Suck It, Wonder Woman! Read online

  suck it, wonder woman!

  The Misadventures of a Hollywood Geek

  Olivia Munn

  with Mac Montandon

  St. Martin’s Press New York

  I’m dedicating this book to everyone who’s ever been mean to me. From family members to girls at school to boyfriends who cheated on me. If you weren’t such jerks, I never would’ve developed such a tough skin to handle Hollywood and be where I’m at today.

  So, thanks for being such assholes!

  I wouldn’t have a book deal without you! Cheers!

  table of contents

  Introduction

  1 Ruff Love

  2 Thoughts About My First Agent’s Girlfriend’s Vagina

  3 The Sweetest Moments in Geek History! Of All Time!

  4 Star Wars Can Totally Help You in Life

  5 Random True Story #1

  6 Sex: What You Can Do to Help Yourself Have More of It

  7 My Fans Rule-And Are Really Good Artists, Too

  8 The First Rule of Kindergarten Is That You Have to Bribe Kids to Let Them Play with You

  9 My Dinner with Harvard’s Finest

  10 The Ten Major Points of Olivia Munn’s 2024 Presidential Campaign Platform

  11 What to Do When The Robots Invade (Yes, When!)

  12 Muscle Relaxers and Swimming Fully Clothed Don’t Really Go Together So Good

  13 Surefire Pickup Lines For College Kids Trying to Nail Their Teachers

  14 A Gallery of Great Women

  15 On the Playboy Cover Shoot, Scandinavian Stylists, and Picking out Panties

  16 The Time I Met the Champ

  17 Dating Tips to Totally Help You Score!

  18 My Worst Day Ever

  19 Princess Leia Tweets Star Wars

  20 Random True Story #2

  21 “Masturbatory” Is Not Always a Metaphor In Hollywood

  22 Spotting Assholes Made Easy

  23 Boys Can Be Really Great-And Also Really F’ing Annoying

  24 Here’s the Part About Moving to Oklahoma, Throwing My First Party, and Fake Sleeping to Trick the Cops

  25 Unfortunate E-mail Sign-Offs

  26 The Day I Saw My First Antique Dildo

  27 I Did It All for the Love of Pie

  28 Random True Story #3

  29 Why I’d Rather Date a Geek

  30 Suck It, Wonder Woman!

  31 How to Make Love Like a Zombie

  32 Location, Location, Etc

  33 FAQ For a Supergeek

  34 “If You Can Get Friction with That Tuba, You Deserve a 25-Year-Old Girlfriend.”

  Acknowledgments

  introduction

  Yeah, so I wrote a book. I know everyone thinks they have a book in them and that one day they will totally write it and it will be great, but that’s not true. For one thing, writing a book is hard as shit. And writing a book that is interesting and entertaining is doubly hard as shit. Plus—who’s to say if anyone will give two shits? Ya know?

  Now, I’m not saying I’m so great and so interesting, I’m just saying I wrote this book. Tough to argue with that! And while I generally worry that I might be doing a terrible job on stuff and am more likely to suck than to rule when I first try any given thing, I have to say, I gave this book my best shot, with absolute honesty. I hope you agree, but if you don’t, that’s cool. I’ll try better the next time!

  I’m not sure many people know that I had a fairly unusual childhood and upbringing. It was the sort of childhood that makes you either desperate and suicidal, or makes you see the humor in almost every situation. I chose laughs.

