Wow, No Thank You.

by Samantha Irby

Everyone thinks I’m going to eventually die of a heart attack, but joke’s on y’all—it’s definitely going to be of secondhand embarrassment.

When is the last time an actual human interaction made you laugh more than a meme did?

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.

So here’s to love and loving your portable handheld telecommunication device. Stay inside where it’s temperature-controlled and there are no bugs and spend some time celebrating your beloved today. Make a delicious homemade casserole (look up the recipe on your phone), dip out to pick up a fancy bottle of wine (request a Lyft from your phone), sit next to a cozy fire (YouTube a fireplace video on your phone), sing along to your favorite jams (find it on Spotify on your phone), listen to your favorite book (open Audible on your phone), watch some cheesy movies (did you know you can get Netflix on your phone?!), send an update to the family members you haven’t seen in a while (use e-mail from your phone), order some Indian takeout (Grubhub dot com on your phone), text your homegirl some juicy gossip from your phone, and since you’re playing around on it anyway, why not do a little shopping on your phone?

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?!

Maybe this is the upside of being ugly, but when men throw shit at you and scream lewd shit at you from passing cars on the street when you’re just trying to get to the bus stop after school, the idea of there being one in a bespoke suit descending from a carriage to escort you to a fancy party doesn’t seem like a thing that could happen in real life. Oh, really, Prince Charming is going to find a glass slipper to awkwardly slide onto this elephantine size 11 foot? Hollywood won’t sell me that dream!

“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.”

it’s totally unfair to make a flesh-and-bone person compete against an imaginary ideal that was imprinted on you when you were too young to understand what was happening. Shit, growing up I wanted to marry the Beast from Beauty and the Beast. A strong, virile creature who read tons of books and could fuck up a wolf ? Yes please! Sign me up!

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

I am now expected to monitor and fill and pave over—that I wasn’t cut out for living in more than four hundred and fifty square feet of space. I’m reminded of it every time I go visit a friend who’s, oh, you know, just doing a DIY remodel of the guest bathroom. LOL, WHAT. How did you learn to make a wall? We learned colors and shapes at the same time in elementary school! When between Elmer’s Glue and yesterday did you figure out how to do a baseboard?

When the zombies come or the aliens land or whatever dystopian shit that is bound to happen in our lifetime happens, I’m not stockpiling buckets of slop and batteries or any of that doomsday shit. I will be in the fetal position somewhere waiting for them to lobotomize me.

I remember one snowy day I was driving to work, and I used to live on top of the fucking lake, because in Chicago it was possible to get an apartment on the beach for cheap if you really lowered your expectations for what the words “beachside living” can mean, and this person (midwestern winters render everyone genderless; in the month of January, we are just amorphous shapeshifting piles of down filling and wool) was waiting for their dog to poop in horizontally blowing ice spittle while struggling to remain upright against the biting wind as icy waves crashed onto the frozen sand behind them, the tattered end of the blue newspaper wrapper clutched in their mitten barely visible through the storm. I sat at the stoplight where Sheridan Road curves and turns into Evanston, fingertips pressed to the heat vent from which a whisper of anemic warm air trickled out, and chuckled softly to myself. “Man, fuck dogs.”

I didn’t know what a TikTok was until a ten-year-old explained it to me, and I’m guessing that shit is already obsolete, which is why I didn’t even bother embarrassing myself by downloading it.

fat people doing fat shit without crying big fat tears about it I can’t watch This Is Us because even though the brothers are hot and the dad is a smoke show, in the first couple episodes the fat girl doesn’t get to be much more than “fat,” and wow, no thank you! Maybe there are fat people sitting around silently weeping about being fat every minute of every day, but that is a redemptive arc thin people like to see on television, and it’s just not the fucking truth. And I like physical comedy as much as the next guy, but it’s also super gross to watch a fat bitch just bounce off shit all the time? I don’t know, dude, sometimes the chair with fixed arms isn’t going to work for me, but it’s not like every time I sit in a desk, I get up and take the whole thing with me, or I’m sighing wistfully as everyone else at brunch joyfully eats their quiche while I pick at a piece of boiled lettuce. The shit is called Meaty, and sometimes I hate my body not because it’s fat, but mostly because I never wake up in the morning to discover it has transformed into a wolf or a shark overnight. When is the last time you watched a show with a fat woman who didn’t at some point reference a new diet or some ill-fitting old jeans? Also this idea that fat people only get pity sex from recent parolees or whatever is bullshit; I’ve never fucked a repulsive loser ever in my life. JUST THE HANDSOME KINDS OF LOSERS.

TV Sam lives in a shithole (so did the real one) and eats meals on the bus (ugh, I did this, too), but definitely has an Instagram corner in her tiny apartment. I feel like this is who I still am, posting soft-focus pictures of the clean and organized corner of my desk when just out of frame there’s a book and paper avalanche threatening to overwhelm me.

I think we all buy into the lofty ideals set by our teachers and parents, but there are actually people who are just fine punching a clock every day and then coming home to stare at their phones until their bodies are completely overtaken by sleep.

We might have to fully break the flaws in my operating system down another time, but I am not a control freak in even the most liberal sense of the phrase. I pay zero attention to detail and have very few accounting mechanisms, so if you say you’re going to take care of it and send a thing, then I’m just going to believe you did that and watch this cat video for the hundredth time.

I approach most endeavors with zero expectations, which is a skill I have honed after forty years of fairly regular disappointment. I learned early on that if you just expect things to be bad, not even bad but the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone, then, unless someone gets murdered in front of you, whatever it is usually turns out to be fine. Bearable, at worst.

Am I rich now? Absolutely not. Did I drive away from a toll machine shooting nineteen dollars’ worth of quarters at me because I only had a twenty-dollar bill at the Indiana dollar toll, and my card wouldn’t swipe, and my rental car was too far away for me to do anything other than fruitlessly claw at them while the seatbelt sliced open my neck skin, and an impatient line formed behind me? Yes, the fuck I did. Because I will melt into a puddle of soft goo if I get violently honked at on the skyway. So that’s the kind of money I have. “Drive away rather than be humiliated” money. “I forgot to stop for candy at Walgreens so I’ll get my overpriced Red Vines at the theater” money. “This candle is just for decoration” money.

Hello, 911? I am the first person at this party.

Maybe I should set my alarm for eight thirty. I definitely want to sleep off this Xanax, but does that give me enough time to take an actual crevice-cleaning, hair-washing shower? Should I be honest about who I really am as a person and factor in twenty minutes of bedside-sitting-and-staring-into-space time?

Hello, 911? So I texted this dude and he texted me back, then I texted him back, then he texted me back, then I sent two heart emojis and a cheeseburger, and now those three little “I’m writing something pithy and hilarious, just wait for it” dots are dancing on the left side of my screen, but they disappeared kinda quickly and now no message popped up? Should I just wait five minutes then start obsessively calling him, or just find some train tracks to lie down on?

Hello, 911? That lady caught me taking a selfie and walked away before I could convincingly pretend to be holding my phone at this angle for some other reason.

Hello, 911? One of the 137 lights on this dashboard just came on, and honestly, I don’t know whether it means I need to stop for gas soon or immediately barrel roll out of this motherfucker in the middle of the highway.

My OkCupid handle back then was “FARTTHROB,” which probably explains why I never had much romantic success on that website.