Take Me Back to Manhattan

"Are you FREAKING KIDDING ME???? WHO THE HELL IS THIS???"

I show it to my husband, who is not on my team. I mean, in life he's on my team, but he's not on my Celebrity team. (ed note: author is tired hence making cheesy analogies.) He starts to laugh immediately. Hysterically and loud. My husband has one of those loud, infectious, contagious laughs. One of the things I love most about him. BUT NOT IN THIS MOMENT. I am convinced the fact that he is laughing so hard proves my point that Mindy Cohen is NOT a celebrity.

Before I can be any more of a sore sport (what an awful expression. but honestly, I can't think of anything better to call myself in this moment besides BAD LOSER which will be reserved for later in this post...) our time is up. We got 0. That's ZERO in case you weren't sure. I am pissed. It seems like everyone else had easy celebrities - superstars. Steve Carrell, Julia Roberts, Katherine Heigl. Meanwhile, we had Frankie Muniz and Mindy Cohen (who, by the way, was Natalie on Facts of Life, just in case you, like me, had NO FUCKING CLUE.)

We get into round 2 and the other teams are racking up the points...Barack Obama, Christina Aguilera, Oprah...then it comes to us. You have to love my partner who doesn't care that the rules say you can't pass...she just does it anyhow. About 10 papers come out of the bowl and she just throws them down and grabs another one. It's hysterical. Until she comes to one that she thinks she can give a clue for:

"Oooooh. Oh. The Hills! He's on the Hills."

That was it. That was the straw that broke this camel's back. Because - and I know some of you love this show and everyone is entitled to their own opinion...but I am adamantly against The Hills. I hate this crap. No - I've never seen more than five minutes of it...but I hate it nonetheless. I hate that these idiots are being called "celebrities" even though they have no talent and create drama in their lives and are now making millions of dollars and have clothing labels and record deals when there are seriously talented people out there working their asses off to make it. I hate that these are the people that teen girls in our country aspire to be like.

Wow. Who knew I was SO angry about The Hills? The point is...I DON'T KNOW HIM IF HE'S ON THE HILLS. Sadly, this is not entirely true. I would have to live under a rock not to be aware of these people named Heidi and Lauren and Spencer. But I definitely DO NOT know their last names. Which I would need to know if I were going to get a point for it in Celebrity.

Honestly, I don't know what happened next. Except that I turned into the POOREST of poor losers. If there was a club for poor losers, I would have been president. Our time ran out, we once again had zero points, and I was not having fun. I don't know what happened to me. I'm telling you - it was totally a Dr. Jekyll Mr. Hyde.

My husband tried to get me to laugh at myself, but to no avail. If I had been able to take a deep breath and burst out laughing as I am doing at this moment as I am writing this, everything would have been ok. If I could have seen that in that moment, I was giving Heidi and Spencer and Lauren a run for their money in the moron department, then it would have been pretty funny.

But I was stuck.

I retreated to the kitchen to "check on dessert" but really, it was to escape from the moment. I stood there having this out of body experience. It was like I was looking down on myself wondering who this insane person was, why she was behaving like a raving lunatic over a game of Celebrity. I knew in my head that I was being crrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazzzzzzzzy, but I could NOT get myself out of it. I was embarrassed and didn't know how to go back and press rewind and make it all go away. Because seriously - I threw a CONNIPTION FIT. Over Celebrity.

And part of what was keeping me stuck was the fact that I felt I had a point. The rules hadn't been clearly laid out to begin with - we were playing with different sets of them. It seemed that at every turn, our team was being thrown a curve ball that the other teams had managed to avoid simply by pulling up the names of people that actually WERE celebrities. But honestly? WHO. REALLY. CARES. My point was pretty weak. Especially given that it pertained to a GAME. And it was definitely not worth taking a stand over.

I haven't really stopped thinking about last night. I hate that it happened. I hate that I behaved that way. In front of other people. I think I get stuck in this place more than I'd like. Rarely are my antics displayed in front of an entire room of guests. But often, I argue the point in my head to death. At times, I argue it - although in a calmer, more appropriate way - with other people. I get stubborn. I want others to see my point of view, all the while forgetting that they have one too. And that perhaps, if I'd just take a deep breath and a step back, then maybe I could see the big picture rather than just the small point that my view creates in it. Lately, I've been forced to let go of my point. And you know what? Things get easier when that happens. It's a huge relief. I'm not trying so hard to be seen and heard. I'm not fighting my point so much, but rather learning about someone else's perspective or perhaps just seeing things through different colored glasses. I've been slowly more and more aware that listening is a true art form and that my point really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. But with a simple game of Celebrity, it all went to hell.

Last night, the thing that I couldn't stop thinking about was why I couldn't laugh at myself. Why I couldn't forgive myself for doing something that was yes - sort of stupid- but really no big deal. Because everyone else was over it while I sat in the kitchen not forgiving myself and feeling embarrassed and having absolutely no ability to just let it go. A few years ago I probably would have let it ruin my night, in turn helping to make everyone else's evening less than stellar. But instead, I actually listened to my husband (who had been trying to help me see the light - or the laughter - so to speak...) and everything turned out OK. I came in and apologized for the person that had temporarily invaded my body, and we played a couple of rounds of Taboo before we ate some fabulous berry cobbler and vanilla ice cream. Even if it was a little late in the game (no pun intended), I still managed to pick myself up by the bootstraps and tell everyone inside that they could, indeed, make fun of me for that moment for the rest of our lives. And incidentally, while my account of this here sounds like it took about an hour, I was actually only out of the room for about 10 minutes before I saw the error of my ways.

The irony of it all is that the berry cobbler that got dropped on my white sofa didn't faze me at all. Nope. I was totally cool - got a Tide pen and a little water and said that a house that doesn't feel lived in is simply a house, not a home. And I meant it.

They say the first step is admitting you have a problem.