Buffering Read online

  RANT: Somebody looks into a camera and talks about the things that bother him or her. I think. Wait, is a rant a Wog? I don’t know. Let’s move on.

  Now you know a little more about YouTubers.3 Are we all work-addicted egomaniacs? I guess that’s a matter of opinion. Is this career of constant output healthy or sustainable? Who knows. All I know is that this is the best job I’ve ever had. And I’ve had some pretty shitty jobs. Literally! Let’s take a peek at this excerpt . . . from my journal during my years in college as maintenance manager of Hoyt Hall.

  11/19/08

  AN ENTRY REGARDING A SUPREMELY CLOGGED TOILET

  Lately, I’ve lost my desire to deal with shit. I mean that quite literally. No part of me wants to fix this mess. Instead, I’ve chosen to let it fester and build bacteria. Why? Part of it is most assuredly laziness. The other part is a fear—no, fear is too strong—a lack of desire to deal with the festering pile. I don’t want to look at it head on, I don’t want it to see me. I don’t want to try, and I don’t want to fail at it. I don’t want to touch the filthy tools used for encounters with home waste. I just want to keep the door shut and pretend it isn’t there. Assure those who encounter it that I have a planned course of action in mind—simply so that they will leave me alone and I can ignore the problem too. The longer I wait the worse it will get. Maybe the toilet will forget the feeling of clean running water. Maybe it will figure that something pure used to exist inside and it wasn’t always brimming with dung. I’m not helping the process any. The toilet used to have a clean and efficient system for renewing itself. I’ve taken that away. The only way to give it back is to sift through the sewage and let it sing.

  Yikes.

  I’ve included this little ditty from a dirtier time to show you that I wasn’t always living the dream. Most jobs I’ve had in my life have not been glamorous, and I took them because they paid the bills.

  (I’d also like to point out that most of my motivation for work was using guilt as a whip to drive me forward. It was the only way I knew how to discipline myself. In this journal entry I’m literally telling myself that I’m hurting a toilet by not cleaning it. Christ, baby Hannah. Give your baby brain a break!)

  My Drunk Kitchen was different, of course. It was not a show born out of obligation or even ambition.

  It began as a show about friendship.

  I dunno, dude. I just . . . I just wish I could get it together, ya know?”

  My friend Hannah Gelb was sniffling from the other side of the country, her tears pixelated by the quality of the web camera on my laptop. Although by March 2011 a crying Hannah Gelb was a familiar sight, it was always a painful one for me to see.

  Hannah and I first met while studying abroad in Japan. The program we had both been accepted into was a partnership between the UCs (University of California) and Tsuru Bunkadaigaku (a small liberal arts college in a town nestled in the foothills of Mount Fuji). Hannah was from UC Santa Cruz, which is kind of the younger and equally hippy-dippy sibling of UC Berkeley, where I went.

  Jewish and naturally neurotic, Hannah has the voice of a Disney character and a Muppet combined, which is appropriate since she sort of embodies the joyous optimism of a Disney tale paired with the soulful quality of Jim Henson’s creatures. We were a perfect pair of misfits joined at the hip during our time in a foreign land.

  While in Japan, my friendship with Hannah was crucial to my survival. I was in the throes of my first heartbreak and subsequent depression. I was unable to eat or motivate myself, but the friendship I formed with Hannah helped me dig myself out of that dark spiral. It wasn’t her words of wisdom or spiritual guidance . . . it was our laughter that healed me. Since then, no matter how dark the days, Hannah Gelb never fails to make me laugh.

  After college Hannah, her boyfriend Alex and I all headed for San Francisco and decided to be roommates in an apartment we found on the outskirts of Noe Valley. We lived together for almost a year before I announced that I had to get out of San Francisco and move to New York.4 Hannah was happy for me but also mournful because she had counted on me for her daily pick-me-ups as she battled her (not yet diagnosed) chronic depression. There had been many tearful conversations at our kitchen table in San Francisco. So many, in fact, that it became a running joke. I’d walk into the kitchen and see her sitting staring out the window with a pile of used tissues in front of her. I’d usually say something like “Before we dive into the meaninglessness of life, do you know if we have any milk left?”

