Wow, No Thank You. Read online

  wow, no thank you.

  ESSAYS

  samantha irby

  This book is dedicated to Wellbutrin.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Into the Gross

  Girls Gone Mild

  Hung Up!

  Late-1900s Time Capsule

  Love and Marriage

  Are You Familiar with My Work?

  Hysterical!

  Lesbian Bed Death

  Body Negativity

  Country Crock

  A Guide to Simple Home Repairs

  We Almost Got a Fucking Dog

  Detachment Parenting

  Season 1, Episode 1

  Hollywood Summer

  $$$

  Hello, 911?

  An Extremely Specific Guide to Publishing a Book

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  wow, no thank you.

  into the gross

  I live for a glamorous lifestyle blog featuring some gorgeous ingenue with piles of secret wealth that she never divulges to the unsuspecting slobs on the other side of the screen. How does she afford three-hundred-dollar eye cream if her job is listed as “freelance editor,” and why is it tossed so casually on her nightstand like she wouldn’t cry if she lost it? I want to admire her floating through a bright and clean apartment in photos so beautiful and overexposed that it hurts your ugly regular-person eyes to look at them as she describes the minutiae of her daily routines, but all the cat dander clouding my eyes makes it difficult. “Maybe I should try alkaline water,” I murmur to myself, as I squint through the unidentifiable goo dried on my phone screen, making a mental note to look up what “adaptogens” are after I search for the cheapest gratitude journal on Amazon. “Wow, she got that skin just from vitamins??” I sigh, taking a sip of a warm Crush grape soda I opened either three hours or three days ago. I subscribe to so many of these blogs and newsletters, I can’t even tell them apart. Partly, I’m curious about the stuff people buy (oh, I am not curious I am actually obsessed and, if I pee at your house, I will make note of the hand soap you use and immediately copy you if it’s fancier than mine, but in an admiring way not a Single White Female way, I promise). But mostly it’s just straight-up awe, because I love STUFF so fucking much, and I want to know how people get to be so pretty and chic.

  I buy a lot of face washes from targeted Instagram ads, but no one gives a shit about what I use probably because I have chin whiskers? Plus, if a hip photographer with cool shoes came to my home, the cats would definitely bite her and we don’t have a single glamorous white wall to use as a backdrop. Even if we did, would anyone be interested in pictures of my stacks of discounted K-Beauty face masks from Big Lots? Um no!!! Still, being featured on a stylish lifestyle blog is my biggest secret dream, and because I am too disgusting to ever be asked in real life, I want to tell you how mine would go:

  I like to wake up naturally, gripped by a heart-pounding panic as the sun slices through my eyelids at noon, when it is perfectly aligned with my bedroom windows. I wince against the sun’s garish rays, a sick feeling spreading through me. It dawns on me that I have already wasted an entire day. AGAIN. I grimace loudly as I slide off the bed and feel around blindly with my toes for the orthopedic flip-flops I keep close enough to find without my glasses on. Sure, I probably could shuffle to the bathroom gripping every flat surface I come into contact with along the way, but who are we kidding? I desperately need the arch support. I have to pee since I’ve been horizontal for several hours, and all the fluid on my legs has pooled backward (upward? what is physiology?) into my bladder. Then I grope through all the bottles in the medicine cabinet until I find the one that feels like Aleve. I get the liquid-gel capsules because they look more science-y and futuristic, and after fumbling with the arthritis cap, I get one lodged in my esophagus despite the fact that I have dislocated my neck desperately lapping at lukewarm faucet water as it slips through my cupped fingers to wash it down. It crosses my mind that I should just stagger back to my room and get in bed and try again tomorrow but—guilt! So I return to the toilet instead (my Kegel muscles no longer hold urine in like they used to) and will myself to just turn the shower on. Turn it on, just turn it on, you can do it, turn it on. I risk shattering my phone in the sink trying to queue up a podcast, probably Who? Weekly or The Read, which I listen to because they’re both very popular and entertaining, but also, if I turn the volume all the way up, it helps to drown out the noise of my washing. I consider doing a single one of the approximately ninety-six beauty treatments littering the vanity and erupting out of the plastic shoeboxes I hide them from my wife in, but I already drank a tablespoon of water, so what else is there even to do?

