Is Everyone Hanging Out without Me - by Mindy Kaling

Published:

Is Everyone Hanging Out without Me - by Mindy Kaling

Read: 2025-01-19

Recommend: 4/10

It’s an okay book, but it did teach me to start helping in the kitchen without asking and to stop claiming I’m ‘bad with names.’

Notes

Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:

  1. I don’t think it should be socially acceptable for people to say they are “bad with names.” No one is bad with names. That is not a real thing. Not knowing people’s names isn’t a neurological condition; it’s a choice. You choose not to make learning people’s names a priority. It’s like saying, “Hey, a disclaimer about me: I’m rude.” For heaven’s sake, if you don’t know someone’s name, just pretend you do. Do that thing everyone else does, where you vaguely say, “Nice to see you!” and make weak eye contact.

  2. I think he felt he had gone out of his way to give me some valuable advice and I had chosen not to follow it, therefore insulting him.

  3. Teenage girls, please don’t worry about being super popular in high school, or being the best actress in high school, or the best athlete. Not only do people not care about any of that the second you graduate, but when you get older, if you reference your successes in high school too much, it actually makes you look kind of pitiful, like some babbling old Tennessee Williams character with nothing else going on in her current life. What I’ve noticed is that almost no one who was a big star in high school is also big star later in life. For us overlooked kids, it’s so wonderfully fair.

  4. The job of comedy writer is essentially to sit and have funny conversations about hypothetical situations, and you are rewarded for originality of detail. It is exhilarating, and I didn’t want it to stop. I soon started dreading the weekends, because weekends meant saying good-bye to this creative, cheerful atmosphere.

  5. I RECENTLY LEARNED that an “Irish exit” is when you leave a party without telling anyone (and presumably it is because you are too drunk to form words). A “French exit” is when you leave a party early without saying good-bye to anyone or paying your share of the bill and maybe you are also drunk.

  6. Avoid asking if someone needs help in a kitchen or at a party, just start helping.

  7. So I really don’t understand why men shave or wax their chests. I find it so unnecessary. I mean, I sort of get it if you’re a professional swimmer because each hair follicle adds a second to your time or something, but it’s every single male actor in Hollywood. When I turn on an hour-long drama and all I see are these forty-year-old men with hairless chests, I feel slightly nauseated. Why? For the same reason one might feel nauseated by a woman with too many cosmetic injectables in her face: it just shows so much icky effort to conform to some arbitrary beauty standard.

  8. As my mom has said, when one person is unhappy, it usually means two people are unhappy but that one has not come to terms with it yet.