bitches gotta eat

i'm done dating forever.

2012-02-09T16:18:00.000-06:00

i know how to write about a horrible fucking date. seriously, i've got that shit down to a science: first i have to skewer whatever misguided friend of mine tried to be a decent human being and give a lonely bitch a reason to put pants that have a zipper on, or come up with a real-ish sounding cover story because "he responded to my craigslist ad" sounds SUPER SAD. poop. okay, next i have to mention that i was dressed wrong, and enumerate the ways i was sweaty or smelly or leaking diarrhea from my eye sockets. i am usually lost, or late, or both lost and late, dependent on shitty public transportation because i have to hang on to my cash just in case this dude isn't going to pay because they NEVER FUCKING PAY. so then i arrive at our chosen meeting place, definitely sweating by now if i hadn't been before, and dude is what, ambivalent? nonplussed? totally fucking disappointed?! yes, one of those. or maybe all of the above. some weird, suburban politeness dictates that i must sit for an hour or two with someone who obviously HATES TALKING TO ME (maybe he's even texting other people every time it's my turn to talk, or updating his facebook, probably scrolling through his twitter feed), and i drink too much or order an entire brontosaurus rib for dinner and turn him off even more. which i hadn't thought possible considering that i'd already had to correct him twice when he thought my name was "stephanie." talk talk yawn bore yawn talk JOKES THAT FALL FLAT over. finally, wait for the bus, in the rain OBVIOUSLY, because he really didn't pay for dinner and i spent all my cab money on a cheese plate. home to my shoebox, where i immediately wish i'd had the foresight to change the sheets because it would have been so much better to come home from a bad date to a fresh bed, yell at the cat, apologize profusely for taking my anger out on said cat, get in bed for the next three days. rinse and repeat.

i went on what i thought was a REALLY MOTHERFUCKING SUCCESSFUL date a few weeks ago, and i want to know, what does one call a good date that was super good and ended well but then maybe wasn't really as good as you thought it had been because even though he texted you for a couple weeks and asked you out again while you were still at dinner the first time and made plans that he broke with a reasonable-sounding excuse that included influenza and then a reschedule never materialized which is weird because i hadn't even sexted him a picture of my tits yet. i'm giving this up, friends. AGAIN. i'm fucking serious this time. nothing works, and even if i think i've got it kind of figured out for thirty seconds i haven't even scratched the surface of how totally wrong i am. it's confusing more than anything else. FOR INSTANCE, some match.com dude emailed me for two weeks and asked for my phone number and i gave it to him, then he no-showed for some plans we made. no problemo, on to the next thing. except he still texts me and shit. like, "how is your day?" or "did you make it home okay in the snow?" i'm sorry, sir, but what exactly is the point of that? are there really women for whom the occasional, "it's not too cold for ya, is it?" suffices as sexual pursuit and meaningful interaction? i never respond, because he's obviously marginally interested at best, yet he remains undeterred in the laziest courtship in the history of cellular telephones. maybe "it sure is dark this evening" will replace "great legs, what time do they open?" as the pick-up line of the future. holy fuck.

what happens when a total clown goes on a date with THE MOST SOMBER DUDE IN THE WORLD? here are some things that i do every single day in my real life: 1 imitate people using a high-pitched child's voice 2 have realistic two-sided conversations with both animals and inanimate objects 3 dance around my office and sing loudly in spanish along with tejano and cubano records 4 laugh hysterically while telling terrible jokes such as the following, Q "what do you call a nosy pepper?" A "jalapeño business!" 5 read celebrity gossip blogs with the intensity most people devote to tolstoy 6 purchase those cheese and cracker things from the corner store, you know, the ones in the plastic with the peel-off top that has four saltine crackers and that fake orange cheese and the little red thing that is neither scoopy enough or spready enough to really warrant inclusion in the package and 7 put that much fucking thought into silly shit like CHEESE AND CRACKERS PACKAGING. basically, when i'm not seething in a blinding rage or marinating in a pool self-induced hate vomit, i'm totally fucking stupid.

now let's be for real: i'm 100% salty, 99.9% of the time. everything is so boring and dumb and everyone is so selfish and terrible, and i think what i've discovered about myself is that i am, despite my efforts to prove to myself otherwise, just not a happy person. not in a sad way, though. I ENJOY SHIT. seriously, i love a lot of stuff: the kitten halftime during the puppy bowl on animal planet; reading a good book on the toilet; huitlacoche tacos; listening to someone smart tell a really amazing story. i might be mired in self-loathing every single one of my waking hours, but if some gilberto gil comes on the old pandora machine i am getting up and dancing, son. and then when i'm done enjoying whatever it is that has momentarily distracted me from the misery that is every day life, i crawl right back into the comfortable embrace of EVERYTHING FUCKING SUCKS. people who are cheerful all the time seem stupid to me.

if you ask me out, though, i'm all goddamned sunshine. no one in his right mind wants to bang some sour bitch, so if i have some brisket plans with a breathing adult male i get all my good jokes together and run through the "this is what i want this dude to think about me" modern-day dating resume. you know what the fuck i mean, the shit you tell a person that makes you look smart and awesome and fuckable. for instance, i pretend like i just sprung fully-grown from zeus's brow at age 26 and have spent the six years since being adorable and hilarious and not weird or mean or jerkfaced. don't act like it's just me, you bitches know you keep a list of your impressive accomplishments printed on the bathroom mirror so you can memorize that shit while putting on the eyeliner he is totally not going to notice. i see you, grrrrrl: "graduated law school, volunteered in guatemala, got a job at a fancy law firm, bought my condo," blah blah blah. over and over and over again until it rolls naturally off your tongue while he pretends not to be staring at your tits over his cocktail.

my abbreviated dating resume looks a little something like this: "animal job, hilarious comedy jokes, have you read [insert title of intelligent-sounding au courant piece of literature] yet?" then, when pressed for a more detailed history: "sorry, homie, but i didn't have a childhood. i was born an adult. weird, right? HAHAHA! and my writing totally isn't available anywhere at all ever at any time. so, should we split an appetizer or what?" i would love to be all, "DUDE, DID YOU SEE ME IN THAT MAGAZINE THAT ONE TIME?!" to prove that i'm worth this hour and a half he's giving me, but in my vain attempt to create the slightest illusion of mystery i have to hold all that in until he hasn't recoiled in horror at my rubber sheets. this is where having studied visual art would totally trump the clickety-clack of this keyboard, because i then could just pull a drawing out of my bag and be like, "let's have sex now." but now i have to be charming and shit then drop a five hundred page manuscript in front of him and say, "if you read the first couple chapters you will so not regret having come home with me." that's a lot of goddamned work, which is why i always lead with a dirty limerick and hope he's sort of dumb and easily impressed.

I WORE A BLAZER, if that fucking says anything. and girl shoes. i mean, i really put some thought into it. and the serious man and i had a good time. at least i thought we did. i even got him to crack a smile, which is the shit i live for. i like a comedy challenge, and i will say anything i have to to get a bitch to laugh. not even kidding. if you're a new reader, or just a lazy asshole who doesn't want to read through the archives, you should know that a couple years ago i decided i was never going to work harder to give my vagina away than a dude was working to get it. that's just silly. and i demanded that we all adopt this policy, but i know that sometimes it's hard because you're lonely. SO AM I, HO. but my black box is made out of the same shit they make airplane black boxes out of, and i turn that loneliness into unbridled hatred. the product of which you're reading currently.

i think that whole "the rules" shit is totally dumb, but i have adopted a modified "he's just not that into you" operating system when it comes to dealing with dudes. as soon as they stop acting interested, i let it the fuck go and move on. seriously, four or five days with no contact and i take the hint and delete him out of my phone and watch unfaithful a couple times and then i'm magically over it. you're never going to know why, so just assume he's not into you and never text him again. the shit works, no joke. listen, you're never going to know why, so don't torture yourself. that dude didn't just forget that he likes me, maybe he really did for a week or so, but right now he most definitely does NOT. and that's cool, man. i'm just not going to sit up all night listening to sad music worrying about it. but i also am not doing this shit anymore. it's BORING and i'm tired of wasting my arsenal of one-liners on dudes who text me about the republican primary candidates for two weeks before dropping off the face of the earth. and into some other lady's vagina, DUH. i'm retiring my dance card. and demanding my $34.99 back from match.com.

you're just like a sister to me!

2012-01-17T16:03:00.003-06:00

issue seven. at the gynecologist a couple weeks ago i learned, from an abandoned magazine left behind in the waiting room, how to turn my bathroom into a mini vacation. did you know that just by purchasing a whimsical toothbrush and throwing a teal mat on the floor that you can transform that tiny room you don't have space to take a relaxing shit in into what feels like a weekend getaway? that a jazzy soap dish and citrus room spray can put you in a beachy state of mind? yeah, ME NEITHER. like most mental patients, everything in my bathroom is white so that i might give all of the butt germs lying around a liberal splash of bleach without fear of non color-safe consequence. more importantly, i also learned that i'm ovulating normally. and i got the warning speech about my old-ass rotten eggs. so if you want to get me pregnant you better hurry up and do so, because there's a good chance that alien hellspawn might see the cold light of day.

january magazines are my absolute favorite. they're so shiny and perfect and filled with the promise of an amazing new year. you know you want to lose some weight, GURL. you know you need a fucking makeover! and you really do believe that shit will come true while standing in line at walgreens clutching your gift receipt waiting to return that jean nate body wash set your clueless cubicle-mate gave you for christmas, you really do believe that this is the year you're going to freshen up that hairstyle and stop wearing sweatpants to dinner. resolutions are nothing but a laundry list of your inherent flaws that starts mocking you two days after you write them, but reinventing yourself (with the aid of a few helpful ladymags) seems like a totally plausible undertaking.

so you buy them. self because, despite the fact that you have the USDA's nutritional guidelines and weight watchers' complicated points system committed to memory, you need yet another step-by-step guide detailing how to eat mini meals and filling snacks to lose that fifteen pounds of mashed potato you put on over the holidays. even though you ALREADY KNOW that four grapes and two peanuts is your morning snack and a sliver of avocado and nine sugarfree jellybeans is supposed to somehow get your ass through an entire afternoon, you still drop five bucks to read about that shit some more. this time, though, you're going to stick with it. and omg SO AM I. this year is going to be the one we actually take our lunches to work and make ziploc bags of tasteless air-popped popcorn and dried apricots every morning to keep in our desk drawers! this year we're measuring peanut butter instead of eating it from the jar! this year we're turning the oven on for the first time in the five years we've lived in this apartment to bake lean pieces of fish!

because if and when we do, that glamour we bought is totally going to come in handy. it's time for a new haircut, and i'm not sure whether or not high-waisted slacks are still in. and since my diet of egg whites, bread crusts, mineral water, and three m+ms at a time has been so successful, i'm going to need some new clothes. do the kids still wear sweaters? how are the models feeling about pants this year? are sleeves still in style? what about orange, are people still rocking orange? is it still okay to wear shoes?! it's exhausting. and by the time i've figured it all out and saved enough pizza money to update my wardrobe the trends have all changed again. which is okay, i guess, because that "half a banana, sip of juice, and three bites of a peach" diet was over by january 10th. BITCHES GOTTA EAT.

you're too awesome for me to want to have sex with you. what is this obsession magazines have with women becoming really good friends with dudes? one of these days, after i finish working on all the other books i'm halfway finished writing, i am going to write a book called, male friends: worth the heartbreak? this month's cover features none other than the vampire, one of my very best male friends, and the blog debut of my mighty skin beard. "being friends with dudes" is a clear example of things that sound better in your head than they will ever actually be in real life. like "taking a spin class" or "eating a bowl of peas when you have a really bad craving for pizza." once you try to put it into practice you quickly find out that the effort is hardly worth it. especially when you're friends and you don't necessarily want to be. you got guilted into the shit. or you never found the right time to tell him you've had a crush on him for years and that watching him go on dates is like twisting a hunting knife in your heart. more often than not, unless you've decided to put him in the friend zone, the shit sucks.

i know, sister. 1 sometimes you get bro'd and that shit comes right out of nowhere. one minute you're holding hands and staring into the eyes of that sensitive dude who you are convinced is just too shy to make a move on you, and the next he's telling you about what a great friend you are and he'll always have your back and, by the way, does that girl meghan you sit next to in latin american studies have a boyfriend? (what?!) or 2 maybe you've had sex before and, for whatever reason most commonly known as "someone goddamned else," he decides he doesn't want to do that anymore. but you're so cool and smart and great! do you think we could still be friends? ie, do you want to sit on the sidelines and provide emotional support without receiving the benefits of my penis? (WHAT?!) and occasionally 3 there's a dude who keeps hanging around to help you move or fix that weird noise your radiator is making despite the fact that you don't want to have sex with him. and he says he's okay with having been relegated to the friend zone, but we all really know he's just waiting for you to get drunk and forget how much his ear hair grosses you out. (um, this one totally works for me.)

there are, of course, some organic male-female relationships that are strictly platonic. i know, because they always seem to happen to my ass. i make jokes and listen to rap music, so dudes are always asking to be my goddamned friend. that's how the vampire and i started out. he sent me an email and we went to dinner and halfway through the meal this dude was like, "so my girlfriend thinks...." and i was like, YAWN. and now we're buddies. pals, even. and i always say yes when a man offers up his friendship, because i need to get a new air conditioner in a couple months and i do not plan on carrying that shit upstairs myself. and once you get over the implicit soul-crushing rejection you'll find that dudefriends come in handy for a variety of things, especially decoding the behavior of that weirdo in the acid wash jeans who actually wants to fuck you. but it's still a bit of a letdown, you know? there's not a woman alive who SIMPLY CANNOT WAIT to listen to all the problems you're having with that bitch you're sleeping with instead of her. sometimes we want to hear how pretty we look today.

your strategy for surviving male friendship:
1 you have to understand that he doesn't want to sleep with you. will he? absolutely. but does he want to? NO HE DOES NOT. or else he would've already. so stop embarrassing yourself throwing that ass at him all the time. it's gross. if you're going to be a friend you need to actually be this dude's friend. seriously. you have to go into it prepared to offer everything you do to your girlfriends. that shit is hard, and if you can't sit still and provide a compassionate ear and sensible sounding board to a dude you sometimes masturbate to? admit that shit and save yourself some agony.

2 perfect your poker face, babygirl. you need to sit in front of a mirror and put "million dollar baby" on the old television machine and dare yourself to cry. you got it? dry-eyed even at the end when they're in the hospital room?! OKAY THEN. you are now ready to have a platonic lunch across from a hot piece of smoked sausage who is going to regale you with stories of this girl with a banging body who is limber enough to tuck her heels behind her ears. because you're like his sister, except better than his sister because he can talk to you about raunchy sex stuff and ask for advice about girls. and don't try sabotaging that dude because you think it'll give you an advantage. that shit doesn't work. trust me, i've tried.

3 stop trying to bang his friends. i know it's tempting, because he just has so many of them! and they're all so fucking cute! but they know why he isn't banging you, and even if they might think about it, it's unlikely that they ever will. so it just makes you look desperate and shady. it really can be nice to have guy friends, but only when they know they can relax and be friendly to you without your reading into shit. i used to be the worst about this, because it feels really good when someone is nice and showing you attention, but that dude and his friends are off-limits. especially if you don't want to look trashy. or you're going to need a rebuilt carburetor or some furniture moved in the near future.

4 use him as much as humanly possible. if there is a man in your life, he should be carrying your shit around. and driving you places. and escorting you to events. you're not going to torment me with all that moony rhapsodizing about that girl you met last week while i carry cat litter on the bus, my man. YOU ARE PICKING THAT SHIT UP. that's my payment for giving you "the female perspective" or whatever dumb reason you back burnered my ass. i'm not going to another wedding, funeral, block party, or store opening by myself, because it is the job of my manfriend to go to that shit with me and be silent while giving everyone the impression that we might be a couple.

oprah's richer than god, and that's why she gets to be famous and fat. "celebrity diet secrets: how they eat and stay so skeleton-thin!" bitches love that whole "stars are just like us" gag, myself included. nothing brings joy to my heart like a picture of ali larter in a ball cap with no makeup on paying a parking meter! or drake sipping a latte while texting at a red light! ben affleck holding his daughter's hand while crossing the street! stars love starbucks! and break traffic laws!! and try to keep their young children from becoming roadkill!!! omg, CELEBRITIES ARE JUST LIKE ME.

i want to know what lady gaga eats, i really do. and i want to know that halle berry gobbles down rare steaks with butter melting down the sides. i always think to myself, "self, if you weren't such a total pig asshole and could limit yourself to four kale smoothies a day the way vogue says charlize theron does you wouldn't be so fucking ugly." but i probably still would, because that bitch gets to spend an hour meditating and swim five hours a day while i have to boss around people who don't listen to me and take four advil at a time because my boss is causing me to have tension headaches. famous people don't stress eat, ho. that's just us regular folk who need a spoonful of cookie dough just to open the electric bill.

magazines are always trying to pretend that a bitch can eat whatever rihanna had for breakfast and look just like her by dinnertime. sure, i can buy an organic banana and spread some flaxseed oil on a piece of ezekiel bread and eat that while drinking a coconut water while standing in my kitchen, but the minute i walk into work and my paycheck is late and fistfights are breaking out and shit is a mess and people are yelling at me i am going to solve my motherfucking problems with a croissant. you know, the ones with the almond paste inside and the slivered almonds on top? those ones. with a full fat latte. and, maybe in an hour, i'll probably have some cheese.

you could be skinny RIGHT THIS MINUTE if you quit your job, shipped your kids off to boarding school, and devoted your entire day to looking perfect. by all means, let eva longoria work with these animals all goddamned day. let's see what her diet looks like then. two 7-eleven yogurts, nine diet cokes, half a lean cuisine, a couple of those expensive chocolates that pharmaceutical rep dropped off, six excedrin, a spoonful of the peanut butter she hides in the bottom drawer, a turkey sandwich from the deli even though that lean cuisine was supposed to be her whole lunch, and that snickers bar that's supposed to be for emergencies only? yeah, ME TOO.

my vagina stinks. how come i'm the only one who knows when i need to go to the gynecologist? every month there's some sort of "beware down there" cautionary story with a checklist of clues to know when your dirty snatch needs medical attention. i know that if my underwear smells like gyro meat at the end of the day that i need to make an appointment to have my little girl checked out. what are the rest of you doing? self-diagnosing?! you know that doesn't work! you are going to fuck around and get a kidney infection, ho. that burning pee means something! i was in the hospital this weekend because CROHNS DISEASE IS AN ASSHOLE, and all i could think was "thank goodness i didn't let this go." it's not the same, of course, but i never have to flip through a cosmo to see if three out of the five major signs of broken vagina are happening inside my pants. get your pap smeared, girlfriend.

my taco armpits are obviously the result of this natural deodorant i insist upon using. these hippies have won the war, friends. they've got me using tea tree oil on my scalp and rubbing herbs under my arms and catching my period in a piece of natural sea sponge all in an attempt to make up for the years i spent driving a car that couldn't pass an emissions test, i guess. i don't know, if you listen to enough bitches in the parking lot of whole foods they start to get to you after a while. i'm pouring vinegar down the tub drain and cleaning my dishes with baking soda and shit, and i swear on mother earth that if i die of alzheimers or whatever cancer it is i'm trying to avoid by smelling like an ox and standing in my kitchen twice a month mixing borax and fels-naptha to MAKE MY OWN FUCKING LAUNDRY SOAP i am going to claw my way out of the grave and snatch you by your white-person dreadlocks.

gross winter skin. every january i set three reasonable goals for the coming year. this year's included the following: 1 go grocery shopping 2 find someone hot and manly to have sex with and 3 wash my face every night before bed. the month isn't even halfway over and two of these lofty goals have already been achieved, and i would've conquered all three if i didn't seem doomed to falling asleep fully-clothed with all of the lights on every goddamned night only to wake up with mascara sealing my eyes shut.

magazines love talking about the dreaded winter dryness, and the solution is a simple one: butter yourself up like a turkey and bundle up in thick socks and long sleeves. black children are not allowed to walk around with dry skin. one time when i was a kid i was walking through the basement of our church after sunday school on my way to shoot dice in the parking lot before service, and right before I BURST INTO FUCKING FLAMES this old lady named augustine grabbed me by the arm and swatted me hard on the bottom. annoyed, yet strangely sexually aroused, i was all, "goddamn, what was that for?" and she pointed at my knees and said, "girl, you ashy!" i looked down and, eep!, I TOTALLY WAS. which came as an utter shock considering that my mother had just finished her morning routine of slathering me in cocoa butter and bacon grease right before i'd left the house.

it's a crime to be black and ashy, isn't it? this morning on the train this woman was literally spackling her small child with a thick layer of vaseline. the white man next to her looked on, horrified, but the rest of us just nodded in approval. i even asked her to wipe a little bit on the webbing between my forefinger and thumb. (i hate that part! that shit is a dead giveaway that your black ass has not properly moisturized.) my friend michelle uses coconut oil head to toe, and my boy ron swears by olive oil. on his face and everything. my hippie ass uses glycerin and this moisturizer from lush that is basically solidified lard that melts as you rub it in and smells like cloves. the cosmetics industry has declared war on white women, and it's high time you girls fight back: one bottle of palmer's at a time.

fuck expensive creams. during the winter months, i want you broads to buy your beauty products from the black section of the drugstore. you know, that one dusty bottom shelf with all the fake kente cloth prints and little brown people on the packaging. it's okay, we won't bite you as you squeeze past where we're browsing the olive oil hairspray and ambi fade cream to grab some baby oil, GURL. it's so crazy to me, the money you'd spend on bullshit lotions that are 98% water or whatever. get some jojoba oil and rub that shit on your knees and elbows and pat a little around your eyes before you go to bed. you'll wake up looking like a sophomore in high school. have you ever seen an old black lady? we look 42 at 85, and it's not just because chicken is so delicious. moisturize your situation.

computer love. sexting combines my two most favorite things: talking dirty sex talk and not having to communicate with a real live human being sitting in the same room. also, you can do it at work! or on the bus! while getting a haircut! OR SHOPPING FOR GROCERIES!

sitting in your room by yourself is the best. sometimes it's fun to have someone over and talk to them and see if they laugh at the parts on 30 rock you think are hilarious, but mostly don't you just want to not worry about dozing off in front of a motherfucker and drooling on his shit? this is why phone sex is the best, because it's sexier than actual sex and way less messy. like, i don't have to tell you that helen is taking a shit in the next room during phone sex, but it you're at my house that's the kind of thing that can really destroy the mood. and that asshole shits like clockwork. dude arrives, helen greets him, i take my pants off, helen drops an atom bomb in the other room. HUGE BONERKILLER.

but people don't use the phone to make calls anymore. watch television shows? check. play video games? check check. stream cubano music on pandora all day long? check check check. everything other than dialing a number and having a conversation, unless you count ordering pizza and placing bets with your bookmaker. so the perverts among us have had to evolve and participate in sexting, which is mostly boring. because i don't know what the problem is, but even though they have their cell phones in hand 98% of their waking hours, dudes never fucking text you back right away. so even if you've sent a picture of your tits in the hottest bra you own and you've said written some nasty, slutty shit that would make your mother smh OMG, are you really supposed to wait an hour and a half for the response?! GTFOWTBS.

and i know i'm supposed to keep the romance and mystery alive, redbook, but when is it appropriate to introduce sexting into your relationship? i mean, how many weeks of "i just ate lunch :)" and "what R U doing l8r?" before you can type, "I WANT YOUR BALLS IN MY JAWS jk. no srsly." i have a swoony crush on this hot georgia peach named drew. i text drew all the time. i <3 him and i want to :-* him. but so far i have been very respectful. hard to believe, i know. sooner or later, though, i'm going to send him something disgusting. it's just the natural progression of things, right? plus, it's cute when girls do it, isn't it? he'll want to give me ((())) because i'm such an O:-) or, if i send him some tits, he'll want to, um, whatever the emoticon for making your fingers into an O shape and poking the index finger on your other hand through it over and over again.

the problem is that you run the risk of turning a dude off. remember that dude who sent me some phone porn before he even knew my last name? (yeah, i know: WHICH ONE?) that was awful, and it made me not want to see it in real life. also, you run the even bigger risk of someone facebooking your boobs, and i'm all tattooed and shit and could never believeably deny that the picture was me. or live down the fact that my shower curtain came from the "kids furnishings" section at target. don't make fun of me, that shit is totally cute. LOL

you need to stop fucking dudes who don't read.

