Everything's Trash, But It's Okay Read online

  I snuck a burrito bowl from Chipotle into the movie theater and made it everyone’s responsibility during Creed to be a lookout in an after-school special and make sure I didn’t get busted by one of the ushers.

  When I was behind on my student loans and the American Student Assistance would call me, I’d say, “Now’s not a good time to chat.” They’d ask when they could call back and I’d pretend to be earnest and give them a time, knowing damn well I wasn’t going to pick up my phone at 4:45 P.M.

  Even though The Bachelor and The Bachelorette burn my toast with their antifeminist ignorance, I watched The Bachelorette when they cast their first black bachelorette, Rachel Lindsay, and I thought, Ooooooh, this must’ve been what some white women went through when they chose race over gender and voted for Trump. Literally. Not. The. Same. Thing.

  I had my sister-in-law, who lives in Cleveland, buy and mail me “rosé all day” white slip-on flats from DSW that I barely wear because white shoes are a mofo to keep clean.

  When I started my period while on a working vacation on Vieques Island and only had two pads, I called Olga, my hotel’s concierge, and she told me they only had tampons, which I’ve never used because I’m scared of getting toxic shock syndrome after leaving the tamp-tamp inside me for too long.* Anyway, she offered to call me a cab to take me to a convenience store about fifteen minutes away. I hard-passed on this suggestion and thought to myself, Well, I guess I’ll give this free-bleed thing a spin.* Free bleeding is generally considered a feminist move, but in my case, it was just unbridled laziness. I didn’t feel like going through the trouble of putting on pants, which makes me wonder: Is this what parenthood is? Something inconvenient happens with your kid and you must fight all urges to be like, “Peace out, dawg,” and instead help them? Like if my kid came to me and said, “Mom, I need new shoes for school and the mall closes in thirty minutes,” I can’t respond with, “Okay, but I need to read this InStyle magazine profile about some white lady in Marrakesh—YOU KNOW, A PLACE I CAN’T AFFORD TO VISIT BECAUSE I HAD YOUR ASS—doing a fashion diary and posing next to elephants that are like, ‘Bish, why you have that goofy AF smile on your face when the back of my knees are like ashy celery?’” Point is, because I didn’t want to leave my hotel room, I free-bled for two days, which were my super light days, so it was less a typical menstruation sitch and more like a few drops from a glass of V8 Splash spilling on a kitchen counter. Then on day three, I called Olga, she gave me one pad from her personal stash, and I went to the convenience store.

  THE FACT THAT I MADE THAT STUPID “SPRAY AND PRAY” SEX COMMENT WHEN I KNOW MY PARENTS ARE GOING TO READ THIS BOOK BECAUSE I WAS HOPING THE JOKE WOULD MAKE READERS LAF (TYPO, BUT I’M LEAVING IT, THUS MAKING THIS TRASH WITHIN TRASH. #INCEPTION).

  See? I can be garbage! And it’s okay. Because guess what? Everyone is garbage. Everyone. I don’t care how great or altruistic or insanely talented a person is, there is something (or, if we’re being honest here, some things) absolutely ridiculous that they do, think, feel, or say. Repeat after me: No one on this planet can completely rid themselves of their trash ways. Meaning you, me, your parents, the local nun, J. R. R. Tolkien, Selena (both Quintanilla-Pérez and Gomez), Langston Hughes, your auntie, all your cousins (but you already knew that tho), the entire bobsled team from Cool Runnings, the lunch waitstaff at Mae Mae Café who told me after I asked for the egg on my avocado toast to be scrambled instead of fried that they can only scramble eggs in the morning (so ig), Galileo Galilei, your boyfriend or girlfriend/husband or wife/side pieces obvs, manufacturers who make it impossible to open scissors packages unless you already own a pair of scissors, Lucy Liu, the movie To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (J/K, it is the most perfect movie that ever movied), poet Gwendolyn Brooks, Martin Luther King Jr., and the founder of the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital (we don’t know their life). All of them have been low-key trash from time to time. Period. End of subject. No rebuttal required.

