Quietly Hostile

by Samantha Irby

Drink more water? Can’t do it. Go to bed earlier? But what about my shows? Give up sugar? Not possible. Save more money? But what about buying stuff ?

Lose weight? Is there a pill for that, and if so can I take it in cheese like a dog?

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.

(one day I would like a job as the person who decides what amenities should come standard in short-term corporate housing; imagine being the dude who’s like, “Nine hand towels, no corkscrews.” What power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!),

caught me looking like I was stealing my own stuff in the middle of the night

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.

touching a gas pump feels like a dare even under normal circumstances, but having to wrap my moist, sticky hand around the visible dirt and invisible disease at the onset of a mysterious, rapidly spreading global pandemic?! I was so nervous I could hardly fucking breathe.

I walked into the station with my hands up like I was under arrest, trying not to accidentally touch anything or let anything accidentally touch me, and I scrubbed my hands and went to the bathroom and scrubbed them again afterward while casually breathing in a billion droplets hanging in the damp, potpourri’d public bathroom air.

just in case those rumors about stomach acid killing Coronavirus weren’t true (they weren’t, imagine that, and even if stomach acid were the cure, how would you bypass all your infectable organs to submerge the Covid in its frothy death bath?),

Stop fronting like he’s not great! Why am I forced to petition on this man’s behalf like he’s my son filming himself playing the recorder and I need him to get some likes, and not a person who has been (mostly unsuccessfully) nominated for fourteen Grammys?!

love this song because Dave spends a lot of it singing in his gorgeous falsetto, and also because I, too, like to project a complicated fantasy onto a person I saw on the street for approximately nineteen seconds.

But listen, I use a retinoid before bed every night now. I am officially in my smooth-jazz adult contemporary years!

No one wants to be their partner’s sexy cane!

It was my first-ever everyone-in-attendance-is-at-least-thirty-nine-years-old concert, and can I say I never want to see a young-people show again? Dude started right on time at 7:00 p.m. and played for two and a half solid hours and then everyone quietly filed out to their minivans in an orderly fashion. I mean, it might’ve still been light out. That is the ideal concertgoing experience!

overwhelmed to be at a show with hundreds of people who were likely on the same arthritis medication I am.

Excuse me? “Linger” is fucking classic rock??? I’m sick. This must be how our parents felt. Am I my own mom?!

Whenever I wake up in a completely silent house after all that, it makes me wonder if maybe I died for a couple of hours, because what kind of creature that isn’t a hibernating bear can sleep like that?

You’re all set for Novembruary 92nd at 2100 GMT, here are six identical-looking Zoom links! Good luck figuring out which one to click before your meeting that absolutely must begin on time!

Don’t let this menu fool you. I would have been just as happy with a tub of store-brand French onion with a bag of Ruffles. I’m glad we had bougie dips, though. It made me feel like a slobbery-fingered princess.

“Don’t you wish you’d had a kid?” Do I wish I could stand idly by and witness all the things I hate about myself manifested in, and mirrored back to me by, a person it’s against the law for me to kill? I absolutely do not!

these cats are emotionally withholding, and I’m sick of humiliating myself for a crumb of their affection.

The first daycare I called had a waitlist several months long, and the second one didn’t even answer the phone, which is a business model I honestly respect.

every day I recoil from the pictures of placid, happy dogs terrorized by my scrawny, watery-eyed offspring.

“Level with me, baby: Don’t you wish we’d gotten serious back in the day and had a kid?” “No way, man! I have a fucking dog!”

This whole essay is amazing.

It wasn’t even that I thought it was gross, I’ve just taken enough unnecessary pregnancy tests to know what messy business targeted urination is when you don’t have the luxury of a penis.

I sit too still between the hours of 7:00 and 8:30 p.m., I will clinically die until noon the next day, so if I’m gonna go out, I need to have a bra and shoes on by 6:55 at the very latest or that shit’s not fucking happening.

I used to never have to pee on flights, due to a carefully calibrated combination of claustrophobic terror and forced dehydration, but now, every time an airplane touches down with me on it, a little pee squirts out to christen my arrival in a new location.

YOU SHOULD DRINK THREE LITERS OF WATER EVERY DAY BEFORE NOON, and, first of all: Who is out of bed before noon, let alone chugging water?

Wash the thong panty by hand in cold water, do not iron. Who is out here ironing their crotchless beaded thong?!

(“Is this overactive bladder or sexual arousal?”)

who’s in charge of the internet? When are we gonna get dot cum?

That’s maybe my biggest gripe when it comes to dirty movies, that so much of it looks painful or uncomfortable. Sometimes these hits and slaps look like the start of a fucking fight, and that makes me nervous!!!! If you like getting your ass slapped hard as hell, I love that for you, but I gotta be treated like a two-hundred-year-old haunted doll in bed.

I don’t know how often you are supposed to confess, but surely if you’re a nun the answer has to be “more than once a month”?!

OH SHIT, this is the first time I have ever seen my preferred style of underpants in a porn??? Mean Nun is wearing high-waisted white full briefs, and I have never felt more recognized by a piece of cinema.

He said he was selling “lightning-fast internet,” which is so funny because the mental picture that creates is one in which my house burns down,

Nothing is more satisfying than watching slick, bubbling grime blasted off some lug nuts pool on the floor of this dude’s garage. It’s like ASMR for your eyeballs.

I haven’t dated a writer, but I have a lot of close writer friends, and the only way to survive the menacing voice in your head that’s whispering “Her book is better than your book; her book is better than your book” on a loop is to just pretend she doesn’t have one. I do it all the time! I buy my friends’ books, but I don’t always read them, because I don’t like having my deficits spread before me as I am forced to examine them.

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 I leave my house with only a teeny little purse, who’s gonna hold my charging brick and lightweight cardigan for when it might get cold?!

This might be too spicy of a take, but what if Steve realized he was too good for Miranda and told her to fuck off into the sea forever?

She could’ve had Knicks season tickets for life!!!!!! I know that this might actually be a punishment, but in my version of the story the Knicks are good. Sorry!

Let’s talk about the most awkward thing I have ever been forced to do in my life: WATCH PEOPLE PRETEND TO BE ME WHILE SAYING JOKES THAT I WROTE TO MY FACE.

The dog looks at Sam like, “Bitch, you do??” Sam shoots him a “Shut up” look in return, and 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.

Fernando does a thing that happens to me when I tell a new person I have irritable bowel disease: offers an unprompted, uneducated suggestion for how to treat an illness I haven’t specified and that they have no expertise in treating.

I was ecstatic because I usually never have the tools I need to do the thing I decided to undertake on a whim in the middle of the night!

Cosplaying as the thoughtful spouse, I stopped to wash the dishes in the sink so they wouldn’t grow new life overnight. Other good husband cosplay ideas I currently use to cheat-sheet my way through marriage, for those of you who might need help not getting divorced:

There’s no reason if I am in a blessedly empty house at 10:00 a.m. on a Tuesday that I cannot be making a roux for homemade clam chowder while enjoying my other solitary-at-home activities like listening to embarrassing podcasts or wondering how many people I’ve never met are mad at me.

I put it in the outside bin when no one is looking, thus sparing my wife the shame of knowing that she lives with an animal.

That is a thought I have never had before, but this is the danger of being the only one awake in the house. You start doing shit you’d otherwise never do because there’s no one in the next room hollering, “Don’t [ill-advised action verb] my [ food item, usually]!”

cursed myself for being so insecure that I did a thing I don’t even like, something that has nothing to do with my personality, just to trick people who already know me into thinking that I’ve become a better version of myself.