John Denver Said it Better: Chapter 7
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7: The chapter in which Ann keeps her cool...and then totally loses it.
I’m telling you the story that way. Complete detail. Everything I know. One hundred percent.
It was told to me like this:
“Robin thought she was pregnant with Barney’s kid and he sort of proposed, but it wasn’t…well…it was….I probably shouldn’t have said anything. It was a while ago.”
Ted Mosby. Known for grace and discretion.
I, unlike our friend Ted, am aware that if I told you the story the way it was told to me I’d be barraged with ‘what?!’ and ‘details, please!’ and ‘are you KIDDING me?!’ until I gave you the full truth. I’m aware of this because that was basically what was going through my head when Ted relayed the story like it was something he’d watched on TV the night before instead of something that would drastically affect my love life and point of view.
I remember at the time just sitting there, staring at him, slack-jawed.
And eventually I mustered a response: “So Barney and Robin have a kid or they don’t have a kid?”
Start with the basics, I always say.
“Don’t have a kid,” Ted answered with conviction.
“But they almost had a kid and Barney proposed to her and she said…?”
“No,” he promised, again adamant and reassuring.
“She said no,” I repeated. It’s one of those things you need to say out loud a couple of times until your brain actually gets it. Nobody’s married, nobody was engaged, everything’s fine…
“She kind of said ‘hell no,’ actually,” Ted amended and I was weak and vulnerable and he was kind and warm and I looked him in the eye - hard. It might have been the first time I had done that - really looked him hard in the eye like he was a guy in front of me instead of just...Ted. I remember feeling something slip lightening fast down my spine.
I remember feeling momentarily confused about who I was dating and who I wasn’t.
I remember forgetting for just a second what we’d even been talking about.
But then the source of my nervous stomach with his blond hair and blue eyes and totally ridiculous back story flickered in my mind's eye, and so I blinked and shook my head at all kinds of things, not the least of which was my own scattered train of thought and my own sorry fate.
I heaved a sigh.
“Why is this my life?” I blurted unhappily and Ted initially looked very sympathetic. “I’m walking some stupid dogs and bump into this suit-wearing Romeo who brings me to a bar where all of his friends call me a hooker and I date him anyway and now I find out he’s somebody’s almost-baby-daddy and was this close to building a white picket fence for the most beautiful woman I might have ever seen, except for Tyra Banks who I passed on the street once and let me tell you that is just not fair - how good-looking she is.”
He stared at me with wide eyes and said nothing.
“This is not a normal story,” I declared, shaking my fists at the sky, and when I turned back to him the sympathy was gone as Ted tried to control his responding grin, but failed so that it broke through just enough for me to breathe it in. Everything about the look of him right then made me feel a little bit better. He was amused, and I didn’t think of Barney.
“You must have really done something awful when you were a gopher in your past life,” he answered and I felt my eyebrows hike toward my hairline almost of their own accord.
“I was a gopher in my past life?”
“I don’t know what you were in a past life, I was taking a shot in the dark that you might have been a gopher…”
There was a pause of consideration as I watched the sidewalk and felt my pulse slow down enough to take a full deep breath again.
“I might have been a gopher, who knows.”
“Who knows,” Ted agreed.
And that was how it was revealed to me that I was fighting a losing battle in an already lost war…
Something, if I was honest, that I’d been suspecting for a while.
So what did I do about it, you’re wondering?
How did I confront this new issue?
Which person did I yell at first?
How long did it take me to cut the chord and run for the hills?
Come on, I bet if you thought about it you could answer these questions yourself. But just in case - congratulations, you’re about to get another philosophical rant from Ann McHale.
Sometimes some kinds of people like to pretend nothing’s wrong. Some of them are very good at it - Robin Sherbatsky comes to mind - and some of them are not. But either way, good or bad, people like to try.
There’s a social pressure to be easy going that baffles the mind if you really stop and consider it. For some reason we are all expected to behave like a seventeen year old stoner who was kind of dumb to begin with but NOW has really killed those brain cells enough to make everything ‘chill’ and ‘totally fine’ so that the people around him or her don’t have to be bothered or hindered or aware at all of this person’s emotions.
This person doesn’t have emotions.
They’re just…all good.
If a person is able to act like nothing’s wrong (or better yet, never have anything BE wrong) they are the ultimate catch, the ultimate best friend, the ultimate companion. No drama. No blame. No confrontations and no bloodshed.