  At this point, you’re probably wondering, “Um, great . . . is that it? Everyone sucks or has tons of moments of suckery? Where’s the moment of hope, the ‘But It’s Okay’ that’s in the book title? You know, something positive?” Right, right, right. Well, here’s the thing. I think admitting to our “trashery” is a positive because it helps us see ourselves more clearly and makes it a liiiittle bit easier to deal with the Major Trash that’s the world right now.

  In summation: We have a president who proclaims that women need to dress like “women,” meaning dressing for the visual consumption of straight dudes; who behaves as though all African-Americans live in the inner city; who endorsed Republican and alleged child molester Roy Moore during his 2017 campaign to become Alabama’s newest senator; and who emboldened neo-Nazis to be out, loud, and proud in a way these groups haven’t been in quite some time in America. The CDC aka the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently revealed that drug overdoses involving heroin tripled from 2010 to 2015. The latest version of North Carolina’s bathroom bill completely fails to address which bathrooms trans people can use, thus making it impossible for them to feel safe using public restrooms. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which measures skill levels in reading, math, and science every three years among fifteen-year-olds from dozens of developed and developing nations, has, as of 2015, concluded that the US placed fortieth out of seventy-one countries in math and twenty-fifth in science. Women’s reproductive rights are still a contentious battle, as documented by that 2017 viral pic of Vice President Mike Pence and a sea of dusty-ass, evil-ass, and old-ass white dudes discussing whether maternity care should be covered by insurance companies. Jobs for blue-collar workers are drying up and have been for a long time, and some of us (myself included) have unfairly ignored this problem for far too long. According to the Center for American Progress Action Fund, one-third of Congress (182 politicians, to be exact) are climate change deniers, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senator Marco Rubio; meanwhile, the Honey Nut Cheerios bee is like, “Every day, I’m legit buzzing the Bone Thugs-N-Harmony ‘Tha Crossroads’ melody because my family is dying thanks to humans, but a’ight, keep pretending Earth isn’t on life support.” And the list goes on and on. I don’t know about you, but I find this amount of mess to be overwhelming and depressing AF.

  Still, not all is lost. Far from it. For starters, all we need to do is look at history and remember that if humanity could survive the worst atrocities—famine, slavery, the Holocaust, natural disasters, corrupt political systems, inequality, Christopher Columbus, etc.—and still be here, then there’s hope. We are stronger, smarter, and braver than we realize, and when we’re deep in the weeds, we can override our trash instincts and help advance society further. And even in those moments when it appears that we’ve made less than honorable decisions (ahem, the election of Donald Drumpf), the pushback (the 2017 Women’s March) has, time and time again, served as a reminder that everything will be okay. OKAY. I know that folks who live in the middle-class-and-above luxury of America and other first world countries and whose daily diet includes therapy and self-help books (I myself love me a good self-help book) and who have been raised on the notion of “living your best life” like Oprah has taught us might view the word “okay” as not promising. But life is fucking hard. Extremely hard for most. And that’s why, to me, “okay” is not a state of settling (aka ordering Sprite at Wahlburgers, but all they have is Fresca and you’re like, “Sure, I guess”—see also: dining at Wahlburgers in the first place); “okay” is a state of acceptance and then pushing forward (aka coming to terms with the fact that you were sober when eating at Wahlburgers, analyzing everything in your life that led up to that moment, and thinking to yourself, I’m going back to school, I’m joining a gym, I’m completing my Alicia Keys music catalogue once and for all, or whatever gets you back on the right track in life). In all seriousness, to me
, waking up every day and not only contending with our baser instincts but also dealing with the multitude of curveballs that life throws our way and coming out the other side, perhaps a little dinged up but tougher and smarter and ultimately okay, is good. In fact, okay is great. Better yet, okay is for closers.

  And I don’t know about you, but I consider myself a closer. I’ve successfully talked (in Barack Obama’s hypercorrect pronunciation) a karaoke staff into letting my friends and I have an extra half hour so we can do our rendition of Biggie’s “Hypnotize”; I’ve gotten free Wi-Fi at a swanky hotel just because I treated the employees like humans and not indentured servants; and on more than one occasion, I’ve made a sick day 1000 percent more bearable by lunging to my Spectrum remote in time to press the start over button before the option went away so I could watch old reruns of America’s Next Top Model from the beginning. To put this in perspective, I’ve never seen Schindler’s List, but I’ve devoured seas three of ANTM no less than eight times. If my eyeballs could #Unsubscribe from my body, they would. In all seriousness, I know how to get ish done and motherfreakin’ close. I’m sure you have your own coming-through-in-a-clutch moments that you use to remind yourself of your awesomeness. I’m also sure that you’re nowhere near done closing on the regs, nor finished with the everlasting journey of accepting and dealing with your own trash as well as others’. I know I’m not.

