Wow, No Thank You - Samantha Irby Page 0,2
to read what other people are saying on Twitter. This is the glamorous life of a writer!
After feeling like a boring failure for a while, I pivot to watching TV. If I don’t want to feel like a total scumbag, I’ll watch something on the iPad, which I can quickly disguise as work if, oh, I don’t know, the mailman glances through the blinds while delivering my many boxes from Amazon Prime. Now would be a great time to snack on some quick-pickled beans or fermented slaw, but I am a regular person, so I dig through the pantry to find half a bag of sourdough pretzels I remember leaving in there a week ago and a jar of creamy Jif. Some people would warn you that that’s just eating one type of sugar smeared on top of another kind, and I would agree with them. I could really go for a fresh cold-pressed juice, but I don’t live in Brooklyn, so I settle for the next best thing: another Diet Coke.
Okay, so here’s the part in the profile where the model meets up with an equally attractive non-model friend someplace cool. The reader is flooded with envy because she doesn’t have (1) friends or (2) cool places to go, and the models are always like, “Oh, tra-la-la, I walked seventeen blocks in these heels I’m posing in to meet up with my girl Monica at a vinyl-only music shop to listen to some vintage hard bop records, and then we walked twenty-three more blocks to get affogatos at this hidden gem that you can only enter through a portal, and after that we went to SoulCycle.” I’m winded just reading that. My afternoons are always like, “searched through all my jacket pockets to find a half-melted lip balm before catching the cat eating its own vomit off the kitchen rug,” but since you’re here taking my picture, I am going to light this fancy candle from Diptyque, pretend it doesn’t make me sneeze, and scroll through shit on my phone while trying to look pensive.
My evening routine is pretty simple. My lady comes home from work and we’ll opt for something light for dinner, maybe some sous vide chicken and fresh steamed vegetables from the market, followed by one glass of wine and a single square of 70 percent dark chocolate, consumed while fully clothed on a white couch in front of a tastefully sized television playing a chic foreign film. Wow, I’m sorry, let me try that again.
My lady comes home and grimaces silently at the pile of mail I’ve left unopened on the table, simultaneously shrugging out of her coat while uncorking a bottle of white wine from Walgreens with her teeth. She gets into her pajamas, and I scramble to boil water for pasta and throw whatever is in the vegetable crisper into a pan to make sauce. Then we eat in our sweatshirts in front of whatever soap opera is on while yelling at the cats to stop jumping up onto the stove. This lasts for approximately forty-five minutes before she is asleep, curled around her wineglass in the corner of the couch, and I try to finish her food as quietly as possible and change the channel to wrestling.
At night, there are many soothing rituals I could perform. I could put on a pot of tea or light some calming incense or put on a collagen mask or rub some moisturizing cream into my hands, but you know what? I don’t live like that! I put all my stuff back in my Baggu, and I drag it upstairs. Then I clean the tank of my sleep machine with vinegar and take all my pills so I hopefully don’t die during the night, and then I pretend I’m going to read but instead I put the news on our BEDROOM TELEVISION SET and worry about the state of the world.
At eleven thirty or so, I remember that despite not having left the house all day, I’m still wearing a bunch of old makeup, so I get out of bed and use one of those time-saving cleansing wipes you have to use three of to clean my face while I brush my teeth, which, honestly, I wouldn’t have done if I didn’t also have to pee. There’s a bunch of