Solutions and Other Problems

by Allie Brosh

That’s the scary thing about decisions: you don’t know what they are when you’re making them.

Anger is not a graceful emotion. I’ve never gotten mad and been like, I’m glad I behaved like that!

It is a proven fact that you can never finish all the bananas.

If you keep going, you’ll eventually realize that the one true answer to all your questions is: Of course it doesn’t make sense—what business do you have expecting things to make sense?

When you can explain things to people who are willing to listen to you explain them, it is extremely difficult to resist fully and brutally explaining them. It feels good to explain them—like maybe you’re getting somewhere. Like maybe, if you can just… really explain them, the experiences will realize you’re catching on and stop bothering you.

Sometimes all you can really do is keep moving and hope you end up somewhere that makes sense.

The human brain isn’t accustomed to navigating a world where it’s hard to tell the difference between objects and animals. For almost all of human history, that has been easy: if it’s trying to interact with you, that’s an animal. End of story. Maybe there was a tiny bit of a gray area around plants, but it’s not like rocks were jumping out from behind trees to tell cavemen what kind of crackers are on sale at CrazyLand. Rocks can’t do that. I don’t know if they’d want to, but it doesn’t matter, because they can’t.

When you’re alone in a field, hiding under a plant because you’re scared of the moon, you just sort of instinctually recognize how sad it is.

trying really hard when you don’t know what you’re doing just happens to be the exact recipe for acting like a fuckin’ weirdo.

Adopting a cat is an entirely different process from adopting a dog. With dogs, it’s all very regimented. Visitation hours and stuff. With cats, they’re like, “What do you want? Cats?” You say yeah, and they say, “Great. Grab however many you want—they’re strewn throughout the building.”

Sometimes, when you’re so fed up with your mouse friend that you can’t even look at it, you’ve gotta do something. Teach it a lesson. Put it in the bathroom so it can think about itself.

I’m very sorry to inform you of this, but if you grow up only reading happy stories where you find out the answers to all your questions, you will be scared and confused and probably die in a dumpster fire. It is better to accept the utter futility of things as early as possible and save yourself the struggle.