Like: ‘I’m really sorry I ran over your foot with my truck, man.’ ‘Oh yeah you know what don’t even worry about it. No harm, no foul.’
Or: ‘I know that my secret life was out of line. Sorry I never told you about my five kids and pet lizard before.’ ‘No, no, I get it. You didn’t mean to totally rip my heart out. We’re good.’
A person like Robin Sherbatsky needs ten minutes to shift into robot mode, and then BOOM. She has the upper hand. She is totally unaffected. She’s practically stoned and easy and completely lacking in drama or emotion.
We all try, but only some of us succeed.
I do not handle these things as well as Robin Sherbatsky. I work very hard to be normal and lacking in drama, but for those of us who are not innately talented in this area all you end up being is…weird.
And that’s what happened next.
I was super, totally, unfortunately weird for like two weeks straight. I don’t even know what I was doing; I just know that practically every two sentences Barney was giving me a sideways glance or saying ‘Ok weird-o’ or patting me on the shoulder like you do with your Great Aunt Edna who has a little dementia kicking in.
I would laugh too hard, or shrug too often, or talk too fast because in my head I was pissed and betrayed and confused while on the outside I was trying to be a 17 year old stoner.
I was trying to be chill.
I was trying, unsuccessfully, to be awesome, in the likeness of Barney Stinson.
And time after time I would catch Ted watching me with a certain heavy kind of facial expression that made me feel like he was reaching into my ribcage and dragging something out piece by piece. We turned into silent co-conspirators with psychic communication in social settings - something which I’m now aware is common in this particular group of people.
He would stare: just say something.
And I would stare: butt out, I’m trying to keep my cool, here.
And then he would stare: you’re doing a really bad job.
And then I would stare: you’re nosy, mind your own business.
And he would stare: I like your sweater.
And I would stare: ...?
Meanwhile Barney would be squinting at me and Lily would look between the two of us with that discerning Lily air about her, and more and more I started to observe some of the things I had been blatantly missing.
Robin clenched her jaw every time Barney opened his mouth.
Barney got misty eyed and tended to stare at families and babies when there were any around as if he were the thirty year old woman with a biological clock ticking in his brain, not me.
The two of them never said more than five words to each other over the course of an evening, and the others in the group (mostly Marshall and Lily) would yammer on nervously to fill the awkward silence.
Barney only looked at Robin when she wasn’t looking, and when she wasn’t looking he looked hard.
So I tried to act normal while observing nail after nail slamming down into the proverbial coffin, Ted tried to silently coach me out of my own utter doom, and Barney and Robin danced around each other with Barney shoving me in the middle persistently like I could help him prove something.
And if any of you have been in this sort of situation before you will readily relate to the fact that while I was chill and normal (read: weird) on the outside…I was losing my patience and my cool bit by bit on the inside.
This gave me time to really work through all the many things I wanted to file a complaint over.
Most notably, it gave me time to decide that maybe the worst thing you could possibly do to somebody is date them to prove a point to somebody else.
Can I get an amen?
This was stewing in the back of my mind, gaining weight and drama as he stared at babies and she stared at him and then she stared at the floor and he stared at her and then I stared at Ted and Ted stared at me and then Lily tried unsuccessfully to stare at all of us simultaneously and Marshall stared at his curly fries, and one night we'd been at Ted's apartment and the hours has gotten progressively more awkward until finally the shit hit the fan, so to speak.
They'd been sitting across from each other in the arm chairs with the coffee table stretching on forever between them. I'd been sitting on the floor at Barney's feet, and Robin had mentioned that she'd been on a date the night before and implied that it had gone well, which I thought was GREAT news.
But it was like a palpable touchable thing happened behind me.
Barney stiffened and shifted and went silent for almost the entirety of the night until eventually he interrupted Lily mid-sentence and blurted something about how he and I had gone to brunch on Saturday (we had?) and it had been so romantic (it had?) and we were planning a ski trip to Canada (total lie and also a total jab, although I was unaware of it at the time) because things were just going so well (they were?)
Robin's stare was piercing and shadow-cast, and the room was rigidly stiff, and I watched the sheen of tears well up inside of the hard-edged woman across from me - which was a rare and wondrous thing. Why these tears happened, I'm not sure. Regret, maybe. Guilt, possibly. Love, probably, so kill me now. And I sat there silently, refusing to step in and clear up these untruths that Barney had blurted because I didn't really have the energy, and Ted was staring at me so hard it was like he was shouting in my head: DO SOMETHING. I ignored him and chose to maintain my dignity, hanging by a thread as it was.