2012-01-04T16:01:00.001-06:00

happy new year, bitches. it's finally 2012, and i fully expect to be as salty and miserable as i was last goddamned year. life only gets worse, right? i'm about to turn 32 in a month and i have no idea what in the fuck a "kreayshawn" is. i also don't know how to use spotify. i have a desktop computer. i listen to cassettes sometimes. i put orthotics in my gym shoes. i still say "gym shoes." i take potassium supplements. i enjoy how effortless it is to eat lukewarm soup. i own compression socks. mtv is mostly irritating to me. everything, everywhere is too fucking loud. i bristle at the sound of laughing children. i put things in my bra for safekeeping. i clip coupons. i sleep at every available opportunity. i am the last person on earth who still gets netflix dvds IN THE GODDAMNED MAIL.

in other words, i'm getting old as hell. and so are you fools. i have friends who are, like, forty-seven and shit. and every passing year just becomes more of a reminder that i have no fucking idea what's cool anymore. and even if, like i do, you go on all the websites and read all the blogs you're still going to be standing on the train platform next to a motherfucker half your age who's twice as informed as you are. every day i live in fear that i'm going to be that asshole inappropriately dressed in some young shit while the kids make fun of me and hide my regularity medication. am i immature? ABSOLUTELY. i'm still sexting hot dudes and buying lunchables and diet coke instead of nutrient-rich dark green, leafy vegetables at the grocery store. i need to not go out every single night of the week and try harder to get to work on time. i shouldn't start all my sentences with "dude." but there's a difference between "emotionally stunted" and "hip."

i don't make resolutions because fuck that. my general operating system is "i'm perfect. why change?" and so far i've been pretty successful staying the goddamned same and getting rid of anything or anyone who finds himself unhappy with who that person happens to be. and at first that shit sounds unreasonable, but it really is the most realistic way to get through life. FOR ALL OF US. if you're a toxic fucking asshole, chances are that's how you'll remain unless a deathbed conversion forces you to get with the goddamned program. and that's fine, because there are plenty of damaged bitches with low self-esteem who hate themselves enough to keep your shitty ass around. and that works for the rest of us, too. change is hard, so instead of trying to be nice or thin or smart if the shit doesn't come naturally to you then fuck that. be mean and fat and dumb and find some motherfuckers who can deal with that shit.

that said, i most certainly DO make resolutions for the types of dudes i want to have sex with. keeping in mind that it is mostly impossible to meet an unsavory person and mold him or her to fit our demands and expectations, i have to look for motherfuckers who have some of my necessary criteria already intact. seriously, dudes, if i don't have the patience to train a dog i most certainly can't be bothered with trying to get a hard-headed dude to do what the fuck i want. so i have to buy him from the store pre-assembled and hopefully meeting all of my classifications. there totally needs to be a DUDE IKEA. someplace you can get this one's personality and that one's dick moves and that other one's generosity and sloppily cobble them together with an allen wrench for less than you'd pay for a venti americano to make the perfect mid-priced college dorm room first real apartment boyfriend. but since life is totally stupid that will never fucking happen, and i figured since this is our last year on earth i might as well update the man list so that we might be able to at least cut our teeth on choicer cuts of meat before the planet implodes and burns us all to a goddamned crisp.

THE 2012 MAN REQUIREMENT LIST:

1 BE MASCULINE AS FUCK. i'm sick and tired of whiny dudes eating salad while wearing girl jeans trying to talk to me about their motherfucking feelings. can we be done with that already? SHUT THE FUCK UP WITH THAT SOFT SHIT. i eat broken glass for breakfast, son. i have the heart of a lion and it pumps lava through my veins. it is simply NOT POSSIBLE for me to have enjoyable sex with a dude in his little sister's t-shirt who has shampoo blood and takes diet pills. i need some calloused hands against my backside, friends. if 2011 was the year of the baby-faced emo drinking his similac while rubbing his wilted penis into your thigh and calling you mommy, PLEASE OH PLEASE let 2012 be the year that men grow some fucking facial hair and and locate their motherfucking testicles AND FUCK THE SHIT OUT OF YOU IN A BED HE CHOPPED DOWN A TREE TO MAKE WITH HIS BARE HANDS. i want to know that a man with a deep voice who slaughters his own meat is not going to put up with any of my goddamned shit. i want to know that a bossy dude with a dick like a beer can isn't going to cry while getting a goddamned blowjob. we need some dudes who put their fucking foot down and are not going to tolerate any of that backtalk, little girl.

where all the real men at?! where are the motherfuckers who smell like whiskey and gasoline? where are the motherfuckers who climb up on the roof to fix shit? where are the motherfuckers who will shake a bitch when she gets mouthy? i don't want to fuck a dude who has a "hairstyle." i don't want to fuck a dude who has "emotions." i want a grizzly bear with a near-constant erection to boss me around and pay for shit while LOOKING LIKE A MOTHERFUCKING MAN. you want a skinny dude who weeps while listening to morrissey? i can't hate. but i'm not one of these broads that enjoys telling a man what to do. i want you to get your grown man on and already know what the fuck you need to do. where did all this moisture come from? single mothers deifying their now-intolerable husband-sons?! I'M OVER IT. get a mentor or join the boys and girls club and man the fuck up. then go build a fire, guzzle a scotch, eat a steak, and TELL ME WHAT I CAN DO WITH THIS SASSY LITTLE MOUTH.

2 read some goddamned books. not a sports page, not a magazine, A FUCKING BOOK. or some smart blogs. or a newspaper that isn't free. there are two important things to consider about books: 1 you have to have, at the very least, some basic level of intelligence to read a book from start to finish. comprehension doesn't come naturally to everyone, and if you know this asshole can follow a plot and invest in some characters then chances are he's not as stupid as he might look. if he can engage in a thoughtful, animated discussion about a book then you should slap a leash on that bald eagle and marry him before he has a chance to object. 2 i can't fuck with a dude who doesn't know how to occupy and entertain himself, and i've finally reached the age that "i watch television" just isn't enough. even if it's all masterpiece theater and nature documentaries, if a man can't sit his ass down somewhere and read some shit i don't want his penis near me.

people who read books have better imaginations and tend to have more intellectual curiosity than those who don't, and after that heady first few months of fucking without ever having a conversation and maybe getting some tacos once in a while you're eventually going to want to wake up next to a dude who can challenge your opinion on that jonathan franzen piece in the new mcsweeney's. men are boring. and six months from now you and that dude are going to be sitting across from one another at brunch without a motherfucking thing to talk about. and that's cool, but if he reaches for his game boy as you pull out your brand new copy of "the marriage plot" then, i'm sorry to break it to you, BUT YOU CAN'T HAVE SEX WITH THAT GENTLEMAN ANYMORE. video games in general don't bother me because i'm a big fan of "keeping quiet" and "leaving me the fuck alone while i'm talking to anna on the phone," and who can argue with the benefits of rapid-fire hand-eye coordination? but if he can't make it through a real book he and his xbox have to kick rocks. he doesn't even have to read good books; even the trash in the magazine aisle at walgreens will suffice. AS LONG AS HE READS IT.

3 he cannot live with his mother... as elaborate and compelling as it may initially seem, the excuse he gives you for currently sleeping in the twin bed leftover from his youth is never really as good as you want it to be. i mean, if you can verify that she is an invalid and that he spends his every waking moment at her bedside tending to her care, maybe that's a good enough excuse. i said maybe. the likelier story is that he's comfortable. and his mama cooks for him and throws his laundry in the wash right after she finishes straightening his room. and she doesn't mind having him on her unlimited texting family plan. and, i know, he's saving money. pfffft. that "money he's saving" is going right into that bmw he can only afford BECAUSE HE LIVES AT HOME. the flashiest dudes i know can only afford to be that way because all the big bills come in mommy's name. and that is the opposite of sexy. i'd rather have sex on a milk crate bed next to a window with an old bedsheet and the lining of a winter coat in place of a curtain than ALWAYS GO BACK TO MY PLACE because, you know, "ma be going to bed all early and shit."

4 or go by a childhood nickname or rap alias. if your rap career hasn't taken off by now trust me, IT ISN'T GOING TO. this might just be black people, but have you ever introduced yourself to someone only to have him respond in kind with a name that sounds like a cartoon character or some shit? i'm sorry, sir, but what in the fuck is a "don swagga?" or a "little poo?" i went to a hip hop show a few weeks ago at which a dude who called himself "big boom" insisted upon paying for my whiskey. this motherfucker was easily old enough to be my father, but definitely not old enough for that shit to be charming. at first i thought he was joking, but he repeated himself three times. "they call be big boom," he said, and i just wanted to be like, "who is they? prison mates?" i talked to him for just as long as it took me to finish my drink, then WALKED THE FUCK AWAY. i want to call you what your mother calls you, please. or some derivative thereof. sincerely, samantha.

5 he must take his ass to the fucking doctor. the sexiest thing a man could ever say to me is "my doctor wants me to..." or "i was talking to my therapist yesterday." this is one of those basics that should go without saying, yet don't you find yourself always saying this shit?! some things just can't be treated with nyquil, dude. get those weird bumps checked out. have somebody take a look at that foot you continue to limp on. 47 advil a day is not normal, son. TAKE YOUR ASS TO THE GODDAMNED MINUTE CLINIC.

6 and have a passport and a cell phone with a contract. you're 36 years old and you haven't yet been out of the country? COME ON, MAN. not even to jamaica?! look, i hate hot and dirty places too, and this isn't really as much about seeing the world as it is about only having sex with A GROWN-ASS GODDAMNED MAN. and i guess everything on this list pretty much boils down to "let's stop banging manchildren." seriously, you only speak one language and you don't have a bank account and you have to go "put minutes on your phone" and i'm supposed to let you fuck me in the ass?! yeah, right. we aren't doing that anymore. i'm serious, jerks. if he can't commit to a cell phone provider, then he is most certainly not going to commit to YOU. either that or he has some sort of nefarious criminal background, because my credit looks worse than afghanistan and i have a motherfucking cell plan. AND CABLE. after a certain age it is simply unacceptable to no longer have a bank account. that "living off the grid" shit is just another way of saying "mentally, i'm seventeen." and that's just gross. you need a lease with your name on it, a com ed bill with your name on it, a passport with your name on it, a phone bill with your name on it, and a drivers license with your name on it. if you don't, kindly put your dick away and come back when you've procured those things.

7 he should not hesitate to lick your fucking butthole. oh, i know: that shit is gross. and, well, probably. but you need to know that he's willing to do it. i'm not sleeping with anymore dudes who have specific requirements. we need to take back the night, sisters. dudes are the ones who need to be good at sex. that's right, I SAID IT. a monkey could bring a man to orgasm, real talk. women are complicated below the belt, so much so that if i was in bed with a woman i'm not sure i could get her off in under an hour and I HAVE THE SAME GODDAMNED PARTS. seriously. my vagina is a goddamned labyrinth, and finding your way around to all of the good places is difficult. and knowing what to do once you've gotten there is increasingly moreso. also? TITS. a man's job is to kiss you, gaze lovingly into your eyes, fuck you, eat you out, do whatever boob shit you're into, stroke your hair, talk you into anal, bite you, slap you, tickle you, punch you, kick your teeth into your stomach, dislocate your jaw, stab you, electrocute you, and make you come seventeen times ALL WHILE NOT GETTING YOU ACCIDENTALLY PREGNANT OR LOSING HIS ERECTION, so how come my motherfucking ass is expected to be the one with an arsenal of motherfucking tricks?! what are there, like, three ways to handle a penis? get out of here with that bullshit.

so in 2012 imma need to know what the fuck you plan to do to ME. i'm going into every sexual encounter for the rest of my life saying "i have two and a half sex tricks that may or may not be successful. NOW WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR ME LATELY?"

8 and hopefully isn't on facebook and shit. facebook is for girls. i mean, posting every five minutes, commenting on every single fucking thing, uploading all 6,227 pictures you took on your trip to the dells last weekend: GIRL SHIT. when a dude posts his every meal and "checks in" at home and gets in comment wars all i can think is, "this shit is moist. he should probably be somewhere reading a book and trying to grow some motherfucking chest hair." it's totally suspicious and weird when someone says "i'm not on facebook," especially because EVEN YOUR GRANDMOTHER HAS A FUCKING FACEBOOK. what the fuck are you hiding?! in reality, though, that's a welcome goddamned change. facebook stalking and twitter interpreting is totally fucking exhausting. and pointless. i've said before that staying up all night squinting at your smartphone trying to figure out the subtext of a bunch of out-of-context comments and tweets is totally fucking dumb. but we do it anyway, because WHO THE FUCK IS THAT BITCH WITH THE BLONDE HAIR WHO KEEPS MAKING SEXY COMMENTS ON ALL HIS SHIT?! "decoding facebook comments" should be my part-time goddamned job. and manspeak email translation?! i'm a veritable expert.

fucking dudes was way less complicated back when bitches had voicemail pagers and payphones. i want to get back to that simpler time, when i could exist in blissful ignorance in the assumption that whomever i was banging was at home daydreaming about the next chance he'd get to see me. not like nowadays, when i have to text ginger to look at some asshole's current status and tell me whether or not that bitch with her tits out is really trying to fuck him or if i've just got a bad case of the ladybrains. this is mostly about how psychotic it is to be a woman in the digital age. my blood pressure can't take this shit anymore. damn you, zuckerberg.

"why didn't he comment on that link i posted?!"
"does he think my status is funny?!"
"is he getting the wrong idea because that dude i haven't spoken to since sophomore fucking year won't stop putting heart emoticons all over my page?!"
"when is he going to change his relationship status?!"
"he really 'likes' katy perry?!"
"oh god, ALL HIS SPOTIFY SONGS ARE DUMB."
"how can i politely tell him to change his profile picture so i won't be embarrassed to tell my friends who i'm dating?!"
"didn't he get my 'words with friends' invite?!"
"why isn't he on chat?!"
"why is he ignoring my chat request?!"
"did he notice how cute my cover photo is?!"
"he spends so much time on facebook."
"did he get what i was saying subliminally in my status about 'disrepect?!'"
"WHEN IS HE GOING TO CHANGE HIS MOTHERFUCKING RELATIONSHIP STATUS?!"

no thanks, son. i can't be going through all that. in the meantime, i gotta go check and see if the dude i tagged in my last post understands that i was basically saying "let's fuck."

this shit goes double for lesbians, too. if she doesn't read, DON'T SCISSOR THAT BITCH.

blind dates are for adorable people.

2011-12-27T16:18:00.002-06:00

this is how a man sets you up on a blind date: last weekend i was in the car with caitlin and ron coming home from smoque, where i almost decided to give up on men entirely and marry a piece of their delicious brisket. caitlin and i were talking shit in the front seat when all of a sudden ron interrupted our mindless ladychatter from the back, "hey samantha, what are your titties, about a 40DD?" i glanced over my shoulder in mock horror to watch him tapping away at his iphone. instead of waiting for a confirmation he continued to text while murmuring aloud to himself, "yep, she has a nice big ass, too. shit sits all high on her back, mm hmm." caitlin demanded to know who he was talking to. "i found somebody new for sam to have sex with," he said. "nice dude, smart, doesn't talk too fucking much. isn't that what you're up there bitching about?"

this is how a woman sets you up on a blind date: she browbeats her boyfriend into exhaustively scrolling through the mental rolodex of every man he's ever worked for, talked to, or shared a goddamned elevator with until he can come up with one who has a job and isn't married and might be convinced to eat dinner across from a woman she's only willing to describe as "very smart" and "super funny" with "an amazing personality" and then drops your unsuspecting ass in the middle of the dating ocean in a goddamned inner tube with no flippers or oxygen tank. GROAN.

if i was a lesbian that shit would be perfect. bitches love talking about how awesome our personalities are, and i'm sure i'd be in a civil union right this minute if you jerks were setting me up with your former softball coach instead of that dude your boyfriend played intramural soccer with a couple summers ago whose facebook status just changed back to "single." and i appreciate the consideration, i really do. i just wish you assholes would stop setting my dumb ass up like a cow going to slaughter. i keep getting blindsided by dudes who have no idea what they're in for and have a hard time masking their disappointment. sometimes they don't even fucking try, stupid bastards. and it's not that i don't appreciate the effort, because i do. i really do want to put a spanx on to awkwardly sit across from that dude your husband met in the dominicks parking lot after he backed into your volvo who just broke off his engagement and talk about television shows he pretends to never have heard of over a plate of mid-priced pasta. yes, please. sign me right up. but could you first maybe give him a heads up about WHAT THE FUCK I LOOK LIKE?!

women are polite. AND DELUSIONAL. we like to think that all that matters is a sense of humor and good taste in music, when what really matters is that a man cannot insert his penis into one of my jokes, so if he isn't interested in fucking this face or this body then what is the goddamned point? zoe and her boyfriend at the time orchestrated a blind date for me last year, and when she emailed me the proposition the first thing i said was, "did you tell this asshole what i look like?" and of course she hadn't because, according to her, in real life it shouldn't matter if your bra has four hooks. and of course it shouldn't. i'm pretty goddamned amazing. humble, too. but if a dude doesn't want to drink a beer across from someone with minotaur thighs and deceptively slender ankles, i am going to look like A MOTHERFUCKING ASSHOLE. zoe is the sweetest, and i wish i weren't such a shithead malcontent and could walk around with her brand of wide-eyed optimism. but my wide-hipped realism knows fucking better.

it was my first blind date in the history of ever. now let's clarify what i mean when i say BLIND. having a beer with a dude you met on the internet isn't really a blind fucking date. i mean, you've seen some blurry, faraway, dimly-lit pictures, haven't you? and you know he likes foreign films and quiet evenings cooking together at home, don't you?! well then that asshole is not a goddamned stranger. i know how many times you read his match.com profile, gurrrrrl. you can recite his "favorite hot spots and destinations" blindfolded while hanging upside down from your meticulously painted toenails, bitch. STOP PLAYING. anyway, real blind dates are terrifying events, the mere prospect of which causes me to break out in a cold, anxious sweat, coordinated by my well-meaning friends who ignore any physical or personality flaws of mine to arrange dinner plans between me and handsome friends of theirs who are mistakenly convinced that they are about to eat a steak across from the hottest, smartest, funniest woman they will ever encounter on the face of this earth.

and i don't get nervous because there's something wrong with me, i get nervous because my fucking friends are all, "sam's hilarious and so smart and you are going to love her," and never like, "listen dude, this bitch snores and she writes dick jokes and sometimes she has to wear a brace on her wrist and her thighs touch. is that cool? does that sound like someone you might be attracted to? YOU'RE NOT GOING TO FIDGET AWKWARDLY AND KEEP CHECKING YOUR WATCH THE WHOLE NIGHT, RIGHT?" so these unsuspecting dudes are expecting halle berry with a genius IQ and a book of limericks tucked in her handbag to come strolling in, and then here i come lumbering into the goddamned bar in a dirty t-shirt with a bald head and four frayed-edged books falling out of my bag, glasses askew, already shitty drunk, and he's like, "OH, HAI. are you the person the girl i'm supposed to be meeting brought as her bodyguard?"

zoe had sent me an email of highlights: background, education, job history, dating overview; it was like a curriculum vitae for his penis. at that point, though, she'd already done the same thing on my behalf, and even if he sounded like total trash i was going to have to get my shit together and meet him. i mean, what the fuck was i going to say? "sorry, munchkin, i'm too busy and interesting and important to get drinks with a dude working on his phD in some shit i've never heard of because i never took physics in high school. i'd much rather stay home in my pajamas and watch the town again." pffft.

i remember it was snowing that night, thus causing the conundrum of whether or not to suck it up and wear my unattractive gross winter boots or risk breaking my ass in half in front of some hot dude by wearing some less sensible shoes and trying to walk on ice. i opted for the former, and made sure i got to the bar early so i could hide my feet under the table. after which i'd only have to worry about crushing one of his toes beneath them. the bartender, who knows me by name, sent over a drink. right after i'd ordered a beer. and a goddamned shot. and before any of this could be reconciled, the most adorable dude i've ever seen in my entire fucking life came smiling toward me with his hand outstretched. the waitress and i exchanged a silent OH SHIT, GURL as he surveyed the table. "i'm an alcoholic," i joked, then bit my tongue because that would only be funny if i'd been surrounded by half a dozen club sodas. le sigh.

it wasn't a bad date, it just wasn't exactly a date. i told a lot of jokes (SO MANY JOKES) and stories and he laughed a lot and pretended he wanted to hang out again. which we didn't. ever again. zoe obviously owes me dinner. AND A BOYFRIEND.

i got an email last sunday afternoon from an address i didn't recognize. it was from a gentleman i've never met who'd apprently been informed by my friend katie that i am "a bright, dynamic individual [he'd] benefit from getting to know." i hated him immediately. because i don't like pretentious gasbags, and no real person describes someone else as BRIGHT and DYNAMIC unless he's making fun of you. or they are reading a television script. but that shit was written coherently and spelled correctly, so i kept reading. his name was stephen (NOT STEVE; remember that shit, it'll be on the quiz) and he described himself as "charismatic and dark," which is exhausting just to think about. who words shit that way?! if i wanted to fuck you and i was going to send you an email before we met, i'd say, "i tell a lot of jokes and i'm a total fucking party. i'll swallow without gagging." or something like that. the point is, i wouldn't call myself "ebullient and convivial."

i wrote him back while waiting for the addison bus in the freezing cold. a handful of sentences: witty and playful, excruciatingly polite. at his suggestion we made plans to go to the hopleaf, because everyone and their grandmother cannot fucking get enough of that stupid goddamned place. WHAT THE FUCK, CHICAGO? listen, i love brisket as much as the next carnivore, and that duck is a goddamned jam, but standing butts-to-nuts with a bunch of bearded indie beer snobs is not my idea of a good fucking time. you can't even breathe in there on a friday night, the air is so heavy with pretension and hipster poseurs. in an effort to make a good impression i agreed to meet him there, but i want you to know i was TOTALLY ROLLING MY EYES as i wrote back, "see you there at eight!"

below please find the transcript of our date, including the reasons why i'm never going out with your brother's childhood best friend's chemistry tutor ever again in my entire fucking life.

1 this goddamned ass. it's a masterpiece, that's true. but some people prefer a smaller one, and we have to learn that personal preference isn't illegal. is it a crime against his penis? absolutely, because i'm killer in bed and everyone knows that skinny girls bruise easily and never want to do anything exciting. you can bodyslam a zaftig broad and CONTINUE TO FUCK HER. seriously, you could blast my ass with a taser and i wouldn't make you pull out. real talk.

i took the bus to our date, which is thoroughly demoralizing and not smart in the least. i'm the kind of asshole who will take a cab two blocks on a perfectly sunny day, but when faced with the daunting task of trying to charm the dude who used to deliver your mail i'm a total fucking idiot and choose instead to try to expertly disguise my skin flaws with makeup while riding in a moving vehicle with fistfighting teenagers and screaming toddlers launching themselves into my eyeliner hand every thirty-five seconds.

i got to the bar early, which was a relief because i was sweating. in the middle of winter. OMG THIS FUCKING HIPPIE DEODORANT. i showed the door man my ID and shoved through the nineteen assholes blocking the doorway with their proust discussion and found a place at the bar where i could drop my bag and stick some napkins in my armpits. i ordered a fancy beer (more on that later) and pulled out my kindle. half an hour later i checked my phone. there was a text from him. "are you here?" i texted back, "at the bar, reading like a nerd." i spotted a handsome black dude in a nicely appointed suit making his way through the crowd while staring at his phone. i extended my hand as he approached and said, "stephen? i'm samantha." his response: "doesn't katie know? i usually date dancers."

2 satanic devil tattoos. all my shit is mean and aggressive-looking and right where you can see them, skulls and skeletons and a screaming grim reaper brandishing a smoking pistol. they look totally fucking cool, man. all black and gray, so menacing and full of death. i love that shit. but did you know that some people would rather a lady have kitten-faced butterflies tattooed at the small of her back? and that's not what i have.

OKAY. just so we're all on the same page, i interpreted that as "the women i date are the circumference of your forearm." i mean, right? no hello, no how are you, NO NOTHING, just straight to the hate. and speaking of my forearm, he took my right one in his hand and said, "this ink is, um, interesting. are you depressed?" i wish you could've heard this dude's tone of voice, like i'd fucking slapped him with that arm and he was deciding whether or not to chop it off. "my tattoos are righteous, dude. should we get a table?"

realizing that he might have started things off on the wrong ballet slipper, stephen apologized and tried to explain what he'd meant by the whole dancer thing. here's one of my favorite things to do: when someone says something crazy or stupid to me, i stand there and let him try to clean up his mess for my amusement. most people hate uncomfortable situations, preferring instead to say, "oh, that's okay" to relieve you both of that awkward discomfort. NOT MY ASS. if you need to tell me how sorry you are, i will stop everything i'm doing to sit and watch you shit yourself and turn red in the face while trying to explain how bad you feel. it pleases me greatly. so he stumbled through some nonsensical bullshit for three minutes, pleading with his eyes for me to let him off the hook until finally i interrupted him to say, "skinny girls. i get it. let's eat."

