Jessi Klein - Breaking Up in the Age of Google

 

 

Okie pokey. So, here it is, in August of 2001, me and my boyfriend of six years, my first love of my life, went through one of the worst breakups in the history of recorded man. I know that may sound naive or self-absorbed, and that's because it is. But I swear I was really, really bad. We worked together at the same company, but that's not where we met. We'd met in college when were both 18, 19 years old. When we met, I was this super, super nerdy virgin. I know it's hard to imagine, but I was really a nerd and I was really a virgin. He was this chubby almost virgin. You know what I mean? Like, he had a really fat face, and he had slept with someone for all intents and purposes. Anyway. 

 

So, we both had really low self-esteem and that was part of what brought us together. It was like, “I feel crappy about myself. So, do I. Do you want to come over and have sex?” [audience laughter] So, that was part of the thing. But then, the magical thing that happened was we got in this relationship, we loved each other and we showered each other with affection and sex and love. And over time, we started to feel better about ourselves. So, at the end of the six years, we were both feeling okay and we were both secretly, independently wondering what it would be like to give having sex with someone else a go. You know what I mean? [audience laughter] 

 

That's when the relationship began to crumble. Even though we still loved each other, we ended up breaking up and he asked me to move out of our shared house. I was devastated. But it was this devastated where you think you feel bad but something's going to happen that's going to make you feel worse. And for me, that was finding out that three weeks after I moved out, he started sleeping with his 22-year-old blonde assistant at the same company we worked at. She sat like five feet away from me. [audience laughter] Yeah, right? 

 

I am normally a level headed human being. I went berserker. I didn't know how to handle this. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me in my life. Like, it was a month, part of six years was the worst thing. What made it even worse is she was absolutely like a Jewish girl's worst chics nightmare. You know what I mean? [audience laughter] She was blonde, she was petite, she was waify, she had a pert nose and no visible body hair. It was just like the worst thing. So, as a Jew, I hated her for being everything that I wasn't. But then, someone who was in the know told me that she was also a Jew. [audience laughter] And I was like, “Oh my God.” I was like, “How could like a member of my own tribe betray me this way.” [audience laughter] 

 

The worst thing was that now, there was the potential for her to actually be neurotic and interesting. You know what I mean? I couldn't just imagine her as this emotionless wasp, which is what I had been thinking to make myself feel better. I know that it's wrong to ethnically stereotype people, but I feel like if you already hate them for really valid reasons already, it's okay. [audience laughter] It's all right. So, I was having a breakdown, just a total breakdown. But I was like, “Okay, I'm a normal human being. I will take the routes people can take to recover from this in a normal amount of time." So, I tried going to therapy to talk it out. Didn't work. I tried going to the gym to work it out. That didn't work. Instead, I fell into this depressive spiral where I couldn't think about anything. I was just ruled by these two horrible urges. 

 

One was the urge to just sort of masochistically think about how much prettier she was than me and everything about her that was, I don't know, just so much more perfect and sexier and better. The other urge was that I needed to find out anything, something about her personality that would allow me to hate her, that would allow me to feel superior to her, some bit of dirt on her that would prove she was actually shitty. [audience laughter] That wasn't what I planned to say, but it's really what was here. [audience laughter] 

 

So, one day, I'm whining on the phone to my friend Wendy, God bless Wendy. And I'm like, “Hey, [unintelligible [00:24:15] I wanted to hate her. I want to hate her. What can I find out to make her hate-able? And she was like, “Well, have you tried googling her>” [audience laughter] Now, I was a nerd, but I was not a geek. So, I didn't know what Google was. I didn't know. And I'm sure, right, you all know what it is. If there's one or two people here, I'll explain it. Google is the most powerful thing ever invented on the planet. [audience laughter] It is this insane search engine that allows you to be crazy and stalk someone from the comfort of your own home, right? [audience laughter] [audience applause] 

 

It is a more important invention than fire or the wheel, [audience laughter] as far as I am concerned. So, she was like, “Why don't you google her?” And I was like, “Sure.” [audience laughter] I am going to Google the crap out of this girl, because I knew her name. So, I went to the little search window and I entered her name. I didn't understand the power of Google. So, I wasn't really expecting anything to happen. But within three seconds, this link comes up and it takes me to this article that had been an interview with her from her college newspaper her freshman year. It was like this thing where she was the campus celebrity of the day. Listen to this. 