  My mom’s parents were Chinese but they moved to Vietnam before she was born. She had eight siblings and my grandfather had a successful bricklaying business. During the Vietnam war, my grandfather was able to pay off the Communists to help his family escape to America. My grandmother and her nine children took a boat to the Philippines and then a plane ride to Oklahoma. Why Oklahoma? Because the only American they knew was a man named Gary, who lived in Oklahoma and offered to help them out any way he could. (Oh, Fun Fact about Gary? This is so crazy. I knew him my whole life and he was like an uncle. A few years ago, there was a really bad winter in Oklahoma, and a lot of homes were damaged. So instead of waiting for insurance to come out and assess his damage, 60-something-year-old Gary climbs onto his roof, steps on his skylight, falls through and is speared by all the falling glass. He lies there dead for a couple of days before anyone finds him. I know! So crazy. All these years, I bet he never thought he’d go out like that. That was an awesome story, you’re welcome. But back to this book!) So my mom and her family moved to Oklahoma in the 1970s to attend good schools. Good, Christian schools in Oklahoma.

  Now, there’s something I should clarify to all you non-Asians reading this. There are two types of Asians. The ones who are quiet, polite, organized and laugh with their hand over their mouths. And then there are the other Asians—the really loud, insane messy ones who hit their kids and yell even when they’re just talking about the weather. My family is comprised of loud-ass Asians. The men have serious aversions to shirt wearing—it’s like their bodies literally will not allow their hands to go above their head to put on a shirt. It’s amazing. And the women scream, hit their kids, and address all white people as “Hey, lady!…Hey, you!…Hey, lady!…Hey, you!”

  You know the Joy Luck Club? The women in my family should form a new club—The Oh Shit You Some Crazy Asian Lady Club.

  I mean that in a nice way and wouldn’t want to change them at all. The truth is that as crazy as they can be, they are also wonderful and loving people—so wonderful, infact, that they probably won’t kill me for everything I am about to say and for my riffing on their foibles.

  I’ll just run it down for you: One aunt has a daughter who is an ex-beauty queen and a son who lived in his room for three years as a shut-in. Like, he wouldn’t come out ever. He was just in there, not talking to anyone, playing World of Warcraft or whatever. He had my aunt’s credit card to order food to live on. My mom once asked my aunt how she knew he was even alive, and my aunt answered that sometimes she would see a light go on or off. That was her only sign of life, or so she speculates, a light switch. Eventually she lured him out and drove him to MY MOM’S house in Oklahoma and told my mom to deal with him. It was crazy! I don’t think the treatment took, as he stayed with my mom for a year before going back home because he refused to go to school or say please or thank you or be…normal.

  This same aunt—fun thing about her—I’m pretty sure is a hoarder. She once bought like thousands of dollars worth of rice cookers because they were on sale. She can’t control herself around a good deal. Or a bad one. She once bought out a store of its swing gliders and made everyone in the family throw away their beds to sleep on their very own, individual swing glider.

  Another aunt married a guy who makes decent money, so now there is nothing for her to do but go to the gym and take long showers there. Why? I think she does that to save money. In the past, when she came to my mom’s house for dinner, she brought a plastic bag and took fruits and vegetables my mom just bought. According to family lore, she hides food under her bed so her kids won’t find it. The good food. The other food she keeps in the fridge for her kids to eat. What kind of food, you ask? Like, spaghetti with tuna fish, marinara sauce and carrots—all in one big pot. That way they don’t have to eat her good food and she doesn’t have to cook for a week. When her kids were young she found a way to make cash off of them. She offered to pay them for chores but when they didn’t do them to her satisfaction she deducted the amount from the ledger, so at the end the month her kids would owe her! All kidding aside, I have to hand it to her; that would be kind of a ge
nius financial strategy. She might have a future at Goldman Sachs.

  One aunt dresses in short shorts, hot pants and tank tops because she’s desperate to look young. One day she decided she wanted to change her name to Britney. Yes, just like Britney Spears. “Call me Brit-UH-Knee,” she told everyone at the gym. “Call me Brit-UH-Knee, because I Brit-UH-Knee Spears, okay?” Once one of her gym buddies called the house asking for Britney and her husband slammed down the phone. “Hey,” my aunt pleaded. “Hey, that was my friend. Let me talk to my friend. You tell them I am Brit-UH-Knee.”

