My alarm goes off at 5:50 a.m. First thing I do is check to make sure I’m not dead. If I am, in fact, still alive, I usually sob uncontrollably until there’s nothing left in my tear ducts but salt dust, then grope blindly through my apartment to the bathroom, where I say a little prayer for a hole to open beneath my building and swallow us all.
First of all: same.
Second: you must read this collection.
Second–and-a-half: by read I mean listen. Samantha Irby narrates this essay collection herself, and you are going to miss a LOT of fantastic inflection if you read it on your own!
Irby is cranky as all hell, and I love her for it. She is honest- honest about life, fears, setbacks, sex, and confidence. She gives no fucks as well as giving all of the fucks, so it’s easy to see her as a kindred spirit- especially when she is talking about money:
Fuck a budget. I grew up poor and now I have money, so I’m going to spend it on Chanel nail polishes. I don’t know how you can possibly have joy in your life when you do shit like “balance your checkbook” or “pay your minimum balance on time,” and if doing those awful-sounding things means I can’t see four movies in one weekend, then I don’t ever want to do them.
Ugh. I feel that in my bones…and my bank account.
Irby lays it all out on the table: her past traumas, living with visible and invisible disabilities, good sex, bad sex, horrifying college misadventures, and going to Zumba with “your mom”. She frequently refers to people as “your mom”, and being the adult woman teenage boy that I am I giggled every time. She is not afraid to say whatever is on her mind, and I wish that more people were willing to just own up to what they are really thinking about- not just what they are “supposed” to be thinking about:
But I was 22 when I started this job, and you know what? Sometimes it really is okay to just have a fucking job. Not a passion, not a career, but a steadfast source of bi-weekly income deposited directly into a checking account from which food, and medicine, and apps one totally forgot about having downloaded will be paid for.