 

So, this thing comes up, there's a photo of her and it's the most adorable photo of a human being ever taken. She couldn't look blonder or more waspy Jewish. She's wearing lowrider sweatpants before anyone even knew about those and a thing with a cow on it. She's just in a 3/4 grade. Oh. And that drove me nuts and I was scared to move on to the article, but I did. It was an interview. And in the interview, she revealed that her greatest desire goal in life was to become a standup comic, a famous standup comic. And I was like, “Fuck me.” Because that was my secret goal. That was my goal. I had always wanted to do that since I was a kid, but I never had the guts, I'd never had the moxie to do it.

 

And here it was, I was reading, she was already in a sketch group. Oh, my God. I was like, “So, okay.” So, she looks waspy, but she's Jewish. She's banging my boyfriend and she's already apparently on her way to achieving my dream. This cannot stand. I decided if we were both aiming for the moon, we both have the same goal, I was like, “I'm getting there first,” So, I start to perform. It's the ironic thing, I've never been more miserable in my life and I start trying to write jokes and go perform. I'm going to open mics, and it's depressing and I hate it. 

 

But over time, it's slowly improving. I get to do book shows. So, it goes from two or three depressing open mics to four or five okay shows a week. But all along, I'm still just manically depressed, and I'm googling her endlessly and looking at the picture. And that picture became the focal point not only of my loathing for her, but my loathing for myself. I literally five or six times a day would just stare at that photo and I felt terrible at myself. My therapist was like, “If you don't stop googling her, [audience laughter] I'm going to call your doctor and put you on Prozac.” 

 

I didn't want to go on Prozac because I was scared that one of the side effects of Prozac would be that I would become less witty. And being witty was the only side effect of being depressed that was working for me. You know what I mean? [audience laughter] [audience applause]

 

No, you really should not clap. But so, I decided to keep performing and I'm not going to go on Prozac yet. So, I'm performing. So, one day, I'm doing this show. It's at a slightly better place than I usually do it. I'm watching the audience stream in, filling in before the show starts. And who walks in but her. She comes in. The show had been advertised in Time Out New York. My name, it was very clear. She must have known I was going to be there. I was like, “What kind of weird drive by shit is this?” [audience laughter] Because she sat in the front row. It was clear. And I was like, “Oh, my God, I felt so terrible.” I was looking at her, she was pretty. I barely could go on. It just so upset me. I managed to do it and I ran out as soon as I was done, I ran home because I needed to have my nightly loathe fest with the photo. I'm sitting, I was just like, “How could she do it?” 

 

I'm about to Google her. All of a sudden, it occurs to me maybe the reason she came there is because she's also obsessed with me. I'm the girl before she's dating this guy. I was with him for six years. So, she must be curious, must be driving her crazy. And I was like, [gasps] “What if she's googling me?” [audience laughter] I don't know why it had never occurred to me to try googling myself. I think I thought there was a rule against it or something, [audience laughter] or that the computer would implode, the self-absorption wouldn't be handled. 

 

But I was like, “I'm going to do it.” I type my name in, I Google myself. And to my shock and amazement, there's shit there on the computer about me. I didn't put it there. It's all stuff about performing. It's all links to advertising for shows I had done, stuff that was still there. One or two just really brief, nice mentions about things. It just briefly made me feel better. I realized that it was the only antidote to the feelings I had when I would Google her was to Google myself and that's how I became obsessed with googling myself. 

 

Here's the thing about Googling yourself. It's as dirty as it sounds. You know what I mean? You have this urge to do it, but you don't want anyone to know you're doing it. [audience laughter] But the thing is, people deny it, but everyone does it. You know what I mean? But I would Google myself, I would look at things, I would see if anything new was coming up, blah, blah, blah. So, anyway, I couldn't stop. I was googling her and googling myself, googling her and googling myself. Feeling bad, feeling good. Okay. 