  Then there’s the Doc. The Doc is my aunt who is a successful radiologist. And that’s another thing about my family—they all possess the clichéd Asian drive to succeed, so they all are super-educated and some of them have done really well in their chosen professions. A few of them are doctors and engineers. Doc is so talented she even taught her cats to pee on the toilet.

  One other aunt is always in pajamas, and usually I think I can make out some sort of juice or soda or stain all over it. And everyone acts like she’s “simple,” but she’s not and she loves her garage sales. It seems like all she does all day is drive around in a pickup truck going to garage sales. So whatever new thing you have, whatever you just bought, she could’ve gotten it for you cheaper. Here is a an invented—but not totally off base—exchange:

  This aunt: Hey, nice MacBook. Where’d you get it?

  Me: Um, the Mac store.

  Aunt: How much did you pay?

  Me: I don’t know, about $2,000 or so.

  Aunt: Oh really? You know, I could buy at garage sale for one dollah.

  But I have to say, as crazy as my family is, I am very proud of what they’ve done. They spent all their money to come to America for a better life. All nine children graduated from college. And some have gone on to have their own radiology practices, or they’ve worked for NASA, or have been a top engineer for Ford, and they’ve become teachers and parents. I am so very proud of that. Yes, they’re crazy, but who isn’t? I think it’s much better to acknowledge and embrace and, damn I say, celebrate the craziness, than to pretend it doesn’t exist or try to convince people my family is something “perfect.” Because honestly, the craziness is kind of fun and made me the person I am today.

  So, yes, there has always been a lot of yelling in my family. And since my mom remarried an Air Force guy, we’ve always moved around a lot, too. I think those two factors had a definite effect on me growing up, and to this day, I’ve looked for shelter and found solace among the quiet and the nerdy. I am a misfit myself and I have always seemed to get along with misfits. And, as I discuss in the pages of this book, I was just lucky that wherever I’ve been—Oklahoma, Japan, Hollywood—there has been a nerd family willing to take me into their fold.

  I think I was raised in a way that was not like everyone else—part Chinese, part white, part Air Force brat, and all geek all the time. The geeks who took me in showed me the many joys of Tetris, Super Mario Brothers, Dungeons & Dragons, and much, much more—they may have saved my life in the process. Or, at the very least, they saved what is left of my sanity. Which is good because then I was able to use that leftover sanity to help me write my book, which, again, I hope you will really like because it doesn’t suck and it has a lot of pictures. Some of them were made by my fans who are, no joke, the best fans in the world. Just ask them.

  Last thing for now—I realize I’ve talked a little shit about my family here but I hope you realize that when it comes down to it—I wouldn’t trade them in for any family in the world. Except maybe the Kennedys because—fuck, the Kennedys! I mean, I would love a family compound and to ask people year-round where they “summer”!

  No, really, without my family this book would not have been possible at all—so if you hate it, blame them.

  For some reason, when I was thirteen years old, I thought it would be really neat to wear only clothes that were Disney themed. Fucking everything. My preferred outfit: Mickey Mouse shirts, socks and hair clips, finished off with blindingly white Keds sneakers. Sexy, I know. (Note: If you’re a preteen kid about to move to a brand-new school in a completely different country it is fate that you’re reading this right now—put down the Donald Duck shirt and pick up a gun! Trust me, it will only end badly.)

  From the moment I sat in my first-period class on the very first day at my new military school in Japan, I knew things were gonna be bad. There was a group of girls sitting in Science staring me down and whispering amongst themselves. I could make out a little of it:

  “Who does she think she is?”

  And: “Is she really wearing that?”

  Oh, and also: “God, she looks like such a

  bitch…and a slut.”

  Delightful.

  I pretended not to hear and picked a random seat not that far from the cackling cunts. Why did I choose a seat so close to them? I didn’t want them to think they were intimidating me. Because the moment they thought they made me feel inferior, it would be over. I decided at that moment that I would never show fear.