3 i'm "earthy." this shit is rarely a compliment when a black dude with obviously manicured hands says it to you. i shaved my head when i was sixteen. prior to that i had shoulder-length chemically straightened hair that took forever to deal with and was incredibly expensive. i also had a scalp full of chemical burns and gross patches that flaked and peeled. i had to get up early before school to flat iron the roots before curling the ends, after i'd spent the entire night trying to stay perfectly still so the silk scarf i wrapped around my head would stay put. only to wake up with impeccable hair that had to be shielded at all times from wind, dust, open flame, and, most importantly, WATER.

"is your hair curly naturally?" he asked after ordering A CRANBERRY JUICE NO VODKA from the bartender. i snickered into my beer and told him that yes, these curls don't come from a bottle. "i've never gone out with a woman as earthy as you are." first i panicked and thought my woodland spice natural deodorant had somehow evaporated in the twenty minutes between my apartment and the bar and my natural musk was starting to soak through my shirt. but then i realized he meant that he'd never been out with a nappy-headed black bitch, and the only kind of asshole who mentions that is the kind of asshole that prefers you'd walk around with your scalp fucked up with a sewn-in yaki weave. i explained to him that my choice to go natural saves me a ton of money and stress and is good for both my health and the environment.

"yeah, but you'd be so much prettier." SIGH.

4 jeggings and gray t-shirts. okay, so i don't have little black date night pants and heels. and i'm lazy and uninterested in fancy clothing. never have i ever been rewarded for struggling into some painful clothing. seriously, not once has my tiptoeing awkwardly all night ever resulted in any tangible gains. i hate peeling off some control-top shit at the end of the night to get in bed by my goddamned self. and for what? so that sweater dress i shouldn't have spent $150 dollars on would get caught in the top of them anyway, giving the entire restaurant a view of my hamhocks?! man, fuck that. so i don't buy nice shit anymore. jeggings, t-shirts, and new balance are the most you can ever hope to get. sometimes i'll wear those flats that make me look like i have dainty chinese feet, but only if i really like you.

i spilled brisket on my shirt, twice. much to stephen's visible horror. but look, i can't help it if the bread is so stuffed with delicious meat that it's hard for me to hold it. plus, we had to wait for over a fucking hour, and that much small talk with a dude who kept asking what it was like to be "internet famous" made me drink. a lot. he ordered the mussels and, after having referred to himself in the third person as a "connoisseur of seafood," he couldn't figure out how to get them open and eat them. after dropping two in his lap and dumping another down the front of his crisp white shirt he told me that next time he was going to take a page out of my book and "dress for dinner like [he] was going to a monster truck rally." it was the first time i laughed all night. WHAT A FUCKING ASSHOLE.

5 dudes like pocket pals. seriously, every man i know wants the human equivalent of a baby chihuahua. tiny people with underdeveloped internal organs who fit nicely into your gym bag. i'm tall. 5'9" with no shoes on tall. and you wouldn't think that would be such a big deal with all these milk hormones and shit producing gigantic young men, but even nba forwards want to walk around with lollipop kids dangling from their jockstraps.

he paid the bill and winked at our waitress, who was the size of my left calf. she glanced at me and i waved it off, "no worries, girl. he's my brother." at this point in my life absolutely nothing comes as a shock or surprise, especially not the disgusting behavior of some silly dude. "bye, steve," i said, gathering my bag and shit. "it was nice meeting you. i'm just going to leave you here to flirt with homegirl and avoid all of that awkward fake hugging and shit people usually do after these sorts of things. get home safe, good luck with everything." i hadn't really listened to anything he'd said during dinner as it sounded like just a bunch of pompous windbaggery and self-importance. you know what i'm talking about. "oh my big fancy job and my big expensive house and my big fast car." BORING.

"i prefer stephen!" he called after me, and i laughed and flipped him off over my shoulder. my favorite feel better song is "off he goes" by pearl jam, and i found it in my ipod and turned the volume all the way up in case stephen decided to chase me down to offer up another criticism. i sent katie a shitty email FROM THE BACK OF A CAB.

the next morning i was on my way to work and got a text from katie, who obviously waits until she gets to work to check her email, unlike those of us who rabidly refresh that shit on our phones in desperate anticipation of some fresh and exciting news. i mean, um, it's not like i do that or anything. i meant the rest of you guys. anyway, it was a forward. "i had a lovely time with your friend last night, k. she was friendly and fun. incredibly bright and dynamic." dudes are amazing.

"40DD?" i asked ron in the car last weekend. "that's all i get?" caitlin blanched, incredulous that ron would be telling a dude my measurements instead of listing the last nine books i've read and my thoughts on the arab spring. nonplussed and completely not offended, i caught his eye in the rearview mirror and said, "you missed a D."
he winked and smiled. "that's cool, babygirl. he'll just find that other one after he meets you." now that is how you set a bitch up. JUST SAYING, omg.

christmas is not for pussies.

2011-12-14T15:11:00.007-06:00

the hellidays are the motherfucking worst. no bigger reminder of what an unloved orphan you are than the most wonderful time of the goddamned year. seriously, from november through fucking march i walk around like a raw wound trying to deflect the salt of happiness being tossed at me from every direction. seriously, it's fucking impossible to brood and mourn when everyone is constantly reminding you why you should go get your jingle bells on, and those are often the very same reasons you sometimes can't get out of bed in the fucking morning. i write a lot of jokes and shit, and i understand how that can be pretty deceptive. generally it's my policy to try to squeeze whatever bit of humor i can from being perpetually alone and getting shit on and eviscerated by dudes and watching my peers skyrocket past me in their adulthood and battling this vicious crohns disease every single day of my stupid life, especially since i get a handful of emails and internet notes every week from people who relate and don't take the chronicling of this struggle for granted. and you jerks know i be spilling all my guts and tragedy all over these keys so we can learn from it and laugh at it together. sometimes, though, bitches treat me like a goddamned comedy robot. like i'm standing under the AVALANCHE OF BAD SHIT laughing my dick off before the first snow even touches me. here's how that shit really works: avalanche begins, of which i am unaware; figure out avalanche has begun once i'm up to my ankles in it, and freezing half to death; until finally i can laugh at that shit a month later once the snow plow has rolled through and i'm safe and warm in some clean fucking socks. then you get the jokes. anyway, my life sucks. here's why:

1 every day of my life since i was thirteen: i've had no parents. and no family of which to speak. and trust me, i don't care how many episodes of party of five you've seen, unless this has happened to you, you have no idea what that shit is like. my sisters and i exist in this sort of fragmented place where we are aware of the existence of each other, but we don't connect. we don't love each other. last week there was a pretty spectacular fight between the four of us which ended basically on some, "see you at your funeral" kind of shit. which is really awesome this time of year. now let's be for real, i thoroughly enjoy not having to buy any gifts or feed my dad cut-up christmas ham, but all of these nuclear families opening their christmas lexuses makes me a little sad.

2 those godforsaken jewelry commercials are meant to destroy you, right? are that many motherfuckers getting engaged on christmas day? really, i gotta sit through seventeen different romantical advertisements during one motherfucking show?! okay, so maybe you aren't crying yourself to sleep every night, but all this happy couple imagery is inescapable come christmastime. and makes you feel worthless. i don't know, man. maybe we are unworthy of human affection? because all this "you're so great" starts to feel like lies without some real validation. because what does it mean when someone who fucks someone else tells you that? or when your BFF extols your virtue? that bitch isn't buying you a fucking house. awesomeness is not the currency of meaningful human relationships, obviously. so i'm going to stop kidding myself. there is obviously something here that no one wants. that theory has been tested and proven, and i reserve the right to skip your holiday party as a result.

3 and this is an email i just had to write and send, like a loser: angry isn't a word i'd use. i'm fucking heartbroken. i'm sad that someone i like doesn't like me back. i'm sad for what that says about my dating future. i'm sad that i was in a competition i had no idea existed and that I FUCKING LOST. because you win either way. i fucking lost, and i had no goddamned idea i even had a dog in the fight. turn the tables. if there was some phantom other that i was choosing instead of you, despite the fact that i've assured you how awesome and amazing and talented you are, imagine for a minute what that feels like. in your heart. that you're awesome and great but not awesome enough to be with. you are the architect of this sadness. and i'll live, i'll get over it.

um, yeah. so that happened. like, an hour ago. and if you're smart you can use your context clues to fill in the who and the how and the what i found in my inbox this morning. sad avalanche.

this time of year is motherfucking brutal and i want to die. so i'm going to take some time off to process this piece of rotting sewer shit that is samantha irby's disastrous existence. and here's my plan of attack, ie the shit i always do when i'm bummed the fuck out, OMG:

-bang it out with a SHITLOAD OF CRAIGSLIST DUDES.
-whiskey shots x1,000,000,000.
-read a fuckton of books.
-hella carbohydrates. seriously, i'm going to eat SO MUCH BREAD.
-impromptu dance parties.
-distract myself with 12 hour workdays.
-swim at the Y with your sexy granddad.
-write my blog with ian (click here, laugh robustly).
-blow money on fancy drugs.
-try to remember that, despite all this, i'm mostly awesome. and amazing. and worthy of good things in my life, despite the fact that they appear to keep passing me over in favor of those who seem less deserving. eventually someone else will recognize that. or i'll get hit by a bus. one or the other.

imma see you kids in 2012 if i don't get hit by an asteroid in the meantime. happy holidays, prosperous new year, and don't thelma and louise it off a cliff unless you take me with you.

attack of the killer ladybrain.

2011-12-08T16:32:00.006-06:00

it's finally obvious to me that i need to go ahead and put a down payment on a goddamned lobotomy. is anyone still doing those? a shady-ass "neurosurgeon" in russia or some shit? because i spent five whole minutes yesterday morning (think about five minutes, think about how long that shit is in real time, especially when you've already wasted so many other minutes nicking your calves with a razor and digging through your disorganized drawers in a fruitless search for one of the two bras you own that is fit for another human's eyeballs and flossing your teeth because somehow that matters? you've already missed one train and are desperately close to missing the next two if you don't hurry the fuck up and get a coat and mittens on) trying to decide whether or not it is totally motherfucking presumptuous to put a pair of pajama pants in my overnight whore bag for a dude who later informed me that he'd double-booked an evening during which we'd scheduled both dinner and naked relations. OH, DUMMY. YOU LOSE AGAIN.

silly rabbit, sleepovers ain't for tricks! yet again i find myself in the utterly hilarious and 100% unenviable position of having been betrayed by this bitch that i for the life of me cannot seem to get the fuck out of my head, this massive idiot who has managed to lodge herself snugly between my parietal and occipital lobes, dictating every ridiculous thought, dangerous word, and potentially humiliating deed since, well, i'm not sure when ladybrain fully develops. the day you get your first menstrual period? yeah, let's say that. sounds accurate to me. stupid womanthoughts. so twice of late i have been stuck in dire need of an emergency eyeliner and purse-sized travel deodorant after having woken up in a bed that doesn't belong to me, and going to work in dirty underwear with dusty bedhead is fucking gross. but this time i'd planned ahead: i stood with one foot in the bathroom and the other in the closet trying to discern exactly how many beauty products i could get away with hauling around in my bag while still managing to look effortlessly cool and put together.

sometimes i fancy myself one of these low maintenance kind of women, and at first glance I TOTALLY AM. i don't shave my armpits and i have no problem using a night cream from the grocery store. come on, now. when compared to bitches with $300 dye jobs and shoes that cost more than my apartment? i'm downright manageable. but when taken at face value, what with all my face washes and hand creams and haircare junk and daily tweezing, my whole routine seems unequivocally, laboriously INVOLVED. it's not my fault that my face requires so many products! and that i have so many errant hairs! god, and that dumb shit took way longer than it should've. because 1 i need to look easy and carefree, right?! and i can't be having curling irons and full-sized bottles of exfoliator tumbling out of my bag on the goddamned bus and shit. plus, i don't want to dislocate my fucking shoulder dragging around nine outfit changes or whatever, and 2 i'm totally the kind of asshole who would pack an overnight bag full of nail polish and acne gel and forget to bring A FUCKING SHIRT.

santa's list-making ain't got shit on me, as i made a quick one of my essentials (always vagina wipes, some hippie deodorant that does absolutely nothing to protect against the scent of livestock that inhabits my armpits after a twelve-hour work day, "daytime underwear") then upon checking that bitch twice discovered some glaring omissions (why on earth do i always forget to bring my fucking stomach drugs?!) and had to take some things out (extra socks, really samantha?!) to make room. so in addition to all of the regular shit i needlessly drag all over the city of chicago, kindles and ipods and chargers oh my!, i had a bunch of things that, if anyone bothered to look, would be a dead giveaway that OMG I'M ABOUT TO GET LAID LATER.

try as i might, the giant, estrogen-leaking vagina that sits atop my shoulders actively lobbying to ensure that i spend the rest of my life walking around looking like a goddamned simpleton is TOTALLY FUCKING WINNING. i've outsmarted her a few times, won a couple battles in the hard-fought war that is MAINTAINING MY SANITY WHILE TRYING TO BANG COOL DUDES, but for the most part this bitch absolutely refuses to play fair and leads me to the emotional slaughter every single fucking time. i used to get salty at men, but now i know the real culprit is this ignoramus in my head who interprets "that one time we had a nice dinner" as "sure, go ahead, take an extra toothbrush to just leave over there." (i DID NOT DO THAT, i promise, but that's the kind of shit this spiteful bitch says to get my ass caught up.) and don't you dare side-eye me. OR LAUGH. because you girls are all equipped with them, too. ladybrain is that bitch in your head who prompts you to make cookies for a dude you fucked ONE TIME. ladybrain urges you have "state of the union" relationship talks with a dude you met three weeks ago. ladybrain is responsible for 99% of your internet stalking. ladybrain is the reason you never turn the ringer off on your phone. ladybrain says "i know he didn't answer the last seven, but why don't you text him one more time?" ladybrain makes you forward his emails to every single one of your friends. pretty much every ridiculous thing you've ever done to embarrass yourself in front of some dude you like is a direct result of your ladybrain meddling with your rational thoughts.

once upon a time in a land that's probably really close to where you are right now, i dated this dim-witted piece of shit bonehead who was probably too old to not have more than one plate in his barren cupboard. he was maybe the second dude i'd been out with as a bonafied adult, and at the time i was super-green and had no fucking idea that 99.9% of dudes are scumbag liars. i'd met him at a house party my friend's boyfriend had thrown, and it was the kind of humiliating event during which i sat next to the makeshift dj table flipping through records while all of the other people who were dancing and comfortable in their own skins mingled and chugged beers and drunk-shouted into each other's faces. now, having had plenty of practice at this sort of thing during the entire tenure of my junior high and high school careers, i don't really have a problem being the quiet, sad bitch at the party. i mean, really. who the fuck cares? most of the time you see some bitch whooping and screaming at a fiesta that shit is an act to convince everyone in attendance that she's the life of the goddamned party. alcohol is a depressant, bitch. GO SIT THE FUCK DOWN WITH THAT.

anyway, toward the end of the party the aphrodisiac that is my morose self-isolation drew the attention of this asshole wearing sunglasses INDOORS and AT NIGHT. moth to a goddamned flame, baby. seriously, awesome dudes totally fucking love me. barf. i don't even remember what he said, i was just so flummoxed that he thought the hoodie i was wearing in the motherfucking summertime was attractive enough to warrant a second viewing that i gave him my number immediately. he called the next day, which i interpreted as "interested" when what it really was was "predatory." we had a date, i guess you could call it that?, on his living room floor, eating takeout chinese food and drinking honey brown while watching STATE PROPERTY. i'll give you a second to absorb that shit. my life = so dumb.

anyway, i had sex with him because i'm totally fucking retarded. and i'm not even the type who goes in for the cuddle right after a dude finishes seizuring on top of me. i swear to god, i really fucking don't. i scoot over to get to the cool spot before he does and try to remember where i last saw my fucking underwear. but this dude was SO TERRIFIED that i might get the wrong idea that he actually liked me enough to have a conversation that didn't involve the proper way to lick his fucking balls that he could barely chuck the rubber in the trash before he was like, "do you need me to walk you to your car?" i'm not fucking kidding, i had barely wiped this motherfucker's sweat off my goddamned clavicle before he was giving me the ol' HEAVE-HO. i hate awkward situations more than anything else, and even if someone hurts my feelings i don't need to sit there and talk it out, i'm really good at hustling into my clothes and getting the fuck outta dodge. seriously, i had my shoes on before he even said "car." i found my shit, went to the bathroom, tried to wash my hands with the tiny sliver of yellow dial melted into his sink, and waved goodbye before walking right out the door.

on the steps in the hallway i almost started crying, because even if you are a total fucking asshole that is not the way for another person to treat you. especially a person you just let pull your hair and slap you. but i willed myself to get it together until i got to my car, because no one wants to be that girl crying on the street with her fucking shirt on backward. i listened to see if he was going to at least come to the door and maybe apologize for being so abrupt, or throw a handful of cash after me because he had just treated me like a goddamned prostitute, but there wasn't a single footfall. i got outside and started to walk of shame (STRIDE OF PRIDE, ahem) the three stupid blocks between his apartment and the 1988 ford escort manual transmission hatchback i was driving at the time.

and then i heard his voice shouting behind me, and ladybrain said, "see? he cares for real!" and i turned around to watch that dude jogging toward me. "you forgot something!" he shouted breathlessly, and i held my bag open under the streetlight to try and figure out what i could have left behind. when he finally reached where i was standing he handed me a half-empty beer and wad of kleenex i'd left in the kitchen. wait, seriously? he brought me an old, flat beer and some used tissue? he hated me so fucking much that he didn't even want my refuse sitting in his garbage can?! i took them, without saying anything, and went to pour the beer in the gutter so that i could throw the bottle in someone's recycling bin on the way to the car. ladybrain sighed and said, "okay, you can cry now," AND I TOTALLY FUCKING DID. all burning hot tears and strings of snot in the middle of the sidewalk. and when i was finished and could see straight, i threw that fucking bottle through the windshield of his fancy car.

then i went home and had diarrhea, because GOOD LORD DOES CHINESE FOOD GIVE ME DIARRHEA. i'm not even kidding, dudes. every single time i eat that shit. i must be allergic to cat meat. anyway, it was that early experience that shaped the beginning of my understanding of what sex with dudes who don't care about you is like. because that wasn't the last time i slept with that asshole. oh no, we carried on for eight months or so? i'm stubborn in my idiocy. but i learned so many helpful things from him. like, did you know that you should never expect a man to call you prior to 9pm? or, that even if you've gone to dinner with one you cannot claim to be "seeing him?" that fidelity can't be expected unless he specifically tires of every single other vagina in the universe?

OH MAN, IT WAS LIKE REAL-LIFE PENIS SCHOOL. i learned more about banging sketchy dudes in that handful of months than i ever have since. i never saw his place in the daytime and he never saw any part of my life other than the outside of my apartment building the one time my clutch blew and i had to put the escort (fail) in the shop, and if he wanted me to blow him he was going to have to provide pick-up and drop-off service. and of course he did that because men are totally fucking shameless and would fuck your withered corpse through a hole in the body bag if they could figure out a way to distract the coroner for five minutes. dude didn't want to know about my soppy feelings and shit, and i learned not only to appreciate the brevity of a lightning-fast sexual interaction with a dude who often told me to "leave the engine running," but i became amazingly adept at putting on pants, gym shoes with complicated laces, and a bra with four motherfucking hooks IN THE DARK while NOT WEARING MY FUCKING GLASSES. seriously, all my buttons would be buttoned and everything. LIKE A BOSS.

are there some new booty call rules? when did the newsletter go out? i know i've been out of the game for a while, but isn't a foul still a foul no matter how long you've been watching from the sidelines? listen, as anyone who has ever seen me talk shit at the sex show can attest to, i'm not one of these "my body is a temple" broads who's too fancy for a fuck and run. I USED TO LEAVE MY CAR RUNNING, people. bitch has absolutely problem getting up and going home, for reals. but if dudes want to eat dinner and make jokes with you, how am i supposed to know that i won't be needing that ziploc full of hair gel that's leaking into my ipod right now?! i'm not used to this newfangled shit you kids are up to these days. like, you really talk to a dude in real life if he's just banging you? you can sit next to a dude in a movie theater. go to his place, jack him off, and then just get on your bike and pedal home?!

how did you figure that shit out? i am not the type to construct a boyfriend out of a handful of sexts or whatever, but i also am not used to having any sort of meaningful conversation with someone who only sees my face in the dark. i'm curious, do you sync up your google calendars and let each other know when you can pencil them in? god, banging in the new millenium is so CONFUSING. and it turns me into a sensitive puddle of YUCK. i am neither smart nor emotionally progressive enough to traverse these choppy waters on my own. throw a bitch a lifejacket, omg.

when i realized that NO I WOULD MOST CERTAINLY NOT BE NEEDING THOSE PAJAMA PANTS, ladybrain was like, "damn, stupid. i'm in shock. i totally fucked this one up for us. i'm so sorry. he has 'shit to do.' AFTER THIS. i mean, for real? wow, huh. okay, we've done this before. this is just like that scene in 'the glass menagerie' when laura gives jim that broken unicorn. you got this, gurl. now try to maintain your dignity while blindly searching for your socks and whatnot. that's right, get your ass out of this bed and find your goddamned glasses, and don't you dare pout. nevermind that your cell phone charger is totally mocking you from the cavernous depths of the inside of your bag. it's not his fault you've overstepped your boundaries, blame me. he's not mean, he's not an asshole, you're the worst. now let's pull ourselves together. did you wear socks? where on earth did you leave them?! being quiet is a dead giveaway, jerk, SAY SOME SHIT. fine then, be quiet and weird and ratchet up the tension around here. you better hope you and the extra band-aids you packed for the occasion haven't scared this young man off. how hard is it to put on a belt? the longer you take, the dumber you look. good girl, that's it, gather up all of your belongings and smile like you mean it. NICE JOB, SAM. you survived. now let's go sit miserably at the bar for a few hours. hey, i was just wondering, if he ever invites us over again, do you think we can maybe leave a bottle of shower gel?"

ladybrain, king of the monsters.

scrawny dudes with no chest hair.

