You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) (14 page)

Actually, not.

Acting in commercials was never my life goal. I wanted to be on TV or in an indie film with Parker Posey about quirky people having family issues around inheritances. Or Parkinson’s. SOMETHING where I wasn’t being yelled at for wrinkling my prop shirt or squeezing the prop burger too hard so the prop mustard started oozing out the back.

After five years of acting and making a great living, I started to forget why I moved to LA in the first place. And so did my family back home.

“We saw you on that post office ad, you’re so cute, are they going to turn that into a TV show?”

“That’s not how that works, Mom.”

“Well, here’s an idea. You should be on that
NCIS
thing with Mark Harmon. You grew up on military bases, you know that world!”

“Gee, you’re right! Why didn’t I think of calling them before? They’ve probably been waiting by the phone for YEARS!” Le sigh.

On a renewed quest for opportunity (i.e., last-gasp attempt to fan the dying fire of my dreams), I hustled to get hired on bigger projects. I finally accepted that my dazzling 4.0 GPA wasn’t the trump card
in this new world that I’d thought it would be, so I started making changes. And I did them out of desperation, which is always a first step into the mouth of existential doom.

I cut off all my hair when an agent suggested it. And, for some reason, I started getting hired more. “People like you looking less like a lead character and more of a ‘best friend’!” Cool! I loved listening to prettier people complain about their relationships, I could work with that!

During one audition, a casting director said I looked “adorable” in a dorky rainbow scarf, so I started dressing only in bright, colorful clothes. Like a hot first-grade teacher who says, “My quilted cardigan hides sensible cotton lingerie under here. Come undress me, but first, please use a coaster for your drink.”

The makeover cherry topper was when I got nerdy librarian glasses. They made me look older, but in a weird, accessible way. Suddenly I could play late thirties as a twenty-seven-year-old. More work flooded in. Good change! Good Felicia! Yay?

And after switching up all the superficial stuff, I was the same person underneath, but for some reason, people
couldn’t stop hiring me
. The snowballing feedback made me abandon the whole “What does Felicia want to be?” and I started doing whatever anyone told me they wanted from me in order to succeed. Lo and behold, it WORKED!

I got tons more commercials. I overcame my nuclear-meltdown nervousness in auditions to get a few jobs as recurring characters on TV shows. I didn’t work every day, but for the average actor, I started to have a career I could brag about at cocktail parties. With my head-to-toe makeover, I’d found my niche: cat-owning, stalker-y secretary.

And I played the same part again and again and again.

Thing is, the “cat secretary” role was never the focal point of any scenes. She was a decorative character, adding a touch of flavor to offices across the TV landscape. Most of my lines were in the vein of “Mr. Garrett, your wife is on line two. Can I go home early to feed my fifteen animals, please?” Either that or I was hired to do laundry. I’ve washed laundry in a half dozen different TV shows. I guess I look clean? Which is kind of a compliment . . .

But who was I to complain? Every show needed secretaries! Finally, after six years of struggling in Hollywood, I was finding bigger success. My grandma got to see me on an actual TV show and brag about it to the checkout clerk at Kmart. I had pinpointed a salable stereotype I could play for the next twenty years, living the nomadic life of audition after audition (accompanied by panic attack after panic attack), begging to answer fictional phone calls in innocuous ways for decades to come . . . and I hated it.

The role was a shadow of the kind of characters I wanted to portray. No one had a place for my geeky, weird, homeschooled, video-game-loving inner self. They could only see me as an extremely clean but neurotic secretary. “Your nose is too weird to be the focus of the show, but you’re perfect for answering the phone in the background in a quirky fashion!”

I painted myself into a tiny corner, so I could be simpler and cleaner and more hirable by Hollywood. I was rewarded for it, but it made me miserable, and I didn’t even realize it.

When the system you want to be a part of so badly turns you into someone you’re unhappy with and you lose sight of yourself, is it worth it? Er . . . probably not. But self-reflection wasn’t my strong suit at the time. I just knew that I kept getting opportunities I couldn’t turn down, that I would have killed to have in the dry years before. I never stopped to wonder,
Why am I so depressed all the time after all this success?

Instead of making big-girl decisions about my future, like setting goals for myself, working on other characters I could play, or hell, signing up for some good ol’ therapy, I turned to another world.

An online world. A game called World of Warcraft.

- 5 -

Quirky Addiction = Still an Addiction

How my obsessive personality steered me into a twelve-hour-a-day gaming addiction and an alt-life as a level 60 warlock named Codex.

Anal retentiveness is one of my most attractive genetic traits. (I also hit the genome lottery for “The ability to pack a suitcase efficiently.”) As a little kid, I filled out index cards on every movie I watched and stuck them in a yellow recipe box. The cards were filled with critical insight and searing analyses. Par exemple:

National Velvet

4 Stars

This made me cry because horses were in it, but the girl had purple eyes. I want purple eyes too.

I tend to obsess over things easily. Like eating oatmeal every morning for a year, wearing a pair of sneakers over and over again until my big toe pokes out, and having an unhealthy fixation on the martial arts personality Jean-Claude Van Damme. (Did you know
his real last name is Van Varenberg?) When I travel, I read dozens of books about the locations I’m visiting, to the detriment of SEEING anything. I can’t show you many pictures of my trips to Thailand or Vienna, but if you want to discuss the history of Buddhism or secessionist furniture design, I’m ready to dish!

