Hello, I'm Rachel.

woody redux

[Yoga guy: In what ways do you feel we don’t click?

Jessica:In what ways? We don’t click in any ways. We don’t have chemistry, or banter, or common interests. You’re a yoga instructor, you get colonics, you don’t understand the chaos or absurdity of life, on this planet and in this city. You don’t understand irony, or ethnicity, or eccentricity, or poetry, or the simple joy of being a regular at the diner on your block—I love that. You don’t drink coffee, or alcohol, you don’t overeat, you don’t cry when you’re alone, you don’t understand sarcasm. You plod through life in a neat, colorless, caffeine-free, dairy-free, conflict-free, banal self-possessed way—I’m bold, and angry, and tortured, and tremendous and I notice when someone has changed their hair part, or when someone is wearing two very distinctly different shades of black, or when someone changes the natural timbre of their voice on the phone. I don’t give out empty praise. I’m not complacent, or well-adjusted, I can’t spend 50 minutes breathing and stretching and getting in touch with myself, I can’t even spend 3 minutes finishing an article. I check my phone machine 9 times every day, and I can’t sleep at night, because I feel that there is so much to do and fix and change in the world, and I wonder every day if I am making a difference, and if I will every express the greatness within me or if I will remain forever paralyzed by the muddled madness inside my head. I’ve wept on every birthday I’ve ever had, because life is huge, and fleeting. And I hate certain people and certain shoes. And I feel that life is terribly unfair and sometimes beautiful and wonderful and extraordinary, but also numbing and horrifying and insurmountable. And I hate myself a lot of the time, but a lot of the rest of the time, I adore myself and I adore my life in this city, in this world we live in, this huge and wondrous, bewildering, brilliant, horrible world.

(sigh) And in these ways, I feel that we do not click.

Yoga guy: So you don’t think it’s gonna work out right now? ]

—Original scene from Kissing Jessica Stein that didn’t make it into the movie; sometimes I wish Jennifer Westfeldt was my homegirl.