2011-12-02T15:14:00.003-06:00

issue six. i need a motherfucking break. oh, i know i know, "FROM WHAT, ASSHOLE?" and you're probably right, why do i deserve a goddamned vacation? the truth is, i'm not even tired. and i probably don't work that hard. let's be for real, i'm not in a factory putting chevrolets together, i have a motherfucking desk. that said, i work fifty hours a week, and spend another ten hours standing in the dark, frigid cold waiting for buses and trains and shit during my wretched commute. and then i have to find time for things like "having fun" and "maintaining my friendships." writing this goddamned blog. scouring craigslist ads. posting hot dudes on my facebooks. keeping track of your baby's first steps. figuring out who is on top in the republican primary this week. listening to the best music. knowing all the hot internet memes. omg, FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS. seriously, though, it's hard goddamned work to fucking know shit and be cool. don't believe me? how many unfunny, boring assholes do you know?! that's what i fucking thought.

does your broke ass need a vacation? does any of you want to go on an apple vacation with me? i'm not kidding. five hundred bucks can equal you + me + jamaica. i'm fucking serious. it doesn't have to be a whole big thing, let's just go and spend a weekend drinking pina coladas and digging sand out of our buttholes! what's the matter, you hate bob marley? FINE THEN. i have a passport, i'll go wherever. i just need a weekend away from the cat and my desk and the internet and my job. taking into account my penchant for melodrama and hyperbole, my life is trying to kill me. real magazines are always saying you should get away to keep the romance alive, and i would like to spend four fucking days eating delicious buffet and sucking down rum punch so that i can come back home rejuvenated, refreshed, and ready to start putting it in my life's butt again. i still love my life, it's just that the magic has died. my life used to excite me; it used to be so fun and unpredictable. remember the beginning, when my life would offer me something fresh and new every single day to show me how much it cared? well, it doesn't do that shit anymore. it's mostly just boring, sitting in its underwear eating chips while i try to coax it off the couch. if i could just get away from it, for even a weekend, i would come back and appreciate this lazy bitch so much more.

it's cool, i can take a hint, YOU DON'T WANT TO GO TO JAMAICA WITH ME. so i'll just do what other assholes in my position do: call all of my friends who live in other places and invite myself to visit them. see how happy i look in that picture? standing on that california cliff, the pacific ocean behind me, enveloped in salty air?! i should look like that all the fucking time. that's not a bitch who has a nagging-ass boss or a $300 cell phone bill. no, that is a bitch on motherfucking vacation. that's a bitch who woke up in nina's guest room and emerged to a full breakfast i didn't have to make and clean laundry i didn't have to wash after having spent the night before at a party being thrown in my honor. i'm going to seattle and new york and california in the next few months to get away from my life for a minute and TOTALLY IMPOSE ON MY GODDAMNED FRIENDS. i feel better alfuckingready. and between those trips i'm going to spend as many weekends as i can holed up downtown in a fancy hotel pretending i'm madeline. or maybe kanye west. that'll show YOU, stupid life. i'm fucking fancy.

touchdown! i'm not into this whole "women don't watch sports" nonsense. i mean, i TOTALLY GIVE THE SIDE-EYE to those over-exuberant girls who try to get all into sports as a means to fuck dudes, but i'm calling fucking bullshit on all of this batting your lashes while pretending not to understand what a fucking touchdown is. children play that shit. so sit the fuck down with that. i watch sports because i had what one might call an inside childhood, which means that while the other kids in my neighborhood were racing bikes and climbing trees and jumping out of tire swings i was in our apartment with the blinds closed reading books and creating elaborate story lines for my massive barbie collection. my sister made me learn to ride a bike so that, at the very least, my muscles wouldn't atrophy, but for the most part i spent my summers INSIDE WITH MY MOTHER. i was one of those weirdo fucking kids who could carry on a grownup conversation because the only people i talked to all day were motherfucking adults. adults fucking love that kid; other children FUCKING HATE THAT KID. i remember saying the word "consternation" in the FOURTH GODDAMNED GRADE, and this bitch named allyson dumped my lunch tray on the floor in response. which resulted in my running to tell the teacher (whom i could call by her first name since we spent so much time making crafts after school), but only after i'd told her that "her visceral and aggressive response to my towering command of vocabulary simply wasn't warranted."

you totally would've beat me up. anyway, when you sit inside on saturday and sunday afternoons the only thing there is to watch on television (or, as i like to call him, "my brother"), is sports. baseball in the summer, football and basketball in the winter, and whatever obscure sports get national television coverage in the spring and fall. channel 9 used to have cubs games on EVERY SINGLE AFTERNOON, and they would often serve as the backdrop to barbie and ken's ferocious lovemaking. i would just absorb all that shit; i was like a walking sports section. i could rattle off the statistics of the entire cubs lineup. which, again, is a thing that only impresses adults who think a precocious eight-year-old who knows what "base on balls percentage" means is totally fucking adorable. that isn't a whole lot of people, just in case you wanted to know.

it's insulting to me when lady rags are all "put on a cropped jersey and give him a lapdance during the commercial breaks!" ugh, WHY?! why would you ever want to do that?! commercials are for peeing, and there's a lot of really important shit to be heard during the halftime break. how else will i stay on top of how the assholes on my fantasy squad are doing this week?! well, i mostly mean YOU JERKS, because this nerd has a motherfucking satellite dish. BOOM. listen, i'm typing this with manicured nails, so i know good and well that there's other shit you bitches can be out doing rather than asking your manfriend what a goddamned touchback is. don't you like brunch? isn't there a jennifer aniston movie playing somegoddamnedwhere?! why on earth do you have to prance around in a bears cheerleader outfit blocking the motherfucking screen while we're trying to focus on the GAME? it's like if a dude came to your hair appointment and quizzed you about coloring your gray or whatever. if he was fucking juggling shampoo bottles and butting into the boyfriend drama gossip between you and julio, the queen who talked you out of that stupid shag haircut you almost got.

these are the same idiots who will sit and watch a dude play video games and ask him who he's shooting and how many points he got and which character is this and HOLY FUCKING SHIT ISN'T THERE AN SVU MARATHON YOU CAN GO WATCH IN THE OTHER ROOM?! hey gurl, sporting events and video games and boxing matches competetive beer drinking are the cheap plastic prize in the cracker jack box that is your relationship with a human male, and you need to start thinking of them as such. ie, he's occupied, he's not occupied in someone else's vagina, and you can rest reasonably assured that he isn't going to fuck anything up while you're out. so you can feel free to go to the botanical gardens and shop for eyeliner and eat salad or whatever else it is you like doing that he ABSOLUTELY HATES. and when you get home there will probably be leftover chips.

ask a guy. you know i don't believe in asking a man a goddamned thing. but i most certainly am not in favor of the way these magazines do it. seriously, bitch? you're going to ask a shirtless, waxed chested college sophomore whether or not i should shave my fucking pubic hair?! you need to be asking that motherfucker about cocaine and xbox, not whether or not having a baby at my advanced age is a wise decision. mouth agape, every single month, i scour these vapid man on the street interviews in total bewilderment. first of all, where did you find these fucking dudes? and why do so many of them have their motherfucking shirts off?! what, you couldn't find someone other than a dude playing ultimate frisbee to quiz about perfumes? GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE. let's ask some grown men a few goddamned questions. and not about my stupid ladyparts.

why don't you have any toilet paper in your apartment?
do you really need so many pairs of the same gym shoe?
sports jerseys as real clothes, eh?
why a chinstrap beard of all the possible ones you could choose from?
do all of these cords actually belong to anything?
ramen again?
can i just lie back and be serviced for a change?
did you fart in here?
who are you emailing during dinner?
why can't you text in complete sentences?
you didn't honestlythink i wanted a AAA membership for my birthday, did you?
those jeans again?
how can one person eat so much cereal?
do you know how to separate your laundry?
cartoon network, REALLY?!

inquiring goddamned minds, jerks.

glossy shiny pretty hair, omg. women should support each other. we need to listen to one another and build each other up, even when some of us say dumb shit all the time and let a man get away with the kind of bullshit that ruins him for every subsequent woman who will ever cross his path. seriously, we need to love each other. that said, it is perfectly normal and 100% acceptable to be frothing at the mouth in a jealous rage if a woman has:

shinier hair than yours.
a smarter, nicer, more successful boyfriend than yours.
health insurance that's better than yours.
a car that seats more people than yours.

bitches fucking need leg room, okay? we can't all be cramming ourselves into the back of your kia, bitch. you're thirty-nine, GET A GODDAMNED SEDAN. anyway, the other day my boss asked me, "what do you think motivates men?" and i, of course, replied, "sex, DUH." i mean, really, isn't that the only reason dudes brush their teeth and shit, so they can maybe get laid? no man would have a car or an apartment or matching socks if he could get laid by a hot broad without them. women, on the other hand, are most often motivated by JEALOUSY. don't act like it's just me; the only reason you joined the gym is because the bitch in the cubicle across from yours lost five pounds going to jazzercise. and that's okay! healthy, even. i never want to do anything cool until i see someone else doing it first and, in a jealous rage, decide that i want to do that shit, too. AND DOMINATE HER AT IT.

you think i would have this blog if some other bitch hadn't had one that filled me with seething envy first? YEAH, RIGHT. i would be sitting at home double-fisting tacos and working my way through a fucking keg every night. fuck the internet, dude, i'd be in pajamas all day testing out my jokes on the goddamned cat. i have absolutely zero motivation to trailblaze. but the minute someone else is like, "look how amazing i am at this new thing i tried!" i think, "OH MAN, I SHOULD TOTALLY BE DOING THAT. BUT BETTER." i would never try to bang dudes if someone i know wasn't already doing it. not kidding, if i didn't have to hear about how awesome and wonderful your boyfriend is i would never even consider trying to come up with one of my own. god, so much work! i'd be content to masturbate to phone porn and eat indian takeout for the rest of my miserable life.

so let's start celebrating jealousy. don't tuck it away like something to be ashamed of, let's embrace that hateful shit. i'll start: i love your shoes. and the circumference of your tiny waist makes me want to stop eating all food groups that don't begin with "vegetables." your grownup apartment makes me want to kill myself. if i could beat you to death, eat your internal organs, and assume your identity while wearing your skin as a coat i totally would. it is because of you that i'm going to work out for six minutes on the elliptical as soon as i finish smashing this mcrib. thanks, girl.

prince charming is total fucking bullshit. after a certain age these magazines need to start keeping it goddamned real with a bitch. how old are we, 137? everyone i know is still holding out for some cartoon character version of an adult male, and we need to stop that. smart, breathing, jokes. seriously, that's kind of all you need. generous and compassionate if you can get them, but if you can't? don't kill yourselves: NEITHER CAN ANYONE ELSE. i have some friends who have the craziest fucking prerequisites for banging a dude you have ever heard in your motherfucking life. and i just want to be like, "seriously?! bitch, you have saddlebags!" maybe the nineteen-year-olds for whom these magazines are intended have a chance at finding true love with a dude who loves dogs and cooks four-course meals on a tuesday, but the rest of us are going to have to work with a motherfucker. by the time we turn thirty we're all banged up and fucked over a totally goddamned damaged, and that's just what you have to deal with to have an interpersonal relationship with another human being. PERFECT PEOPLE DON'T EXIST, and magazines need to tell you that. and reinforce it. and remind you again two pages later.

one of my friends didn't make a second date with a dude because he tucked in his goddamned shirt, and i was like, "what planet do you live on?! eligiblemania? THERE ARE, LIKE, FIVE AWESOME DUDES OUT HERE TO DATE. you better work with that asshole!" for serious, doesn't he get a point for at least wearing a shirt? remember the time i went out with that vegetarian who couldn't even be bothered to put on real clothes? (click here if you don't.) yeah, that was fucking terrible. and even that dude got a polite phone call explaining that i would be joining a monastery and regrettably could no longer enjoy his exquisite company. i'm not saying that you should nest with some shit-sucking scumbag who can't read and won't go down on you, but maaaaaaaaaybe holding out for that jon hamm lookalike with a fifteen inch dick is something you need to get the fuck over already. aren't you regular? then why are you too good for a regular dude?! seriously, girls, aim realistically. it's less heartbreaking. and that is coming from a bitch with a UNICORN LIST. which, upon careful consideration, you'll realize is just a long list of regular shit losers can't be bothered to do. there's no real magic involved in "being nice" and "reading books."

now get back out there and give that skinny wino panhandling outside your local starbucks a second look. i hear that dude is single. rawr.

my vagina's name is "rap beefs."

2011-11-23T15:17:00.008-06:00

if she wants me to, i will totally write your mom's match.com profile. moms fucking love me. i'm not even really sure what it is that i do, but menopausal women fucking swoon over me. maybe it's my intoxicating mix of irresistible charm and borderline inappropriate dirtbaggery? who the hell knows, but mature bitches love my orphan ass. i'm that annoying asshole friend who's sitting in the kitchen wolfing down snackwell's and taster's choice with equal packets like, "omg lois, i would die to hear about the new scrapbook you're working on!" while you stomp around rolling your eyes, mad because she won't put fifty bucks on your cell phone bill or whatever. joyce and i are TIGHT, dude. just last week we went to zumba before having lunch at the walnut room and shit. you mad?! i can't help it if sylvia prefers my company when she goes to see a movie at eleven in the goddamned morning. that bitch likes my jokes. why you salty at ME?! a few weeks ago i got this text from jeff: "my mother asked for your phone number. if you two are planning some sort of intervention i will set your hair on fire." what a melodramatic little pussy that dude is. gross. anyway, jackie called me later that night.

sam: "hey, sexy."

jackie: giggle.

sam: "i can't believe a hot piece like you isn't out on a date this evening."

jackie: "stop, samantha! you're making me blush!" more giggling.

sam: "well, it's not often a beautiful lady calls me after ten on a weekday."

jackie: "is it too late? i justgot in from the office!"

sam: "it's never too late for you, GURL."

and that's basically an example of why i'm the worst motherfucking friend ever, because i will shamelessly flirt with your mother and say suggestive shit to her and make her blush, and then sooner or later she'll be calling me to go to dinner or grab a drink at happy hour or enjoy a leisurely brunch with her lonely ass. she knows you won't; you're too fucking busy banging craigslist dudes and chasing your dealer around town. so then she calls me, and i'm like a smarter, funnier, more grateful version of you who never screamed "i hate you!" during a fight or crashed her brand new car into a light pole. i'm you without the constant bitching and siphon on her bank account. which makes you look like a total fucking asshole. and you know what else? i don't act all weird when there's a hot grandpa at the bar in a smoking jacket making eyes at her over his corncob pipe and monocle. i just get up and wingman for her ass. unlike you, who tries to pretend that the only time she ever had sex in her life was the one drunk night she conceived you. wrong, bitch. YOUR MOM HAS SEX NEEDS.

jackie invited me to have dinner at her fancy grownup apartment the next night, and the second i walked through the door she pounced on me and shouted, "i want you to write my dating profile!" OH MAN. i was tempted to remind jackie that my own attempt at internet solicitation not only had failed to result in any tangible human penis but had also been heartily laughed at by one of my goddamned friends. (i rewrote it, and it's fucking hilarious now, but that is beside the motherfucking point.) but then i remembered that jackie is the type of mom who buys buffalo trace and keeps seven different types of cheese in her spotless refrigerator, so i dropped my bag in the entryway and sighed, "okay, let me have a look."

i have no idea what moms should be asking for when it comes to dudes. what does an old broad want in a gentleman caller? someone to go to church with? someone to walk the mall with every morning? someone who likes eating soup?! every time i try to imagine what she might want my head fills with dudes in tophats and tails on some fred astaire shit. jackie is a pretty fancy motherfucker what with her designer suits and granite countertops and law degrees, and it baffled me that this bitch 1 couldn't find a decent man just milling around the financial district and 2 was willing to take a chance on THE GODDAMNED INTERNET. "aren't there matchmakers and shit for women like you?" i asked. we were sitting at her dining room table, me in my "inside pants" and my "house glasses" and my "weekend underwear," jackie wearing the same $900 pajamas oprah probably wears. she told me that she'd recently joined a book group with other older successful women, many of whom were either widowed or divorced, and several of them had suggested that she try her hand at dating again and that match.com had seemed like the easiest way to transition her way off the bench and back out onto the playing field. noticing for the first time that she'd checked the casual sex box on her profile i looked up in mild surprise. "you know that means they don't have to buy you dinner, right?" we changed it immediately.

1 your vagina deserves a name. jackie emailed me a week ago to report that she'd been on two successful dates with men who did nice things like open her car door and pay for dinner at phil stefani's. i immediately started frothing at the mouth, boiling in a jealous rage. but then i remembered that i'm young enough not to need vaginal suppositories and congratulated her on kicking internet sex's bony goddamned ass. her response was a forward entitled "how to wake your sleeping vagina." inside i found an invitation to join her book group for a discussion on how to start fucking dudes after a lengthy hiatus caused by death or divorce. at the end she'd added, "i read your blog, darling. you could obviously use the help. i'll send a car for you. PLEASE wear pants with a zipper. and maybe some sophisticated lipstick? love, jackie." and this is why i murdered my own fucking mother.

in honor of the occasion i wore tasteful zippered slacks from talbots and a j.jill cardigan set your grandmother lent me, and i put my grownup makeup on, which i get at bobbi brown. i think i saw your aunt getting her winter palette done the last time i was at bloomingdale's picking out a muted shade of barf. jackie sent a car for me (RICH OLD BROADS ARE THE BEST, omg) and i tried to joke with the driver but i think he thought i was hitting on him and he totally stiff-armed my ass. he dropped me at this nice building on state parkway, and all of the other women were already there, EATING CUCUMBER SANDWICHES I'M NOT KIDDING I WISH I WAS MAKING THIS UP. they were all artificially friendly and talked to me in that bored, distracted way you'd talk to a toddler who is trying to show you the macaroni necklace he made when you're trying desperately to check your philandering husband's email before he returns home from his squash game. "comedy? animals? oh, lovely. that's nice, dear. now return to your cartoons."

the "book" was really a pamphlet, and its "author" was a woman named alice who dressed sort of like a gypsy and smelled like incense. i mean, this goddamned blog is longer than that shit. listen, i like free advice as much as the next person, but could this bitch at least pretend to be credible? photocopied pieces of paper that you folded and heat-sealed? QUIT PLAYING WITH ME, GURL. i skimmed the booklet while trying not to smear sophisticated lipstick all over jackie's homegirl's expensive wineglass, rolling my fucking eyes at every other sentence.

alice told us that to properly reintroduce our vaginas to the world of sex that we needed to christen them with new names. "den of iniquity!" i yelled out. that hippie gently reminded me that i wasn't competing on a game show and should write my possible names on the notepad she'd provided. now this is the kind of shit i can get into. weirdo sex rituals are my fucking favorite. she said that vaginas deserve names that are happy or powerful, and that calling your pussy "sally" doesn't really give her the authoritative moniker she deserves. she told us to make a list of four possible vagina names that sounded mighty and strong and/or involved something that brought joy to our lives. i already call my shit "the fist of fury," which sounds pretty fucking powerful to me, but i figured a name change might do her some good. i glanced over at the enraged look on jackie's face and literally drooled with excitement. i elbowed her and she hesitantly picked up her pen.

my vagina name list:
tiger woods before the hooker scandal when he was still dominating motherfuckers.
adorable kitten videos on youtube.
18/8 stainless steel.
rap beefs.

i've seen 8 mile 247 goddamned times. rap beefs was the obvious goddamned choice. alice said that now that we'd chosen names we had to address our bald eagles like they were separate entities and listen to them, ask them what they want, and treat them with the same respect we would our partners. so when i meet a dude i'm supposed to say, "hey rap beefs, would you like to let this gentleman explore you sexually?" and then i need to tune in and LISTEN TO WHAT THIS BITCH HAS TO SAY. i fucking love it. the other women in the room were blushing and whispering in hushed voices. i decided to go get more wine and asked jackie if i could refill her glass. "no thanks, darling," she whispered. "i can't drink too much around this crowd."

"what about 'sunshine after the rain?'" i loud-talked. "would SHE like another glass of wine?!"

2 you must prepare your temple for worship. i found the snack table and asked rap beefs how many braised beef empanadas she would like for dinner. we decided on four, together. isn't that sweet? WE ARE GETTING ALONG BETTER ALREADY. back in the living room alice was talking about the things a mature woman has to do to get her body ready for sex. thank god i'm young, because these broads were talking about shit i've never fucking thought of. like, did you know your vagina dries out?! like, for real for real. she just stops basting in her own juices, even when you are sexually excited. my jaw hit the fucking floor. i basically spend 80% of my waking hours feeling like i'm sitting in a half-empty children's swimming pool, and it never occurred to me that one day this shit just GOES AWAY. one lady started talking about banging her ex-husband and realizing halfway through that it felt like a "salami wrapped in sandpaper," and it's two motherfucking days later and i still am not over the mental image of that shit.

eventually they turned to me wondering what pains i take when faced with the prospect of having some new sex. after all the stress tests and vagina moisturizer i felt like an asshole saying, "i have to shave, i guess?" but let's talk about it for real for a minute. the morning after i booted the last dude i was banging on a semi-regular basis i nearly wept tears of joy that i would no longer have to set the alarm ten minutes early to balance on one foot with the other in the goddamned sink trying to shave my goddamned legs. GONE were the weekly battles with the beard trimmer, teetering awkwardly on the edge of the tub while trying not to castrate myself with those spinning fucking blades. i could eat sandwiches again! and skip those expensive monthly pedicures! no more sexy and impractical undergarments! life was good again!

monday i went to zumba then came home and greased up the old wahl to attend to the overgrowth in my enchanted forest. i even trimmed my ass hair, which will make my GI doctor's life easier, i suppose. and i stood with my fucking foot in the sink to shave my goddamned legs. i found all of my fancy ruffled, sheer, high-cut panties and those plunge bras that are only meant to be worn for 1/2 an hour at most if you have even a teaspoon more than an A cup. i cleaned my apartment from top to bottom, INCLUDING THE DISGUSTING CEILING FAN, and donated two bags of books. i brushed helen so she'd look presentable to potential stepfathers. i made an appointment to get my eyebrows waxed. i opened the mail. i took the garbage out. i threw out expired bags of frozen peas. i thought about buying food to make my house more appealing to a dude who might like a woman who feeds him, but instead reorganized all of my takeout menus because seriously the grocery store is the fucking WORST.

because dating and banging is never just about the sex. i mean, come on. it's about whether or not dude has handsoap in his bathroom. or if you have a clean glass for him to drink his post-sex water out of. you have to fake like you don't wear holey underwear the color of a dirty band-aid to work sometimes. you have to not buy so many magazines so that you actually have money to meet some dude for drinks. i always joke about being totally goddamned lazy, and trust me i am, but maybe it really isn't laziness. doing all this shit is TOTALLY FUCKING HARD. i have to work fifty hours a week, try to exercise at least six hours during that week, feed the cat, keep my living space clean, pay my important bills, stay updated on current sociopolitical issues, maintain my friendships, stay current on music news and celebrity gossip, make sure i'm wearing what i'm supposed to, read good books, eat at the best new places, support and participate in the arts, be totally hilarious and interesting, and MAKE SURE MY LABIA AREN'T STUBBLED?! not fucking dudes was easy because that meant there were, like, a hundred fewer things i had to goddamned worry about. i went to get an STD screen to make sure i hadn't caught anything off a public toilet seat, and while i was sitting there the nurse was like, "do you need condoms and some dental dams?" HOLY SHIT I HAVE TO DO THAT, TOO?! back in the game for one quarter and already sacked nineteen times. jesus christ.

3 face your fears. i am NOT EQUIPPED for this 21st century dating shit. and i'm basically a teenager when you consider my lack of savings and tendency toward melodramatic hyperbole. the internet is a crazymaker. and you hoes know i'm right. facebook and tweeting and foursquare and tumblr will drive even the most rational bitch OUT OF HER GODDAMNED MIND. dating makes me so sensitive and nervous. i devolve into motherfucking harriet the spy, an insecure chatterbox trying to find the hidden meaning within 160 characters of text. AND IT AIN'T JUST ME. i have an inbox full of "read his status and tell me what you think that means" to fucking prove it. omg if you motherfuckers could read my gchats! 98% of them are me and some other broad trying to translate the poorly-written messages sent by some neanderthal dude. HOLY HELL and when i used to chat with dudes i had to send that shit to amanda to have her make sense of the conversation. i just can't with this shit. and neither can any of the rest of you.

DECIPHERING TEXT MESSAGES IS THE DEVIL. and internet stalking is the devil's handmaiden. i want to go back to the olden days when you didn't have to sit up half the night trying to piece together the relationships of people whose toes you want to suck and their internet friends that you've never met and have no business asking them about. are men doing this? seriously, are you wringing yourselves out trying to discern whether or not we used to fuck that dude who heart emoticons every single status we post? i'm sure you don't even care, but you girls know what i'm talking about. "who the fuck is this asshole who 'likes' everything he says? god, desperate bitch, he's not even funny like that. she's obviously a loser since she comments on EVERYTHING. damn, get a hobby. stupid idiot. i wonder if he thinks she's prettier than me?" and there's no cure, because none of us is going to go cold turkey off our social media addiction. eventually there are going to be asylums all over america filled with strung-out, ashen women scrolling through smartphones while muttering, "is he fucking her? what about her? is my status funny enough? is that his ex-girlfriend?!" under our collective breath. terrifying.

4 put yourself out there. not only is my vagina awake, now this bitch is CRAZY. old women are worried about performance anxiety and breaking a hip during rough play, meanwhile my ass is all, "OMG WHAT AM I MISSING ON FACEBOOK RIGHT NOW?!" i had three glasses of wine during that fear exercise, and i was just on the verge of the mortifying drunk cry. you know the kind, when tears stream down your face at the slightest provocation because you drank two bottles of cheap chianti in a sitting? yeah, that's the one. i don't know, but all of that talk about insecurity and body shame and relationship wounds past was really starting to fuck with my drunk ass. i had to keep blinking like a crazy person to stop myself from bursting out crying. one of the women disclosed her fears about moving on after her husband died because she'd never have sex with anyone else in HER ENTIRE LIFE, and when she tearfully admitted that she'd never had an orgasm a loud, audible sob escaped my mouth and jackie hissed "go to the bathroom and get yourself together" and glared at me. then some other woman cried because she kept getting rejected by her eharmony matches and i came completely undone.

i'm one of those pent-up mean people who are so bitter and angry at life that we can hardly be bothered to compliment someone or share a kind word, and as punishment for being that way when i cry, I CRY. i also take a lot of hormones to keep rap beefs in check, and sometimes they turn me into a blubbering mess. surging and estrogen mixed with all that fucking wine destroyed any ounce of composure i'd had up to that point. jackie was already calling the car service while i sat there sobbing about how that old eharmony dude is such a liar he only matches you with people who suck who don't want to marry you and DID YOU KNOW THEY WON'T MATCH GAY COUPLES?! boo hoo it'll get better, sister. boo fucking hoo. jackie got up to leave with me before alice could tell us about internet dating and joining co-ed sports teams and attending singles mixers. i kept my swollen eyes closed and we locked arms in the elevator.

before we'd left alice suggested that we write letters to our newly baptized vaginas when we got home to prepare them for their journey out into the brave new world. a world full of syphillis exposure and craigslist dudes who want to put their dickheads in your ear. here's mine:

dearest rap beefs,

i'm really sorry that i've introduced you to so many idiots. i know it may appear that i might've done so out of spite but, i'm not sure whether or not you know this, i'm vaguely mentally retarded. and too liberal with the benefit of the doubt. i'm sorry about that time i let a dude stick a roll of pepperoni in you, and i really do feel bad about that moron who kept chewing on you with his teeth. in the future i promise to be better about screening applicants. seriously, no more dudes who are not smart and don't laugh at my jokes.

since we're talking, why do you smell so weird sometimes? is it because i've been eating too much meat? and how come you get inexplicably itchy? is this your way of demanding my attention? are you trying to alert me to my neglect? i swear i'm going to get better about this sort of thing. have you been enjoying the new feminine wash that i occasionally use? those disposable wipes i've been carrying around have made you quite lovely and chemically fresh.

you look good with your new haircut, by the way. i mean, i love it long, but short and sassy REALLY works for you. hope you're having a fantastic day, and please try not to queef next time some hot asshole is banging me sideways. that shit is embarrassing.

love, sam!

ps, jerks: I'M FAMOUS NOW. click here, omg

how to survive a break-up.