  Hannah would laugh her big, joyous laugh before replying with something like “I dunno, dude, I think I used it all up on my morning cup of sorrow.”

  “Did you say ‘morning’ like daytime or ‘mourning’ like sad time?”

  “Both.”

  “Perfect.”

  I worried a great deal about my sweet friend when I left for New York. I imagined a parallel universe where I’d stayed by Hannah’s side, as her crutch, helping her to avoid emotional pitfalls wherever they appeared. But I decided that positive self-action was important, so I went. I missed her badly, but I never regretted it.

  One day, a few months after I’d moved, I was down in DC cat-sitting for Naomi while she and her husband attended a wedding. Naomi and her husband lived in a basement apartment with no windows and an odd dampness to it, with a fat cat named Mochi who would sit and stare at you for hours, assessing your character flaws and quietly judging you. At least that’s what it seemed like to me.

  That night, Hannah and I were video chatting to test out the new laptop that Naomi had just gotten for me as an “I love you, please let me get you something you need”–type present. Naomi was always catching me neglecting myself, and carrying around my old, broken twenty-pound Toshiba laptop was something she’d considered neglectful. So what if it shut off randomly and had no battery life? It still turned on-ish sometimes!

  “Everything just seems really hopeless. Like, am I ever going to get a real job? I work part-time, dude. At a coffee shop. Is this going to be my life forever?” Hannah sniffled.

  “There’s no such thing as forever, man! It’s just right now. And right now you work at a coffee shop and you’re learning how to be an awesome barista. We love coffee shops! That’s cool!” I said.

  “I don’t feel cool.”

  “Dude. You are cool.”

  “No. You’re cool. You’re like the coolest. I mean, you moved to NEW YORK.”

  “Yeah, it is pretty cool.” I liked to be jokingly smug because it made Hannah laugh. “But I also had to get surgery because I had a cyst. A cyst on my butt, Hannah! My butt!”

  “That cyst was so lucky to be on your butt! I wish I was that cyst!”

  “Oh, my god, then we’d really be soul-cyst-ahs!” Hannah and I were both laughing now. That was what we did. We just laughed our way through the tears. Cry. Laugh. Cry. Repeat.

  Hannah was wiping tears from her eyes. “I really do miss you, man. I miss laughing like this. I miss just, like, normal stuff. Daily stuff. Ugh. I just wish you were here in my kitchen with me! Just, like, getting drunk and cooking and talking about life.”

  “I’m a terrible cook.”

  “Yeah, but you give great advice!”

  “Maybe, but that’s got nothing to do with cooking. Remember when I grew the Genmai Monster5 in Japan and Erin had to wear a hazmat suit to clean it out of my rice cooker??”

  “YES!!! And she drew that comic about it!!! Hahaha! That was amazing!!” Hannah paused in the middle of her laughter and was suddenly pensive.

  “I was just thinking . . .” Hannah began, “. . . why did she do that for you? Did she lose a bet?”

  “Huh. You know, I don’t remember . . .”

  The conversation was winding down and I could sense Hannah’s mood starting to shift. That’s the thing about joy and sorrow: they are opposite sides of the same coin. One as powerful a feeling as the other, but until Hannah found a space between them she’d be flipping back and forth. Not wanting her to become sad ag
ain, I tried to think of something I could do that would cheer her up and get her through the night. “Hey, dude, maybe you’re onto something . . .”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe I should make you a cooking show! I can just record it on this thing and cut it together and then send it to you!”

  “HAHAHA! That would be AMAZING.” Hannah was excited. I was excited, too. “Do you know how to do stuff like that?”

  “No, but I’m sure I can figure it out. This laptop that Naomi just got for me is amazing. It’s got a movie editor and music editor and all sorts of things. I can’t believe computers come with this stuff!”

  “You’re rich!”

  “SO rich.”

