Yes Please (34 page)

Once I was wrapping Christmas gifts with an old assistant. She was a young and lovely girl whom I was thinking of firing. Let’s call her Esmerelda (not her name). I texted my husband, Will, and said, “Not now, not today, but eventually we should think about getting rid of Esmerelda.” I went back to wrapping my gifts and chitchatting about my upcoming schedule. Later that night, I received a call from Esmerelda. I had sent the text to her instead. I had sent it while we were together and she read it while I was humming Christmas carols right in front of her. She figured we should talk. She was right. I fired her. Then I threw my phone across the room and hid under my bed.

Another time, I spent an afternoon talking to a friend about a recent relationship she had been in. She had gone back and forth with a guy who was acting like an asshole. She had finally ended it and was processing her feelings. She left the room and I texted another friend and wrote, “Thank god they broke up. He is such an asshole.” My friend came back into the room and asked why I had just texted her that weird sentence. She was upset that I hadn’t even waited five minutes before reaching out to someone else and talking about her. I apologized. I threw my phone into the garbage and tried to run myself over with my car.

I wish I could tell you that those were the only times something like that happened, but it has happened over and over: an e-mail for the wrong eyes, a text to the wrong person, a picture sent with the wrong message underneath. My inability to keep my shit straight made me straighten out my shit. Now, as a rule, I try not to text anything that I wouldn’t mind the whole world seeing. I try to use restraint of pen and tongue and thumb. It’s a constant struggle. If my phone had its druthers, it would butt-dial my frenemies while I was in therapy.

3.  
My phone wants me to feel bad about how I look.

When I was younger we used to have these things called “parties.” They were fun hangouts where young people would get together and talk and maybe dance. During these “parties” we would take pictures with things called “cameras.” One week later, we would pick up those pictures from a strange man who lived in a tiny hut in the middle of town. By that time the party had become a distant memory, something that I had experienced in real time with little regard as to how I looked. I would receive the hard copies of the pictures and throw away the ones I didn’t like. No one would see those pictures but me. No one would be allowed to comment on those pictures until I decided to share them. They would be a reminder of a good time but not something that kept me distanced from the experience.

Now my phone lets college admission officers check to see if an applicant ever posed in a bra.

My phone also wants to constantly let me know what other people think of me. It lures me into reading about myself. At first, things seem really nice and great. My phone shows me lovely things the Internet made about my show or my work. But the phone doesn’t turn off after I see the good things. It stays on, and in my hand, until I scrape further. Then I find out that some people think I have “a scary face” while other people think I’m “just not funny, period.” My phone shows me that I didn’t really get a lot of e-mails over the weekend. My phone directs me to news that is gossipy and awful. Which leads me to . . .

4.  
My phone wants to show me things I shouldn’t see.

I read in a book once the three things that shorten your life are smoking, artificial sweetener, and violent images. I believe this to be true. Violent images are not new, but the immediacy with which we see them is faster than ever. During the horrific Boston bombings, I reached out to my family in Watertown and prayed for those injured. I also went to news websites and was met with pictures of a man with his legs blown off. I was not ready for that. Who ever would be? Certainly not that man, who must now live with the pain and struggle of losing his legs, and also live with the pain and struggle of his image being disseminated in perpetuity. Sure, these sorts of visuals have been around a long time. I saw the R-rated movies on HBO. War photographers documented horrors and published them in magazines and books. But one used to have to go to the library or one’s personal book collection to see Nick Ut’s photograph of the naked South Vietnamese girl running after being severely burned. That picture was accompanied by text. It had context. It was surrounded by other moving pictures that told a similar story. Now we can look at the grotesque while we wait in line at the bank.

Porn is everywhere. I am a fan of porn. It can be a very nice accompaniment to an evening of self-pleasure. It’s as important as a good wine pairing. Lest you think I am using fancy language to avoid revealing intimate porn preferences, please know that I prefer straight porn with occasional threesome scenarios that preferably don’t end in facials. I also like men who seem to like women, and women who seem to be on the top of their porn game. I basically like my porn like my comedy, done by professionals. But I am a forty-three-year-old woman, and so I can handle some of the images and feelings that porn conveys. I had a friend whose seven-year-old kid Googled the word “naked” once. The first picture he saw was a woman with asparagus in her vagina and up her butt. That’s just too much to handle. How are we going to get him to eat his vegetables now?

The Dalai Lama has said that Hollywood is “very bad for [his] eyes and a waste of time.” I understand. Most of what my phone shows me is bad for my eyes. My eyes need a rest, spiritually and literally. My eyes hurt from staring at my phone. But of course they do. My phone wants to kill me.

5.  
My phone wants me to love it more than my children.

Last summer I was sitting next to my youngest son, Abel, on the edge of a swimming pool. He slipped and went under. I jumped in and pulled him out right away. We were both a little scared but thankfully everyone was fine. My phone had been in my back pocket, and my first thought was total triumph that I had chosen my child over my phone. My second thought was complete devastation that my phone had been submerged. I couldn’t Google what to do with a wet phone because my phone was wet, and so I quickly ripped it open and started to dry it with a hair dryer. I used my laptop to get on the Internet, where most sites told me to shove my wet phone in a bag of rice. I had just pulled my little guy out of a pool and I was sweating in my kitchen as I poured rice into a Ziploc bag. I spent the day without my phone, even though I had two other gadgets that allowed me to constantly check my e-mail and texts. I paced around hoping the rice would soak up the water. (It didn’t.) I realized I might have to go out that night without a cell phone. I put my iPad in my purse just in case. I spent the entire dinner reaching for a phantom phone that I didn’t have with me. This is the behavior of a crazy person. Don’t you see what the phone is doing?

