one copy and I’m not the literal only person in the county with this book. NOT THE POINT)

Of course, as predicted. I like it. It’s charming and funny and the section on Best Friends Rights and Responsibilities means I will likely be sending underlined and notes-in-margins versions to my close friends. But here’s the part when Mindy completely won me over: her quick little discussion about how ridiculous the John Cougar Mellencamp song “Jack and Diane” is:

 “I wish there was a song called “Nguyen and Ari”, a little ditty about a hardworking Vietnamese girl who helps her parents with the franchised Holiday Inn they run, and does homework in the lobby, and Ari, a hardworking Jewish boy who does volunteer work at his grandmother’s old-age home, and the they after school at the Princeton Review…

The chours of “Jack and Diane” is: Oh Yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone. Are you kidding me? The thrill of living was high school?

Ok, Min. We can be friends (even though I copied from your book illegally and then stripped out the money portion of that section where you talk about how it’s ok to be quiet in high school and the wonderfulness of getting to spend time with ones family.) (And called your book Bossypants 2.0) (even though you already made that joke in the book already.) Because you know, my stepdaughter just started high school, and I love seeing her love it, going to Varsity Football games, getting involved in all the high schooley type stuff, and it’s easy for me to be so excited for her to be having this great experience, but you know it’s like that Indigo Girls song (what? We’re talking high school here, people. It’s excessively on-point for me to be quoting the Indigo Girls) – “I don’t want the things that mean the most to mean the things I miss.”

Anyway – I hadn’t thought much about it, but I did like the look at our nice little American idealized view of how high school is the best years of our life (“Glory Days”, anyone?) and how, actually, if you’re doing it right, that’s not it, not even close.