Wow, No Thank You - Samantha Irby Page 0,6
I use this time to make a plan for the evening, i.e., imagine, in excruciating detail, all the things that could go wrong.
12:40 p.m.: start making the plan.
Remember when you could be roused from a night being spent on the couch in your pajamas, curled around a pint of Chubby Hubby, and goaded into joining your friends at the bar even though you’d already taken off your bra? Yeah, I can’t either, but I know those days existed. I have the liver damage to prove it. Now when I go out I have to start gearing up for that shit at least three days in advance, and if I’m actually going to go through with it, it has to include both an ironclad reservation and a reliable seating arrangement. Showing up at a restaurant and hoping for the best is a young person’s game. If I’m going out, I need to know that there is a table with my name on it and a comfortable seat pulled up to it. I’m too old to hover anxiously near the door, sweating under my coat in my good outside clothes, watching people who actually planned ahead be ushered to their awaiting tables and served the foods I am dying to eat.
I’m not that organized, though, so I spend a long time scrolling through OpenTable to try to find a reservation for 7 p.m. at a place that has more than a few high-tops left and won’t attempt to put us outside. It’s slim pickings.
1:00 p.m.: get the text chain going.
I’m going out tonight with three people who all get along, and I don’t mean that they can endure each other for two hours without scratching one another’s eyes out. I mean they have relationships that are established enough that I don’t have to spend the whole time babysitting them or pointing out the things they have in common. In the past, I would have been just fine being the common thread in a random group of people and spending my entire night bouncing from person to person screaming, “You like pasta, right? So does Melissa! Talk to her about it!” or “Emily has a weird boyfriend, too! Discuss!” and trying to make a group of virtual strangers feel comfortable while low-key ruining my own good time. It’s exhausting, and inevitably one person hates another person, and then you have to defend the bad person to the good person, while internally questioning both of these stupid friendships, and why the fuck am I doing this again? Now I just ask the group chat if they want to go out.
3:30 p.m.: either a coffee or a nap.
It’s the aging club kid’s Sophie’s choice: drink a giant watery espresso and risk further aggravating my irritated colon, or lie down for a refreshing ten-minute disco nap and wake up at seven the next morning. Both have their advantages. Coffee is cheap and readily available; or, if I overshoot my nap, I won’t have to go out and party! It’s usually around this time in the afternoon that I start rethinking my later commitments, no matter what the fuck they are. An eight o’clock movie on Tuesday night sounded plausible last Thursday, but now it’s Tuesday afternoon. I just had a lot of soup delivered while squinting at the laptop in my office, and now I don’t think I’m going to be able to make that movie, okay? Going out on Saturday night sounded great on Wednesday, but now Saturday is here and I’m in my cozy clothes and I’ve got Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark playing on this phone I’ve propped in a glass because I couldn’t connect to the Bluetooth speaker and it’s gonna be really hard to put shoes on, dawg. It’s extremely hard to motivate myself to get to a place where I’m required to pay a twenty-dollar cover to get hip-checked by linebackers in church shoes all night, especially when I could just get back in my warm bed and NOT DO THAT. I decide on a coffee, because housekeeping is outside my room and I will literally die of shame if I am just lazily lying around in the afternoon half-sleeping while people are at work vacuuming, plus there is a Starbucks in the lobby of this hotel. Convenience is the number one driver of everything I do.
5:00 p.m.: it’s put-up-or-shut-up time.