2011-11-10T16:57:00.005-06:00

last night i let one of my ladyfriends look at my okcupid profile. and i know what a huge mistake that is, letting someone who knows me see what a motherfucking jackass i am when it comes to advertising my vagina on the old computer machine. but rachel just had her heart ripped out of her chest and stomped on, and i felt like it was my sisterly duty to let that sad-ass bitch make fun of the way i solicit internet penis. curled up in her pajamas and settled on her couch underneath a pile of sadblankets, macbook warming her lap, half-empty diet coke can at her side, i told that jerk my screen name and sat back to enjoy the steak jibaritos we'd just ordered from borinquen. ten seconds later that asshole BURST OUT LAUGHING. not just an appreciative chuckle, mind you, a full-on belly laugh that made me flush with shame. there were brief periods of silence punctuated by ACTUAL LOLing, and as i cringed and prayed for instant death, rachel kept saying "it's only funny because i know you," as if that were some sort of motherfucking reassurance. pffft. it wasn't "you're so charming and adorable and witty!" laughter, because my dating profile really is some of my least hilarious goddamned work, it was like, "YOU DUMB BITCH, THIS IS WHY YOUR INBOX IS EMPTY." both of them, zing. omfg, i was immediately filled with self-loathing at my "braggy" and unintentionally funny profile. i'm just going to change that shit to "millionaire, sex on the first date, titties." i'll let you know how it goes.

i have only had two real break-ups in my life, and only one of them was crazy hard to get over. i mean hard, like, if i ran into him on the street tomorrow it might make my stomach hurt. hard because he had a shaving kit at my place and we had a joint costco membership and i left my favorite pair of new balances in his car hard. and that shit ended back when myspace was still popular. ie, FOREVER AGO FACEBOOK OMG LOL, yet sometimes it still nags at me. but anyway, i've had a shit-ton of the kinds of relationships that do the most immediate crushing damage: that two days/two weeks/two months shit when you CANNOT FUCKING BELIEVE that this thing that seemed so promising a week ago is fucking over already. because it's one thing when a person has grown tired of you after a few years, or you realize that your long-term goals don't intersect; that shit is fucking manageable. what's inexplicable is when some dude you hit it off with who SEEMS TOTALLY AWESOME and wants to HANG OUT WITH YOU ALL THE TIME and really seems to like HAVING SEX WITH YOU and insists upon MEETING YOUR FRIENDS and texts you FIVE TIMES A DAY, which in girltexts is like 99 times a day, all of a sudden drops off the face of the motherfucking earth. or he doesn't want to hang out at normal times anymore, he just wants to "drop by" after that rock show you heard about that he didn't even ask if you wanted to go to. or he acts irritated if you text him "hey, how are you?" ONE TIME in THREE DAYS. which, if he really knew you, he would know is your showing admirable restraint.

until, inevitably, it winds down and peters out. like an old candle or something. and the end of these relationships can go one of two ways: you are either like me (most of the time) and can smell this shitstorm coming a mile away so you just pack up the little emotional investment you've made and file it away in your brain's asshole library before you leave a toothbrush at his place; or you are like rachel (and like me too, sometimes) and try to save this sinking ship despite the fact that everything he's doing is making you feel SO FUCKING BAD and he's blowing you off and lying to you and is too much of a pussy to say "stop calling me," so he lets you hang yourself and feel like garbage until someone new comes along which might not happen for a really long time and then you're stuck in this shitty place for longer than you deserve to be. and that sucks the biggest suck that ever sucked.

so i've come up with what is basically a foolproof method to get myself over some piece of shit asshole who tricked me into thinking he liked me (and maybe he did for five minutes but WHATEVER) and really did seem like someone i might want to let see me in my meat shirt and my inside pants. this list is written down, IN PEN, and magnetized to my refrigerator. it's splattered with salsa, of course, because i'm a slob and i wrote it in goddamned 2004, but it's posted up there and i'm going to share it because bitches need to fucking help each other. IT'S SO HARD OUT HERE. so imma help you deal with being dumped LIKE A BOSS. you can copy and paste this shit and put it wherever you'll see it the most. for me, it's the place i keep my ice cream and beer.

1 you get one day to fucking hate yourself. but THAT'S IT, bitch. ONE MOTHERFUCKING DAY. what the fuck is it about being dumped that makes us deify the lame-o dude who basically spread his ass cheeks open and spewed diarrhea all over our future with him? every single time some asshole is like, "thank you but NO," i get sad that someone that smart (or nice or handsome or interesting, whatevs) no longer wants to be involved with me. forget that he wore pink dress shirts to dinner and couldn't pronounce the name of that fancy vodka he ordered, he was SO GREAT and i am OBVIOUSLY NOT GOOD ENOUGH TO BE WITH HIM. i forget every flaw, every weird hang-up, every single thing he did that made me think, "holy fucking shit, i should've never agreed to be exclusive with this idiot," and start beating myself up about how awful and horrible and terrible and unloveable i am. and i know, you girls are all the worst person in the world, too.

you don't get anything right, you're not pretty enough, you could be smarter, you should know more about foreign policy, and you should have at least two favorite shows on NPR. why are you so fat? and why do you watch so many terrible television shows? why do you have a subscription to glamour magazine?! YOU'RE THIRTY-SEVEN. why don't you have more than one set of sheets? why are your mattress and box spring on the floor? how come you only have cereal and peanut butter in your cupboard? what do you even put on the cereal, tap water?! i live in an apartment the size of a normal person's bathroom. jesus, i am SO BROKE. no one likes me. even my friends are just faking it. i totally fail at everything. i'm not funny. i'm not sexy. i ruin everything. i can't make pancakes. i always chip my manicure five minutes after it dries. my feet are ugly. i can't play tennis. i snore. i'm the WORST PERSON ON EARTH blah blah blah sad blah.

we all do it, we all rake ourselves over the mental coals trying to find an explanation for why some talking gorilla with the IQ of a houseplant doesn't want to stick his dick in us anymore. and it's totally cool. but you only get one day to be mean to yourself. i'm not kidding. you can be as sad as you want for as long as you need to, but the self-hate stops after one goddamned day. 24 hours to be the fattest stinkiest dumbest girl in the world, then it's on to remembering how that motherfucker chewed with his mouth open and didn't know that the "s" in illinois is silent. what a moron.

2 cut off all communication. i've been fortunate not to have been shit on too badly after the advent of the facebooks and the twitter machine, because if the agony that is stalking my online crushes is any goddamned indication, breaking up in the modern era is ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE. while i've been blatantly stood up at least three or four times in my life, i've never been stood up and had the pleasure of dragging myself home from whatever bar in which he'd abandoned me to cry in my beer to see that while i'd been texting him: "are you nearby?" "how many minutes?" "you remember where the bar is?" "do you need cab fare?" "are you hurt?" "did you get out of work late?" "should i meet you at your place?" "you know we had plans tonight, right?" "just tell me if you're not coming." "seriously, i've been here for an hour." "why are you doing this to me?" "DO YOU EVEN LIKE ME ANYMORE?!" in rapid succession for forty-five minutes while burning with shame because everyone in the restaurant can tell i'm being stood up, OBVIOUSLY. only to find out from my newsfeed that THIS MOTHERFUCKER HAS BEEN UPDATING HIS STATUS AND POSTING PICTURES OF HIS DINNER ALL GODDAMNED NIGHT. how humiliating. i would throw my fucking computer through a wall if that ever happens to me. how can you get dumped with facebook in your life?! holy mother of god all of the picture deleting and relationship status changing! that shit is devastating.

that's why you have to delete that dude. don't torment yourself trying to figure out who these adorable commenting ass bitches are. is he fucking them? probably. now UNFRIEND HIS ASS. and unfollow his fucking twitter, too. all he does is post twitpics of his shitty tattoos and literary quotes from books he's never read, and are you really going to glean any useful information from that? besides, it's going to take SO LONG to click on all this asshole's @messages and try to figure out whether or not those women are his girlfriend. or if he's referring to you in some cryptic way. painful confession that i am willing to share in the hopes that you'll learn a valuable lesson from it: this musician dude i had a crush on last year was like, "facebook is old news, girl. I TWEET," and even though i didn't even understand how twitter worked at the time (i still don't; WHAT THE FUCK IS "TRENDING?!" welp) i followed him and he followed me and i spent two weeks reading all of his totally fucking stupid tweets (he's one of those jerkbags who tweets from the toilet, OMG) and trying to decipher the veiled sexual innuendo in them to several of his female followers. i was like a goddamned crazy person, trying to translate 160 characters of code words and inside jokes written by a dude that i 1 didn't know, to women he was 2 probably fucking. that shit's insane. needless to say, my twatter no longer follows his tweets.

the hardest, i know, is THAT GODDAMNED TELEPHONE. but you have to do it. i erase a dude's number as soon as three days lapse with no word from him. that's the beauty of cell phones: no one memorizes a goddamned thing anymore. because even though you can recollect with crystal clarity your childhood digits, you have no idea what the fuck that dude you've been banging's number is. and that's amazing! so delete that shit! and get the fuck out of here with that, "I'M SAVING IT JUST IN CASE HE CALLS SO I KNOW WHO IT IS AND I WON'T ANSWER IT." listen whore, your bill collector-dodging ass doesn't answer any numbers it doesn't know, and chances are you can figure out either from the context of his text or the voice on your voicemail who the fuck just called you. don't play with me, DELETE IT. here's what i told rachel, and i'm telling it to you because i love you: from the minute i give some dude my number i start thinking of his phone as a "sadcatcher." it's like a dreamcatcher, but instead of dreams that blackberry of his is storing all of your sad, miserable, pleading, embarrassing messages. all of the tear-soaked voicemails you left, all of the drunk texts you sent, all of the nineteen calls you placed in one night and, i hate to break it to you, HE IS SHOWING THOSE TO PEOPLE. nothing is a secret, and there's no break-up code that says he has to dutifully delete any of your incriminating evidence out of respect for what you lovebirds had that never was. that sadcatcher is an archive of all the ways you embarrassed yourself when he stopped calling you, you fucking jackass. my ego is too massive to let some random dude walk around knowing how sad he made me and how fucked up i was over him, so i make it a habit to only text directions and meetup times. fuck if he gets to dump me AND laugh at my, "is this really how you want to end this?!" harbingers of relationship doom. i have the heart of a goddamned lion. that sappy shit is for jerks.

3 throw his goddamned shit out. you will NEVER GET OVER IT if you keep sleeping with that dirty t-shirt he mistakenly left in your bathroom. just get it out of your apartment. TODAY. you don't need it and he is NEVER COMING BACK FOR IT. again, i know the reason you're really hanging on to that shit. "it's so comfortable" and you "love sleeping in it?" bitch, that's the reason you still cry yourself to sleep every night. TOSS THAT MOTHERFUCKER OUT SO YOU CAN MOVE ON. and i know, you really want those pajamas and the reading glasses you "accidentally" left at his place. sorry again, babydoll, those things are now casualties of war. we all know why you did it, it's the same reason we all do it. 1 so he'll be reminded of his awesome new girlfriend 2 so any girls he has over will be intimidated by the presence of those supercute pajamas and hip glasses his awesome new girlfriend wears (omg she has such good taste why are you cheating on her?!) and 3 so you have ONE MORE GODDAMNED REASON to try to get into his apartment once he falls off the face of the earth. besides, we all know you would never leave your GOOD shit in some dude's rank, dirty house. so stop that. and burn his boxers in the dumpster behind your building.

4 distract yourself. you aren't ready to date anyone yet, because you're damaged and fucked up. and you probably should get an STD screen. but there are books you can read. seriously, SO MANY BOOKS came out while you were in relationshangri-la. also, your dvr is full and there are nine netflix envelopes in that stack of mail you haven't tended to since you met him. i bet you haven't seen your fucking friends in a while, SO CALL THEM. catch up on celebrity gossip, re-join that yoga class you paid for but never use, organize your cutlery, change all your furniture around, go see a play, eat at all the restaurants he wouldn't go to because he's gluten-free or whatever. i make a concerted effort to schedule something every day. even if it's a little something, like "go get magazines." go out and do something, ANYTHING. i promise you, if you leave your house and go to work then don't go home until it's time to collapse in bed you will feel better. or you'll at least be too fucking tired to feel bad.

5 enlist the help of your friends. this one is self-explanatory: it is my job, AS YOUR FRIEND, to feed you and hang out with you and listen to you and keep you sane as you deal with that terrible flood of horrible feelings that tsunamis your soul after someone rejects you, so MAKE ME DO MY FUCKING JOB. i'm not just here to hold your hair back when you vomit and tell you how amazing you look in those pants, i'm also available to listen to you tell the same story four hundred times and to try to figure out the meaning of his last email. because last night i wanted to snuggle up in my bed amid the drone of my humidifiers and scare myself shitless watching "american horror story," but instead i traveled eight stops past where i live before braving the indignity of the bus in the freezing cold in FINGERLESS GLOVES (i'm so fucking stupid) to go to rachel's house and talk shit about the pathological liar who wouldn't return the belongings she'd left at his place and was wearing a fruity INSIDE SCARF the one time i'd met him. I GOT HOME AT FUCKING MIDNIGHT, PEOPLE. ON A GODDAMNED WORK NIGHT. if that isn't love, i don't know what is. and i'd do it again, because that bitch is my motherfucking friend. it's in the contract.

6 FLIP THE SCRIPT. i'm not a silver lining kind of broad. in general, i'm totally fucking negative. unless there's a kitten around. that said, the thing i am the best at out of all of these things is making lemonade out of a relationship lemon. well, i always remain thoroughly convinced that i am going to die alone in my apartment with a regenerated hymen, but i'm really fucking good at remembering all the things that suck about a dude and using them as consolation prizes when he BLINDSIDES ME WITH THE DUMP. for every endearing little drop of charm there is a giant glaring fault just waiting for me to embellish it before regaling all of my friends with its glory. repeat those flaws on a continuous loop, lovers. seriously, when i'm feeling like a gross little man-repelling troll all i have to think is ILLINOIZE and i dissolve into a fit of giggles. men are fucking stupid. and often repulsive. guaranteed that dude you're so goddamned sad about bleaches his hair or cuts the crusts off his sandwiches or WEARS A MOTHERFUCKING SCARF IN A BAR. i don't need my ex-asshole and you don't need your ex-asshole, either. and if you feel like you do just call me and i'll come sit on your couch and eat jibaritos while you cry laughing at me for telling the internet that "i have the best goddamned jokes."

that bitch hurt my motherfucking feelings. oh well, rachel dated a dude who wears an inside scarf. so we're even. see, i told you i'm good at the lemonade.

new sex rules for 2012.

2011-11-02T16:16:00.004-05:00

omg omg omg, holy omfg, it's already 11/11? WHAT IN THE FUCKING HELL HAVE I BEEN DOING?! making peanut butter sandwiches in lieu of cooking a real dinner, making pretty decent progress sounding out the big words in "infinite jest" because i have diarrhea all the time, and listening to department of eagles records. that's what. holy crap, the year is fucking over already. yes, OVER. the mindless blur of murdered indians and overstuffed turkeys that is november bleeds right into the plus-sized red velvet pajamas and dystopian loneliness that ho ho hos its way to the glittery new year. a new year, of course, that brings with it little promise of fresh starts and bright beginnings. every january i buy a new calendar (to replace the back-to-school one i purchased in august with the wide-eyed hope of all the possibilty that accompanies those empty lined pages: the one i spilled a latte on, rendering the tan, wrinkled pages unappealing to me; the one i tried to keep a food log in, but stopped because there were too many days filled with lies like "1/2 a cookie" and "large serving of kale;" the one filled with potential plans that i had to scratch out because bitches be bailing on my ass ALL THE GODDAMNED TIME), with the hopes that the dawning of another year when i will most certainly get older (and inch ever closer to wiser) fills me with promise.

the promise of what remains to be seen. i don't make resolutions because fuck that. i'm already enough of a goddamned loser, i don't need a fucking piece of paper mocking me from where i've taped it on the refrigerator (where i hope it also might discourage me from pulling out that pint of ben and jerry's i've been "just having a spoonful of" for the last hour and a fucking half). what is it that makes us this way? because i know i'm not the only one. i would rather pretend i'm not eating it and get out of bed thirty-seven motherfucking times to walk into the kitchen and scrape the spoon i've left on the counter FOR THIS EXPRESS PURPOSE around the melty edge of the carton until something resembling a mountain (seriously, like, the K2 of late night snack) is built atop, eat it over the sink, put the carton away, delude myself into thinking of myself as health-conscious, go back to sobbing through the kardashian wedding, then repeat the same cycle ten minutes later.

okay, four minutes later.

why not just loosen the elastic on my inside pants and drag the whole thing into bed? why not just soften the entire pint, drop it into a bag of tortilla chips, sprinkle some lime juice in, pour some salsa over, add a dollop of brownie batter, and shake it up with some crumbled gorgonzola and a pound of semi-raw bacon? because i haven't given up on life yet. which is the same goddamned reason i am compelled to purchase a bright, shiny slice of hope in the form of a child's assignment notebook every august, and the same goddamned reason i throw that one in the trash and purchase one meant for adults (or burnouts who are giving school another shot the spring semester) every january. even though i should abandon all hope of a happy life full of realized dreams and actualized purpose, i'm still over here placing all my bets on the next calendar year. come on, 2012!

i had dinner with some of my black friends* a couple weeks ago. akilah and i went in on some prix fixe living social deal at branch 27, and i was irritated before i even got to the fucking restaurant. my life refuses to understand the words "on time," so i missed the good express train and was forced to take the one full of creeps. then, no cabs. not a single one. by the time i got to dinner i was a sweaty mess, and eating dinner feels SO GOOD when you're damp and can smell your deodorant working harder than you want it to. awesome.

so akilah had invited some dude to dinner, unbeknownst to me, and when i rounded the corner to join her at our table my stomach fell right out of my butt. 1 i had no idea whether or not it was a set-up, and she's sneaky that way and 2 most dudes are boring and i didn't want some asshole ruining my dinner. also, if i'd known a man was joining us i wouldn't have worn my meat-eating pants. i know, WHO CARES WHAT A DUDE THINKS ABOUT YOUR PANTS? the answer is: everyone. it doesn't even matter if you're sexually interested in him or not, no one wants to wear her pie shirt and her meat pants out with a dude who might be convinced to pay for the meal they're eating. no one is going to pull his amex out for my greasy cat hair pants. i mean, i wouldn't even expect him to. add to that my rushing latesweat and you have a recipe for easily the most uncomfortable meal i've sat through in a while.

i kept trying to gauge from akilah's face whether she was trying to fuck him or if i was supposed to, but that bitch is a fucking pro. equal parts friendly and flirtatious, ie IMPOSSIBLE TO GODDAMNED READ. and your worst fucking nightmare. akilah is one of my best friends, but she is also one of these insanely (unfairly!) pretty women with a nice ass and huge rack who can get away with talking to every dude like she wants to bang him even if she hates his guts. and he won't even be salty at her! if i'm not interested in a gentleman chances are that he is so not interested in me that my even considering that possibility is laughable, but if he happens to be nice to me i usually scowl and make snide jokes that insinuate he's fucking stupid. endearing, i know. anyway, i couldn't tell what was happening, and that makes me uncomfortable. i like to pretend to be in control of social situations that could possibly end up leaving me melting into a pool of shame.

but then dude described his drink as having been "infused with the smoky essence of black pepper and a hint of sweetness," and i was like "I'M JUST GOING TO UNBUTTON MY PANTS AND HANDLE THESE PORK EMPANADAS." come on, son. "smoky essence?!" YOU'RE MAKING MY PENIS SOFT. i can't bang a dude who talks like that about his dinner. unless we're filming an episode of top chef, "this is delicious" will goddamned suffice.

after a while the conversation turned, as it often does between a group of veritable strangers, to hardcore sex acts. i'm not even sure how we ended up there, but my pants were already undone and i'd probably farted at least a dozen times, so i can't front like a little sex talk makes me blush. akilah is recently single and was talking about all of these dudes who've come out of the woodwork (that means facebook creepers) to ask her out. oh to be fucking gorgeous. have you ever listened to a hot broad talk about casually discarding dudes due to flaws the ordinary among us would "just learn to live with." this whore. you know how many times i've said, "it's okay, maybe you're just stressed out?" to some sniveling asshole connected to a flag just barely at half-mast? TEN FUCKING THOUSAND. she regaled us with the story of some soft serve dude she fired after his first day on the job, and i like "i hate this jerk."

because i'm the kind of nerd who always has a notebook on her person, i got mine out and found a pen so that we could make a list of the new sex rules for 2012. because i can't resolve to "eat better" or "be nicer to people," but i most certainly can decide exactly what kind of dicks we should be putting in our mouths.

rule 1: maybe we don't have to have sex. god, i met some stupid dude on saturday. i was downtown, getting ready to blow half my paycheck at akira, and i was coming up the escalator at monroe when this dude literally ran to jump on it behind me. first thing i thought: HE IS GOING TO ROB ME. second: I AM WEARING PUBLIC PAJAMAS. when we got to the top he asked if i was listening to my ipod loudly, and i said, "yes, because i don't like the sound of anyone else's voice." what a fucking bitch. undeterred, he told me that he worked security (he was wearing a uniform, which i heretofore hadn't noticed because i'm an asshole who wears sunglasses all the time) and was warning women not to turn their music all the way up because flash mobs of kids were sneaking up on them to steal their holiday packages. i was not carrying a holiday package. long story short, he gave me his number. and i took it, even though he'd asked me, "what do you like to do for fun?" have you ever heard an answer to that question, particularly when posed on the spot, that was either interesting or exciting to you? i know i know, i deserve to die alone. seriously, if even one of you can tell me SOMETHING TRUE that you do for fun that is anything different than ANYONE ELSE ON EARTH i will buy you dinner. blarf. so today is wednesday and i texted him at the advice of the young people in my life who think calling is stupid, and i've heard nothing in response. and you know how i feel? GODDAMNED RELIEVED. because my third thought was: oh man, sex is so gross and i'm really fucking tired. do i really have to call him? and no, i obviously did not.

rule 2: no quiet dudes. A CAVEAT: you know how i feel about dudes who talk too much. i hate them, and they should die. so i don't mean dudes who are shitty conversationalists, because the last thing i'm interested in is michael vick's stats from last sunday. this rule refers to the bedroom, because banging a dude who thinks he's too fucking cool to tell you how good it feels is totally fucking lame. maybe this is a black thing, because i haven't yet held a peach-colored set of testicles gently in the palm pf my hand, but white dudes in porn are always grunting and letting out tarzan screams all over the place. black men, EVEN WHEN THEY ARE INSIDE YOU, always give you that look that says, "yeah, gurl, i'm tearing this ass UP." no, homie, you ain't. that's actually the inner fold of my labia that you're blindly stabbing while making faces at yourself in the mirror pretending to be wesley pipes. it's never "hey! i like this! having sex with you is exciting for me! thank you so much for your effort!" nope, all you're going to get is, "YOU LOVE THIS, DON'T YOU. SAY YOU LOVE IT." i never do. i always stop them at that part and ask if he might be a doll and get my silver vibrator out of the drawer so we might hurry this along a bit. that right there is an ego destroyer, plus it'll make you laugh and laugh to watch his stupid boner wobbling around as he slips and slides in his socks (WHAT IS WITH THE SOCKS, DUDES?) while digging through your lingerie and shit.

rule 3: no arrogant dudes and no argumentative dudes. this one sells itself. if you are bossy and smart, as i imagine all of my internet girlfriends are in spades, then you have undoubtedly come across a dude who COULD NOT FUCKING DEAL WITH IT. no matter how progressive, how understanding, how in love with you he claimed to be, at some point in your life or another you have had a dude with an ego problem get all up in your face because you outsmarted him or wouldn't let him have all of the power. i'm a fan of being bossed around, but only by a dude who gets that i haven't relinquished control to him just because i let him order me around while he isn't wearing any pants. it's such a thin line with most of these assholes. give an inch by asking a dude to tell you what to do in a hot way, then he takes a goddamn mile's worth of "get me this" and "get me that" when the two of you have your clothes on in the middle of the electronics aisle at costco. um, no thank you. and i know there are SO MANY PEOPLE who get turned on by a heated argument, but i'm not one of them. especially because i don't get into sexy arguments like "why did you leave your beard stubble all over the sink?" or "no, it's YOUR turn to take the recycling out." pfffft. mostly dudes want to argue with me about one of two things 1 who's smarter or 2 who's funnier. the answer to both of these questions is usually me, but if it isn't i am quick to concede the victory. (seriously, though, it's always me.) and all that fuss makes me fucking tired, man. and after a certain age is it too much to ask to just kick our feet up and agree with each other about everything? jesus christ.

rule 4: no spitting. this repulses me, so i'm not going to dwell on it, but the dude akilah brought to dinner referenced "spitting in a woman's vagina" as a sexy thing to do, and i nearly vomited at the table. I JUST CAN'T with this one. not ever. decide amongst yourselves whether or not you think it's hot to CLEAR ALL OF THE PHLEGM OUT OF YOUR THROAT AND EXPECTORATE ALL OVER SOME GENTLEMAN'S ERECTION, but imma be over here squeezing my eyes shut and rocking in the corner to soothe myself until this spitstorm passes. holy mother of god, let some dickbag assault me in this filthy way. i will lose my shit completely. i'm not dry, and there's lube in the nightstand, buddy, so if i look down and see your cheeks moving to work up a bunch of spit in your mouth that you are planning to discharge into my vagina i am going to kick your jaw right off your fucking skull. omg. i don't even want to talk about this anymore. i'm dying inside.

rule 5: no ATM. i didn't even know this was a thing. my original "no atm" rule just meant "never give a dude money ever even if he's starving to death in front of you and that five dollars might save his life," but our dinner companion informed me that this acronym means "anal to mouth." ANAL TO MOUTH. for the slow kids, this means your sex partner PULLS SOMETHING OUT OF YOUR BUTT before INSERTING IT INTO YOUR MOUTH. boy, shit is on everybody's mind lately, eh? hot damn. i don't know who does this, or if it's intentional, but this might be the worst thing i've ever heard. worse than the fucking spitting, because you can get e.coli from your own butt and that would be tragic. that's one thing i learned from IBD, that you have to be careful where the shit that is always leaking from every one of your orifices ends up. because it's full of toxic disgustingness that could ruin some unsuspecting person's day. once when i'd been in the hospital for ten days basically marinating in my own excrement (it wasn't that bad, but i am PROVING A POINT) i got an infection in my LADYBUSINESS because she had come into contact with so much smelly poop. being a human is fucking awful. so, if he's pounding you in the dirt star, you might want to tell him he can't stick it in your vagina without a thorough bleaching either. nothing turns up the sex heat like a clinical talk about intestinal bacteria. YUM.

so i'm probably just going to stay celibate for another year because i hate entertaining new people and there's chlamydia and whatnot just lurking behind the crevices of everyone's testicles just waiting to jump onto my vagina lips and eat its way through my tender flesh and destroy my brain, but you girls have fun. just write all this on the back of your hand so you don't forget.

