Excuse Me While I Disappear Quotes

“Expert Tip: “No matter how old and achy I am, I can still haul ass outta bed when the dog starts making vomit noises.”—Connie Sherretts, MAW”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“I’ve seen so much stuff that I had to purge 90 percent of my childhood memories from my brain in order to make room for passwords and PINs.”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“Your ankles are swollen from carrying the weight of the patriarchy all of these years.”—Danika Hill, MAW”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“Expert Tip: “The day will come when you fervently wish that you are only as fat as you were the FIRST time you thought you were fat.”—Michelle Loyet, MAW, whom I’ve been on vacation with numerous times”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“You’re just a senior at Rock and Roll High School,” someone else posted.”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“Expert Tip: “Your ankles are swollen from carrying the weight of the patriarchy all of these years.”—Danika Hill,”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“Aren’t you proud that you know how to use a dial phone? That you lived a whole, full life without a digital device in your pocket? You remember who Gilligan is! You watched Fonzie jump the shark! You remember when coming in second place was still awesome. You know how to use a phone book and roll down a window manually. You probably drove a stick shift. As a kid, you played outside all day until dinner. You lived in a time when you could walk your loved ones all the way to the gate in an airport. The guy who sang your favorite song on the radio wasn’t also a model. You know what “Where’s the beef?” means and remember when everyone ate Hamburger Helper. You watched Jaws at the drive-in. We have seen a lot. We survived Aqua Net. We were the last generation of children to ride in a car without seat belts! And there’s nothing shameful in saying that.”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“People act poorly because other people have let them act poorly, and they have been able to get away with it for a lifetime.”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“The brilliance of growing older is that with each passing day, you lose an equivalent amount of fear.”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“Then the guy in the car behind me laid on his horn as I paused at a Yield sign to merge with traffic. I looked up, and in the rearview mirror I could see a younger man in a red truck getting very animated because I wasn’t moving fast enough for him. “The sign says ‘yield,’ not ‘forge ahead with total disregard for human life,’” I yelled at the rearview.”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“We are badasses. Own it!” I reiterate, we are badasses. We are the generation who didn’t give a shit, remember? We invented punk rock, then grunge. None of the Kardashians belong in our group, not even the mother. That alone makes us the fairest generation of them all.”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“Young people see old people and believe that they were born that way. They don’t know that the shrunken, hunchbacked woman at Safeway who asks for their help to reach a can of peaches was once a raging beauty who could outrun any boy. That the bald, freckled head of an elderly gentleman was once full and thick with reflective hair that was indistinguishable from the heads of the thousands of other young men who marched alongside him to war or crowded onto commuter trains with him.”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“So if you like Chico’s clothes, wear Chico’s clothes. If you’ve always shopped at Anthropologie, shop at Anthropologie. We are not MAWs in any other decade but this one, and if Mick Jagger can still be siring offspring into his seventies, I can wear my scuffed cowboy boots well into mine.”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“I’m not going to dress my age; I’m going to dress as me.”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“But I made it. I am here. So why not . . . show off a little? I proved them (every one of my mother’s friends) wrong; I didn’t end up in rehab, prison, or an urn. I’m still alive! I’ve seen more than half a century of events. I’ve seen so much stuff that I had to purge 90 percent of my childhood memories from my brain in order to make room for passwords and PINs.”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“impressive consumption of cigarettes and Pepsi alone made the State Farm life insurance agent laugh out loud when I was seeking coverage. I am old, but I am alive. If you would have spent only an hour with me in 1993, even if I was sleeping, you would have laughed harder than the State Farm agent at the possibility of my reaching the gray-hair stage of life.”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“Face the truth. I am past fifty. I have gray hair. Big deal. What was I so afraid of? Looking my age? That’s ridiculous, I thought to myself. I have somehow lived through five decades of bad decisions. I have scars that look like I got them in prison, and none of the under forties I work with believe that mothers used to send their children off with ham and cheese sandwiches in metal lunch boxes in 115-degree heat without one of those children dying. I have beaten the odds! My”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“This is not a midlife crisis car,” I corrected him. “This is a midlife memory car!”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“I felt so powerful that I wanted to go to Costco and wheel out a freezer on a dolly while waving around an old Safeway receipt, just because I knew I could. It’s easy. I’m supposed to be so harmless and weak and afraid that no one pays attention. But those weeks of dye stripping and returning to my natural state created a phenomenon in which the world had literally become mine for the taking.”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“Because we are superwomen. Because it’s how we are. We’re high, we’re sleep deprived, and we’re still doing all the shit. If my husband doesn’t get his full eight hours, he’ll mention it the whole next day, as if he spent the dark time keeping flesh-eating zombies from gaining entry to our house. Not middle-aged women. They get up from a bed they’ve never slept in, put on an underwire and some mascara, and do it all over again. And no one knows.”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“I cannot bear that lowering myself from the waist down will force one fat roll to collide with another like Earth’s tectonic plates, and the subduction energy that results will bring me faster to unconsciousness than sniffing glue.”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“I’ve realized that nearly every day, I learn something new. That means that, at my age now, I have so much more knowledge and perspective than I did at twenty-seven. I’ve seen more things, had more experiences, and am honestly smarter than I was thirty years ago. There simply is no arguing with that. At fifty-plus, I now know that: You should never trust a junkie, no matter how blue their eyes are. When a motorcycle gang member named Pudgy wants to hang out at your house, it’s not because he thinks you’re cool; it’s to scout your living room for shit he can come back and steal later when you aren’t home. When you suspect that your boss is a little off and demonstrates multiple personalities, HR is not going to help you, and you need to find another job stat. If you need to fart at work, you need to go outside and find an active leaf blower or a steady stream of traffic to serve as a sound buffer.”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“I’ve seen more than half a century of events. I’ve seen so much stuff that I had to purge 90 percent of my childhood memories from my brain in order to make room for passwords and PINs.”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“12. WHY ARE MY ANKLES SWOLLEN? Salt intake, circulation issues, hot weather, your name is Hillary Clinton, you just got off a plane that crossed over Texas, or someone put a curse on you. Who knows. All I know is that if I’m traveling anywhere, by the time I land, my ankles will look like a python who snuck out of its cage at a pet store and paid a visit to a colony of rats. Bring water pills with you, and wear compression socks (they look just like regular socks). For most people, swollen ankles are seasonal, really only affecting them at a time of the year when people will actually see their ankles. The best news is that you probably still have your Docs, and this is indeed the very best time to wear them.”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“had to purge 90 percent of my childhood memories from my brain in order to make room for passwords and PINs.”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“There are two things people in their twenties do better than anyone else: get drunk and fall down and experience unplanned pregnancies. That, Greta, is your specialty. That is your area of expertise, dear girl, not calling other women out for failing to be tablecloth woke.”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“Do you know that I saw a picture of myself and genuinely thought that someone had eaten a powdered doughnut over my head?”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“I found out that the treatment for restless leg syndrome is a nice, tidy dose of Klonopin, a beautiful little orange tablet, every night. After I got my prescription, every night I got to drift away to sleep on a delicious benzo cloud.”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“People act poorly because other people have let them act poorly, and they have been able to get away with it for a lifetime. There is no sense of consequence. So I called a lawyer who looked up the”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

“so when they are running from uphill, it makes a tremendous amount of noise. That is very bothersome, especially if they have big feet.”
― Laurie Notaro, Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem