yes please(27)

The girls were a tough bunch as well. I was pushed into a locker and punched by a cheerleader. One girl pulled my hair at lunch because she thought I was “stuck up.” It was bad to be “stuck up.” It was also bad to be a “slut” or a “prude” or a “dexter” or a “fag.” There were no openly gay kids in my high school. My school had a quiet hum of racism and homophobia that kept all of that disclosure far away. Every year the girls would have a football game called the Powder Puff. The girls would play tackle football on a cold high school field while the boys dressed as cheerleaders and shouted misogynist things at everybody. It was as wonderful as it sounds. I played safety and tried to talk my way out of getting beat up. I saw a girl hike the ball and then just go over and punch someone in the nose. There was so much hate and hair spray flying. Black eyes were common. I started to learn that as much as I chased adventure, I had little interest in the physical pain that came with it. I also realized I didn’t like to be scared or out of control.

And then Keri’s mom, Ginny, got cancer.

Suddenly the world was small and tight. Our parents could get sick and our pretend games felt a million miles away. The inevitability of death became a new nightmare. I don’t remember when I first heard of Keri’s mom getting sick, but it was in that way young children receive news, a watered-down fashion that is a combination of investigating and straight-up eavesdropping. I remember her children pleading with her to stop smoking, and stealing her cigarettes from her purse and throwing them in the garbage. I remember her daughters spending days lying in her bed with her as her cancer spread from her brain to the rest of her body. I remember their dad and her husband, Mike, seeming very lost but also very strong. I also remember my incredible paralysis through the whole thing. All of my practice chasing bad guys did not add up to much. Cancer was too scary and too real, and I wanted the whole thing to go away. I was in high school when Ginny died, and I didn’t do a very good job of being there for my friend. I had little experience with death and did that classic thing of thinking I should just leave everyone alone and wait for the sad parties to reach out when they needed help.

Now that I am older life seems full of things to worry about. Sometimes I search for bad news as if reading the details will protect me somehow. I call it tragedy porn. I will fill myself up with every horrible detail about the latest horrible event and quote it back to people like some bad-news know-it-all. Remember that Austrian dad Josef Fritzl who raped his daughter and kept her and her kids in the basement for twenty-four years? I do, because I spent many nights reading every horrible specific fact about it and talking about it to everyone who would listen, until one day Seth Meyers gently reminded me that I worked at Saturday Night Live and it was a comedy show and maybe I was bumming everybody out. At the end of the year the “Update” team surprised me with a framed copy of an Entertainment Weekly cover Seth and I had posed for. They replaced Seth’s face with Josef Fritzl’s. I am smiling and pulling at his tie. This is what it is like to work in comedy. Hilarious and horrifying.

Speaking of horrifying, I still troll the Internet for terrible stories. I see an awful headline and try not to click it. I often can’t believe how hard it is not to read. For a while I was obsessed with a cable show called I Survived . . . I was never very interested in the people who were attacked by mountain lions while hiking or the dummies who crashed their single-engine airplanes. Those stories seemed like foolish risk-taking scenarios I could successfully avoid by never going outside. No, I would watch the horrible pieces on women who had been assaulted and left for dead. First-person accounts of people being attacked by strangers or stabbed by boyfriends. This is the ultimate narcissistic white-girl game. I would picture how I would handle the attack differently. Or the same. Inevitably, I’d think about my own death, which next to staring at your face in a magnifying mirror is probably the worst thing you can do for yourself. The ambulance-chasing aspect combined with the Monday-morning quarterbacking of it all is the luxury afforded to those of us left untouched by trauma. Sometimes I would use these tragedy-porn shows to unlock deep feelings or cut through the numbness. I would read terrible stories to punish myself for my lucky life. Some real deep Irish Catholic shit. Either way, it was all gross and all bad for my health. I remember being depressed after my second boy, Abel, was born. I couldn’t lose weight and I couldn’t stop working. One evening, Will tried to gently point out that drinking a bottle of wine by myself while I watched Oprah on DVR probably wasn’t the best way to feel better. I remember arguing with him that these shows didn’t make me feel sad. They were real. They were emotional. They were what I needed to feel better. Then Oprah’s show came on and she announced the topic was African baby rape. I was forced to admit perhaps it was time for a break.

Let’s not end on African baby rape (or start with it, for that matter). Let’s end by pointing out all the positive ways you can scare yourself and feel alive. You can tell someone you love them first. You can try to speak only the truth for a whole week. You can jump out of an airplane or spend Christmas Day all by your lonesome. You can help people who need help and fight real bad guys. You can dance fast or take an improv class or do one of those Ironman things. Adventure and danger can be good for your heart and soul. Violence and desperation are brutal things to search out. Why search out the horror? It’s around us in real ways every day. I’m talking to you, the people who made that movie The Human Centipede. No more Human Centipede movies please. No more movies about people’s mouths being sewn onto people’s butts. The whole idea of making and watching a movie like that makes me want to take a ten-year nap.