Unqualified Read online

  4. ATHLETE

  Not necessarily because they cheat, which I know is what you’re thinking. But because if they’re getting older or there’s a new recruit or they have massive injuries, you have to spend a lot of time stroking their ego. “Honey, don’t you worry about Brock. I’m sure he’ll tear his ACL too.” After a bad game, you have to be so emotionally supportive, and the exhaustion will just burn you out. Plus, during the season, what are they going to have left to give you?

  5. CHEF

  I know, it sounds like a good idea. They’ll cook for you. I get it. That’s what I call the Chef Trap. Don’t fall for it. As someone who has dated a chef zero times, I can tell you that the culture of the kitchen might not translate to relationships. It’s hot and incredibly stressful, and, as I know from experience watching Hell’s Kitchen, temper is encouraged. If people have a hot temper at work, I just don’t think they can avoid bringing it home. And he probably gets home at three thirty in the morning.

  6. THERAPIST

  I haven’t been to much therapy at all. It terrifies me. Growing up, my parents were of the belief that if a person is in therapy, that was true validation that they had a mental illness. But in LA, you’re the person with the mental illness if you’re not in therapy. So I went once, and the therapist asked me where I see myself in ten years. “I’d like to live in Northern California in a house with a lot of land and plants and maybe an amphitheater to put on plays,” I said.

  He responded, “Do you realize that in that explanation you didn’t mention your son once?” I wanted to throw something at him. Um, that’s why I want to go there, dick, to be with my son and give him everything I wanted as a kid. And would you ever say that to a man? Question his commitment to fatherhood because he focused on himself in therapy? After that, I was therapyless for years because it made me so furious. If you date a therapist, I imagine their silent judgment at home, your therapist boyfriend dissecting the meaning underlying everything you say or do. And who wants to date someone who is going to be analyzing them all the time?

  7. ACTOR

  We all just need so much praise. I know I do, and male actors are the same way. Still, I can’t help but be attracted to them. And I know many men have actresses on their “don’t date” list, too. Of my four serious relationships, two of the men—so, not a great percentage—told me their moms said they should never date an actress. Hearing it for the first time was jarring. After the second, it was like, Is this really a thing? I wasn’t even successful yet. I was doing local Seattle theater, and I wasn’t all that dramatic of a person. I just wanted men not to cheat on me.

  • • •

  Basically, the only profession you can or should date is a woodworker, or a guy who makes boats. Like Kevin Costner in Message in a Bottle. Someone who is brooding but carves wood all day, making something gorgeous with his hands while he ruminates on lost love, and finding new love, and stormy seas.

  Ich Liebe Dich

  Chad Burke was my first boyfriend. He was a junior, I was a senior and, as far as I was concerned, he was the hottest guy in our high school. So I couldn’t believe it the night he kissed me at a Stone Temple Pilots concert. Chad was incredibly angry—this is the guy who snuck out at night to write Rage Against the Machine lyrics on telephone poles—which turned out to be a theme in my life. I spent a long time feeling drawn to angry men.

  Chad worshipped Steven Seagal. He looked like a high school version of the action star, with the low ponytail and everything. It was 1993, back when that was sexy. (Was it, though? Or was that just me?)

  Chad was popular because he was good-looking, but not in the way well-liked people are popular. He would never have been elected the captain of a team or voted Most Likely to Succeed or anything like that. He was a cynical, bitter teenager, but looks can get you far in high school.

  He was smart, too—although, can we talk for a minute about how fucked-up our societal intelligence scale is? Why do we gauge smarts the way we do? I say this out of pride, because I took an intelligence test in high school that scored students on a level of 1 to 5 and I got a 2. The teacher told me my score and suggested that I should become a secretary and I was so pissed off. Not because secretaries are dumb—I’m sure most secretaries are plenty smarter than a 2 out of 5—but because being told what I “should” or “could” do, as if I was too stupid for anything else, was infuriating.