  In the shower, I use a big block of Irish Spring and because I am black, I was raised to always use a washcloth no matter what, so I do. I also scrub my scalp vigorously with anti-dandruff shampoo, which is a thing beautiful people never have to use. (Just once, I want to read one of these profiles where a slender, shiny-toothed model is like, “Hey, bitch, I have psoriasis!” while aggressively slathering T/Gel onto her roots.) I don’t shave my armpits or legs, but somehow I still take an inordinately long time to get clean. After my shower, I use Neutrogena body oil, because you can get a giant bottle super cheap at Target and it smells like rich people. My towel smells like mildew, but I ignore it!

  Yoga, meditation, and calming morning rituals are for people who actually wake up in the morning, so instead I skip all that and launch into my day, gathering everything I brought up to bed last night when I was pretending I might work instead of watching TV. I load it all into the pink Baggu I schlep with me from room to room, because, listen, I am not walking back up these stairs until nighttime. I wear the same thing pretty much every day: a tucked-in T-shirt, high-waisted sloth pants, and a Madewell sweatshirt. Despite my having what is obviously an impossibly flashy and lavish lifestyle, I regret to inform you that Madewell is not a sponsor.

  Breakfast was over four hours ago, so I start with lunch. I once read one of these profiles where the woman featured talked about alkalizing her body at the start of the day with lemon water, and I am being 100 percent sincere when I say that sentences like that fucking mystify me. What does that mean? How did she learn those words?? I go to the doctor every other day and never has one of them told me about alkalization. Alkalining? Alkalinization? THE NEED TO BE ALKALIZED. I’m in awe of people who talk like that with a straight face, and let me tell you: the shit stuck. So now I start my morning (I mean, afternoon) by drinking some room-temperature water from the pitcher on the counter with a few slices of Meyer lemon from those little bags of them you can get at Trader Joe’s. It has done absolutely nothing for me, from what I can tell, but later on, when I eat an entire jalapeño-and-pepperoni pizza and feel bad about it, I can think to myself, “Bitch, remember when you alkalized?!” and feel clean.

  We live up the street from a middle school, and children are already on their way home, for fuck’s sake, so I don’t feel bad having six Diet Cokes in a row. I’ll finish my water, but, like, I don’t ever want to be too hydrated. All these magazines tell you how you should really be drinking your weight in water every day, and all these movie stars would have you believe their skin glows because of that water bottle they’re carrying around, and I believe them, but also, why doesn’t anyone ever talk about how much peeing you will have to do? I no longer have a pelvic floor, Jennifer Aniston. I cannot just be gulping down smartwater with reckless abandon!

  After consuming all the liquids I’m going to for the entire day, I settle down to work, which I’m really going to do as soon as I put on a little cream highligh
ter and blush that no one else is ever going to see. My work: I occasionally write jokes on the Internet for free because I am the last person on Earth who still has a blog. Sometimes I have freelance projects, but there’s nothing right now. No one is going to pay me to write another book about nothing for at least the next two years. Unfortunately, I don’t have anything new or exciting to say online and absolutely zero paying scams, so my heart sinks as it dawns on me that I have gotten up and gotten dressed just to read what other people are saying on Twitter. This is the glamorous life of a writer!

  After feeling like a boring failure for a while, I pivot to watching TV. If I don’t want to feel like a total scumbag, I’ll watch something on the iPad, which I can quickly disguise as work if, oh, I don’t know, the mailman glances through the blinds while delivering my many boxes from Amazon Prime. Now would be a great time to snack on some quick-pickled beans or fermented slaw, but I am a regular person, so I dig through the pantry to find half a bag of sourdough pretzels I remember leaving in there a week ago and a jar of creamy Jif. Some people would warn you that that’s just eating one type of sugar smeared on top of another kind, and I would agree with them. I could really go for a fresh cold-pressed juice, but I don’t live in Brooklyn, so I settle for the next best thing: another Diet Coke.

