Wow, No Thank You - Samantha Irby Page 0,33

I can latch on to in the hopes of a semipermanent relationship once I officially moved to Kalamazoo. A dude named Ike came and sat next to me as we waited for the buffet to be set up, literally the only reason I braved a room full of people unironically dressed as Tolkien characters. He was wearing a Scientology uniform as his costume, and I immediately fell deeply in love. I talked to Ike for a while, writing his name in permanent marker on the Potential New Friends list in my mind.

After he abandoned me to go fill up his plate with communal vegan enchiladas from the hot bar, a cool-looking woman with shiny bangs and interesting glasses (PRO) carrying a tiny crying baby (CON) and wearing a Ruth Bader Ginsburg costume (NEUTRAL) came over to introduce herself to me. We got on like a house on fire. After a few minutes, my palms started to sweat in anticipation of what would surely be an awkward transition from a pleasant introductory conversation to the method by which I could secure her contact information to lock down a future friendship.

Is there an app for this? I wasn’t the best fucking dater you ever saw, but by the end of my run I had certainly grasped the machinations of “let’s turn this thing into the next thing”: clandestine shared glance over the heads of the other people at the bar; awkwardly squeezing past other people’s sweaty boners to reach each other; eight minutes of scream-talking the coolest things you can think of directly into each other’s ears, standing close enough to get spittle on your neck; an arm caress, but super casual; *fake laughter*; *effusive praise you’ll eventually come to regret*; “oh, hey, sorry, looks like my friends are done doing coke off the public toilet”; EXCHANGE OF PHONE NUMBERS. At ten the next morning, smoking a joint and listening to some Anita Baker and deciding whether you are too hungover to make it to brunch, you stare at your empty inbox and curse yourself for being so desperate and eager. That, I have mastered. I am the queen of “they probably input the digits wrong, I shoulda had me call them” when it comes to a deal I couldn’t all-the-way seal. But with friends it’s weirder. For instance, I have some treasured Instagram pals that I would maybe like to text rather than DM, because memorizing people’s handles and organizing them all in my brain is difficult plus I assume everyone is like me and turns all their notifications off because all that popping up is stressful. On the flip side, some of these people live in faraway places like Omaha and Los Angeles, and it’s not like I need their numbers for emergency purposes, just for my convenience. It’s not important, but what if I wanted to call them? How in the fuck do people ever make non-romantic friends?

RBG sits down next to me at the table, and my lady is off being charming and laughing with her head tossed back, because these are the adulthood friends she’s acquired through various Parent Teacher Associators and Slumber Party Coordinators, circles I don’t have access to. Also, a lot of these peoples are Neighbors, a club I have no interest in joining! RBG’s given name is actually Emily, and Emily is funny and smart and has a bubbly energy that is very appealing to me, and the more she talks, the more vivid my fantasy of us listening to somber podcasts in her minivan while driving to the petting zoo becomes. I can literally taste the nutmeg silt from the bottom of a pumpkin spice latte on my tongue when her husband (CON) comes over with a towering plate of food for her (PRO) and coaxes her away from my table. I start to say “hey, do you like tweeting?” or some other useless shit, but she’s got that goddamn baby and this Jedi Knight is looming anxiously over us balancing a precarious platter of nachos, so I stammer out a “Nice talking to ya!” in my most nasal midwestern twang and go back to fucking around on my phone.

When I moved half a year later, rather than thinking about making new friends, I spent my first few days hiding from the surprising number of people who knocked on our door throughout