  That was a joke because at the time we were both totally broke. Although I’m tempted to point out that I was broke because I’d just spent my savings on moving to New York. I was typically obsessive about saving money. While in Japan I kept a detailed tally of all my spending because I wanted to have enough left when I got home to try to buy a used car.

  Whereas my dear, sweet Gelb . . . literally spent all of her money on ice cream.

  “I’m serious, man. I’m gonna do it!” I was excited.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, dude, really! But you have to promise to start using your Twitter!” A year previously I had convinced Hannah to join the up-and-coming social site called Twitter. I’d joined it in 2008 and thought that if I made a funny enough account some website like McSweeney’s might hire me to write for them. It was my big dream.

  “I’m stoked. I’m gonna go and film it right now, before I change my mind. Wait. Lemme make sure Naomi has some wine in the apartment . . . Okay, solid, she does.”

  “Awesome. That’s the best part.”

  I was confused. “What’s the best part?”

  “The best part of staying at your sister’s place! The wine is always free,” Hannah joked.

  I laughed and said, “I’m using that in the video.”

  And I did.

  The next morning Hannah sent me an e-mail:

  Date: May 16, 2011

  Hannah Gelb

  to Hannah Hart

  I think I have to realize that being 27 and not having done my thing yet is not the catastrophe it seems to be.

  Let me know if you want to talk more about grad school or anything :D

  DUDE, I went to the library today and looked at pictures of Morocco. it’s BEAUTIFUL!!!!

  Love, Gelb

  Date: May 16, 2011

  Hannah Hart

  to Hannah Gelb

  online?? i have something to show youuuu!

  I had filmed the video as soon as we’d ended our video chat, and I’d edited and uploaded it the morning after (My Drunk Kitchen—still available to watch now on youtube.com/harto!). My motivation was simply my desire to see Hannah smile. And smile she did. She smiled so much that she shared it with all of her friends to make them smile. And then those friends shared it with all of their friends to make them smile. And so on and so forth. A mere forty-eight hours later, I was a viral sensation.

  I’m going to skip the details of what happened after that, because at this point the whole “viral video turned YouTube star thing” is old news. But in a nutshell:

  * I made some more videos.

  * Those videos also went viral.

  * I thought, “This could get me one step closer to my dream of becoming a writer!”

  * I slept on couches to cut expenses and sold merch6 until I had built a tiny online empire.

  Making My Drunk Kitchen for Hannah Gelb felt amazing. When I’m creatively stuck or filled with doubt about what content I should create, or bothered by the views on videos being low, I like to take a step back and remember why this all happened in the first place: to give a friend a break from the worries of the world.

  I may not have always wanted to be famous, but I have always wanted to brighten someone’s day. To brighten their view of the world.

  And for all of us, I think, that’s the view that matters most.

  1 I actually prefer the term “content creator,” because at this point in my career there are all kinds of different content that I create. But at the beginning, yes, I was exclusively a YouTuber.

  2 So many kinds of knots!! I’m telling you! It’s amazing!

  3 If you still want more, I strongly recommend an incredibly popular and thought-provoking series called My Drunk Kitchen. Watch now at YouTube.com/Harto! Like and subscribe!

  4 More on what spurred this decision in the chapter “Fear and Ecstasy.”

  5 When I was living in Japan, I had a bad habit of making brown rice (genmai) and then forgetting about it—for like a month.

  6 Big secret: Ads on YouTube rarely pay the bills, but selling T-shirts and wristbands and coffee mugs sure does. To everyone who bought something from me in 2011–2012: THANK YOU—YOU ARE DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE FOR WHERE I AM TODAY. THANK YOU. BLESS YOU.

  HELLO, HARTO?

  2011 was an amazing year. It was the year that My Drunk Kitchen was born, and it was the year I discovered that I had the chance to earn a living by making people feel good and laugh. My goal had always been to make enough money to support my family, and who makes more money than people in the entertainment industry! If I could figure out how to swing this into a larger career in that space, well, that could really be something.