  Similarly, I scored a 1060 out of 1600 on the SATs and I remember this guy in my grade asking me what I got, and after I told him he said, “Oh my God, I thought you were so much smarter than that.”

  “I know,” I said. “I thought I was, too!”

  Thank God I had parents who believed in me, because I really took that secretary thing to heart, and if I didn’t have a family who constantly encouraged me I certainly wouldn’t have the confidence to write this book that I’m totally unqualified to be writing.

  But anyway, by conventional standards, Chad was smart.

  One September evening in 1993 a group of seven or eight of us went to a Stone Temple Pilots concert. It was exhilarating to be out with the cool kids. I was not in the popular crowd in high school, and while I mostly tried to stay under the radar, I found myself on the receiving end of mean girls or general mocking a decent amount. Being a theater kid wasn’t looked highly upon in Edmonds. So for the concert, I told my mom I was staying the night at my friend Stephanie’s, and instead I went to the concert with classmates I didn’t usually hang out with. So there I was with this hot dude making advances on me, and it was a whirlwind of not just physical but mental intoxication. All I could think was, This is the best night . . . Of. My. Life. Chad and I made out, and despite the fact that we were completely stoned and smashed in a sea of sweaty fans and standing in front of our classmates—or maybe because of that—I thought it was completely magical. A couple of days later, when Chad asked me to be his girlfriend, I was overjoyed. He snuck over to my house in the middle of the night and put a big banner in my window that read ICH LIEBE DICH. That’s “I love you” in German. He was a big German studies fan.

  Chad and I got very passionate very quickly. We would look into each other’s eyes and say that we would die without each other. One day my mom looked at me and said, “Anna, I’ve never seen you this happy before.” I hadn’t told my parents about Chad because I was too embarrassed. It was incredibly important to my mom that I wasn’t boy obsessed, which was a hard standard to live up to as a teenager. And, of course, I was boy crazy, but instead of just embracing that as a normal phase of my teen years, I was ashamed. I thought I shouldn’t feel the way I did, so I never told her anything about boys—not Jason Sprott’s ice milk or Jason Berry’s sodas or anything.

  But once my mom noticed that something was different, I admitted that I was dating someone, and that I really liked him. I showed her Chad’s picture, and I remember her saying, “Oh, he’s so handsome.” It was gratifying to hear her say that, but I also thought, Mom, you could not have said anything worse because now I am diving in headfirst. If you are going to approve of this, I am so in.

  I was crazy for Chad. He was just so hot and angry, which were my only two requirements in a man back then, and I was in such disbelief that anyone so good-looking would like me that I would have done anything for him. If he had said, “I really, really, really want to have a threesome,” I probably would have been like, “Great! With who? Where? The parking lot? Awesome!” He was the guy I lost my virginity to (more on that later) and my first love. It was that heady rush of young love that has no basis in logic at all. I really thought we were going to get married—he gave me a promise ring!—so when he decided to graduate a year early and enroll at the University of Washington, I followed him there.

  Two weeks before college, Chad asked if I would mind if he joined a frat. I told him I didn’t mind at all, even though I had no plans to be a part of the Greek system. The week that college started, I didn’t hea
r anything from him for three days, even after repeated pages. (Yes, pages. Again, 1994.) So eventually I stalked him. (Yes, stalked.) I knew where all his classes were—and this was a huge school, like forty-five thousand undergrads—so I conveniently found myself outside one of the buildings at just the right time and “bumped” into Chad. He saw me and said, “Oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to tell you I want to see other people.”

  It was a blow. I must have known on some level—he hadn’t communicated with me in a few days, which was a pretty strong indicator that something was off—but I was still devastated. So I did what any self-respecting reluctant ex-girlfriend would do, and continued to stalk him. Maybe it was more like borderline stalking. I showed up at his fraternity, and his frat brothers would say, “Chad’s not here,” and I’d gasp out between drunken sobs, “Why . . . isn’t . . . he . . . here? Where . . . is . . . he?” Then they’d escort me back to my dorm and it was all very pathetic and dramatic in that way that only happens during college.