  I’m still battling self-doubt, trifling dudes, sexism in the workplace, people who hold up the line because they take forever to figure out what kind of latte they want, internet trolls, the barrage of depressing political news, homophobia and transphobia my friends and strangers are on the receiving end of, and the fact that I believe that “showering on the weekends should be optional AF for single people” falls under the umbrella of “civil liberties.” Clearly there’s so. Much. Trash. To. Contend. With. But all of it takes a back seat to the biggest problem of the day: getting this book into Viola Davis’s hands so she’ll read it and want to meet me. All right, all right, I should have written “the biggest problem of my day.” Oops. But also I’m medium-key garbage, so you should’ve expected that I would pull some monkey mess like this.

  Anyway. Why Viola Davis? Well, she’s an acting genius, insanely gorgeous, and I love her. But my mom, Octavia? She loves her. I can’t blame her. My mom is also a badass, so this is merely real recognizing real. And because my career in entertainment as a podcast queen, writer, and performer has taken off since I started ten years ago, I occasionally brush shoulders with the A-list. As a result, my mom has only one thing on her mind. Her Hoda Kotb–esque follow-up query to whatever career news I share is forever “Have you met Viola Davis yet?”

  This is one of my favorite things about black parents, besides watching them cuss out their kids in public and witnessing the resulting fallout on their child’s face. (Truly, getting read to filth in a Burlington Coat Factory will really make you have a mini existential crisis.) But getting back to my original point: Black parents typically have five to seven celebrities that they are impressed with—and this roster of celebs will never ever change, mind you, for as long as the parents live—and all the other famous people? The. Parentals. Could. Not. Give. Less. Of. A. Fuck. About.

  Exhibits A to D of My Mom’s Not-Giving-a-Fuckness

  I worked with Kevin Bacon on the Amazon show I Love Dick, and by “worked with,” I mean I had one scene with him where his character said two words to me and I tried not to vomit, smile hugely, or blurt out, “MOTHERFUCKING FOOTLOOSE IS TALKING TO ME!” I told my mom about being on set with K. Bake and she didn’t care.

  Jon Hamm, who is in the running to be America’s Next Top Zaddy,* did the 2 Dope Queens podcast I have with Jessica Williams, and he and I crowd-surfed while holding hands like this was the fucking end of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Sex and the City, and Roots all rolled into one. I texted video proof of this sexcellent moment to my mom. No gahtdamn reply. A month later, I worked an event Jon attended and chatted with him briefly. I mentioned this to Octavia, and she goes, “By any chance, did you bump into Viola Davis?”

  I recently had the extreme privilege and pleasure of interviewing Tom Hanks for my other podcast, an interview talk show called Sooo Many White Guys, and he was a good sport and recorded the outgoing message on my voicemail. My mom’s response? “But what about Viola Davis?”

  I was a guest on a talk show to promote my previous book, and my parents flew out to attend the taping. Before we arrived to set, I was gabbing with the parental units about dream run-ins at the show and I said, “It’d be insane if Beyoncé was here. I mean, she never does TV, but it would be cool to be in the same building as her.” My mom responded, “I wouldn’t even say hi to her.”

  You did not misread. Octavia Robinson’s reaction to Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter is not an ugly-cry nor a squeal nor to ask for a picture. My mom’s instinct is to ignore her like the two of them are a WASP couple midargument on Big Little Lies: just nothing but chunky knits and silent rage.

  To be clear, there is no backstory. It’s not like Yoncé and my mom were at Trader Joe’s one time and Bey snagged the last Amy’s Thai Red Curry frozen meal. Nor did Beyoncé cut her in line at Starbucks and pretend like she didn’t feel my mom staring her the hell down. And finally, no, it’s not like Beyoncé and my mom are in the same baking club and B showed up with some dope-looking pies and casually said, “Oh, yeah, it’s this new recipe my friend Patti let me borrow,” and locked eyes with my mom real hard on the “my friend Patti” line to make it clear she’s talking about Patti LaBelle, my mom’s all-time favorite singer. And once everyone else in the club finished oohing and aahing at the pies, my mom showed her dessert, which was vegan oatmeal raisin bars, and she was met with some weak encouragement like she’s on Family Feud and just gave an asinine answer.

