Wow, No Thank You - Samantha Irby Page 0,56

but at least when I started wearing all black and got really into Ani DiFranco junior year of high school, not a single one of my forward-thinking classmates was like: HA-HA, LESBIAN, GO KILL YOURSELF. I was lucky enough to grow up in a Super Nice Town, where it was okay if you dyed your hair purple and wrote mopey song lyrics on the white parts of your knockoff Chuck Taylors. It was a Culturally Accepting Haven where (Jewish or not) we learned about the Holocaust and got Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur off from school, a Promiscuity Province in which part of my sex education included the golf team’s coach sternly watching my fingers as I carefully rolled a lubricated spermicidal condom down the rigid shaft of a lunchroom banana.

I can maybe give a rudimentary explanation of how evolution works (dinosaurs are birds!) and sing a nursery rhyme in Swahili if pressed, but I didn’t learn any useful small-town shit while I was busy trying to look smart reading Vonnegut and pretending I was interested in skateboards. I didn’t take home economics in high school. I took gender studies and shaved my head and started spelling women with a y. All these things are well and good for someone nestled safely between mid-rise buildings. But how are any of the limited number of skills I’ve acquired, like hailing cabs at midnight without falling into the street from too much tequila or having artisanal cupcakes delivered to my apartment before noon, going to translate in a place that has roving deer brazen enough to just walk up onto your porch and sort through your junk mail while waiting for you to toss the compost out. I get nervous being in places that are dark, without street lights, and where you can’t get a pizza after 9 p.m. I do not possess the handiness to make myself useful around a toilet I’m responsible for fixing if it breaks. And okay, sure, pseudo-country life has its perks. Gas costs approximately thirty-seven cents a gallon. You can buy shoes at the grocery store. You’re never going to stand shivering in your high heels outside in the cold trying to get in the club after midnight. The farmers’ market is full of actual farmers instead of bearded hipsters in distressed flannel bloviating at you about peak asparagus season while criminally overcharging you for Pink Lady apples. These are all pros!

It sounds cute and all, but I am living in an actual nightmare. I hate nature! Birds are terrifying flying rats, and the sun will fry you and give you cancer, and large bodies of water are made up of mostly garbage and liquified human waste. I am a blue-state city slicker to my very core, content to ignore the outside world in favor of convenience apps and cable television. Everything here is dangerous and/or irritating: mosquitoes the size of a fist bite me through my practical long sleeves and leave itchy, egg-size welts in their wake; loud-ass frogs live in our backyard pond (why do we even have that?) and croak all goddamned night; bats hysterically flap their leathery wings while trapped in a woodstove; maniacal squirrels aloft in the branches over the deck hurl walnuts at our heads as we mind our human business grilling farm-stand corn for lunch. Sick raccoons fall out of our trees, fat groundhogs burst through the fence to eat the okra and tomatoes I refuse to help harvest from our garden but am pleased to know exist, and field mice scurry across the basement floor, sending chills up my spine with their scratchy-scratchy nails. This season on Americana Horror Story.

I have had very few encounters with the people who live in our surrounding towns since I moved, because I once drove past a house in which a person had literally built a makeshift wall in their yard made of Trump signs and I’m terrified the neighbors will sense the pro-choice vibes rising off me like steam and start inaccurately lecturing me about embryonic stem cells. One time, a man I’d never seen walked his golden retriever by our house as I was dragging the garbage can up the driveway from the curb, and he stopped and said, “You must be new here.” How did he know I was new? Could he smell the lingering stench of unreliable public transportation on me?