  Four months later, in January, Chad got kicked out of his fraternity, so he moved into a probably illegal apartment next to a Korean restaurant, which smelled like kimchi had permeated the wallpaper. Soon after that, he called me in my dorm and told me he wanted me back. I did not pass go and ran directly into his waiting arms. And his waiting bed.

  Within the week, I realized I’d lost all sense of myself for this douchebag of a person. But instead of being courageous that very day, I went home and wrote in my calendar that on March 14, I would break up with him. For whatever reason, that was the day I chose—two months away.

  I stuck it out for those two months, even though everything about Chad drove me crazy by then. I would stare at his long, delicate, artistic fingers and feel a tug of annoyance. His pride at wearing Tevas, as though he were a river-rafting guide, made me cringe. So did his ponytail, and his cackling laugh, which was usually directed at someone less fortunate than he. One time he told me, after pointing out a Darwin fish sticker on the back of a car, that he “could have invented that.” The worst grievance of all was his surprise at my decent acting skills in the idiotic Steven Seagal fan videos he made with his friends. But mostly, I was horrified by those fingers. Sometimes I worry that if I get dementia like my grandma (who, by the end of her life, talked exclusively about how her brother burned down the family farm when she was nine) I’ll spend my life ranting about Chad’s fingers. In that case, I like to think my family could make a solid case to the state for assisted suicide.

  It turned out I needed those two months to realize that I hated more than what I liked about Chad, and to muster the confidence to put my first real relationship behind me. I needed to digest all of it before I really broke it off.

  On March 14, I woke up and thought, This is the day I have to have some pride. I marched over to Chad’s place and said, “I’m leaving you,” and he didn’t say anything. He just walked to his fridge, pounded a beer, threw it at a wall, and said, “You’re going to be back here in a week.” At that point, I knew that even if I did want to be back there in a week, which I kind of did, I couldn’t ever return.

  So that was the end of Chad Burke. Almost.

  Ten years later, right before I married my ex-husband, I tracked Chad down—which was probably a sign that I shouldn’t have been getting married in the first place. I called his mom, and when she picked up I was just like, “Hey, Mrs. Burke! You might not remember me but this is Anna . . . ,” and she immediately said, “Oh, hi! I’ve been following your career. It’s so great.” The way she spoke to me, and her lack of surprise at hearing my voice, it was as if we’d chatted two days earlier. It was so strange. I told her I’d love to catch up with Chad and gave her my number. At the time I was in New Orleans shooting the movie Waiting . . . , and the next night, Chad called. It had been twenty-four hours since I’d reached out to his mother—enough time for me to come to my senses. My phone rang and all I could think was, Oh fuck, what am I doing? Why am I reaching out to my ex when I’m about to get married? I didn’t pick up.

  He called three more times. I had started this, I realized, so the polite thing to do was at least talk to him. We ended up on the phone for six hours. He lived in San Francisco, and he told me the most grotesque story about going to China and marrying a woman who was in love with someone else and how her family hired him a prostitute. I laughed so hard, not because it was funny, really, but because I was so relieved at how gross it was. I remember thinking, Okay, I made the right choice. This is the sign I’m doing the right thing.

  In the end, that wasn’t entirely the case, and that marriage ended in divorce. But the Chad Burke call was another instance of me reading a lot into the idea of closure. Chad was my first love, and we all romanticize our first loves. Especially as a teenager, when the emotions flood into your brain in a way that doesn’t happen in your thirties. I do wonder, though, why we are always so tempted to revisit that first relationship. In the very best-case scenario we have someone begging for us back. “Oh my God, you’re the one that got away,” they might say. “I can’t believe I fucked it up. Is there anything I can do to get you back?” But the reality is that that’s not going to happen. And do you really want someone to say that anyway?