I have been borderline-ready to become addicted to something my whole life. And more common addictions got ruled out because I’m weird. Alcohol, I metabolize too fast (two sips I’m twerking, five sips I’m snoozing). I’m too neurotic to do drugs because they give you meth teeth (not
all
, but enough to make me concerned), and sex addicts get vagina warts. Or so I read on the side of a bus. What’s left that could become a trigger area?

Video games, of course.

At the height of my “auditioning for burger commercials” acting career in late 2005, my brother, Ryon, invited me to join a new online game called World of Warcraft. For nongeeks (Are there any of you out there reading? I like your hair!), it’s a “Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game” where millions of people can play together simultaneously. Ryon had been playing for a few months with his friends and thought I would enjoy it.

My brother and I hadn’t been close growing up. I know that sounds weird. You’d think, two kids locked in a house together, there should be some great indie-film, Wes Anderson bonding happening, right? Not so much.

I could maybe trace it back to when he was three or four years old, when he ate chocolate ice cream in the messiest way possible, spreading it all over his face, and I’d dry heave and scream, “Mom! Tell Ryon to eat neater!” and then he’d smear it even BIGGER, right up to his eyebrows. Or it might be the time when he was ten, when I wanted to
watch a miniseries about Anastasia, the maybe-not-murdered Russian princess, on our only TV.
He
wanted to watch Monster Truck Racing. My mom wasn’t home to arbitrate, so he forced me to try to strangle him with a phone cord.

Either of those incidents could have been what separated us emotionally. I’ll talk to a therapist about it and get back to you. We loved gaming together, but that was about it. We kind of just EXISTED with each other. I regret that, because if we’d supported each other more, I think we could have been more secure in our respective weirdness when we finally encountered the real world (which was WAY later than it should have been because we were homeschooled). The fact he was reaching out to me to play an online video game together was flattering. I jumped at the chance.

BUT A TINY CAUTIOUS LITTLE JUMP.

Because I didn’t know much about this Warcraft thing, but I did know that anything online with other people in a “game form” could be potentially hazardous to my time-health. The previous year, I’d developed a slight addiction to another online game called Puzzle Pirates. It was brilliant in its design, AND you got to customize your character,
who was a pirate
. In all categories, it was a four-hour-a-day winner.

The tasks in the game were simple but fun puzzles. There was a carpentry puzzle (like Tetris), there was a sailing puzzle (a variation on Tetris), and about three other puzzles with . . . Tetris-like qualities.

There were overall goals, too. The better you played, the faster your ship ran. The faster your ship ran, the more stuff you gathered. The more stuff you gathered, the more money you earned. The more money you earned, the cuter the outfit you could buy, and the cuter the outfit . . . well, that was a basic end goal. The outfits.

I was KILLER at running my pirate ship, particularly with the navigation (quasi-Tetris-like) puzzle. I mean, savant level, guys. And after a few months of playing, I impressed enough people to make a lot of in-game friends, and we banded together to form a regular “crew.” It became the people, not the clothes, that kept me logging online day after day as we sailed the virtual seas.

Both of my closest friends in the game were stay-at-home moms. “Ploppyteets” had just had her first baby, and you could tell from her attitude, she did NOT know what she was getting into with the whole “Shoving a human out of the bio-oven.” She’d type things like, “Sorry, have to leave. This baby wants to rip my tits off all day.” I never figured out much about her personal life, but I pictured her in a trailer park in Nevada, breast-feeding as she solved puzzles and smoked cigarettes, ashes dripping on the infant’s forehead.

The other mom we’ll call “LadyLee.” She had a newborn and a two-year-old, and her husband traveled a lot. LadyLee seemed like the kind of woman who was pretty and sweet but unhappy in her marriage. She had gained a ton of weight after her last child and was depressed all the time, so she didn’t leave the house. Ever. Real American Dream story. Instead of worrying about herself, LadyLee would counsel people in the crew about their love lives, their schoolwork,
anything they needed, all through the game’s chat interface. She was always there and sweetly comforting, like an AI big sister.

There was one incident where I got a job on
Days of Our Lives
, and afterwards, the producer called my manager up and said, “We will never hire this girl again.” I had exactly five words in the episode, and I couldn’t figure out how I screwed them up so badly. I kept having panic attacks in my sleep, reliving the single line, “My princess, how are you?” over and over in my head, as if somehow it could un-ruin my career. LadyLee was the only person in my life who could get me to laugh about how stupid the whole thing was.

“Oh, was that the scene with Sami? She had an affair with her brother-in-law Tom, and then he murdered his own brother, which caused her to be committed to a mental hospital and meet another woman who was MARRIED to Tom, and then they broke out together and got revenge on Tom by ruining his shipping business. They probably didn’t like your nose.”

Then LadyLee bought me a new Pirate hat in-game, which had a feather in it and REALLY looked good with my character’s hair design, and suddenly I was weeping onto the keyboard, typing, “Thank u, life saver. <3.”