  Okay, so here’s the part in the profile where the model meets up with an equally attractive non-model friend someplace cool. The reader is flooded with envy because she doesn’t have (1) friends or (2) cool places to go, and the models are always like, “Oh, tra-la-la, I walked seventeen blocks in these heels I’m posing in to meet up with my girl Monica at a vinyl-only music shop to listen to some vintage hard bop records, and then we walked twenty-three more blocks to get affogatos at this hidden gem that you can only enter through a portal, and after that we went to SoulCycle.” I’m winded just reading that. My afternoons are always like, “searched through all my jacket pockets to find a half-melted lip balm before catching the cat eating its own vomit off the kitchen rug,” but since you’re here taking my picture, I am going to light this fancy candle from Diptyque, pretend it doesn’t make me sneeze, and scroll through shit on my phone while trying to look pensive.

  My evening routine is pretty simple. My lady comes home from work and we’ll opt for something light for dinner, maybe some sous vide chicken and fresh steamed vegetables from the market, followed by one glass of wine and a single square of 70 percent dark chocolate, consumed while fully clothed on a white couch in front of a tastefully sized television playing a chic foreign film. Wow, I’m sorry, let me try that again.

  My lady comes home and grimaces silently at the pile of mail I’ve left unopened on the table, simultaneously shrugging out of her coat while uncorking a bottle of white wine from Walgreens with her teeth. She gets into her pajamas, and I scramble to boil water for pasta and throw whatever is in the vegetable crisper into a pan to make sauce. Then we eat in our sweatshirts in front of whatever soap opera is on while yelling at the cats to stop jumping up onto the stove. This lasts for approximately forty-five minutes before she is asleep, curled around her wineglass in the corner of the couch, and I try to finish her food as quietly as possible and change the channel to wrestling.

  At night, there are many soothing rituals I could perform. I could put on a pot of tea or light some calming incense or put on a collagen mask or rub some moisturizing cream into my hands, but you know what? I don’t live like that! I put all my stuff back in my Baggu, and I drag it upstairs. Then I clean the tank of my sleep machine with vinegar and take all my pills so I hopefully don’t die during the night, and then I pretend I’m going to read but instead I put the news on our BEDROOM TELEVISION SET and worry about the state of the world.

  At eleven thirty or so, I remember that despite not having left the house all day, I’m still wearing a bunch of old makeup, so I get out of bed and use one of those time-saving cleansing wipes you have to use three of to clean my face while I brush my teeth, which, honestly, I wouldn’t have done if I didn’t also have to pee. There’s a bunch of little oil droppers on my bedside table that would look really cute in a still life if they weren’t next to toppled bottles of potassium supplements and industrial-strength callous creams, but I sort through them and extract one rosehip oil (for my face) and one oregano oil (for under my tongue). I use the rosehip so my skin continues to glow with the health and vitality of a newborn, despite my salt intake, and the oregano is a holdover from when I had thrush that I just keep taking because I haven’t had thrush again since then, and, also, why the fuck not? I roll some compression hose onto my legs to remind myself that I am sexy, and change into pajamas that look exactly like the clothes I wore all day, which are folded atop the hamper because I will be wearing those same things again tomorrow.

  I watch Brian Williams and some reruns of Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes, and pretend I understand what is happening in the world. Then I set the sleep timer before burrowing beneath this T.J.Maxx comforter that has been surprisingly durable, and I drift off to dream of adaptogens and other beneficial herbs. Which I will never take.

  girls gone mild

  My lady and I were out getting hammered at the local watering hole on a weeknight and feeling like cool olds, when the waiter asked if it was “moms’ night out,” while offering to explain to us what whiskey is. And now I’m a corpse—please bury me in my L.L.Bean comfort fleece.

  ME: “Excuse me, I have tattoos, Jeff.”

