Wow, No Thank You - Samantha Irby Page 0,3

little oil droppers on my bedside table that would look really cute in a still life if they weren’t next to toppled bottles of potassium supplements and industrial-strength callous creams, but I sort through them and extract one rosehip oil (for my face) and one oregano oil (for under my tongue). I use the rosehip so my skin continues to glow with the health and vitality of a newborn, despite my salt intake, and the oregano is a holdover from when I had thrush that I just keep taking because I haven’t had thrush again since then, and, also, why the fuck not? I roll some compression hose onto my legs to remind myself that I am sexy, and change into pajamas that look exactly like the clothes I wore all day, which are folded atop the hamper because I will be wearing those same things again tomorrow.

I watch Brian Williams and some reruns of Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes, and pretend I understand what is happening in the world. Then I set the sleep timer before burrowing beneath this T.J.Maxx comforter that has been surprisingly durable, and I drift off to dream of adaptogens and other beneficial herbs. Which I will never take.

girls gone mild

My lady and I were out getting hammered at the local watering hole on a weeknight and feeling like cool olds, when the waiter asked if it was “moms’ night out,” while offering to explain to us what whiskey is. And now I’m a corpse—please bury me in my L.L.Bean comfort fleece.

ME: “Excuse me, I have tattoos, Jeff.”

HIM: “Oh my goodness, ma’am, I’m so sorry, I just saw the fluid collecting at your ankles and assumed—”

What the fuck is happening to my life? What vibe am I giving off?? Yes, I am wearing soft, pull-on, straight-leg Gloria Vanderbilts, but I also have cool glasses and a motherfucking hand tattoo. Couldn’t it just be middle school art teachers’ happy hour, Jeff??! I should write a girls’ night out movie. But a realistic one, featuring people my age who have neck pain and no cartilage in their knees and spend the entire movie trying to calculate how to split a check and figure out the tip across four different cards. Or two women with questionable credit try to rent a car on their way to a wellness retreat neither of them can afford and the teenager behind the Enterprise counter asks them to show nine different forms of identification. A group of friends goes on a wild Caribbean cruise, and “when things get spicy, they get heartburn.” (That’s the poster.)

I used to party a lot. The only reason I stopped is because I got too old to do it right. Also I moved to a town where the most popular bar has a mechanical bull. I spent two months on the road once when I was nearing the end of my thirties, lugging around a bright orange suitcase full of disposable underwear plus a bunch of impractical shit I thought I was going to need to wear to become a different person, and I tried to party again. Here’s how that went.

8:30 a.m.: pry eyes open at the sound of the alarm.

That’s right, preparation for Girls’ Night Out starts in the morning at this age.

When I was a kid, I could work a full eleven-hour shift on four hours of sleep, change my shoes and put mascara on in the back of a moving cab, and go from drinks to dinner to the club without a second thought. When I turned twenty-one, my roommate in Chicago was this old queen who worked a corporate job and partied five out of six nights and almost never went to bed. Every other night he was at clubs like Manhole (RIP) or Berlin dancing with his shirt off, his waxed chest glistening as he worked his hips to the unce-unce-unce of a European house beat. Then he’d cruise home at four in the morning, brew a pot of coffee, and have a suit on by seven. When I told him I was finally going to be of legal drinking age, he arranged a weeklong celebration: a group of his friends and I were going to hit a different club in