*only my BLACK FRIENDS make a big fucking deal when i hang out with them, because it doesn't happen often, which is the only reason i make note of it. to shut them the fuck up. my phone is like a goddamned benetton ad, man. all shades and colors! it's just that all my black bitches act like coming up my way equals a trip to siberia. assholes. white people live near me, and they always tip 20%. JUST SAYING.

**reader submissions welcome for any rules i've missed. wordscience@gmail.com, kittens. HOLLER.

way to bro me, dude.

2011-10-27T16:28:00.005-05:00

a couple weeks ago i got shoulder-clapped. by a hot dude i kind of wanted to see without his pants on. my heart sank immediately. why, you wonder? well, according to merriam-webster, one of the definitions of the word clap is "to strike with the flat of the hand in a friendly way ." in other words, when a gentleman you might have intentions on banging does this to you, when he STRIKES YOU WITH THE FLAT OF HIS HAND IN A FRIENDLY WAY, it is instantly made clear that you are never ever ever in your life going to get that man spread out naked on your my little pony bedsheets. even if you push your boobs right up under your chin and tiptoe past him a hundred times in your trashiest slutbag hookersuit, homeboy is probably not going to tap that. well, he might. but his heart won't be in it. because you guys are officially buddies.

it's one thing when the girl gets to decide "we're just friends." i mean, DUH. some well-meaning dude with food in his beard and a tucked-in t-shirt wants to drive you to wal-mart and carry your groceries upstairs? why the hell not? this other homeboy with a bowl cut who smells like old soup doesn't mind picking up your bar tab and fronting the money for tickets to that concert you want to go to? WHY STOP HIM?! but it's different when some talking gorilla turns those fucking tables on YOU. dudes are supposed to want to have sex with everything, ALL THE TIME, so when one gives you the old "we're best pals, you can wear your eating pants in front of me" speech it's a major slap in the face. OR CLAP ON THE MOTHERFUCKING SHOULDER.

every woman, even the stinky gross ones with chin acne, wants to be seen by dudes as a sensual creature of mystery. except ladydudes, who want nothing more than to be seen as equals on the basketball court or the fastpitch softball diamond. the rest of us want a man to think we're made of magic and potpourri, and when it becomes clear that he thinks you're just another hairy pile of NORMAL it's such a fucking bummer. it's like, "why did i wear uncomfortable shoes for you?!" a broad at least will string a dude along for a little bit, letting him down easy, crushing his soul gently with each passing day of non-romantic air-conditioner installing and flat tire changing and makeup-free pizza gorging in your inside pants. until finally she breaks down and says something like, "we should probably get separate hotel rooms for that wedding i'm dragging you to in ohio," and it slowly dawns on him that THIS BITCH who ate up half his rent money last month and caused him to dislocate his left goddamned shoulder helping move her shit from one four story walk-up to another has NO INTENTION OF BANGING HIM, even though he SANDED and REFINISHED that antique dresser she made him PICK UP FROM THE HOUSE OF SOME SKETCHY CRAIGSLIST ASSHOLE who lives two hours away. and he can't be mad at anyone but himself for putting a down payment on a pipe dream.

i'm always late to the bro party, but i blame that shit on INSENSITIVE-ASS DUDES for being sneaky and manipulative liars. because bitches might let you caulk their bathtubs and replace the coolant in their carburators (is that how that works? giggle giggle I'M SUCH A GIRL giggle snort), but a DUDE will take you to a nice dinner and slow dance with you and massage the tension out of your neck while knowing full goddamned well he is never going to bend you over the back of the couch. NOT FAIR. they have no problem doing all sorts of intimate shit while working up the courage to ask if your BFF is seeing anybody at the moment. every good date i've ever had was with some jerkballs who said, "love hanging with you! next time we gotta find you a boyfriend!" while depositing my stunned ass standing onto the curb in front of my apartment. WHAT THE WHAT? i thought YOU were about to be my boyfriend! why on earth would i have shaved my legs for dinner with a FRIEND?!

tricky fucking bastards. my most memorable BRO FAIL was with this dude who is so good looking that one of my male friends recently remarked, "i would go gay for him" upon viewing his picture. now, that shit is 100% moist, but i understood what the fuck he meant. HE IS SO HOT. he found me on the facebooks a year ago after having read my blog, and i am not creeped out enough by shit like that because i read his email and was like, "yes, want. dangerous, don't care. killer, handsome. rape and disfigure, still don't care." we talked on the phone a couple times and then he asked me out to dinner, and i know it shouldn't matter, but life is just better when someone handsome wants to eat across the table from you. SORRY, FEMINISM, but that shit is true. he picked me up and took me to a fancy sushi place and knew all about sake (who the fuck knows about SAKE?!), and i said to myself, "self, you don't deserve this. you still pee in the shower, and you haven't done a sit-up since 1996. please don't fuck it up."

and i didn't! i kept all of my food in my mouth and i didn't let any of my dragon roll slip out of the chopsticks! i choked down those sake bombs without falling off my chair! i landed all of my fucking punch lines! i was killing it, as far as being amazing on a first date goes. PLUS I GOT TO STARE AT A HOT DUDE ALL NIGHT. so i was feeling really good, even though sushi sort of makes me want to swallow my own tongue, and then he wanted to get drinks after. omg, did i just die and go to heaven?! yes, yes i did. hold up, here's how awesome this shit REALLY was: he was playing little dragon in the car. dudes with good taste in music seriously could walk me on a fucking LEASH. nothing is better than someone who either 1 let's you pick everything on the radio or 2 already has everything awesome that you listen to. GIANT MUSCIAL BONER. no one with my history can believe in any sort of god who isn't a raging, vengeful, multi-tentacled alien full of hate, but that night i came pretty close.

it took two weeks for him to mention his "girlfriend." right when i was sucked all the way in. another difference between men and the ladies: if a girl has a boyfriend she can barely fucking introduce herself to you without name-dropping his dumb ass. "hi my name is amy nice to meet you i've heard a lot about you the weather sure is nice today my boyfriend loves this restaurant did you know i have a boyfriend his name is peter boyfriend." ALL IN ONE GODDAMNED BREATH. you practically have to pry it out of a dude. i'm not playing. he could be literally clearing the pantyhose and bobby pins and half-used lipsticks off the car seat when he comes to pick you up, and you'd still have to say, "are you dating someone, OR WHAT?"

and it was totally random. like, in some random conversation he was all, "my girlfriend blah blah blah. want to go out for cheeseburgers?" and i was FLOORED, because i never see shit like that coming. i'd never even considered it. how had he been spending so much time with me? is he dating the most doormatiest doormat in the history of cheap accent rugs?! or did he just show her my picture and say, "see? NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT." what a shitbag. i wasn't heartbroken, because i knew that if a dude like that was interested in me for real he was probably a cuckold or stricken with herpes or whatever, but i was surprised nonetheless. and that's the shitty thing about being bro'd: most of the time you never see it coming. and then you totally feel like a fucking asshole, especially if you tried to kiss him or casually rest your hand near his groin in a dark movie theater. and sometimes you don't even know when you've fucking been bro'd. alas, a little cheat sheet.

if a dude regularly asks you to hang out with him and a bunch of his male friends, bitch you just got bro'd. i know it's easy to think that maybe he's showing you off to his pals, but dudes who want to fuck you know that SO WILL EVERYONE ELSE. and no lion is going to drop a zebra carcass smack in the middle of a circle of hyenas. he's going to tear its heart out and then drag it to his hiding place. so if that guy is always inviting you to tailgate with his fraternity brothers, i'm sorry. THAT IS NOT YOUR BOYFRIEND.

if a dude has spent a lot of time with you despite the fact that he has a ladyfriend sulking at home, bitch you just got bro'd. he's not leaving, GURL. whatever you provide that that ho doesn't is good enough for him, and why rock the boat when he can have his cake and eat it, too? no matter how many late-night talks you have or candle lit meals you share, he's still going to go home and bang the shit out of that other broad. and then call you afterward to complain to you about how she's such a bitch and yelled at him about the electric bill. THAT IS SOMEONE ELSE'S BOYFRIEND.

if a dude is doing all the boyfriend stuff except putting it in your butt, bitch you just got bro'd. oh, i know. he's opening doors and pulling out chairs and helping you into your coat. believe me, I KNOW. romantic gestures up the butt: flowers on your birthday, bottles of jo malone at christmas, expensive dinners just because, all of which are followed by absolutely zero physical contact. if you're a month in and he's still not trying to get his dick sucked in the back of a cab, you might just need to put your match.com profile back up. maybe he isn't gay, and if not then either you are a hideous, fire-breathing monster or he was chemically castrated in prison. seriously, though, THAT DUDE PROBABLY HAS A BOYFRIEND.

this is by no means an exhaustive list. BUT it'll give you some shit to think about the next time you're about to wax your legs and deep condition your hair to go "hang out and watch tv" with some dude at his suggestion. stop it, no need to shake my hand for helping you poor little kittens out. JUST CLAP ME ON THE GODDAMNED SHOULDER.

bitch, you need prozac.

2011-10-26T15:30:00.004-05:00

issue five. i want more sneering on my magazine covers, please. for reals, can't we make some shit called, "bitches with attitudes weekly?" it would just be page after page of menstruating jerkholes who just got cheated on and dumped by a dude with fourteen dollars in his checking account who lives with fourteen roommates in a one bedroom apartment. i get tired of looking at bitches smiling through the pain. sometimes you just have to snarl at motherfuckers.

bitch, you need prozac. my hair just fucking fell out. i started taking new drugs for this rancid cadaver i call a body, and a week later i was pulling clumps out by the handful every time i took a goddamned shower. the top was normal? but underneath my scalp looked like fucking afghanistan. so i called my sister and asked her to come over and cut my hair because she's a total fucking asshole and i knew she'd make fun of me and not let me get away with whining too much, and she most certainly DID NOT. she called me "frankenscalp" and gave me shit for not making the bed, and then i didn't feel so bad about having visible head skin. cara emailed me a bunch of links to speed dating events she wants to "uglyfriend" me to (this again?) and i didn't even click them. i just wrote back NO HAIR NOT ATTRACTIVE REFUSE TO LEAVE THE HOUSE, and resumed my etsy shopping for adorable skull caps. knit me some, plz. anyway, this bitch emailed back some hippie remedies and juice fasts and other shit i am totally not going to do that is supposed to make me happy the natural way, and i thought, "goddamn, i need some friends who get me."

once i was at the GI doctor, this was very early in my treatment of this dreaded IBD, when i still had a shred of hope, and i had a list of questions laura had written for me to ask him about causes and treatments and shit. i am incredibly lazy when it comes to that sort of thing. i mean, this was like two weeks after he had just removed some of my small intestines THROUGH MY MOUTH, and after some shit like that it's really hard to care about anyfuckingthing. okay, so one of the things she'd written was "do probiotics help? are there any natural remedies?" this dude smiled politely at me while listening to this, and i could tell from the smirk beginning to appear on his face the answer was a resounding "NO." he was like, "i believe in medicine. you can eat a bunch of yogurt if you like, and if your stomach can tolerate the dairy and your GERD doesn't cause you to vomit all over the place, but i'm going to need you to take all twenty-seven pills i prescribed for you. IDIOT." well, he didn't call me an idiot, but that's how i fucking FELT.

i know there are lots of bitches who can drink tea and do yoga to improve their moods, but i'm not one of them. meditating is boring, and all i can think about is 1 what i'm missing on television and 2 how stupid i must look trying to goddamned MEDITATE. i have the least peaceful brain of any non-schizophrenic you've ever met. i'm either thinking about jokes i should write or shit i hate or shit i don't want to do or nasty shit to say to someone who pissed me off, and all that shit is a full-time mental occupation. plus, if you're calm you don't get to be an asshole, and i am going to cling to this bitter hatred until i drop dead. dead with a prolapsed rectum and a gut full of billions of live acidophilis or whatever.

i'm not one of these happy people. that line of text on my chest says, "i want no one else to succeed," and I TOTALLY FUCKING DON'T. really, i don't. if you're happier or more successful than i am, please rest assured that i hate you. at least a little bit. even if we're friends. i don't know how you kids do it. maybe you're healthy and in love and eating balanced meals and that's why you're smiling so goddamned much, but even when i try it just reads false. so i usually just keep bitching and scowling, lest i make anyone nervous with my cheerfulness. i am having such a tough time emotionally these days, and i can't pinpoint exactly why. seriously, i cried 142 times this week. ONCE WHILE WATCHING THE KARDASHIAN WEDDING. like, real tears! i'm obviously about to have a nervous breakdown.

PLUS, THE COSMO HAPPINESS QUIZ I JUST TOOK IS TOTALLY WRONG. i don't know, some of my friendships are fucking weird and i'm finding all this misery less and less hilarious, but if i SAY THAT it terrifies people. bitches don't want to listen to my shit when i'm not making them laugh, and i get that, but i have, like, THREE PEOPLE to talk to. and insurance that doesn't cover a fucking shrink. being bummed out is fucking lame, friends. which is why magazines need to come with rx pads and a DEA number. wouldn't that be so great?!

inappropriate crushes! gay men and unavailable dudes are my fucking kryptonite. gay men are perfect; well-mannered, appreciative of a nicely-cut blazer, complimentary to excess: PERFECT. and i know so many, plus i just keep meeting more. they all know exactly what the fuck to say, exactly when not to point out that there is a stripe of mustard on the collar of your blouse, exactly when to freshen your drink, exactly why you need to cry to them on the phone at 3:30 in the goddamned morning. homos are the best of both worlds: gentlemen who look sharp and open doors and smell fantastic, and ladies who will gossip about project runway and sing the soundtrack to "a star is born" and tell you the TRUTH about that questionable dress you just bought. (it makes your ass look weird, girlfriend.) it's virtually impossible not to fall in love with every single one of them. although i stopped hoping a loooooong time ago that i might be able to convinve one to change his mind. did you know they're born gay and that they can't just choose who they want to love? dang, neither did i!

angie is my good friend keely's lesbiwife, and she is the most perfect dude that ever lived. every time i hang out with them i think, "if keely has an unfortunate accident that i don't know anything about, i would totally figure out how to use a dental dam on angie." SHE'S AMAZING. i hung out with her a couple weeks ago eating chicken wings and watching football, and she paid for everything and doesn't talk too much and looks like she plays a mean shortstop on the softball field, and i was like, "i'd go gay for her." but she's taken. i think the appeal of people who already have some asshole warming up the other side of their beds is that they've already been fixed up and cleaned up and taught how to be nice and not be an asshole in public, and then they parade all those years of someone else's hard work past you and it's like, "goddamn it! why am i always late to the party?!"

i have been trying in vain SINCE CHILDHOOD to figure out how to properly deal with swooning over someone who could get me killed, and here is the best formula i could come up with: 1 either never speak to him EVER or 2 kill everyone he knows and leave him no other choice than to devote himself to you. AM I RIGHT?! i read some fruity glamour article wherein some asshole advised this poor woman to write down all of the qualities she admired in some married coworker she wanted to bang and try to find a dude with those qualities, but that's moist. and an awful lot of goddamned work. it's way easier to deprive yourself and churn out some really powerful heartsick poetry or to start poisoning bitches. i'm in if you hoes are. keely better watch herself around me.

fuck rachael ray. i made ONE RECIPE by this whiny bitch. some "single girl pasta" that is supposed to make a dude want to put it in your butt, and the sauce turned out runny and gross and i ended up with a fuckton of shallots i bought specifically to make that garbage and couldn't use for any goddamned thing else. and i know it wasn't my fucking fault. BECAUSE I CAN FUCKING READ.

i don't believe in this "i can't cook" nonsense. i don't cook, because i hate myself too much to invest forty-five minutes in a meal that only i am going to eat, but if i can lure some naive soul into my lair in the hopes of getting his pants off sometimes i'll reward his journey with a meal that i made with my own two hands. that bullshit pasta didn't get me any action AT ALL, but i have a recipe that i make for every dude i've banged since i found it in 2006. and i'm going to share it with you because i care about your vaginas so much.

PURCHASE: a pound of boneless, skinless chicken thighs (i don't believe in having sex with vegetarians), a quart of cream, a can of chicken broth, five medium zuccini, a decent-sized yellow onion, a package of blanched almonds, a bunch of fresh basil.

SHIT YOU SHOULD ALREADY HAVE IN YOUR HOUSE, YOU DIRTBAG: olive oil, coarse salt, coarse pepper, ground cinnamon, curry powder, rice; a big melamine bowl and a deep, heavy-bottomed [insert joke here] cast iron pan. or a wok, but i hate them.

FOREPLAY: 1 bite-size cut the chicken (dark meat tastes better, believe that), put it in the bowl, completely cover all pieces with an equal mix of cinnamon and curry powder, set aside; 2 chop onion (i do big chunks because I AM LAZY), dump it in the pan. pour some oil over, low heat, let them sweat. 3 slice zucchini while the onion is cooking, throw it in the pan when you're done, pour a little more oil over. FUCK MEASURING. if you have eyes, you can see what's too goddamned much. you want a slick pan, not an exxon spill. 4 let the whole thing soften up, 5-8 minutes?, but you still want some crunch. 5 throw in the chicken bits, a little more oil to coat, cook for a few minutes, stirring. 6 when they're whitish and bouncy, ie COOKED A LITTLE FUCKING BIT, pour in all of the cream and, like, half the broth; unless you want it soupier, then you can add more 7 salt and pepper to taste, turn the heat up, let it boil, TURN THAT SHIT DOWN, cook twenty minutes or so until it reduces a little and is thicker 8 make your rice or quinoa or couscous while it cooks 9 when you've decided it's finished, or dude won't stop fucking pestering you with "is it done yet?", add the almonds; i like a LOT of almonds in it, but feel free to be conservative 10 serve, over grain, with some ripped-up fresh basil on top 11 be awesome, look like a rock star.

dude is going to fuck you after this. I'M NOT FUCKING KIDDING. he's going to suck your toes and do all the sensitive shit you like. he will stare into your eyes and compliment your new weave and admire that three pounds you lost, and he might even get up and wash the dishes after he's finished with you in bed. then he's going to tell you that even his MAMA DON'T COOK LIKE THAT, and for two or three weeks, max, he's going to be awesome to you because you fed him and it was delicious. then he'll realize you're a one-trick pony and probably break up with you in a text message. but whatever, YOU'RE WELCOME.

your thighs touch? i don't know what you assholes are expecting from "lifestyle changes," but these jerks never tell you that drinking water and working out more just means that you'll probably be considering plastic surgery you're too fucking broke to get. i was at zumba next to this woman who was really DOING WORK, and during our one-minute break she panted, "stick with it, it works. i lost two hundred pounds." and at first i was like, "DAMN, GURL," then i noticed she was bundled up in a fucking sweatshirt. when i asked why she was wearing that hot ass shit she said, "i have so much loose skin. it's awful." i went right out and bought a package of thick-cut hickory smoked bacon. fuck, health. i mean, seriously?! I GOTTA WORRY ABOUT MY EXTRA SKIN?! this is too much.

let's be for real, at this point it's deck chairs off the goddamned titanic, but if i keep avoiding stinky cheese and meat with the skin on one of these days i might find that one of my parts comes with its own carrying case. gross, man. can't i just eat ice cream and die at thirty-five?!

plushies! my friends are the best. this picture of me dressed as the meanest fucking zebra you've ever seen outside of an african safari is from a non-halloween party my friends threw where they asked everyone to dress up like animals. i'm lazy and unimaginative, so i dug through my closet until i found a zebra-print sweater and then ordered these stupid ears and a tail from amazon. then i just wore regular goddamned clothes. seriously, one day people are going to stop inviting my surly ass to shit.

i'm always salty that magazines suggest "outfits" as a way to spice up an otherwise lackluster sex life. really, seeing this dude who didn't pay the gas bill and hasn't yet cleaned the motherfucking garage like i asked him to in a superman costume is going to make me forget i hate him for long enough to give him a handjob and let him see me in something other than a ratty sweatshirt? yeah, right. and i hate shopping for REGULAR clothes, let alone spending an afternoon getting trussed up in a sexy maid costume or a sexy cop costume or a sexy kitten costume and paying two hundred bucks for some shit that is just going to make me FEEL DUMB and serves no purpose other than to COME OFF is ridiculous. wake me up when i can get a sexy sewer inspector costume or a sexy roadkill cleaner costume or a sexy pig farmer costume. what, you don't want to see me sprawled across your bed dressed as a sexy avian vomitologist? the idea of making sweet love to a sexy monkey caretaker doesn't give you a boner? how about i just wear my normal work clothes and unbutton a couple extra buttons? I'M TOO TIRED FOR ALL THIS BULLSHIT.

that said, i might still have those zebra ears tucked away somewhere. so, um, if you're interested in that sort of thing...HOLLER.

welcome to my nightmare.

let's bang chicks at weight watchers.