  To be fair, hearing that the guy who treated you like crap might want you back, and realizing that you’re over it—that you don’t need them, and certainly don’t want them, and are actually too good for them—would definitely feel empowering.

  So, yeah. That would be kind of great.

  Unqualified Advice: Squad Goals?

  When I was cast in Scary Movie, I called my friend and former college roommate, Claire, to tell her that I landed my first big role. She was thrilled. And then I told her that it was a spoof comedy, and, with a voice full of concern, she said, “But, Anna, you’re not funny.”

  It wasn’t mean; it was true.

  “I know,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  It’s a very special kind of friend who can verbalize your insecurities in a way that is a show of support rather than a teardown. When Claire reminded me that I wasn’t a comedian, she was saying, “Okay, how should we tackle this?” Not “Man, you’re going to fuck this up.”

  I’ve never been the kind of gal who surrounds herself with female friends. I’ve never had that Sex and the City posse—I haven’t met my ladies regularly for brunch or had a group that I just called “the girls.” I always wanted that, but I never knew how to get it, so instead I clung to the man in my life at any given time.

  But I do usually have two or three incredibly close girlfriends, and I am fiercely loyal to those people.

  For a while, in my twenties, I thought it was cool to say that I was a guys’ girl. I didn’t realize until later how lame I sounded, bragging as though having a lot of girlfriends was a bad thing. Back then I thought that having the approval of my stoner guy friends was of great intellectual value, while friendships with beautiful blond sorority girls would be shameful, so I touted my male friends as if my association with them spoke to how cool I really was. But, like I said, that was lame. I was selling my own gender down the river, and I wasn’t even getting any fulfillment from the relationships with those stoner dudes. The truth of why I didn’t have girlfriends probably had nothing to do with my being a guys’ girl and everything to do with the fact that I was angry and jealous and unduly proud of the guys I was hanging out with.

  That said, I did have some precedent for shying away from packs of ladies. Growing up, I fell victim to plenty of mean girls. In fifth grade, for example, I was invited to a girl named Mandy’s house for a slumber party. Mandy was one of the most popular girls in school, and I couldn’t believe I was invited because I was not in her social circle at all. My mom was really skeptical, but I begged her to let me go. She did, and I joined Mandy and her two friends, Lindsey and Amy, and they made fun of me the whole time. “Let’s play boat!” they said when I go
t there, which I knew was a reference to my ill-fated playdate with Michelle a year earlier. At one point the girls said we should all take a shower together, and they made me close my eyes and I could hear them laughing at my body. It was fifth grade, so I don’t think they were especially developed or anything. Our bodies couldn’t have looked that different from one another. I think I was simply the nerdy girl who liked to play imaginary games and they wanted someone to pick on. I’m sure they invited me to the party for just that reason. (It was so wild to me that my mom totally picked up on what was happening—she knew the party wasn’t a good idea and that these were mean girls. I never told her about what happened, though, because I was too proud. I didn’t want her to be right.) In high school, Mary Young and her crew had a running joke where they would sneak up on me and snap my bra strap. It may sound like a small thing, but when you’re a quiet teenager trying to get through high school unnoticed, that kind of unwanted attention is rough. One day, I went to my locker and the words fuck you, bitch were written across it in permanent marker. It was humiliating. But it was also confusing—I didn’t think I was worthy of that kind of hatred. I generally flew under the radar in school, or at least I tried to. Yes, I did some acting in local theater, and I was in a commercial. I played the chubby kid in a frozen yogurt ad, for which I was paid a $200 gift certificate to Safeway. (I wasn’t really chubby, but I had a weird round face as a kid and the commercial was entirely close up. The script said: “Chubby girl: ‘Mom, are you eating ice cream?’” and I remember one of the producers saying to my mom, “Oh, she’s not chubby, we just call her that because she has a chubby face.”) But at school I primarily focused on how to be as small as possible. The guiding question of my teenage years was simply, How do I survive this time in my life?