Chelsea Handler - Are You There, Vodka, It's Me Chelsea

My expression remained the same as I responded, “In my apartment!”

Aubrey was too horrified by her gift to be paying attention to all the commotion at the table. Lydia’s composure had long since vanished and she was now vacillating between snorting and violently shaking. Jen has a quieter laugh but had her head in her hands with her shoulders bouncing up and down. I had my drink in between my legs and was trying to redirect the urine that was seeping its way out of my vagina. Six had no idea what was going on, and it was taking Ivory even longer to connect the dots.

“Did somebody already play this?” Aubrey asked as she emptied the mismatched pieces in their little plastic bags that were no longer sealed. That’s when Ivory’s mouth opened.

I tasted blood in my mouth from biting my lip so hard, but had to retain composure. What if blood just starts spilling out of my mouth? I thought. I thought of the scene in Million Dollar Baby where Hilary Swank chews up her own tongue trying to kill herself and envisioned Clint Eastwood coming over to my table and telling me I was his “Baklava” or whatever the hell he called her in that movie.

“What is so funny?” Aubrey asked, looking at Lydia, who was face-to-face with the wall next to her, slapping her hands against it.

Any normal person at this point would be completely disgusted by our behavior. Not Aubrey. She was so wrapped up in her own bubble of delusion that the next thing out of her mouth after seeing each one of us laughing hysterically was, “Who wants to make a toast?” Before anyone responded, Aubrey interrupted herself and stood up.

“I just want to say (long, dramatic pause)…that without any blood relatives at the table, I want everyone here to know that this has been the single most meaningful birthday of my life. I am the type of person that will remember this for the rest of my life (another long, dramatic pause, this time with tears)…I want you to know that when I get my inheritance , and my family, who have caused me nothing but pain…”

“We’re your family now,” Ivory interrupted, and got up to give Aubrey a hug.

I stood up. “Oh, Chelsea, that’s sweet, you want to go next?” Aubrey asked.

“No, I just need to use the bathroom.” I grabbed my things and went to the bathroom. After I was done, I headed straight out the back door, around the front of the restaurant, got in my car, and drove home.

The next morning around 9 a.m. I was checking my e-mail when Lydia walked through the door looking haggard. “Thanks a lot for leaving last night, asshole. I had to sleep over at Aubrey’s house with that girl Six. Aubrey ended up crying all night long and telling us it wasn’t even her birthday. And then she tried to get us all to take a bath together.”

“What?”

“Yeah, Ivory and Jen were so pissed. They both got up and made toasts. Then three hours later we ended up at Formosa, where she reveals that she’s actually thirty-six and has no brothers and sisters. They both said they were going to the bathroom and left me there. Ivory took the game back. She said she’d rather give it away to an orphan.”

“I can’t believe that, what a lunatic!” I said.

“I know. Can you imagine lying about having brothers and sisters? She’s a sociopath who-”

“No,” I interrupted. “I can’t believe Ivory thinks Rehab is an appropriate game for an orphan.”

“I’m going to bed,” she said, and walked into her room.

I sat at my computer, elated. It turned out that there was someone out there who was even more mentally unstable than me. And that special someone’s name was Aubrey.

It was a Friday morning and I was on MySpace exchanging messages with a guy who had asked me to go to dinner. My immediate response was, “How big is your penis?” His return message was, “I’ve never had any formal complaints.”

This made me laugh out loud. As if when women encounter a small penis, we wake up first thing the next morning and lodge a formal grievance with the LAPD. I consider myself to be a very obnoxious person, but even I would never tell a guy that he has a small penis.

Men don’t seem to understand that, under no circumstances, will we confront them on this issue. That would be on par with telling a girl she has a smelly vagina, which, by the way, is something I have once been told by a woman, but only during a particularly disturbing massage. Most men would never tell a girl her Pikachu smells like a crab cake. It’s just not done. But they would have no qualms telling their guy friends. Similarly, if you’re a guy and you pull your pants down, and the girl you’re with immediately starts text messaging her friends, you have a small penis.

After I decided to never meet this person in public, I looked down at my gut. My body had really taken a turn for the worse, and the surprise party I was throwing for my thirtieth birthday was three weeks away. I knew I wasn’t out-and-out fat, and I don’t think anyone would have described me as a heifer, but there was definitely some toning up needed. It had gotten to the point that the only body parts I felt comfortable exposing in public were my forearms.

Everything else seemed to be in some state of disrepair, especially my abdomen, which somehow managed to divide itself into three sections when I was sitting cross-legged. Something had to be done, so I closed MySpace and Googled the word “fatass.”

While looking at a website for liposuction, I learned that it was a six-to eight-week recovery period, the clincher being that, during that time, I would under no circumstances be able to use street drugs. Obviously I had to think of a more realistic approach.

I decided to call a nutritionist my friend Lydia had used, and set up an appointment for Monday. He asked me to keep a food journal of everything I ate over the weekend. I decided once and for all to commit to eating healthy. I have always worked out, but my diet has never been the best, and I knew things were only going to go downhill after thirty. This was my chance to make a change, and I made a commitment to be completely honest about what I was eating. Unfortunately, that Sunday I had to go to a good friend’s baby shower, where there was an abundance of unhealthy food. When I met with Matt, the nutritionist, on Monday morning, I handed him the following list:

FRIDAY

Breakfast:scrambled egg whites with spinach and jack cheese

Lunch:chicken Caesar salad

Dinner:2 crab enchiladas and 2 margaritas

SATURDAY

Breakfast:Zone bar

Lunch:turkey sandwich with cheddar and mayo

Dinner:filet mignon with mashed potatoes, 3 Ketel One and cranberries

SUNDAY

Friend’s baby shower

17 jalapeño poppers

1 brick of cheddar cheese/12 whole wheat crackers

14 chicken wings/no bleu cheese dressing

1 bagel with low-fat cream cheese

34 strawberries

8 Bloody Marys

14 pigs in blankets

I thought I had made some healthy choices on Friday and Saturday. Obviously Sunday was a complete disaster, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being a little proud of the will power I demonstrated when opting for the whole-wheat crackers to go with my brick of cheddar cheese.

I must have repeated that I had been at my friend’s baby shower seven times, and the phrase “I don’t normally eat like that” at least four times. I could tell the nutritionist was repulsed, but I explained to him emphatically that I was ready to commit to being a healthy eater, and that jalapeño poppers were a thing of the past. “I wanted to go out with a bang,” I told him, staring at my stomach with my head hanging down.

He explained to me what clean eating was and had a whole diagram with charts, percentages, a pointer, and a blackboard. The whole presentation was no different than what you’d see on an episode of CSI: Miami.