2011-10-12T15:09:00.008-05:00

i could be a goddamned hostage negotiator. every sunday when i am doing my shopping for the week at 7-eleven, i don't have any motherfucking children so SHUT UP ASSHOLE, and i make my way around the store, i always set my basket (contents: sunday new york times and chicago tribune, several cans of diet coke, a package of charmin extra strong, rice, two cans of green beans, and maybe an apple from the refrigerated sandwich section if they don't look too busted; same shit, every fucking week) in front of the ice cream case and have some semblance of the following debate between the lazy pig side and the indulgent asshole sides of my brain: piggy "no, bitch, you can't even look at that shit. if you buy that peanut butter cup ice cream you are going to have to do five zumbas, two kickboxing classes, and lift weights four times this week." asshole "what if i just get it and don't eat it?" piggy "is that even possible?! you know you don't have that kind of willpower." asshole "okay, i'll buy it, eat three-quarters of it, then do three zumbas and a kickboxing." piggy "wrong. eat one serving size and do four zumbas and pilates." asshole "half the pint, three zumbas, and an aqua aerobics?!" piggy "DEAL." then i take it home, feel guilty about having zero resistance for creamy frozen treats, and hide it behind the lean cuisines in my freezer until i remember it's there and finish the entire thing standing over the kitchen sink.

today i am wearing pants that are six sizes smaller than the ones i was wearing six fucking weeks ago. so if you made fun of me for doing zumba you can get skull-fucked by a motherfucking grizzly bear, because that shit fucking WORKS. and i've already had bacon twice today, so rest assured that i am not starving myself. anorexia is for people who have never been poor, and i've stood in too many free hot lunch lines to ever pass up a goddamned sandwich. and i hate cocaine, so don't even think i'm doing it the chemical way. plus, that shit is expensive. i really do drag my ass to the ymca five or six times a week and try to follow your mom's feet because she really does have the choreography to "hey senora" totally memorized and i still can't get that hip swivel. every time i get paid i have to go get new pants, because wearing pants that are too big makes you look like a trash collector. this is what i'm learning from the internet when i'm not filling it with blog vomit: 1 everything you wear should be tight and have spandex and 2 push-up bras every day of the week. NO MATTER WHAT THE FUCK YOU LOOK LIKE. let's just be gross and sexy all the fucking time. tight jeans, dirty hippie feet, tits up on your clavicle. life's too goddamned short.

so me and my small pants were hanging at home a couple saturdays ago, and i was standing in my tiny bathroom waiting for the stanky veet i had dripped all over the place to eat through the hair on my legs (seriously, that shit is magical and i'm going to convert you girls from the razor, just NOT TODAY) when my phone rang. i only noticed because i was using it as a timer so that toxic shit wouldn't burn through the top two layers of my fucking skin and start incinerating vital organs and, because i was in a charitable mood, i answered. it was just dumb jeff, and he immediately launched into a long, convoluted story about a whole bunch of shit i don't give a shit about. i love, like, four dudes. i mean, love them enough to be interested in anything they are talking to me about. but even then, if it goes on a second too long, i start to get fucking irritated. "i have to remove my leg hair," i interrupted. "this is why i never answer the goddamned phone." and just as i was about to hang up on him, he asked, "would you come to my weight watchers meeting today?"

i paused, despite the fact that i could feel the thioglicolic acid starting to cook the tender meat on the back of my calf. "weight watchers is for girls," i said. at that moment, smelling my seared leg flesh, helen keller slipped into the bathroom with her knife and fork. "no, i am not going to anything like that. you don't even need to lose weight, you asshole." he fed me some bullshit story about trying to get a handle on his (nonexistent) overeating problem, pretending he had "trouble spots" on his body that could be trimmed a few inches. finally it dawned on me. "YOU ASSHOLE, YOU GO TO WEIGHT WATCHERS TO FUCK SAD FAT CHICKS."

let's start here. know a lot of zaftig broads who kick ass and fuck hella dudes and aren't sad at all. but these are also women who'd be able to spot some asshole with six pack abs trolling a room full of women with a cheesecake problem for the bottom-feeding scumbag he really is. i need to say this shit for the slow girls in the back of the class: if a dude doesn't want to have to use both hands to grab your goddamned ass that's totally cool; it's his fucking choice. but that doesn't make you a piece of shit. you hoist up your fucking saddlebags and go find some dude who thinks you're rad and doesn't mind wiping the sweat off your stomach flab when you switch sex positions, babydoll. don't be all down in the dumps and let opportunists and perverts take advantage of some low self-esteem you're too awesome to have. who is keeping the month count on my celibacy? where are we at now, eighteen months? and I DON'T GIVE A SHIT, because i vowed to stop fucking around with dudes who hate me and don't laugh at my goddamned jokes. let's all promise to only suck dicks who return our emails and think we're the most amazing people ever, okay?

that said, when jeff proposed i tag along to watch him dangle his grade-A beef in the middle of a pack of starving wolverines, all i could say was, "give me twenty minutes to get some pants on."

the meeting was held in this nondescript storefront in a strip mall whose other occupants were a dollar store, a "psychic," and a fried chicken joint. too perfect. jeff looked like he'd just stepped out of the pages of an express men catalog, and i was all, "you really get laid at these fucking things? YOU LOOK SO GAY." so we walked in and i laid eyes on a dude in a goddamned sweater vest and immediately regretted my decision to join him. before i could tell jeff i was going to bail to get my palm read and would meet up with him for some hot wings after the meeting, a stick-thin, incredibly pale woman accosted us at the door with a BIG FAKE SMILE pasted on her face. i hate that, when people smile at you with all of their teeth showing. it's unnerving. she said hello to jeff then turned to me and said, "you're new! what brings you in today?!"

i am one of THE MOST defensive people you will ever meet. i'm sensitive, i'm easily-provoked, i hate absolutely everything, and i scowl a lot. so of course i assumed this bitch was fucking with me. THIS DUDE RIGHT HERE is built like a goddamned adonis, yet i could easily be mistaken for early second trimester and you want to know what brings ME in?! jeff elbowed me in the kidney and i buckled at the knees before i could say something fucked up and rude. she was still standing there expectantly when i recovered, so i said, with a straight face, "well, i'm here because i've got dumps like a truck truck truck. and thighs like what what what. baby move your butt butt butt..." the light of recognition didn't turn on behind her vacant eyes, so i just looked into her blinding white teeth and said, "oh, i'm just here for the food. is it served buffet-style? i brought a bib."

we sat at the back of the room so that i would be less tempted to make a spectacle of myself and could scorn all of these people in relative private. i drank my DIET COKE and silently judged all of the terrible fashion choices in the room. the leader was one of these forty-something dudes who is chubby and soft in a feminine way, and that is a huge turnoff to me, so i couldn't focus on anything he was saying. i get hot for the middle-aged, but i couldn't stop thinking "i bet his mom bought those pants for him at kohl's" and kept getting confused about the new points system he was outlining because i he was wearing athletic socks with dress shoes. when he asked if there were questions my hand shot in the air. "how many points are in an entire pizza?" i asked.

all 1,286 chins in the room turned to glare at me. "you know, what happens if you just can't stop and you eat the whole thing? do i just add up twelve pizza slice points and not eat for three weeks?" THAT IS A REAL QUESTION. if you have one piece of pizza and can happily close the top of the box and put it in your refrigerator until the next day then maybe this is not the blog for you. BITCHES GOTTA EAT.

to his credit, he flipped through some of the papers on his lectern, ostensibly searching for an answer while i pretended to make notes on all of the introductory materials ol' wooden teeth had thrust upon me at the door. jeff moved his chair away from mine, apologizing with his eyes to all of the ladies holding their collective breath beneath their spanx. finally he gave up and told me to "email someone in corporate," which is a polite way of saying, "fuck you, bitch. do you think i gave up doughnuts to stand here sweating in front of these people while you ask questions that are beyond my scope of knowledge and blatantly goddamned ridiculous?!"

i don't know how other weight watchers meetings go, but at this one they do this thing that can only be described as FULLY-CLOTHED FOOD PORN. this woman up front in an awkwardly-fitting purple sweater dress (why do i remember these stupid details?) stood up and made a tearful confession of having eaten an entire cheesecake over the course of a day. okay, gurl. i get that. and i can't say shit, because 1 i understand how sometimes "just a sliver" and "another little tiny piece" often turn into "holy shit i ate the whole fucking thing and it's not even two o'clock" and 2 I HAVE TAKEN FOOD OUT OF THE GARBAGE BEFORE. and eaten it. everyone has a bottom. but i didn't cry about that shit, and especially not in front of a room full of people who don't fucking know me. i threw it up, tried to find my dignity at the bottome of whatever trough i'd left it in, and NEVER DID THAT SHIT AGAIN. i glanced around the room and saw other people tearing up. even the dudes. gross, man.

sweater vest, who bore a striking resemblance to carlton from "the fresh prince," told a story about demolishing a chocolate cake that was so sexual and erotic that i broke out in a nervous, titillated sweat. there were stories of food channel marathons, food hidden in glove compartments, strange binges, unhealthy obsessions with calorie counting, and one woman whose husband left after an argument about a SANDWICH. i didn't know whether to hug these people or run screaming for fear that close proximity to my succulent flesh might encourage one to take a bite out of my soft meat. man, i was uncomfortable. and i can adapt like a motherfucker, but still. these people were next fucking level. i could feel the stress diarrhea rumbling through my large intestine.

carlton made a beeline for me as soon as the meeting ended. "i know it can be difficult when you're new to the program," he said. "if you'd like to get together sometime i can help you figure out the point calculations? i'm an accountant, so i'm pretty good with numbers." maybe if i had a 1099 that needed filing that would be interesting to me, but aren't we talking about the made-up point value of soft-serve yogurt or whatever?

unless this dude thinks i'm retarded and CANNOT COUNT TO TWENTY-MOTHERFUCKING-SEVEN, he's obviously trying to schedule some sort of date. i couldn't get the image of him sticking his dick in a three-layer devil's food cake out of my fucking skull. "i hate healthy eating," i said, picturing him naked with chocolate frosting smeared on his little manboobs, flaccid penis bobbling around with moist cake crumbs clinging to it.

across the room jeff was obviously telling sandwich lady something HILARIOUS, because she was throwing her head back in that fake way people do that really means, "i would let you porn-star come on my face if you wanted to." god, i hate witnessing that stupid game bitches play when they're going to fuck each other. all that arm-touching and pretending someone stupid is interesting, BLARF. and i know you're thinking, "this hating-ass bitch is probably jealous." YOU ARE CORRECT. but not because i want to throw a bone jeff's way (i know all of that dude's dirty secrets, and i've seen him CRY BEFORE, and once you've crossed that bridge it's pretty much over, kittens), mostly because whenever there is fawning to be done, I WANT IT TO BE DONE OVER ME. i'm so great! i need some attention! just not by cakedudes who jerk off to old issues of saveur. carlton put his business card in my face, distracting me from the jeff and sandwich lady seduction dance. he glanced down at the picture of a healthy serving of green grapes that i'd turned into a dozen sets of cocks and balls and said, "call me if you ever need help figuring out a serving of pasta!" my life: SO DUMB.

when i've had enough i've had E-GODDAMNED-NOUGH, and i busted up that circle jerk of women surrounding jeff and told him to go get the fucking car. he handed me his phone, which was so hot from all of the frantic contact storage that i fucking JUMPED at its touch, and turned to hug the four women who didn't even care that he was going to bang and NEVER FUCKING CALL every single one of them. this asshole.

as i was waiting by the door for him to run across the parking lot purple dress came up to me and introduced herself. "i was so surprised to find out that you and that handsome man aren't a couple!" she lied. "seriously, girl, how could you let a fine ass piece of delicious chocolate like that slip through your fingers?!"

chocolate fine ass (pffft) pulled his car up and leaned on the horn like the giant cocksucker he is. i could see him drumming his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. i could play nice and be a sweet little wingman but COME ON. fuck him! "that dude has herpes," i said solemnly. "you're better off fucking that cheesecake."

pubic hair is gross, apparently.

2011-10-05T15:12:00.006-05:00

if you are unfortunate enough to have been born with a vagina, and you would like to attract the positive attention of a man, here is a list of what you absolutely must do in order to be considered desireable. some of them EVERY SINGLE DAY. hair must be dyed, cut, straightened, relaxed, colored, gently curled, flat ironed, softly waved, lightly tousled yet totally unfussy, cleaned, conditioned, deep conditioned, highlighted, lowlighted, and de-flaked. the whites of your eyes need to be as pure as the driven snow; eyebrows waxed and plucked and threaded, not so thick as to appear manly, yet not so fine that you could use them to slice deli meats; creams and serums for the crows feet, laugh lines, dark circles, and bags; them skinny lashes need prescription eyelash grower, not to mention that scary-looking curler, lash glue with which to affix giant doll-like falsies, and nineteen coats of mascara; contact lenses, because glasses are for homely broads; besides, how else are we going to see your liquid-pencil liner, lash-to-brow base shadow, the lash-to-crease eyeliner shadow, and the brow arch highlighter shadow with those stupid specs on, poindexter?!

your skin is gross, so wash it. BUT NOT WITH SOAP, stupid! you need a gentle cleanser in the morning; a toner, a serum, an oil-free moisturizer, an eye cream, and a broad-spectrum UVA-UVB sunscreen during the day; an exfoliator, a toner, a serum, a free radical fighting moisturizer, undereye gel, a wrinkle cream, some antioxidant shit, something with peptides, and another thing to regenerate cell turnover while you sleep. when you get up you need to do a tightening mask, then a moisturizing masque, then a deep pore-cleansing MASK, then a detoxifying MASQUE. oh shit, you need to use zit cream, and acne wash, and blemish gel, and pimple solution. we gotta get you a primer. and a liquid foundation. and a loose powder. and some pressed powder. and how about some blot powder? a pore corrector? a line refiner? dang, gurl, your shitty face is a PROBLEM. and, goddamn it, we're going to SOLVE IT. but first you need a facelift. and a chemical peel. and some microdermabrasion. and while you're under maybe they could lift your jowls up a taste? seriously, just a smidge. mustache? wax it, or consider laser hair removal, you hirsute troll. your cheeks need to be permanently set to "rosy," and imma need you to maintain a sun-kissed glow, even in the middle of january. so get on that.

don't even think about touching me with those hands until they've been manicured, shaved, and dipped in parrafin for an hour. you also should get rid of those gnarly age spots. (i have a cream that will bleach those paws right up, don't worry.) your mouth needs some work, too. straight, white teeth (stop smoking and drinking wine, why don't you?) that have been brushed at least nine times today lest you offend anyone with that breath. mix some coarse salt with almond oil (or is it superfine sugar with mineral oil?!) to make an exfoliator for your lips, which need to be moisturized and painted a subtle shade of tramp. unless i want to bang you, which means they should be blood red. but if you're trying to get hired then they should be nude. and lined in a pencil that matches so you don't look like a chola. unless you're going for that; i hear nars was putting bitches on the runway with, like, grape liner and a semi-nude sheer beige stain. you need that, OBVIOUSLY. your crepe-y neck vagina is totally grossing me out, so you should enlist the help of a surgeon. or that new la prairie $975 neck cream. it's made from the virgin mary's placenta, with some cavier and crushed diamonds mixed in. it is amazing, omg. YOU NEED THAT.

your tits need to sit up higher. and sag less. and be less like normal human tits. have you ever seen a fully-inflated beach ball? THAT'S what they should look like. and, really, they need to be pinned right up under your chin, which hopefully you remembered to pluck before you left the house this morning. can't you do something to make them more symmetrical? think more "titty balls" and less "titty sacks." and your areolas need to look like perfect slices of pepperoni. man, your whole body is horrifying. lose some weight, and tone up them thighs. because you need to be skinny. but you also need to have a gigantic rock-hard plastic booty. like...juicy, but not too juicy. make sure your anus is bleached and that all of the errant hair has been ripped out of your labia and butthole. ps, GET THESE: tiny waist, thin (BUT NOT MUSCULAR) arms, slender hairless calves, tiny ankles, and little itsy bitsy doll feet.

there is a piece in the new allure magazine (salma hayek and her boobs are on the cover) about new procedures women are undergoing to fix their fucked up, terrible, horrible, irreparable, dirty rotten stinking EYELASHES. who knew that something so tiny could cause your face so many problems?! gasp, THE HORROR. anyway, there's one called lashdip during which a bitch uses a little brush to paint a basecoat, semipermanent mascara, and shiny topcoat on each lash individually before drying them with a fan. at the cost of an hour and a half of your time, and TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS of your money. at home you're required to paint on a topcoat every three days, and at three weeks you have to go into the salon for a touch-up.

tell me i'm not the only one that shocked the shit out of. PLEASE. for real, imma need you all to reassure me that you read that and were all, "that shit is CRAY," not "what salon do they do that shit at?!" because i can get down for the justification of most beauty things, but come on. don't we lose nine hundred goddamned eyelashes a week? it's not enough that a tube of diorshow costs almost thirty bucks?! i gotta spend TWO HUNDRED on toxic eyelash paint?! gross. i don't give a fuck what anyone does with her body. SERIOUSLY, I DON'T. especially not if it's by choice (and not suggestion). and i try not to judge too harshly considering that i have thousands of dollars' worth of fancy cosmetics that i never fucking use littering my tiny apartment. now, despite my vehement support of your choices, would i rather you girls limit yourselves to the things i'm willing to do so i don't look like such a slovenly asshole? well, yes. yes, i would.

between readers at the sunday night sex show robyn and i answer anonymous questions submitted by our adorable audience about love, sex, and the gross dripping parts of the human anatomy. we get all kinds of shit: how can i introduce bdsm into my current relationship? i'm polyamorous but my partner isn't interested, can i change her mind? do you have any tips for how to make a woman ejaculate during orgasm? why is my boyfriend always asking for a threesome?! every single month, some furry little beaver in the audience submits some derivative of the "why should i have to shave my pubic hair if he gets to keep his gnarly hipster beard?"relationship query, and every single month my answer is the goddamned same, "FUCK HIM. YOU DON'T." revolutionary advice this is not. as with any optional feature not included on the cheap model, if you want power windows and door locks: YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR THEM SHITS.

i have the best gynecologist ever. seriously. he's a mellow, straightforward, no bullshit type of dude who laughs at my jokes and doesn't talk about a whole lot of shit i don't want to hear about. he explained to me in vivid detail (WITH A STRAIGHT FACE) how to properly use a dental dam when i asked, "how do i protect myself from throatarrhea if i want to put my tongue on some hot dude's butthole?" he also told me that if i ever "experiment" with a lady (i'm too old to call it that, yes?) that i'd have to wear latex gloves to keep her period from seeping into my cuticles just in case she was carrying around the old hiv. he's fucking smart, man. and he's not a judgmental fucking asshole. i went in for a nasty bite wound on a place one ordinarily would not be brutally bit, and when i tried to be all, "um, yeah, this dog at work got loose and attacked me. my vagina smells like sirloin, i guess." he was like, "i don't care about your sex life. let's get you some antibiotic cream." WHAT A PEACH. plus, he brings his dogs to our hospital and it isn't even weird. as a matter of fact, it's quite refreshing to have a conversation with him when he isn't elbow deep in my vagina.

a couple years ago i had some cancer on my cervix. seriously, i am some kind of goddamned mutant between my ribcage and my pelvis, HOLY FUCKING SHIT. between this charred wasteland of intestinal tissue and my uterus that does not function in any way whatsoever, i really got the short end of the biological stick. anyway, while he was down there scraping and cutting it out (yum) i asked, "hey listen, while you're down there, can i ask you a sensitive question? do you think my bush is too much? should i take a lesbian to home depot and get some sort of garden utensil to handle that action?" this dude never misses a beat. "well, [scrape scrape scrape] your vagina is similar to a self-cleaning oven. or a cat. it takes care of itself, [cut cut scrape] and that hair serves a very important function. [scrape scrape] the length of your pubic hair should be whatever you're comfortable with. [scrapity scrape scrape] there is no right or wrong amount." he brushed it away from my knees and wiped his sweaty brow with it before tying it in a bow. "all done! and so absorbent!" (he might not have said that. especially not with that level of enthusiasm.) then i went home to "research" cervical cancer on in the cosmo health section (i am neither 1 smart enough or 2 patient enough to wade through a bunch of medical mumbo jumbo; I JUST NEED TO KNOW IF I'M GOING TO DIE, plz) and wait for my test results, excited at the prospect of losing SO MUCH WEIGHT from chemotherapy.

so i didn't die. which is too fucking bad. life is so long and so hard and do you know that i have to wear a goddamned diaper sometimes? get back to me when you figure out what to live for after you've shit yourself publicly in front of a hot dude. and listen, i have a MOTHERFUCKER of an "i have three months to live" to-do list. a lot of people better hope i die unexpedtedly in my sleep, because if i get any warning at all i'm going thelma and louise on some bitches. and you can tell by the damp patch of moss in my pants that i really took that pubic hair business to heart. "this sabre-toothed tiger takes care of HERSELF," i haughtily announce when unfastening my diaper prior to sexual activity. "so if you don't like a little nature's floss in your teeth, you can beat it up out of here."

my problem with maintenance demands, in general, is that they are often incredibly one-sided. and OBNOXIOUSLY SPECIFIC. i'm not talking your basic cleanliness and lily-gilding; should you brush your teeth and clip your fingernails before trying to convince someone to get into a reverse cowgirl situation with you? ABSOLUTELY. i mean all of the extra, expensive, time-consuming, painful shit: the plucking and waxing and scraping and filing and bleaching and lasering and pinching and pushing and pulling and ironing and chemically altering. that shit is like a part-time fucking job, and for what? a dude with crusty eye boogers who made you split a thirty dollar check?! yeah fucking right.

i got a brazilian wax ONE TIME. one excruciatingly painful time, at the request of a dude whom i sort of wanted to impress. a dude with manicured hands, no less. i lay on a table holding my skin taut while a tiny eastern european woman stood sweating over me spreading burning hot wax on my taint before using both hands to apply a strip of cloth and rip it from my goddamned skin. FOR AN HOUR. i walked around for three days feeling like my most sensitive parts had been dipped in a vat of boiling oil. i didn't feel more attractive, i didn't feel more womanly, i didn't feel sexier. i mostly just felt SALTY that i had spent all this money to end up with a pincushion vagina for a random booty call that never turned into anything more serious.

which brings us around to my other gripe: making a shit ton of arduous ladychanges with no guarantee of a return on that investment. like, i'll rip all of the hair out of my armpits if i know you can fuck good and won't try to sneak it in the back door. or i'll learn to walk in platform heels if you can promise me you won't bore me half to death while talking my ear off. can we trade a pedicure for a chest hair trim? an anal bleach for a nasal and eyebrow wax? throw in an ear hair trim and i might even consider snipping my butt hairs. and look, i understand that there are women for whom these tasks are absolutely no problem whatsoever. somehow you manage to poke and prod and truss yourselves up like a christmas ham and not become a festering boil of prettified resentment, and to you i say, GOOD JOB, SISTER. but, unless your name is halle berry and you get paid millions of dollars to walk around with your shit peeling and on fire, you're probably a little bit crispy that you've put in all this work for a dude with lint in his beard and balls of deodorant stuck in his nappy armpits.

that dude could've banged me with a titanium light sabre platinum-plated penis and it still wouldn't have made the shit worth it. to me, your regular penis for my war-torn, overheated, scalded, torched, burnt-up vertical smile is not a goddamned equal exchange. imma need you to holler at a penis extension, some hair plugs, six pack abs, a tight fucking ass, and toenails that aren't as thick as cardboard. plus some other shit i haven't thought of, yet. give me a minute, i'll figure something out.

here's what i propose we do. you girls should get together all of your magazines and bring them to my house. helen will make snacks, and we can all sit in my bed with notebooks and crayons and make a two-sided list. on one side: beauty shit you are willing to do. and on the other: rewards you get for doing them. because that really is the heart of the fucking problem. if i have to stand in a dry tub going at my bush with a beard trimmer for fifteen fucking minutes for a person who can hardly be bothered to notice, then i'm going to give MYSELF a special unsexy treat. like a new pair of crocs, that i get to wear with slipper socks. OUTSIDE. see? that makes me feel better already. let's try another one. if i [horrible beauty ritual], then i get to [disgusting, unsexy thing that makes you feel really fucking good].

so. if i wax my eyebrows and upper lip, then i get to eat bologna and cheese sandwiches in my underwear while watching gossip girl. or, if i get a pedicure and laser my chin hair, then i get to sit in the bathtub and cry while listening to fiona apple. AND SO ON. it's like giving a kindergartner a gold star. or a good dog a treat. plus, you ain't gotta resent nobody. i might have just solved female depression. FOR REAL. now pass me that at-home wax kit while i treat myself to some tori amos and a bowl of brownie batter.

ps, go give my other blog some love. xx

HOLY SHIT, I AM HAVING A BABY.

2011-09-22T14:46:00.004-05:00

if you squint really hard you might be able to just make out his tiny little embryo penis. JUST KIDDING, BITCH. the only things i might have floating around my belly are a couple tacos and five or six extra-strength advil. oh, and maybe a split of champagne. anyway, i had to get your goddamned attention somehow. i can't fucking compete with redtube and espn.com and scarlet johansson's nipples and shit without employing some trickery, but now that i've got you here, please be advised that I AM DOING A NEW BLOG. on the real. my friend ian belknap and i rubbed our megabytes together and are proudly giving birth to the most amazingly hilarious advice column since the dawn of man. best internet baby ever. I'M NOT SHITTING YOU.

from ian's blog: Ian Belknap is a writer/performer living in Chicago. Currently he serves as the Dean of Mean at The Paper Machete, the Minister of Veracity for The Encylopedia Show , and Host and Overlord of WRITE CLUB.