  But in 2011, it was anyone’s guess. There were some things that people knew were effective for building a YouTube following (calls to action like asking people to subscribe, and so on), and in building relationships with other creators and researching other channels, I started to piece together a system. These days there are actual “playbooks” and “best practices” available for every form of social media, but back then there wasn’t anything like that. It was all uncharted territory, which was my favorite kind.

  Growing up, I was always bored in math class because finding the answers involved using equations that everybody knew. Math, it seemed, was less about problem solving and more about applying existing systems. Snooze fest. I wanted to do something different. The early years of my career were less about being an “entertainer” and more about being an “entrepreneur.”

  And what’s more enticing than doing something that’s never been done? What could be better for a naïve and ambitious heart at twenty-four?

  I was determined to swing this burgeoning YouTube thing into a career. And it seemed as if that was a real possibility. My Drunk Kitchen was getting more and more popular, and the channel was growing into other shows as well. With interest building, I thought that there was sure to be big money in this new form of entertainment. And any amount was going to be more than what I was making as a part-time/night-working proofreader.

  So 2011 was an awesome, exciting year. It felt like possibility was a light shining through me in radiant and varying color.

  2012, however, was all shades of gray.

  Because in February 2012, I moved to Los Angeles.

  I left my couch-surfing life in New York behind and found a shared room in Silver Lake. I started to take meetings with agents who introduced me to production companies and studios in a series of meetings called “generals.”1 I was excited to figure out what Entertainment!Hannah looked like.

  This is how those meetings would generally go. The first sentence out of the mouth of every executive or representative I met with was: “Picture this . . . what if . . . My Drunk Kitchen . . . WAS A TV SHOW?!?!?!?!?!!”

  When I asked how they thought My Drunk Kitchen would look as a TV show, they’d immediately start morphing the format: “Well, you couldn’t actually drink. And you’d probably need to make the food look at least edible. And maybe you could interview celebrities! Don’t you want to meet celebrities?”

  First of all, I was not a professional chef. Nor was I a polished host. Nor did I know if “hosting” was something I was able to do. What would be my stance? What would be my voice? What if I sucked? I had no tra
ining and no experience. I was nervous to try.

  Second, and maybe it’s because I grew up with limited access to pop culture, but the “opportunity to meet celebrities” had never enticed me personally. Except for meeting Patrick Stewart or Beyoncé or Oprah. Still hoping to make that happen.

  When I told them I wasn’t interested in a TV show, the response was “Are you sure? You know what, how about you just sell us the rights to My Drunk Kitchen and someone else can star in it? You might even get a couple thousand dollars for it!”

  “No thank you,” I’d say, “but I do think it would make a fun parody cookbook.”

  Blank stares. “Right. A book. That’s a thing. Listen, I’m gonna level with you. People only have good ideas once. You should probably capitalize on this right now. If you don’t, well, be prepared to have missed a massive opportunity.”

  So traditional media was telling me to sell the idea and move on, and the advice I was getting on the digital side usually went something like this:

  “I love Drunk in the Kitchen! A drunk channel! A channel about being a drunk! That’s hilarious.”

  To which I’d reply: “Actually, the channel is called Harto, which is my nickname. But I want it to stand for something more. And, yes, the most popular show on the channel is called My Drunk Kitchen but I don’t want to get stuck drinking for th—“

  “My Drunk Kitchen! Even better. And you can turn that into My Drunk Gaming or My Drunk Skateboard or My Drunk . . . Drunk! Just getting drunk is superfunny. Let’s make sure all those channels are available first. Also, we should turn on copyright infringement settings to make sure no one is stealing your idea and making their own version.”

  “Actually, I don’t wanna do that. I like it when people are inspired by my work to make their own videos. It’s just an idea. People can do what they want with it.”2

  Then I’d offer up ideas I had that nobody seemed to be interested in or knew what to do with: like a concept for a superhero series3 my friend Hannibal and I wanted to make, the dream of selling a book, a project involving music, and so on. But everything I suggested was either “not new enough” or “too new” to be a surefire win.