Wow, No Thank You - Samantha Irby Page 0,24

sure, but Who Is Jill Scott didn’t come out until 2000, and I’m trying to stick to the rules here.)

“No Surprises,” Radiohead

I don’t know what I was doing before OK Computer found its way into my life. Every single song is the best song I’ve ever heard. Well, maybe this one is the best best.

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Flip the tape over. Play it again.

love and marriage

I got married, and now I am an expert on marriage and relationships. Here are the answers you so desperately need to your desperate questions.

My wife and I are dear friends with a younger couple. They both have busy careers and text and e-mail incessantly for work. Recently the four of us dined out at a wonderful country inn, and they texted throughout the meal. I care very much about my relationship with them and do not wish to offend them, but this behavior bothered me. How can I nicely ask them to put their smartphones away?

Everything is boring. You’re boring. There’s a 95 percent chance your wife is pretty boring, and going to a “wonderful country inn” is probably, definitely Totally Fucking Boring. I’m boring, too! This is something that I have had to come to terms with as I am now staring middle age right in its sensible orthopedic inserts. I have to get over myself and let go of young-person shit that is irritating to me. If I’m too old for it, I don’t give a shit about it. And that’s not to say that it shouldn’t exist, which is an old person thing I really don’t understand. Jesus God, the stuff kids are into is literally too exhausting to get pissed off about. WHO CARES. Let them do whatever they want. My lady and I aren’t friends with any young couples because I don’t want to have to learn what the fuck “no cap” means. I want to eat my sensibly balanced meals and spend my days listening to jangly guitar music that came out in the years before I graduated high school.

There are two types of awful old people. There are (1) the silently awful who grind their rear molars into stumps and pray for sudden death as some teenager tries to record them for their story and (2) the “put your phone away, young lady, and pretend to be interested in this New York Times article about charter schools I am misquoting” awful. My favorite thing is to spend my old-person money on expensive electronics for the babies in my life, because I will actually die if I have to figure out interesting things to say to a Gen Z-er that might make them think I’m not as cool as my tattoos (how do I say “tattoo” in a cool way? “Ink”? “Body art”?!) would lead them to believe. And they most certainly don’t care about listening to all my ancient leisure activities. What the fuck do I even talk about all day, 1099s and full-coverage underpants? LIKE, FOR REAL, WHO EVEN CARES? JUST POINT ME TOWARD THE SUN AND WATER ME OCCASIONALLY.

I can’t tell you about the first time I thought I was in love (yes, I can, it was Wil Wheaton on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and it was devastating), but I can tell you each and every time some adult tried to bully me into a conversation about low interest rates or whatever seniors with rain-indicating knees and hip problems talk about, while I plucked out my eyelashes one by one in despair. I don’t want to sit at the kids’ table, because, truth be told, I can’t sit with my legs at a ninety-degree angle for more than forty-five minutes, but if they sit at mine, I need to know that these dudes are for sure texting the entire time while pretending they care about that foreign film I saw at eleven thirty Sunday morning. Whether I like it or not, and despite my having neither a mortgage nor a dedicated gynecologist, as the bitch with the SEP-IRA, I am absolutely going to be stuck paying for that wonderful country meal.

I have been living with a man for more than a year. We get along perfectly, and he says he loves me. The problem is he will not make a commitment to get