Wow, No Thank You - Samantha Irby Page 0,30

hide the phone, you kick a path through piles of soiled laundry to the bathroom you meant to bleach last weekend when your mother-in-law was in town, wait for the water to get hot and the pressure to build, then coax her into joining you in the shower with promises to carefully shave that stubbly bit of thigh-back that always gets missed when she bathes in contended solitude. You initiate clumsy, ham-handed slippery-fingered lovemaking that is over before it has really even begun, then immediately retreat to a separate corner of the house. You indulge in whatever SPORTS!!! happen to be on television for the remainder of the evening while she locks herself in the spare bedroom to text homeboy back.

Sadly, life is not a movie. Life is an impossibly long and unyielding march to the grave, peppered along the way with myriad disappointments and misfortunes. Living is a mistake and everyone is trash, which is why shower sex usually winds up with one or more of the naked parties shivering alone at the back of the shower, trying not to slip on a viscous glob of body wash, while the other gasps and sputters as shampoo burns her sensitive eyes. Your wife sounds pretty sensible. Just leave her alone already.

I am a morning person, and my newly retired partner is the opposite. At night in our bedroom, they read on their iPad for several hours while I try to sleep. I am in bed by 11 p.m. while my partner usually stays up till 1 or 2 a.m. If I wake up, they’re on our couch in the bedroom with a glow of light from the iPad. We have been married twenty years and usually went to bed at the same time because of work, but now that they’re retired, they like staying up reading, watching movies, or watching videos on YouTube. Bottom line: it bothers me that one person is doing an activity while the other sleeps or tries to sleep. What would be your advice?

I don’t have a job. I mean, not for real. Sometimes people try to act like writing about my asshole on the Internet qualifies as work, but those people have obviously never worked as receptionists for veterinarians and been vomited on by a dog with parvo while trying to schedule dentistry for a cat. THAT SHIT IS WORK. Burning my knees with an overheated laptop all evening after crawling out of bed at 3 p.m. is most certainly not!

That said, I love to go to sleep at 2 a.m. Which is weird, because I’m an extremely jumpy and anxious person, especially in the dark. As soon as night falls, a family of raccoons will skitter across the deck eating compost or a deer will ram its head repeatedly into the garage door, causing my heart to skip several beats as I brace myself for a horror-movie villain to come crashing through the glass door while my wife sleeps peacefully upstairs, blissfully unaware of the corpse she’s unfortunately going to have to heave out of the way when she wakes up to get past the guy in the Scream mask hiding in the closet. But let me tell you what your partner won’t: it’s worth risking getting your head chopped off by Freddy Krueger to watch your makeup tutorials and/or read a couple chapters of your Book of the Month in blissful unadulterated silence.

When I lived alone, I would go to bed at 9 p.m., but now that there is a family in my home who won’t stop talking to me, I can’t really get anything done, or enjoy anything in my life, until all those people go the fuck to sleep. Respect a pair of headphones? Give a shit about a locked door?? No, ma’am, not in this house! If the sun is up, guaranteed there is someone beating a snare drum or sprawled in front of a blaring television or bleating, “Sam? Sam? Sam? Sam? Sam? Sam? Sam? Sam? Sam?” while standing right in front of me until I drag my eyes to wherever they want me to look. So when they sleep, I’m up. It’s just me and the cats watching R-rated violent, sexy shit without anybody asking where the scissors are or if lentils are okay for dinner. Sure! Cook whatever you want! I’m going to