And finally as Barney and I were walking to the train and Robin's name dropped into conversation for the fortieth time in one sentence, I couldn't stand it anymore. I had the kind of outburst only possible if you've been trying to be normal and failing miserably for weeks on end:
"Are you FUCKING kidding me with this?!"
So the drama arrived.
Victory washed over me as Barney was staring at me, finally, and so I said it again - high on the attention I was getting at long last:
"Are you fucking KIDDING me with this, Barney? Seriously?"
And I could tell by his fallen facial expression that he knew exactly what I was talking about, and that he had been waiting for the fall out almost as long as I had. I'm sure, in retrospect, that Ted had mentioned our conversation to Barney because Ted has a really hard time keeping that kind of thing to himself, and Barney didn't ask what I was talking about. It seemed, in the utter silence of West 86th Street at 2 in the morning on a Tuesday, that Barney Stinson had nothing to say.
"Look," I began (never a promising opening line, am I right?) "clearly you have some issues you need to work through, and I'm done waiting around for you to get over whatever it is, and I'm done feeling like a total moron, and I'm seriously done watching you drool over Robin and her empty uterus." (wow...really? yes. really. I said that. A gross thing to say even if it hadn't also been mean...which it had.) "I'm going home," I declared - decisive and solid and finally sticking up for myself. I found myself wishing Ted had been there to see it. I reached out to hail a cab and ignored the way Barney took two steps toward me and the way he seemed so obviously and genuinely distressed. I opened the back door of the taxi and tossed one last request over my shoulder: "Don't bother calling."
(He did bother calling. But we'll get to that later.)
So, my friends, after weeks of watching this group's inner-drama unfold in front of me like a weathered old red carpet, and after weeks of being treated like a trophy of good-will and reconciliation, and after getting laid twice a week instead of twice a day, and after hearing it from an outside source instead of the horse's mouth, I took back my pride and I dumped Barney Stinson on the sidewalk at 2:14 AM.
And so, I ask you this: Can I get a fucking amen?
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7: The chapter in which Ann keeps her cool...and then totally loses it.
I’m telling you the story that way. Complete detail. Everything I know. One hundred percent.
It was told to me like this:
“Robin thought she was pregnant with Barney’s kid and he sort of proposed, but it wasn’t…well…it was….I probably shouldn’t have said anything. It was a while ago.”
Ted Mosby. Known for grace and discretion.
I, unlike our friend Ted, am aware that if I told you the story the way it was told to me I’d be barraged with ‘what?!’ and ‘details, please!’ and ‘are you KIDDING me?!’ until I gave you the full truth. I’m aware of this because that was basically what was going through my head when Ted relayed the story like it was something he’d watched on TV the night before instead of something that would drastically affect my love life and point of view.
I remember at the time just sitting there, staring at him, slack-jawed.
And eventually I mustered a response: “So Barney and Robin have a kid or they don’t have a kid?”
Start with the basics, I always say.
“Don’t have a kid,” Ted answered with conviction.
“But they almost had a kid and Barney proposed to her and she said…?”
“No,” he promised, again adamant and reassuring.
“She said no,” I repeated. It’s one of those things you need to say out loud a couple of times until your brain actually gets it. Nobody’s married, nobody was engaged, everything’s fine…
“She kind of said ‘hell no,’ actually,” Ted amended and I was weak and vulnerable and he was kind and warm and I looked him in the eye - hard. It might have been the first time I had done that - really looked him hard in the eye like he was a guy in front of me instead of just...Ted. I remember feeling something slip lightening fast down my spine.
I remember feeling momentarily confused about who I was dating and who I wasn’t.
I remember forgetting for just a second what we’d even been talking about.
But then the source of my nervous stomach with his blond hair and blue eyes and totally ridiculous back story flickered in my mind's eye, and so I blinked and shook my head at all kinds of things, not the least of which was my own scattered train of thought and my own sorry fate.
I heaved a sigh.
“Why is this my life?” I blurted unhappily and Ted initially looked very sympathetic. “I’m walking some stupid dogs and bump into this suit-wearing Romeo who brings me to a bar where all of his friends call me a hooker and I date him anyway and now I find out he’s somebody’s almost-baby-daddy and was this close to building a white picket fence for the most beautiful woman I might have ever seen, except for Tyra Banks who I passed on the street once and let me tell you that is just not fair - how good-looking she is.”
