Crash Test Girl Read online

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  But put me together with a stranger in a foreign city and I am enthralled. When you know you’ll never see someone again, you’re more likely to fall into a deep conversation, open up, and be honest. A barefoot boy in Budapest and I poured our souls out to each other as we walked the city and castles. We never spoke again, but he may have a bigger piece of me than some in my social circles now.

  When I was staying at the Gayatri House in Ubud, Bali, I came back to my room one evening to hear this girl complaining loudly and annoyingly from the room above. I couldn’t imagine what could be so wrong with a room that cost a dollar fifty, two dollars if you wanted a bathroom. Later that night, we ended up at the same dinner with a group of travelers.

  We sized each other up. Lisa was the kind of girl you picture as the perfect girl from a cheesy teen movie, all shiny mermaid hair and glowing teeth. Turned out, she lived in San Francisco. We left California within a day of each other. She was also spending a year traveling the world. Having so much in common made me instantly wary of her. I’d left SF for a reason, but I couldn’t get away from it, or this girl. She kept popping up everywhere I went, like a haunting. I was walking through Kathmandu, and I ran into her on the street. We kept meeting all the same people. I was crashing in Jerusalem with my friend Eli, and guess who he had to go pick up from the airport? Lisa! On her arrival, Eli said to her, “Funny, there is another girl from Bali staying at my house.”

  She said, “Oh God, it isn’t that annoying girl with the dog collar, is it? I swear she is following me.”

  When I look back on this moment now, I wonder why it didn’t occur to me that Lisa was 1) a woman, 2) from the same city as me, 3) doing the same thing as me, 4) in the same order as me. Basically, we were two people who should have immediately sought each other out as friends. I’d had this idea that friendship was something I had to figure out, something I had to select for myself, strategize, and create. It never occurred to me that friendship might find me for a change.

  We reluctantly spent the day together walking the old city and fell in friendship. We even got our belly buttons pierced in Jerusalem together. We took trains and buses throughout Israel and made our way down to the shore of the Red Sea in Egypt. By then we had our own language and a cadence to speaking. After we parted and said goodbye, the universe threw us together again. We were star-crossed strangers, friends of fate . . . if I believed in that nonsense. I was traveling with my sister in Italy, and I ran into Lisa with her sister at a café, and later on the streets of Florence and Paris. We decided that something bad might happen if we didn’t stay in touch. Once we grew tired of blowing through our savings in European destinations, we decided to go back to Egypt together. We sailed the Nile in a felucca and shopped the markets of Cairo; a lifelong friendship was now sealed. Side note: I learned that she freaked out about being eaten alive by an infestation of bedbugs in Ubud—my bad for being judgy. I guess there can be something to complain about in a dollar-fifty-a-night room. Sometimes, fate has to hit you over the head with a sledgehammer. (Literary fate, not real fate, ’cause that is silly.)

  I was a heavy drinker when I met Lisa, but when I fell in friendship love with her, the thirsty void was filled with her and I drank less. A writer and journaler, Lisa taught me to embrace my sadness or loneliness and turn it into words. Emotions, all of them, even the dark ones, were material I could mine for my own stabs at poetry (so bad, really, truly hideous stuff). I had always done it with drawings but never realized how a journal could be both a work of art and a therapy session. We would just sit on the bank of the Seine in Paris and she’d read from her journals about things we’d done. I was inspired by Lisa to keep a journal of my own and came home with a bunch of them. My journals were like art books, with drawings and notes that were a record of my travels—but not only the best moments. It wasn’t enough to just see a place, we had to have an experience there that was worthy of inclusion. We pushed ourselves to take risks so that I would have something to document. In the days before selfies, texts, and video recording, we had pen and paper. The words “journey” and “journal” became one and the same to me.

  It was all right there on the page: Lisa and I were on a journey together, into ourselves, each other, and the world. We once followed a boy in Cairo to the desert behind the Pyramids and helped smuggle liquor across a border just because he was standing under a huge sign that said TRUST (Egyptians love exotic English words like we love to tattoo nonsensical kanji tramp stamps to look woke). It just made a good story.

  Lisa and Kari in Egypt.

  * * *

  WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR

  Being my friend is rarely boring. You might be a victim of my odd admiration and practical jokes.

  For example, my buddy Eric is squeamish about lady stuff, so I sent him a picture of the bucket of placenta from the birth of my baby. I labeled the email “Stella’s first house.” Knowing that he’d be horrified when he opened an innocent attachment of gory lady stuff was hilarious to me. Eric? Not so much.

  When I found out my friend Michael has a fear of clowns, well, that was too easy. I started sending to his house unmarked packages containing my childhood porcelain clown collection. It took him forever to figure out it was me. I delighted in his amateur sleuthing and would say, “I think you’re getting close to solving this one, Sherlock!”

  I once sent my friend Celeste a box of doll parts that I found in a creepy fire pit. Clearly, she’s as weird as me since she baked them in a loaf of bread and sent them back. She is a baker, so it isn’t that weird?

  So, just a warning: If you befriend me . . . watch the mail.