  The only problem with this plan was that I was scared shitless. I was terrified that no one would like me. That I’d have zero friends—apart from Mickey and Minnie, of course. But these girls apparently saw something that I didn’t. Did I have food in my teeth? Were my shorts too tight? Did I pee in them? What the hell were they whispering about?! I calmly excused myself to the restroom to take a quick look.

  Standing in front of the mirror I conducted a fast check: White button-up shirt? Check. Blue Esprit shorts cuffed at the bottom? Check. Mickey Mouse ankle socks with blue rim at the top? Oh, hells yeah, check. Turn around. Yep, there’s the whole gang on the back of my shirt: Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, Donald. What could they possibly be saying about what is clearly a genius outfit? I really had no idea. I honestly had no idea that some people might regard me as a preppy douche upon which Walt Disney had hurled massive, Technicolor chunks.

  I’d like to say this is where things got better, but that wouldn’t make a good story…and it wouldn’t be true. I made just one friend in six months.

  Her name was Eve. She had bangs and one long braid in the back, wore glasses and liked to fold up notes like little origami birds. She would sit with me at lunch and look away helplessly as the other girls would step up one by one and share their one-word descriptions of me.

  “Bitch.”

  “Slut.”

  “Dickhead.”

  Dickhead? Seriously? I was only thirteen years old and had never even seen a dick yet.

  It was the weirdest thing to be called a slut. I mean, I was only thirteen years old and had never even kissed a boy yet. But, somehow by the grace of God I was, in fact, a slut. And because popular opinion rules in high school, that’s all anyone thought of me. And I got used to being bullied, harassed and having only one friend. At least I had Eve. I can’t imagine what it would be like if I didn’t have anyone.

  But then one day, everything changed for me.

  There was a new guy in school and every girl was talking about him. Not because he looked like Brad Pitt, but because we were all so bored. Any new blood was interesting. I’ll call him Sam. He was stocky and a little chubby. Had a splotch of acne on his cheeks and floppy blondish brown hair that fell over his eyes. The only other thing I knew about him was that he played soccer. And he wore his backpack straps on both arms—not the one-armed slingover all the cool kids were doing. Sam gave off an air of not caring at all what people thought of him, whether or not they liked him. He was my hero. I was in love.

  He didn’t concentrate too hard and…yep, heard him die. Definitely Mario.

  I watched him closely for his first week at school. He didn’t talk to anyone. He ate lunch by himself and played his Gameboy on a shady patch of grass beside the building. What was he playing? Tetris? No—too much finger movement. Mario? Possibly. He didn’t concentrate too hard and…yep, heard him die. Definitely Mario.

  Sam was awesome at soccer. He was alwa
ys practicing and could do all these crazy tricks. But the best thing about him? He was always alone. No one seemed to want to talk to him, not even his teammates. Soon word spread through school that everyone thought he was “weird” and “retarded.” Wait—so that was why he didn’t have any friends?

  That’s why he didn’t have any friends? He was so cute and talented…but because he had a little acne and played a Gameboy in his spare time he had some sort of mental retardation? These dumb bitches were as dumb as they were my first day.

  One night I made a decision while going through my closet, picking my outfit for the next day—Daisy Duck tank top and jeans: so cute! I decided I would tell Eve to spread the word that I wanted Sam to be my boyfriend. She did; it moved like wildfire or crotch fire or what have you.

  The next day it was all anyone could talk about. The school had this low buzzing as its soundtrack: Olivia likes Sam. Sam likes Olivia. OMG! OMG! OMG!

  So I did the only thing that made sense: I started freaking out. I might have even thrown up on myself. I don’t remember. Suddenly there was all this attention on me. Suddenly all those bitches who hated me wanted to quench their gossip thirst, acting like they were my friends just to get the scoop. It was crazy.

  “Are you gonna say yes?”

  “Are you gonna put out?”