He stared at me with wide eyes and said nothing.
“This is not a normal story,” I declared, shaking my fists at the sky, and when I turned back to him the sympathy was gone as Ted tried to control his responding grin, but failed so that it broke through just enough for me to breathe it in. Everything about the look of him right then made me feel a little bit better. He was amused, and I didn’t think of Barney.
“You must have really done something awful when you were a gopher in your past life,” he answered and I felt my eyebrows hike toward my hairline almost of their own accord.
“I was a gopher in my past life?”
“I don’t know what you were in a past life, I was taking a shot in the dark that you might have been a gopher…”
There was a pause of consideration as I watched the sidewalk and felt my pulse slow down enough to take a full deep breath again.
“I might have been a gopher, who knows.”
“Who knows,” Ted agreed.
And that was how it was revealed to me that I was fighting a losing battle in an already lost war…
Something, if I was honest, that I’d been suspecting for a while.
So what did I do about it, you’re wondering?
How did I confront this new issue?
Which person did I yell at first?
How long did it take me to cut the chord and run for the hills?
Come on, I bet if you thought about it you could answer these questions yourself. But just in case - congratulations, you’re about to get another philosophical rant from Ann McHale.
Sometimes some kinds of people like to pretend nothing’s wrong. Some of them are very good at it - Robin Sherbatsky comes to mind - and some of them are not. But either way, good or bad, people like to try.
There’s a social pressure to be easy going that baffles the mind if you really stop and consider it. For some reason we are all expected to behave like a seventeen year old stoner who was kind of dumb to begin with but NOW has really killed those brain cells enough to make everything ‘chill’ and ‘totally fine’ so that the people around him or her don’t have to be bothered or hindered or aware at all of this person’s emotions.
This person doesn’t have emotions.
They’re just…all good.
If a person is able to act like nothing’s wrong (or better yet, never have anything BE wrong) they are the ultimate catch, the ultimate best friend, the ultimate companion. No drama. No blame. No confrontations and no bloodshed.
Like: ‘I’m really sorry I ran over your foot with my truck, man.’ ‘Oh yeah you know what don’t even worry about it. No harm, no foul.’
Or: ‘I know that my secret life was out of line. Sorry I never told you about my five kids and pet lizard before.’ ‘No, no, I get it. You didn’t mean to totally rip my heart out. We’re good.’
A person like Robin Sherbatsky needs ten minutes to shift into robot mode, and then BOOM. She has the upper hand. She is totally unaffected. She’s practically stoned and easy and completely lacking in drama or emotion.
We all try, but only some of us succeed.
I do not handle these things as well as Robin Sherbatsky. I work very hard to be normal and lacking in drama, but for those of us who are not innately talented in this area all you end up being is…weird.
And that’s what happened next.
I was super, totally, unfortunately weird for like two weeks straight. I don’t even know what I was doing; I just know that practically every two sentences Barney was giving me a sideways glance or saying ‘Ok weird-o’ or patting me on the shoulder like you do with your Great Aunt Edna who has a little dementia kicking in.
I would laugh too hard, or shrug too often, or talk too fast because in my head I was pissed and betrayed and confused while on the outside I was trying to be a 17 year old stoner.
I was trying to be chill.
I was trying, unsuccessfully, to be awesome, in the likeness of Barney Stinson.
And time after time I would catch Ted watching me with a certain heavy kind of facial expression that made me feel like he was reaching into my ribcage and dragging something out piece by piece. We turned into silent co-conspirators with psychic communication in social settings - something which I’m now aware is common in this particular group of people.
He would stare: just say something.
And I would stare: butt out, I’m trying to keep my cool, here.
And then he would stare: you’re doing a really bad job.
And then I would stare: you’re nosy, mind your own business.
And he would stare: I like your sweater.
And I would stare: ...?
Meanwhile Barney would be squinting at me and Lily would look between the two of us with that discerning Lily air about her, and more and more I started to observe some of the things I had been blatantly missing.
Robin clenched her jaw every time Barney opened his mouth.
Barney got misty eyed and tended to stare at families and babies when there were any around as if he were the thirty year old woman with a biological clock ticking in his brain, not me.