  HIM: “Oh my goodness, ma’am, I’m so sorry, I just saw the fluid collecting at your ankles and assumed—”

  What the fuck is happening to my life? What vibe am I giving off? Yes, I am wearing soft, pull-on, straight-leg Gloria Vanderbilts, but I also have cool glasses and a motherfucking hand tattoo. Couldn’t it just be middle school art teachers’ happy hour, Jeff?! I should write a girls’ night out movie. But a realistic one, featuring people my age who have neck pain and no cartilage in their knees and spend the entire movie trying to calculate how to split a check and figure out the tip across four different cards. Or two women with questionable credit try to rent a car on their way to a wellness retreat neither of them can afford and the teenager behind the Enterprise counter asks them to show nine different forms of identification. A group of friends goes on a wild Caribbean cruise, and “when things get spicy, they get heartburn.” (That’s the poster.)

  I used to party a lot. The only reason I stopped is because I got too old to do it right. Also I moved to a town where the most popular bar has a mechanical bull. I spent two months on the road once when I was nearing the end of my thirties, lugging around a bright orange suitcase full of disposable underwear plus a bunch of impractical shit I thought I was going to need to wear to become a different person, and I tried to party again. Here’s how that went.

  8:30 a.m.: pry eyes open at the sound of the alarm.

  That’s right, preparation for Girls’ Night Out starts in the morning at this age.

  When I was a kid, I could work a full eleven-hour shift on four hours of sleep, change my shoes and put mascara on in the back of a moving cab, and go from drinks to dinner to the club without a second thought. When I turned twenty-one, my roommate in Chicago was this old queen who worked a corporate job and partied five out of six nights and almost never went to bed. Every other night he was at clubs like Manhole (RIP) or Berlin dancing with his shirt off, his waxed chest glistening as he worked his hips to the unce-unce-unce of a European house beat. Then he’d cruise home at four in the morning, brew a pot of coffee, and have a suit on by seven. When I told him I was finally going to be of legal drinking age, he arranged a weeklong celebration: a group of his friends and I were going to hit a different club in Boystown every night for a solid week. The first night, on my birthday proper, was at a gay bar called Roscoe’s, which I clearly remember because I was wearing fuchsia bell-bottoms and a sheer shirt, and how the fuck could I ever forget that? My birthday is the day before Valentine’s Day, and Chicago is always a freezing, slu
shy mess. At some point in the wee hours, I misplaced my shoes (read: took them off because they were hurting me, and fucked around and forgot where I put them) and left the bar after dancing all night in bare feet and, as my mother would say, with my chest all exposed. I woke up the next morning and went to work with a fever. I went to the Jackhammer later that night, and I went to Sidetrack the night after that, and then the night after that I died and now my ghost is writing this.

  9:00 a.m.: lie very still and contemplate getting up.

  I can’t just wake and pop right out of bed like someone in a commercial for antidepressants. I have to summon the will. In the minutes after I groan myself awake, I lie there taking a mental inventory of all my various aches and pains: Oh, my lower back is sore, must’ve slept funny during the night…. Wow, the fingers on my left hand are numb, clearly I forgot to wear my carpal tunnel brace to sleep … If I don’t move a single muscle, how long can I get away with not peeing? Also for the past few years I have been having very vivid near-nightmares every single night, and I like to use my lying-down morning time to reflect on them and try to figure out if the one I just woke up from is proof that I’ve finally lost it. Here’s an example of a dream I had on February 2, 2018, which I immediately wrote down so I could tell my Internet therapist about it:

  I agreed to house-sit former attorney general Eric Holder’s giant, rambunctious Bernese mountain dog? At the beginning of the dream I have this horrifying feeling in the pit of my stomach because it dawns on me that I was supposed to start taking care of the dog days ago and not only has he been all alone in the house, where he’s likely been shitting all over everything and knocked over the refrigerator trying to get at some food, but this fucking dog has been left alone in Eric Fucking Holder’s house and I’m probably going to get sued and definitely going to lose when I do. Inexplicably, Amy Poehler (is she even friends with Mr. Holder?) was at the house (RANSACKED) when I got there and was in the kitchen (COVERED IN TRASH) talking on the phone and writing down all the damages my negligence had caused, while the dog chewed on a designer shoe in the corner of the room. I never met the attorney general—he never came home, at least not while I was there—but Amy ended her conversation and was very pleasant to me despite standing in the middle of canine wreckage that was absolutely my fault.