Wow, No Thank You.

by Samantha Irby

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 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.

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.

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.

can’t just wake and pop right out of bed like someone in a commercial for antidepressants. I have to summon the will.

I’m not sure how this dream ended—the endings are always hazy—but I remember waking up and thinking, “WHAT THE FUCK IS MY PROBLEM?”

And you shouldn’t feel bad for even a second for blocking that hoe and throwing her a funeral in your heart.

I first try to have compassionate thoughts like, “What if something terrible is happening in her world?” because there’s still a very slim chance that hell is real and I’d like to have a plausible defense of my actions on Earth should there be some sort of way to argue my way out of damnation.

Apple put this new Screen Time feature on the iPhone that’s supposed to, I don’t know, shame me into putting down the drug they won’t stop peddling to me. Every time I get that notice, I take it as a challenge to spend even more time messing around on my phone.

There was a certain type of girl in the ’90s that I dreamed of channeling, chief among them Veronica Sawyer and Vickie Miner and Daria Morgendorffer. They all seemed like the kind of girls Hole made music for. So I listened to Hole a lot,

First of all, why you would ask a man anything is beyond me. Also, accepting his assessment of an album meant for hyperemotional girls twenty years after it came out is bullshit. Why does he care? Was “Hand in My Pocket” even written for him?!

most of the available offerings for fat women at clothing stores were of the choir-rehearsal-on-Wednesday-night variety.

All I ever wanted—shit, all I still ever want—is a cool-T-shirt-appropriate job where I can eat snacks and sit around talking shit with my friends all day while hiding all the good CDs behind the counter for myself.

If I’m too old for it, I don’t give a shit about it. And that’s not to say that it shouldn’t exist, which is an old person thing I really don’t understand. Jesus God, the stuff kids are into is literally too exhausting to get pissed off about. WHO CARES.

A handy trick is to think long and hard about what the person who hates you would realistically add to your life if they were to actually be a part of it. Most people really do have absolutely nothing to offer you.

“Settling” is a coarse way of saying “adjusting my expectations,” and I think that gets a bad rap. Dude, I would rather settle than be “chronically unfulfilled due to my outsize desires.”

Also, my kingdom for a person on Earth over the age of five who does not have any “life issues.” LIFE IS MY ISSUE, SIR.

I aspire to have the confidence of this perplexed single man. How does one build up nerve like this?

I assume everyone is like me and turns all their notifications off because all that popping up is stressful.

Why has age made me better at so few things? I thought getting older was supposed to make me wise and good at stuff ?

Am I ever going to stop writing the horror movie I have been starring in since the day I was born?

Imagine the time and mental energy I could save if I were not this person.

I guess what I’m actually saying is that, sure, I move this body around every day but I’m not actually in charge of it, and I have no idea and no control over anything that happens within it.

I am the kind of person who deftly weaves 30 Rock quotes into my everyday lexicon, and my favorite among them is when Liz says to Tracy, “How do you know I’m not rich?” and Tracy replies, matter-of-factly, “YOUR TEETH.”

Loving yourself is a full-time job with shitty benefits. I’m calling in sick.

The power that young people have is amazing, because neither I nor ANYONE I HAVE EVER MET has reached that mythical age at which you “stop caring about things.” Here’s a tip: it does not exist!

and then go take off your shoes and lie down, because all you wanted was something to stress-eat over the garbage, and now it’s a goddamn production. Sometimes I think to myself,

(kids go through so much milk and it is truly revolting!)

I bought a car, because you have to have a car in the Midwest. Only, when you live with children, you don’t need a car as much as you need to have a ROLLING VEHICLE FILLED WITH MISCELLANEOUS SHIT FOR THEM TO SPILL FOOD IN.

stepparents is fucking TERRIBLE. No one is ever like, “Wow, this new bitch fucking my dad is so nice. I love her so much. I would never even think about murdering her.”

I’m not a monster. I know how to keep my shit in check when in front of a son-of-a-bitching child, okay?

Am I so worried about having a negative impact on them that I won’t end up having an impact at all?

I immediately started doing the one thing I’m best at: making a mental list of all the reasons a thing that has just been suggested to me absolutely will not work.

I am not a person who automatically thinks, “This is gonna be great! I’m totally gonna kill it!” It’s always like, “I hope the bottom of my chair doesn’t collapse,” or “Are any of these women tigers? Is it possible they can smell my fear?”

But for me, Shrill was an opportunity to put a bitch fat lady who can’t sing on TV, and it made people so fucking mad, and I love that.