The two of them never said more than five words to each other over the course of an evening, and the others in the group (mostly Marshall and Lily) would yammer on nervously to fill the awkward silence.
Barney only looked at Robin when she wasn’t looking, and when she wasn’t looking he looked hard.
So I tried to act normal while observing nail after nail slamming down into the proverbial coffin, Ted tried to silently coach me out of my own utter doom, and Barney and Robin danced around each other with Barney shoving me in the middle persistently like I could help him prove something.
And if any of you have been in this sort of situation before you will readily relate to the fact that while I was chill and normal (read: weird) on the outside…I was losing my patience and my cool bit by bit on the inside.
This gave me time to really work through all the many things I wanted to file a complaint over.
Most notably, it gave me time to decide that maybe the worst thing you could possibly do to somebody is date them to prove a point to somebody else.
Can I get an amen?
This was stewing in the back of my mind, gaining weight and drama as he stared at babies and she stared at him and then she stared at the floor and he stared at her and then I stared at Ted and Ted stared at me and then Lily tried unsuccessfully to stare at all of us simultaneously and Marshall stared at his curly fries, and one night we'd been at Ted's apartment and the hours has gotten progressively more awkward until finally the shit hit the fan, so to speak.
They'd been sitting across from each other in the arm chairs with the coffee table stretching on forever between them. I'd been sitting on the floor at Barney's feet, and Robin had mentioned that she'd been on a date the night before and implied that it had gone well, which I thought was GREAT news.
But it was like a palpable touchable thing happened behind me.
Barney stiffened and shifted and went silent for almost the entirety of the night until eventually he interrupted Lily mid-sentence and blurted something about how he and I had gone to brunch on Saturday (we had?) and it had been so romantic (it had?) and we were planning a ski trip to Canada (total lie and also a total jab, although I was unaware of it at the time) because things were just going so well (they were?)
Robin's stare was piercing and shadow-cast, and the room was rigidly stiff, and I watched the sheen of tears well up inside of the hard-edged woman across from me - which was a rare and wondrous thing. Why these tears happened, I'm not sure. Regret, maybe. Guilt, possibly. Love, probably, so kill me now. And I sat there silently, refusing to step in and clear up these untruths that Barney had blurted because I didn't really have the energy, and Ted was staring at me so hard it was like he was shouting in my head: DO SOMETHING. I ignored him and chose to maintain my dignity, hanging by a thread as it was.
And finally as Barney and I were walking to the train and Robin's name dropped into conversation for the fortieth time in one sentence, I couldn't stand it anymore. I had the kind of outburst only possible if you've been trying to be normal and failing miserably for weeks on end:
"Are you FUCKING kidding me with this?!"
So the drama arrived.
Victory washed over me as Barney was staring at me, finally, and so I said it again - high on the attention I was getting at long last:
"Are you fucking KIDDING me with this, Barney? Seriously?"
And I could tell by his fallen facial expression that he knew exactly what I was talking about, and that he had been waiting for the fall out almost as long as I had. I'm sure, in retrospect, that Ted had mentioned our conversation to Barney because Ted has a really hard time keeping that kind of thing to himself, and Barney didn't ask what I was talking about. It seemed, in the utter silence of West 86th Street at 2 in the morning on a Tuesday, that Barney Stinson had nothing to say.
"Look," I began (never a promising opening line, am I right?) "clearly you have some issues you need to work through, and I'm done waiting around for you to get over whatever it is, and I'm done feeling like a total moron, and I'm seriously done watching you drool over Robin and her empty uterus." (wow...really? yes. really. I said that. A gross thing to say even if it hadn't also been mean...which it had.) "I'm going home," I declared - decisive and solid and finally sticking up for myself. I found myself wishing Ted had been there to see it. I reached out to hail a cab and ignored the way Barney took two steps toward me and the way he seemed so obviously and genuinely distressed. I opened the back door of the taxi and tossed one last request over my shoulder: "Don't bother calling."
(He did bother calling. But we'll get to that later.)
So, my friends, after weeks of watching this group's inner-drama unfold in front of me like a weathered old red carpet, and after weeks of being treated like a trophy of good-will and reconciliation, and after getting laid twice a week instead of twice a day, and after hearing it from an outside source instead of the horse's mouth, I took back my pride and I dumped Barney Stinson on the sidewalk at 2:14 AM.
And so, I ask you this: Can I get a fucking amen?