  * * *

  This is the same Lisa, girlfriend of Brett, who was buddies with Paul. If I weren’t trying to find Lisa that night, I wouldn’t have met and fallen in love with my husband. I wouldn’t have our daughter, Stella, the greatest joy of my life. You never know who will become important to your life.

  It might be for a single encounter, like that Hungarian boy who lifted me up on a bad day and taught me the romance of a love affair that lasts only twelve hours. It might be forever, like Lisa, who remains a huge part of my life. Allow yourself to figure out what temporary or permanent friends mean for you, and what you are supposed to do for them, and no human connection will be wasted. Everyone is an experience to learn from.

  Mythission Impossible: Make Work Friends

  Until I started working at M5 Industries, I didn’t understand how amazing it is when your work friends are your actual friends. When I found myself at the right place, at the right time of my life, I was compelled to bond with the people there. It wouldn’t be like making friends with Brittany or Lisa. Things are a little more challenging when you’re the only woman in a shop full of men.

  Or so I thought.

  Women hear a lot about “leaning in” at work these days. I’m a big Sheryl Sandberg fan, but she didn’t write that damn book until long after I’d sorted shit out for myself. When I look back on my time at M5 navigating relationships, I know that I didn’t need to “lean in,” because I fit in. In a room full of shop guys telling dirty jokes, working hard but always down for a prank, I was basically right at home. Literally. It was my natural personality, picked up from my dirty-joke-telling dad, a man who never shied away from a crass punch line, even with his daughters.

  I could tell the grossest jokes and swear like a sailor. The shop guys were so surprised by my foul mouth, they were both disarmed and charmed. I appreciated their laughter and attention, and they appreciated mine. It was like cracking the guy code: sarcasm + humor + sexual innuendo = friendships at work. Double entendres rolled off my tongue. While sure, this version of myself wasn’t the same one I employed when, say, hanging out with my grandma, it was nice to connect with the people I worked with. And I had a willingness to meet my male colleagues in the middle—to connect with them in a way that put them at ease, and they reciprocated with a respect that put me at ease.

  My friendships on MythBuster
s actually reminded me of my high school crew, a ragtag bunch of smarty-pants who inspired me. On science TV, of course, you’re going to meet a lot of intelligent, creative people. Jamie has a degree in Russian. Adam is one of the most well-read self-taught people I have known. Grant is an intuitive electrical engineer. Tory has a tremendous wealth of knowledge about all kinds of building and making. As friends, we learned from and taught each other, and each one of them made me a better builder and thinker. Work friendships run deep because you spend so much time together, often more time than with your own family.

  In lucky cases, your work friends feel like a family.

  The build team—Tory, Grant, and I—were particularly close, and that togetherness created a kind of synergy that allowed the sum total of our individual parts to be greater as a whole, like Mulder and Scully or Woz and Jobs. In certain combinations of personality and talent, something amazing happens. It is something that can’t be cast or created, replicated or forced. It’s a kind of magic, and we had that on MythBusters. A cameraman once gave us the nicknames Practical, Technical, and Logical because, between the three of us and our totally different ways of thinking, we could solve any problem. For that reason, Tory (Practical), Grant (Technical), and I (Logical) were thrilled to work together again on White Rabbit Project on Netflix. The format wasn’t exactly right for us, and the show lasted only one season, but, man, did we have fun getting the band back together. I hope we work together again, but in the meantime, we remain lifelong friends.

  * * *

  LINDA

  Over time, at MythBusters, there were more women around the shop and on the production team, and I was glad. One of my favorites was Linda Wolkovitch, a pure genius. She was a researcher and a producer, and her job was, basically, to figure stuff out. She knew every detail of every myth we did. If we needed an expert on medieval torture devices, Linda would find them. If we needed a bomb range or a 747, she could find it. Without her, MythBusters wouldn’t have had such incredible access. She’d unearth experts who were studying exactly what we were up to and get them to help shape our story. Once, an energetic materials expert she found published a technical research paper on an experiment we did with him, and gave us coauthorship.

  For the Pop Rocks and soda myth episode, we needed a cow stomach with the esophageal valve still attached, and we were having trouble finding one. Linda said, “Give me twenty minutes.” Half an hour later, cow stomachs with valves appeared. If it weren’t for Linda, the true unsung hero of MythBusters, I have no idea where we would have gone for two tons of coffee creamer. Even though we don’t work together anymore, I still see her when she and other women of MythBusters—Linda, Lauren, Yvette, Jax, Jaime, and Francesca—congregate to drink wine, eat organic cheese, talk about the old days, laugh about the crazy things we did, and occasionally gossip about the “where are they now” refugees of MythBusters days, while MacGirlvering broken eyeglasses at dinner with a pen shaft and duct tape. Old habits die hard.

  * * *

  People often ask if I was involved in any sexy shenanigans behind the scenes on MythBusters. Hate to disappoint, but no. I was a woman among men, but they stayed very firmly in the friend zone. (Not to say others on the show didn’t engage in salacious relationships . . . but this isn’t that kind of book and it’s not my story to tell . . . yet. Maybe someday, wink.)