6.  
People text and drive and die. People check their e-mails and get hit by trucks. People fall into shopping mall fountains while texting and the security footage is passed around on the Internet and that person dies of embarrassment.

Enough said.

7.  
My phone won’t let me go.

It used to be that when we lost our phones we really did lose them. We had to rebuild our contacts list. We had to send out e-mails telling everyone to send us their contact information again. We didn’t have everything saved and backed up. This gave us all a chance to reset. I am a firm believer that every few years one needs to shake one’s life through a sieve, like a miner in the Yukon. The gold nuggets remain. The rest falls through like the soft earth it is. Losing your contacts was a chance to shake the sieve.

Now everything is backed up on the cloud and you can find your phone if you lose it in a taxi. Don’t you realize it’s only a matter of time before our phones can FIND US?

Our phones have somehow convinced us that they aren’t trying to kill us; rather, they’re trying to protect us. You are a ridiculous person if you are not reachable by phone or e-mail. As a parent you are expected to be constantly available at all times. You are encouraged to provide your children with their own devices. You are expected to monitor those devices, keep up with your children’s technology, and have proper age-appropriate conversations about sexting and trolling, all while the super-nerds create apps that allow you to send a picture that disappears within seconds.

My phone has even gotten its grubby, technological hands on this book. This book is expected to have a big e-book presence. People don’t buy books anymore, they buy e-books. Or maybe they buy both? Either way, it’s very important that this sell as an electronic book. I am supposed to be excited about this. Gone are the days when you sat on your couch and turned pages with Dorito-stained fingers. Gone are the days when you took Henry James on the train and read it in front of cute guys to impress them. Gone are the books stuffed with pressed flowers and handwritten notes and hotel room receipts. For a minute, I wanted this book to be stuffed with things that fell out when you opened it, but my editors said no.

(They actually didn’t, I just didn’t get my shit together in time. It’s a whole thing.)

So let’s review.

My phone is trying to kill me. It is a battery-charged rectangle of disappointment and possibility. It is a technological pacifier. I keep it beside me to make me feel less alone, unless I feel like making myself feel lonely. It can make me feel connected and unloved, ugly and important, sad and vindicated.

So what do we do?

Well first, we go back to the Dalai Lama. He says, “I think technology has really increased human ability. But technology cannot produce compassion.”

Man, that’s good. That’s why he’s the Big Lama.

He goes on to say, “We are the controller of the technology. If we become a slave of technology, then [that’s] not good.”

So we must work hard to not be slaves. We must find a way to fight against complacency and mindless patterns. How do we do it? How does it work in movies when the good guys go up against the robots?

1.  
We try to destroy them.

This is not happening. Technology is moving faster than ever and the Internet is here to stay. Plus, telling someone to not look at bad pictures or comments online is like telling a kid not to eat a cookie. And I’m here to tell you that any actor who says they don’t search for their own name on occasion is a filthy liar.

2.  
We beat them at their own game.

This theory was the impetus for
Smart Girls at the Party
, a Web series and website I created along with my friends Meredith Walker and Amy Miles. We wanted to build a brand that attempted to combat the deluge of shit young people see every day online. It actually all started with the idea of one simple show. It would be a
Charlie Rose
–type interview show for girls that ended in a spontaneous dance party. We wanted to celebrate the curious girl, the nonfamous, the everyday warrior. At first we only knew a few things: we wanted to make content we would have watched when we were younger, and we wanted to end our episodes with a dance party. Spontaneous dance parties are important in my life. I have one in the makeup trailer almost every afternoon on
Parks and Recreation
. Dancing is the great equalizer. It gets people out of their heads and into their bodies. I think if you can dance and be free and not embarrassed you can rule the world.
Smart Girls
is growing and changing, and Meredith and I have big plans to open up camps and create more content and connect with more and more young people. Our hope is to provide something for people who can’t stand to look at another awful website highlighting some fame-obsessed garbage person.

3.  
We believe in people, not machines.

I will finish this book with a little story.

By the way, THANK YOU for reading
Yes Please
all the way to the end. I know how busy you are.

During my writing process, I struggled with my limited relationship with technology. I was forced to buy a new laptop, and I grew to love my tiny MacBook Air with my badass black cover and UCB sticker on the front. It has traveled with me for over a year and a half as I have pretended to work on this book all across America. Recently I flew to San Francisco, to shoot the finale of our sixth season of
Parks and Recreation.

Life is endings and beginnings. Pema Chödrön says we are constantly being “thrown out of the nest.”

It can be hard, this life. Beautiful too. Mine is beautiful, mostly. Lucky me.

I arrived in San Francisco with that rare combination of sadness and joy. There should be a name for that feeling. Maybe it’s “intimacy.” Either way, I had a wonderful time shooting the show and the shit with a cast of people I have grown to love like family. After two days, I reached into my bag to pull out my laptop and work on a piece for the book. The laptop was nowhere to be found. My heart sank. I assumed it had been stolen. Then I had the terrible memory of putting it in a separate tray in the security line. I was tired the morning I flew to San Francisco. I fly a lot, and it can wear you down. I opted out of the X-ray machine, because I was just getting tired of being zapped with rays that nobody could tell me were safe. I mean, if my phone is trying to kill me then that crazy X-ray machine at airport security is a straight-up assassin. I asked for a pat-down. It was nice, actually. A sweet woman and I chatted as she touched me. I didn’t mind. It felt human. She told me she loved me in
Baby Mama
. I went on my way, but because of the small change in my routine, I had left my laptop at LAX security forty-eight hours before.