Quietly Hostile

by Samantha Irby

You can use “I like it!” (the exclamation point is necessary) any time some freak questions a regular-ass thing you enjoy, and it’ll swipe their legs out from under them every single time, and you can stand over their quivering body with your subpar tastes and laugh your face off. Deploy it whenever you want, then sit back and watch your judgmental friend splutter and try to choke out a response, because what people like that really want is to show off how much more cultured and evolved they are than you, and saying “I like it!” (include the exclamation point, I mean it!) robs them of that opportunity.

Pandemic cons? Death, uncertainty, economic collapse, the fall of society. Pandemic pro? Absolutely zero traffic on eastbound I-94 at rush hour on a Wednesday. I’m sorry! I hate merging!

Anytime you hear a French fucking horn?????? Babe, you are being wooed.

This is all I want. Someone to tell me to do whatever I want no matter what and even if it’s reckless or horrible they’ll still be there to have my back. No one will ever tell me this because I am not to be trusted.

Then the Cranberries came on the terrestrial radio classic rock station a couple of days later, and I almost drove my car off the fucking road. Excuse me? “Linger” is fucking classic rock??? I’m sick. This must be how our parents felt. Am I my own mom?!

I had an ablation five years ago and thank God it worked, so even if I accidentally slipped and fell on an ejaculating penis, all those spermies are gonna find at the end of their .18-meter relay is an empty haunted house overtaken by gooey floating cobwebs.

I thought to myself, “This is kind of nice, does this mean he’s my boyfriend now?” as I tried to hot-water-rinse whatever UTI-causing bacteria he’d deposited inside me down his sink.

Who is out here ironing their crotchless beaded thong?!

“Come on, babe. I took an edible and a Benadryl an hour ago; we got fifteen minutes MAX.”

Everything is so embarrassing all the time, I don’t want to add to it by forcing strangers to watch the biggest decision I’d ever have to make, on the street, or in a nice restaurant while their soup gets cold, against their will.

Man, I’m a bitch. That fancy book party Carrie had? The one with the flowers and catered snacks?! That shit is absolutely not happening. Nobody’s regular-ass book tour looks like that. A color scheme? A stylist?! BAHAHAHAHA SHUT UP. No, Carrie’s book event’s gotta look like all the ones I’ve ever had: crammed in the back of an independent bookstore with a dozen disheveled people who just got off work staring expectantly up at her as she stammers through an intro for a book those folks are definitely not gonna pay thirty bucks for;

Also, I just hate Big so much, I can’t help it. It should be a felony for a man to waste that much of a woman’s time.

If Berger and I were text friends, I would gently remind him that people who publish novels and people who publish printed-out blogs are technically in the same category, but not really the same kind of writers, so he shouldn’t worry that his girlfriend got a bigger advance than he did.

I’m not sure how we were gonna teach a dog face-acting but never let anyone tell you I’m not delusional enough to try.

My big plan for the evening was to rent the New Kids on the Block No More Games pay-per-view concert and eat snacks until we threw up. But the cable box was broken, and the screen kept cutting out, which was devastating both as the party host, but also as a person who would have taken a bullet for Jonathan, Jordan, Joey, Donnie, or Danny. In that order.

I resisted making a joke about giving me some tip and mourned a future in which I would not be tits up to a Red Lobster bar, slurping seductively on a Berry Mango Daiquiri, trying to bone a dude who smells like Clamato and is young enough to be my son.

Baby kale begs the question of whether mother kale exists.

(These details are only for the benefit of people in Chicago, who are undoubtedly pointing to this page and screaming “I know where that is!” right now.)