Wow, No Thank You.

by Samantha Irby

but I already drank a tablespoon of water, so what else is there even to do?

My towel smells like mildew, but I ignore it!

I go to the doctor every other day and never has one of them told me about alkalization.

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.

Nowadays, who even cares? I don’t think my wife even notices that I have nails.

An eight o’clock movie on Tuesday night sounded plausible last Thursday, but now it’s Tuesday afternoon.

Going out on Saturday night sounded great on Wednesday, but now Saturday is here and I’m in my cozy clothes and I’ve got Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark playing on this phone I’ve propped in a glass because I couldn’t connect to the Bluetooth speaker and it’s gonna be really hard to put shoes on, dawg.

me, the first thing I thought was “I wish I knew what everyone else on Earth was doing at this exact moment. I wonder if there is a device nearby that could tell me.”

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

unless you are looking for a shapeless sack to attend a christening in,

then parroting their opinions and presenting them as my own to my dumb-ass friends who definitely didn’t care.

or write all the track names on the insert so I could stare at his handwriting in a totally not-creepy way while I was alone in my apartment waiting for him to call me.

and I will know enough of the words from memory to be impressive, if you have low standards for things that impress you. I

and then they started snapping to get me to leave the stage, but I didn’t know that was a thing, so I talked for four more excruciating minutes until I died.

and, deep down, I was terrified of doing crime.

I performed Betty Wright’s “After the Pain,” a song about an abusive relationship, at my second-grade talent show.

and I felt like ~interesting~ people Did Stuff At Night.

with my legs at a ninety-degree angle for more than forty-five minutes,

Anyway, later in the evening, the DJ came over and pointed out that I didn’t look like I was having a good time, and in a panic to prove him wrong I drank a tumbler of gin in one gulp and went home with him.

for the car that I can park anywhere on my sprawling 2,000 acres of land that were practically free.

Can you just go up and introduce yourself and ask her to do a friend thing with you? “Um, excuse me, miss, would you like to sit around and vape sativa with me and eat

Trader Joe’s Cubano wraps while MSNBC plays on a continuous loop in the background?” Or, “Hey, stranger, would you like to skim the extensive collection of sad memes saved on my hard drive to see the kind of shit I will regularly be texting you at three in the morning?”

abbi (2:13 p.m.): “i just don’t like that i can feel my organs working, you know? like my gallbladder burns and that makes me terrified that it is going to burst out of my body.”

Anyway, my wife and I were at this wedding where I knew a few people well enough to say “Hi” but not well enough to say “Hi, ____,”

as I aged forty years in one second.

We drink a lot of carbonated water and take a lot of CBD tinctures that don’t work. I somehow

the limits of which I tested.

and here comes an actual ovulating womanchild grumbling about lower back pain while cracking Midol between her teeth like grape Nerds?

but that’s what it felt like after skip-walking two-plus miles across the entire airport in ten minutes with a sweaty backpack full of trashy magazines jostling against my back.

seventeen bras for a weekend trip to South Haven, which is an hour away from where all my socks live.

eat soft cheese, then play toilet roulette while running a bunch of errands on the bus

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever changed out of one cozy shirt into an even cozier shirt?

but have you ever watched PBS?

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever met your state representative?

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever been to a lecture that wasn’t for a class?

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever folded your clothes on the same day you washed them?

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever watched a television program then read no fewer than six think pieces about it to make sure you understood what you just watched?

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever eaten soup as a meal?

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever actually finished the book your book club was reading?

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever given a crying baby back to its parent?

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever paid real money to read articles on the Internet?

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever played dead at work?

Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever tried to figure out what is happening with your 401(k)?

I’m not cheap, and I love flushing money down the toilet,

Your neck is supposed to be firm and long, but I thought that was only asked of penises.

Of all the things I have to check off this endless list, “neck maintenance” is not going to be one of them.

And okay, sure, pseudo-country life has its perks. Gas costs approximately thirty-seven cents a gallon.