 

So, one day, I do a show at Irving Plaza. It was like this big thing. Do the show, next day, normal stuff. Come home, Google myself. [audience laughter] Want to check in, want to check in. Something new pops up and it's this thing, the heading. It's this link. It says funny Girl. I'm like, “What's this?” I click on it and it takes me to Craigslist. Yes. Do we know what Craigslist is? If anyone here doesn't know, it's this hippie dippy bulletin board. People renting apartments and giving each other bikes. [audience laughter] 

 

But there's this thing on it called Missed Connections, and that's what Funny Girl was from. And Missed Connections, is that, on the back of the voice, when people see each other on the street and you're walking down the street, you see someone cute or whatever, and you don't have the guts to talk to them and then the next day you write something like, “Hey, I saw you on 6th Avenue and 8th Street. You were wearing a Metallica T shirt. I like Metallica. Please call me,” like that. [audience laughter] 

 

It's like billions of them. That's what Funny Girl was. Someone wrote, “They'd seen me at the Irving Plaza show. It was like, Funny Girl. Like, “Hey, Jesse Klein, I saw you at the show and I thought you were really adorable. I wanted to talk to you afterwards, but I didn't have the guts. You can email me.” This is the most amazing thing that's ever happened to me my entire life. I've never had someone just like me without putting a lot of work into it. Like, when I used to want to hook up with guys, it was a huge exertion of personality, which was exhausting. It's exhausting to have a personality. 

 

So, okay. Anyway, so, there was, like, take a couple of days to think about it. In the space of those few days, I continued to Google myself more shit start popping up on Craigslist about me. The second thing was from a totally different guy. And he's like, “I saw you performing, but this one was creepy. It wasn't as brief and adorable.” It was like, “Ugh.” That's when I was like, “Yeah, maybe the people on Craigslist missed connections are not dating material. But it could be funny material for the stage, because it's really the greatest website ever.”

 

So, I started doing this bit all around town about Craigslist and missed connections. I found out that when I did it, by saying it, I was inviting every delinquent loon to my little app, because people would email me, because they knew I looked at it. And stuff kept popping up and popping up. What I didn't immediately know, was that a lot of it was from my friends. Because once I told them about the first two, they were like, “Ha-ha. Wouldn't it be funny to fake her out?” So, it was like these decoys. 

 

But I didn't care, because if you looked on Craigslist, it looked like I was hot shit for a week. [audience laughter] I was like, “Awesome.” But one day, it's within this special two weeks, I get back to my office from lunch and I have a voicemail on my phone from a man who identifies himself as a writer for the fucking New Yorker. And he says, “Hello.” He's like, “I've seen all this stuff about you on Craigslist. [audience laughter] I would like to write a talk of the town piece about you and this crazy trend. Please call me.” Oh, my God. [audience laughter] What better revenge on the ex-boyfriend than for them to read an article in the New Yorker about the fact that I am hot, and I am funny and I have groupies. Oh, my God. [audience laughter] 

 

And I was like, “I did it.” I called him. It was done deal. I was like, “How's it feel down there, bitch, with no one writing about you in the New Yorker, the most legitimate publication ever?” I've won. I've won. I'm on the moon. But then, something happened, which was that the article didn't happen. [audience laughter] Oh, she loves the pity. No, it didn't happen. I don't even remember why it didn't happen. He was very nice on the phone. He called me to pitch it to his editor. For some reason, he couldn't get it through. I was really nice on the phone back. I was like, “That's okay. Don't worry. Okay, fine.” I hang up. I was more disappointed than I'd ever been in my life and I started bawling, bawling having a breakdown, bawling, crying. 

 

During that bawl fest, I had this epiphany where I left my body. It's like, my soul suddenly was like, “I can't take it.” I left my body. I floated up to the top of the office. I looked down. I was like, “Let's take a lay of land here.” I'm in my office where I have not done any work for my employer in about six months, because I've been diddling myself on the internet constantly. [audience laughter] And I'm crying. I'm crying and I'm disappointed. But why? Not because I didn't get the article in the New Yorker, but because the ex-boyfriend wouldn't read it. 

 

It was like at that second, it all just dawned on me that in the years since the breakup, I'd become so obsessed with being in this race to make other people laugh that I'd lost my ability to laugh at myself. I was like, “If I could just regain the ability to step back and look at all the crazy things I've been doing since this thing happened, I would be a better comic.” Like, “This would be material. This is much funnier than anything I've been trying to write. And moreover, I would be a happier person.” [sighs] So, that's what I did. I've become a better comic and I've become a happier person. I've been dating this guy that I really like. I don't look at that girl's picture anymore, but he and I Google each other constantly. Thank you very much.