  My mom and Beyoncé have never met. There is no rivalry. It’s just that Queen Bey did not make the cut of celebrities that my mom gives an eff about. So who did make the cut? Oprah, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, Bruce Willis, The Rock, Patti LaBelle, and, of course, Viola Davis. So, dear reader, how about we make a deal? Throughout this book, let’s acknowledge all the trash that’s surrounding us (literal litter and also the state of American politics) and accept the trashery within ourselves that we cannot change (the way I eat chips, you would think a Sonos surround-sound system was installed in my molars) while fixing the garbage that can and should be changed (e.g., FaceTiming in public without headphones on so everyone can hear your friend regaling you with a story about her noisy neighbors like it’s a Greek tragedy), and then please put in your prayer requests that I meet Viola Davis or, better yet, my mom and I meet Viola Davis together. In the meantime, let’s do a search to unearth more Justin-Trudeau-looking-fondly-at-Barack-Obama pics because that ish is #Goals for whomever I marry. Sure, compatibility, sharing same values, attraction, and emotionally and financially supporting each other matters greatly in a marriage, blah, blah, blah. Whatever. If my future husb looks at me the way Trudeau stays looking at Obama, we won’t have any problems. If not, there will be some dreadheaded n***** in the lobby, waiting on bae. #ChanceTheRapperReference.

  I Was a Size 12 Once for Like Twenty-Seven Minutes

  Since I was fourteen, my brain has been consumed with all the ways my body is not good enough, meaning not attractive to straight dudes and/or failing to meet fashion-industry standards. Even now, at thirty-four, and with a deeper understanding of how we’ve been conditioned to have unhealthy relationships with our bodies, I still remember what I weighed eight years ago as if that’s important information. If you were to throw out a year at me, I could, without fail, tell you what size I wore. Ugh. Every day, I struggle not only with rewiring my brain to not equate self-worth with how my body looks but also with not letting men and clothing companies define my own gaze. But because the ole noggin has been busy accruing its ten thousand hours and then some i
n mentally Hadoukening me via negging about my physical appearance, there’s so much knowledge I don’t possess, and in its place a big chunk is dedicated to straight-male societal approval, but more on that later. First, I have to address the lack of information in my brain.

  Remember when Mariah Carey shaded Jennifer Lopez with the now legendary “I don’t know her” comment when we all know these beige beauties are on a first-, middle-, and last-name basis? Well, that’s my response to everyday stuff because I (black-girl-in-an-argument hand-clap) literally (black-girl-in-an-argument hand-clap) don’t (black-girl-in-an-argument hand-clap) know (black-girl-in-an-argument hand-clap) shit (black-girl-in-an-argument hand-clap): The metric system? I don’t know her. Thirty-three percent of the names of former US presidents? I don’t know her. Is saying “Candyman” five times in the mirror with the lights turned off just a ruse to scare the chillrens, or is it real AF? I don’t know her, and I damn sure ain’t going to test her, because living is one of my top three favorite things to do. What are the other two? Glad you asked: texting friends pictures of U2 and hanging with my niece and nephew. Anyway, as I was saying, women are conditioned to waste hours, days, weeks, months (although, truth be told, it’s most likely years) doubting, undermining, and ultimately hating parts, if not all, of themselves based solely on “problems” with their bodies that can be solved by buying products from an industry that invented these problems in the first place. How fucking convenient. And when all is said and done, what is the prize for this self-torture? Fitting neatly within society’s destructive narrative about the female body. Hmm, I don’t know about you, but this endeavor seems like my checking account after I pay rent aka it’s empty as hell. Yet here most women are with very complicated, time-consuming, and counterproductive relationships with their bodies, which helps explain why, at times, especially for me, straight men’s opinions about us seem to matter as much as, if not more than, our own. Ooof. That last bit might be a tad scary to own up to, but it has certainly been true for me in the past.