  Regardless of my experience, plenty of inappropriate behavior does indeed happen in male-dominated industries by coworkers who should know better—or do know better and hit on you anyway. I have had my share of punishments from bosses that I wouldn’t date. Almost every woman I know has some degree of a #metoo story. Some can shake their heads and ignore it; some get to the point that they need to file lawsuits. Hopefully, with more women speaking out, this kind of behavior will become a relic of the past.

  What I have found, and what we are seeing now, is the power of women who come together. We are a force when we support each other. And though I adore my many male friends on set, I always feel a special camaraderie with the women I work with.

  WHEN IT COMES TO MAKING FRIENDS, KEEP IT SIMPLE

  How Many Friends Do You Really Need?

  According to science, if you have three close friends you choose (as opposed to family) who will be there for you no matter what, you are doing fine.

  I have more than three best, best friends, but not too many more.

  My social circles are rounded out with good friends and acquaintances to share experiences and make more fun memories. I find different people to tap into different sides of my personality. Having a number of friends with narrow interests won’t expand your mind, but having diverse friends with a wide range of interests will. To develop all parts of your brain, maintain a handful of friend groups. I’ve got my:

  Workout friends for bike riding or yoga class.

  Maker friends for crafting and cocktails.

  Adventure friends for rock climbing and shooting.

  Fan friends who I’ve met promoting MythBusters and stayed in touch with.

  Social media friends for DMing on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

  Text buddies who watch Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, and American Gods with me from our respective couches. Doesn’t everyone watch a new X-Men movie while texting with her nerd BFF (talking to you, Eric!)?

  My daughter is my best friend of all time. Our connection touches every part of my brain and makes my entire life profoundly more joyful. But she is not really my friend. Friends don’t tell friends to stop biting their nails and to go to bed (for the most part). I’m her mom now, but I’m laying the groundwork for our future adult friendship by having fun and working on projects together. I’m sure she’ll go through a period of hating me or at least rolling her eyes at me, so she becomes independent, and then, when she comes back, we’ll be besties. She is already the coolest person I know.

  Poke It with a Stick

  When I look around at the wonderful, true friendships that have lasted and lasted in my life, I wonder if all of them didn’t emerge from the simplest of circumstances: shared experience, like-mindedness, and respect. Even my first friends—the neighbor girls—who let me walk with them to the bus. While it seemed at the time like I schemed them into being my friends, perhaps they let me join their squad because they too felt high school loneliness, and sensed a kindred spirit.

  My work relationships were no different. Despite age, gender, and background, we’d all found ourselves at M5 or MythBusters studios, working similar jobs we loved. That like-mindedness made for easy and natural friendship.

  The simplest method might be the best one, in busting myths, and forming friendships. When things get more and more complicated, you’re not getting closer to an answer or a human connection. You’re getting farther away from it. Occam’s razor, the scientific principle about problem-solving that says the simplest theory is probably right—it was true when I used the “poke it with a stick” method on the infrared camera, and it’s true about friendships as well.

  Every time I tried to use complicated measures to make friends, they didn’t materialize. But when I applied simple, logical methods like aligning myself with people who cared about what I did, who enjoyed art and adventure, we bonded so easily, it was like we were meant to be friends.

  The people right in front of you, the ones you have things in common with, who are at the next desk, in your favorite classes, and go to the same comedy clubs, should be your friends. You might go looking high and low for the people who fill your heart with joy and belly with laughter. But chances are, they’re right in front of you. Your friends might not be what you expect, but if someone appears in your life and you enjoy each other, he or she is probably exactly what you need.

  One more simple friend formula: The work you put into friendships is matched exactly by what you get back. If you stop working on maintenance, friendships will fade. If you keep in touch, they will sustain. When you have an all-consuming job, and kids, and a packed, busy
life, it’s not easy. Laziness sets in. I compare it to physical exercise. If you want to be strong, you conquer laziness and do those push-ups. If you want to have friends, you make those calls. Like I said, simple.

  People. People who need people. Are the neediest people in the world?

  I veer to extremes in so many ways, but a major one is in my social needs. I can be completely alone for days at a time. If I’m focused on an art project, it’s like I’m the only person on the planet. I consider myself to be an introvert. But put me around a table with my best friends, and I’m the loudest person in the room. Apart from my daughter and husband, only my besties can make my heart burst with joy.

  I’m so grateful to have them for the laughs and love, but also because I know what it’s like not to have any friends at all.

  A Priest, a Crash Test Girl, and a Comedian Walk into a Bar . . .

  When I travel to another city for PR or meetings, I get into being anonymous and alone, going out to eat and to movies. It’s cheesy but true: I have a friend in myself.

  But I also like to make friends with people for an hour or an evening, just to test my social skills. When I was in New York pitching this book to publishers, I went into my hotel bar by myself and struck up a conversation with a gay Catholic priest ten years my senior, and, on my other side, a twenty-five-year-old female improv comic from one of those Saturday Night Live feeder companies.

  We just started talking, drinking, telling our stories, and bonding over our differences, and we became an unexpected trio of fast friends, staying at the bar for hours and laughing our asses off.