His highly regarded live memoir show Wide Open Beaver Shot of My Heart: A Comedy With a Body Count debuted in the Rhino Theater Fest and was later produced at The Neo-Futurists. He is curator/host of the shows Something Wicked This Way Comes (seven deadly sins-themed monologues), which appeared at Rhino Fest and later at The Garage at Steppenwolf, and Ian's Dog & Pony Show (it's a big world of funny - let's all play nice) which gathered solo performers, improv, sketch, and stand-up in a comedy mashup. He used to be an actor, but did not find this sufficiently interesting to continue with it. He used to be a stand-up comedian, but had not the patience for it.

i don't have anything nearly as fancy as that asshole's "about me," so some of this is from my now-defunct match.com profile: samantha irby is a shithead who writes a blog for jerks called "bitches gotta eat." she isn't particularly smart or talented but has somehow fooled the ENTIRE INTERNET into reading her ridiculous and hateful, yet somehow (bowel) moving and hilarious, blog vomit. samantha is a lazy, whining complainer who will most likely never find a husband because she would rather eat cookie dough and watch sons of anarchy than give some undeserving shitstain a blowjob, but that hasn't stopped her from writing "loves giving head" in the paragraph section of this application to trick you into asking her out on a date. she's mean, she talks a lot of shit, and she will totally put visine in your dinner if you mouth off to her too goddamned much. so like i said, she writes a dumb blog (yawn), performs "comedy" all over chicago (just the north side, really), and is the inimitable co-host of the sunday night sex show. which is a literary reading series (nerd) about fucking (YAY). also, she smells really fucking good ALL THE TIME. seriously. next time you're near her get close.

irbyandian.com is going to be amazing, but give us a few weeks before you decide you hate it and shit. as a matter of fact, bookmark it in case you forget. and keep checking it. like, every day. even if you only have a minute. so PLEASE PLEASE PRETTY PLEASE go read our new blog, then PRETTY PLEASE PLEASE WITH SUGAR AND METHAMPHETAMINES go like our new facebook page, and i promise the shit won't fucking suck and will be totally awesome and hilarious. and do you think you could "follow" it, too? my fragile ego can't handle having zero followers. and don't worry, imma still post shit here once a week. I SWEAR TO GOD. i won't even fake it and halfass some bullshit. as a matter of fact, i might even double the testicles just to show you how much i fucking care. love you, now go read my new shit.

ps, if you love ian more than you love me I WILL KILL MYSELF. don't comment on his posts more than you comment on mine. i mean, i guess you can. just know that you will be killing me slowly. from the inside.

let's just be lesbians.

2011-09-21T15:50:00.002-05:00

issue four. here's why i refuse to worry about medicare and social security, despite the fact that i'll probably need both within the next five years: my end of life plan involves settling down in a progressive community with a retired wnba forward and maybe a small dog who doesn't require a whole lot of exercise or attention. SERIOUSLY. at this point, i'm not going the fuck back to school. as the gap between what i'm into and what "the kids" are into continues to widen, i become less and less convinced that one day i'm going to feel like dragging a desk across a linoleum floor to make a circle with a bunch of 19-year-olds so that we might hold hands and discuss the ilead. i already know that i want to spend my old age eating hot wings and sobbing through lifetime movies, and do i really need a college degree to do that? all of my suburban white friends are probably shaking their heads over their plates of wilted arugula and cold beet soup, but i have to be realistic up in here. i work fifty to sixty hours a week, and when i was going to community college in addition to this full time fucking job i would get home and literally fall asleep with my head in the algebra book after leaving the class that let out at nine. NINE IN THE EVENING. then i'd get up and try to figure out integers or some shit while riding the goddamned train to work at seven in the morning. homeless dudes would be standing over me rubbing their crusty testicles while correcting my work. "you forgot to carry the one, babygirl." KILL ME, PLZ.

i don't know how you bitches do it. magazines are always full of some uplifting trifle about a bitch with a crack addiction and nineteen fatherless children who lived in a paper bag while prostituting her way through princeton, and i'm always stunned. if i get a motherfucking hangnail i'm half an hour late to work and spend the whole day whining about how much it hurts, so i simply CANNOT COMPREHEND how these bootstrap broads pull it together and earn a masters degree while eating one can of soup a week and buying their bras from walgreens. and i guess that's why my 401k will forever have $37 in it, because the minute shit gets difficult and complicated i quit fucking doing it. i like to sleep a lot and go to big star twice a week, and if it takes remaining a goddamned idiot to do that, then that's what imma have to do.

HEY GIRL. every time i see a cialis commercial i think, "oh my fucking GOD, i bet the last thing that old broad wants to do is wait for that old dude to finish raking those leaves while his boner pill kicks in." isn't the sweet shit about getting old that you don't have to do that shit anymore?! you know she would rather be somewhere with a light pink sweater draped over her shoulders and a pair of magnifying glasses dangling from a chain to nestle in her bosom watching daytime television, not rolling down her knee-high beige stockings while waiting for arthur to turn off fox news long enough to remove his oxygen mask and bang her for 45 strong, hard seconds.

sooner or later every installment of your favorite vagina rag is going to have a section called, "have you gone gay yet?" or give you a step-by-step guide to transitioning off the penis. these dudes are just doing too much. you know i revel in other people's misery, and i've had SO MANY terrible conversations lately with my lady friends who are still climbing back into the dating ring after being TKO'd over and over and over again. ambiguity, assholery, dickballism, YUCK. and even the positive stories from the fucking frontlines are tempered with, "well he hasn't been an asshole...YET." being on the sidelines is just brutal because, despite this hardened exterior, I'M A SENSITIVE FUCKING PERSON. listening to these poor girls crying because a dude dumped her over breakfast cereal (true story men are shit die die DIE) makes me want to cry, too. women all over the country are sobbing on one another's padded shoulders about all of the dumb shit their men are unnecessarily putting them through. and it's inevitable, sooner or later all that commiseration is going to turn into a hand-holding trip to home depot. to pick out heated floor tiles.

i hate talking, though. i like emailing and texting, and if i could only express my love for a person through smiley and heart emoticons i could die happy. i'm not fucking kidding. and that's why i keep my penis hopes alive, because BITCHES GOTTA TALK.

when sarah and i were roommates i would come home every night and before i could even get my MOTHERFUCKING COAT OFF it was, "how was your day? are you tired? did you go anywhere? did you see anyone? how was work? how is everyone at work? did you do a lot of work? were you busy at work? why didn't you answer when i called you at work? are you hungry? do you want pasta? can i get you some advil? do you want a cocktail? what should we watch on tv tonight? is that what you wore to work? what happened to that red shirt? did you feed the cats this morning? is this milk in here spoiled? did you vacuum last weekend? why was your toothbrush in the sink when i got home? do you like this weather? did you put gas in the car? did you see that ginger snaps are on sale at dominicks? do you want me to get you some when i go there? why do you still have your shoes on? aren't you going to take your jacket off? when are you going to put those books away like i asked you to? why did you leave this laundry in the dining room? have you taken the recycling out? samantha irby, WHY DO YOU STILL HAVE YOUR COAT ON IN THIS HOUSE?!"

and i would stand there in the hallway in stone silence, THOROUGHLY DEFEATED, thumbing through my mail that she already "accidentally" opened, getting bludgeoned over the head by questions i had no cognitive ability to answer. because i worked all goddamned day, and all i wanted to do was come the fuck home, sit in the goddamned bathtub for twenty minutes, and then EAT THE BIG PIECE OF CHICKEN. i wouldn't speak, i would just go sit in the bathroom while she talked at the back of my head. and before long i'd hear little padded footsteps outside the door. "well, since you're being so quiet, i'm just going to tell you about my day. traffic was terrible, dunkin donuts gave me a CORN muffin instead of a BLUEBERRY muffin and i was SO MAD when i got to work it totally ruined my day, none of the kids did their homework and they all failed the test, the salad i took for lunch was spoiled and i left the low-fat vinaigrette on the counter, my check engine light came on, and ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME WHILE I AM TALKING TO YOU?"

i'd silently take my bath to the soundtrack of what was on the car radio when she left school, brush my teeth while listening to how busy whole foods was and she only stopped there to get that quinoa salad because SAM LIKES IT and she could make me the same thing for half the money why do you have to be so picky, put on my pajamas while she explained, yet again, why i shouldn't soak the cast iron pans with dish soap and hasn't she already told me that five times and if i'm not going to do it right, why bother doing it at all?! and finally, two hours after walking into the house i pay half the money for, my supposed sanctuary, it's so late and my eardrums are so abused that i'm not hungry anymore, i'm not thirsty anymore, all i want to do is get the fuck away from the sound of this asshole's voice. because i love her to pieces and everything, but if she says one more motherfucking word to me I AM GOING TO CHOKE THE SHIT OUT OF THIS BITCH.

please tell me how you mancakes tolerate it. not that any of you deserves a medal, but i can't fathom putting up with all of that every day. sarah and i lived together for three years, but i at least could shut my door and throw myself across the bed and put my headphones on. it was like she spent all day thinking about ways to chap every bit of skin off my ass. i don't know how her students learned any biology, because i'm convinced she sat at her desk all day every day writing a list called "how sam is ruining my life." she'd get herself all lathered up during the commute home, and the minute she heard my key in the lock every evening she'd step away from whatever dinner she was making me (pro), and light into me about how i left a knife out and hadn't given the plants enough water (MOTHERFUCKING CON). and, by the way, do towels just put fold themselves?! holy fucking shit, give a guy a BREAK. they lure you in with a homecooked meal, and as soon as you take your shoes off, BAM. nag nag bitch bitch nag. we just had a fight a couple weeks ago during which she sent me TWELVE CONSECUTIVE TEXTS. TWELVE. EACH ONE CONTAINING THE MAXIMUM 160 CHARACTERS. and i responded to that onslaught with one word, to which she text-shouted "IS THAT ALL YOU HAVE TO SAY FOR YOURSELF?!" sigh. i don't know if i can do it, man. maybe i'll have to wait until after i go deaf. AND BLIND.

let's fuck while balancing on a tightrope over a volcano. here is a REAL LIFE example of the position of the day: THE PASSION PROPELLER. your man lies on top of you and enters you traditional missionary style, but then YOWZA! he starts doing a 360-degree spin, all the while keeping his penis deep inside you. as he's rotating and thrusting, help guide him around your body the way a propeller would spin around the top of a helicopter. make sure to lift his legs when they swing around over your head. omg, IF YOU COULD SEE MY FACE RIGHT NOW. you bitches are not doing this. are you?! because if you are it's obvious i have to retire my vagina as of yesterday. i never took physics in high school because i was too busy playing in the marching band and singing in the goddamned choir (jesus, i'm the most winningest winner), but i know some smart people who did. and i'm sure any one of those nerds could draw a diagram and shit to demonstrate how this is impossible for anyone without "jenna" or "jameson" in her name. first thing, dude needs to have a MONSTER PENIS. not even regular big, i'm talking firehose-length, beer can-width, unhinge your jaw enormous. and those horse dicks aren't worth the trouble, believe me. because 1 chafing 2 painfully rearranging my slowly digesting dinner 3 he'd never get into anything like this anyway, because those dudes are ALL convinced that all that is required of them is to SHOW UP. i'd rather let a dude with a tootsie roll midgie shove a lightbulb up my asshole than suffer through another fledgling wannabe porn star congratulating himself with every stroke. BORING.

okay. so you are on your back, helping to spin this dude's entire body weight atop yours. PROPELLING, as it were. even if his penis wasn't curving in an awkward direction and he didn't have a gut that was sweatily mashing against yours, unless you have kegel muscles built like fort knox, HE IS SLIPPING OUT. especially if you're wet, which you should be, because listening to this dude complain about his fantasy football roster over the entree you two just split at chili's was TOTALLY SEXY. so then it goes something like this: 1 you're sweating 2 he's sweating 3 your meat suite is slippery 4 you shouldn't have eaten so many beans at dinner, OMG 5 his slightly below average length penis is barely in to begin with, and after a quarter turn is out completely 6 was that the condom coming off? what is that on your leg?! 7 his butt is in your face 8 HE JUST KICKED YOU IN THE HEAD 9 he's too heavy to turn, you should really do some biceps curls 10 you're dry now 11 ouch! watch the elbow! 12 his knee is crushing your left breast 13 he's soft, and sportscenter is about to come on 14 you push him off and get up to catch your breath and wash off the lube that is now smeared everywhere but your sexy parts 15 he calls you a cab and gives you ten bucks, which makes you feel like a prostitute, but your salty because it takes twenty to get to your apartment 16 at home you order a pizza then masturbate to the first twilight movie while the cat sleeps next to you on the couch 17 life is totally fucking stupid.

LET'S JUST BE GODDAMNED LESBIANS.

thank god my sabre-tooth tiger coat is back in style. my favorite, FAVORITE magazine thing is the "we let a clueless celebrity pick out an outfit for you." or, even better, the ubiquitous celebrity STYLISTS, who are rapidly becoming more famous than the zombie mannequins they hang expensive clothes on. i was flipping through a glossy fashion spread nibbling on some bald eagle and trying to figure out what would go best with my panda skin leggings and sea turtle boots when i happened upon a feature put together by a stylist entitled (something like) "how to have style, without even trying!" last time i checked, wasn't NOT EVEN TRYING a style? i've been dressing that way for years! anyway, there was the usual spread of skinny jeans paired with fat sweaters, maxi dresses to hide your bloat while you're wearing a maxi pad, and there in the "curvy" section, was a goddamned shiny pink vinyl trenchcoat. "a fat bitch would look like a beanbag chair outside in that shit," i said to helen keller, who surveyed my inside pants with a sneer and said, "UPGRADE." what a little jerk.

seriously, though, i'm over this whole "everyone can dress like lady gaga" thing we're going through as a nation. can't we just wear pants and shirts and sometimes a dress if it's not so hot that your touching thighs will burst into flame? i like for celebrities to look like celebrities, and for poor people next to me on the bus not to think they're kim goddamned kardashian.

i have a phD in anal sex. i want to know where these sexperts got their degrees. for real, does the university of phoenix have a doctoral program in sucking dicks? seriously, i want to see proof of qualification for the title of SEXPERT. do you just have to bang a lot of dudes or whatever? successfully survive a round or two of chlamydia? not that you need a graduate degree to advise some jerk on how to fuck some dude standing up in a bathroom stall, but i always wonder "how do these bitches know?" and i know you're saying, "awfully rich coming from an assbag who has the nerve to write advice columns," and to that i say, SHUT UP. just kidding, whenever i don't know something i say so. i'm an expert in: tacos, kittens, and DIARRHEA. as a matter of fact, that's what my magazine is going to be called. good luck explaining that one to your overly judgmental letter carrier.

can i borrow your baby? i swear i'm not a pervert or anything, but all the cool people have them and i'm feeling a little bit left out, sitting on my towel in the grass while everyone else is out wading in the kiddie pool. so can i hang out with your baby, please? don't worry, i'm not going to do anything harmful like turn on spongebob or let him have a sip of my natural ice light, i just want to walk around the park pushing him in a stroller while flirting with all of the stay at home dads. by the way, do you maybe also have a dog i could borrow? dudes fucking love dogs. is that cool? AWESOME. okay, so i'm going to wake up around noon and roll through your place maybe 1ish? after you've fed the kid a couple times and changed all his shitty diapers i'm just going to slide through and whisk him off for the few hours of the afternoon that he's calm and happy and pretend he's mine and shit while i try to use him as manbait.

for real, sister. i know a lot of bitches with c-section scars getting banged by hot dudes they don't file a joint tax return with, and I WANT IN ON THAT. but i'm not shitting out any alien spawn, so i'll just borrow yours. except not when he's teething. or tired. or hungry. or at that stage in his life when he just asks "why?" all the time. fucking exhausting. you can go take a yoga class or whatever, or enjoy half an hour of uninterrupted sleep. imma just be over here making your daughter do a fake tapdance on the counter at starbucks and COLLECTING DIGITS. you know you need a shower, bitch. lend me your smiling eight-month-old for an afternoon, and you can take a shit and drink a beer and eat all the rare steak you want until i decide i'm tired of listening to this little asshole cry, which will probably be in ten or fifteen minutes. that's long enough to prove to some handsome passerby that i am caring and gentle and maternal, AM I RIGHT?

magazines always want to tell a bitch how to chart her ovulation, when the knowledge they really need to be dropping is how to look sexy while juggling your best friend's baby and trying to save a hot dude's number in your touchscreen phone. i refuse to believe i can't capitalize on the sexual activity of all of my friends. because how else do i know so many children with STEPfathers?! remember the days when having both "never married" and "childless" on your dating resume was THE MOST AMAZING SHIT EVER?! back then you could take your birth control IN PUBLIC and bitches would applaud you for it; now motherfuckers look at you like you have herpes or something. i'm not kidding, from the ages of 29-42 people are like, "what the fuck is wrong with you?" and move their goddamned chairs away when you tell them you haven't cracked your pelvis in half pushing an infant through it. my typical response is, "YOU SHOULD THANK ME FOR NOT GETTING KNOCKED UP. I WOULD TOTALLY BE SUCKING UP YOUR TAX MONEY ON WELFARE." god, i need to hurry the fuck up and turn 43. all of my friends are goddamned liberals.

so i'm working on this book (for serious) that is essentially about being INCREDIBLY AWESOME yet NOT GETTING FUCKING LAID EVER, and a male (read: idiot) friend of mine responded with this unsolicited response to my endeavor: "hey stupid, your problem is that you aren't warm enough and you make jokes all the time. men want to know that you are nurturing, they want to feel cared for. no one likes laughing that much. you need to go the extra mile to make a man feel wanted. cook for him, let him know he has your support." it's not enough that i had to go to the emergency room after some rhythmless neanderthal face-fucked me so hard once IT BROKE MY NOSE, true story, i also have to let him know that i'll kiss his boo boos and make him a pot roast just for having a penis? GROSS. thinking about that makes me stupid tired. can't we just have sex with murderers on craigslist? can't i just tell a couple jokes and not have to learn how to saute woolly mammoth burgers to make someone fall in love with me? CAN'T WE JUST BE LESBIANS?!

to catch a predator.

2011-09-14T16:54:00.003-05:00

i have an embarrassing confession to make. i am 31 years old, i've had my own place (in some form or another, when i was 19 i temporarily lived in my car) for thirteen years, i have a full-time job, yet for at least two or three months out of the year people pay me to stay in their really nice houses while they are away on vacation. every single time someone who's just met me asks, "bitch, what are you doing this weekend?" and i respond, "HOUSESITTING," that response is met with a blank, open-mouthed stare. then that stare usually turns incredulous. "i thought you had an apartment? aren't you a little OLD to be doing that?"

YES. yes, i am too goddamned old to be packing a bottle of conditioner and a handful of underwear into my big all-purpose black bag-purse and hauling it on the train to stay in some other adult's home. i'm too old to leave three bowls of water and a ripped-open bag of diet cat food on the floor for helen keller while abandoning her to spend two weeks walking a dog that doesn't belong to me. i'm too old to spend three hours trying to figure out the six remotes that operate fancy networks of televisions, cable boxes, tivos, and dvd players; too old to try to figure out where rich people hide their toilet paper and extra kleenex; too old to remember garbage day and recycling day and cleaning lady day; too old to deal with these gangster ass suburban possums and skunks that just don't give a FUCK about rolling up on the porch to fuck with the family dog; too old to be sleeping on pull-out couches in the den or in the lumpy bed of the son that's away at grinnell.

but bitches will pay seventy-five bucks a night for me to water their plants and sign for their UPS packages and watch movies on showtime with their dogs, and I'M NOT TOO OLD FOR THAT. the first time i did it i was living in a tiny apartment with two roommates who never went the fuck to sleep EVER, so when my old boss was like, "want to stay in my house while i'm in mexico for two weeks?" i was wearing her robe and testing the water in the jacuzzi bathtub before she could even finish asking me. i was raised by wolves, remember, and i could not believe that people had so much money just lying around that they would pay me more than i was making in a week to just lie around their palatial homes, eat food i'd never heard of, and make sure the dog didn't starve or die. back then my broke ass was eating packets of lipton soup mix and day-old (read: HALF PRICE) bakery goods every day because my third of the rent and utilities plus gas money was bleeding me dry (seriously, i'm surprised i didn't get scurvy because fresh fruits and vegetables were not in the goddamned budget), so the prospect of living someplace air-conditioned with fresh fucking cheese was AMAZING to me.

since i had my own little shithole to smoke crack and bang hookers in, i had no desire to ruin any of my vacation homes, and word got around that there was an awesome house-stayer-inner on the scene who wouldn't have her friends vomiting in your flower pots and shit. and the requests just started pouring in. in 2003 i shouldn't even have had my own place; i was always staying up in kenilworth, sleeping on some pratesi sheets and bathing in la mer and shit. listen, everything i know about fancy neck cream i learned from staying in some rich woman's house. my mother's beauty secret was rubbing alcohol and vaseline.

last weekend i was housesitting for tom, whom i've been sitting for for eight or nine years. which is a really long time to have a relationship with someone that consists primarily of text messages that read, "september 5-19, are you around?" i've seen tom less than ten times in nine years, which is hilariously awesome. i know his medicine cabinet better than i know him, and that's the beauty of this whole thing. i feel like such a creep, letting myself into someone's empty house and drinking all of his good beer while feeding the dog scraps from his fridge, but that's the way this works. i wish i could do this shit as my real job. it's like being the personal assistant to an inanimate object, and your only boss is a typed sheet of instructions left on the counter next to a set of emergency keys. sometimes your boss is just a post-it and a blank check for the maid. now glance into the office of the prematurely balding sexual harrasser who signs your paychecks and tell me you wouldn't trade him for a list of neighbor numbers and emergency plumbers.

pictured above is tom's yard. and tom's dog sammie, who is sweet and old and wondering why i'm trampling this dude's hydrangeas to take her picture when i could be inside boiling a ham bone for her. sammie's the best because she's low-maintenance and doesn't give a shit about other dogs, which is handy when walking around a neighborhood where no matter what time of night i'm out in my pajamas WAITING FOR THIS DOG TO SHIT, someone else is out there, too, wondering why i didn't put a goddamned bra on. that, by the way, is the reason i don't have a dog of my own, because i refuse to spend my life at the mercy of another creatures bowel movements. like my own aren't enough? people with dogs plan their entire lives around that dog's shit schedule, and i'm not having any part of that.

so some white people are still afraid of black people, gasp. even in obama's post racial utopian america! and last week i was out early one morning with the dog, wearing the least threatening flamingo-print pajama bottoms in the history of plus-sized casual wear, doing the crossword while waiting for sam to poop, and this pale, rickety blonde woman comes out of her house and asks, with a TONE, "excuse me, do you live in this neighborhood?" i may be a little out of touch with the current state of race relations, but is "driving to a white neighborhood to let my dog shit on some cracker's lawn" a new thing my brothers and sisters are doing? has the NAACP sanctioned walk-by poopings?! i obviously haven't been watching enough BET. "i've never seen you before, and i don't want that dog on my grass."

"why, because i'm a lesbian?" i figured why not tap into all of this bitch's latent fears at once? LET'S MAKE THIS SHIT FUN. she immediately retreated back into the house and slammed the door, while i solved a five-letter word for "backbone."

even though we hadn't been on that bitch's grass i dragged sam a few yards east and willed her butthole to loosen up so i could take my nipples back in the goddamned house. FINALLY it came out, like carrot-flecked manna from heaven, and while i was crouching to pick all of it up a shadow appeared over me, and i froze. my first thought was that this bitch had called the police and i'm out here with a handful of dog shit and no keys or identification and i was going to go to a well-appointed suburban jail in FLAMINGO-PRINTED HOUSE PANTS when all i wanted to do was let this old dog do her business before i had to leave for work. i stood up and was confronted by a decent-looking young black dude, not in uniform.

"did you drive your dog over here to take a dump, too?" i asked him.

"leave her alone!" he shouted toward the house, and i caught a flash of curtains closing in my peripheral. "i saw what happened, that old lady is such a bitch. always giving us a hard time. just ignore her," he said to me, before introducing himself. i don't brush my teeth to walk the dog, i don't hike my tits up to walk the dog, i don't wear my glasses to walk the dog, and OF COURSE when i'm out in the street looking like the maid on tom and jerry some hot and sweaty basketball-carrying gigantosaurus rex has to come up and marvel that i do the crossword in pen? WHY IS THIS MY LIFE?! all i could think was, "my mouth tastes like old soup someone spilled on a goodwill sweater." seriously.

"i've never seen you before, do you live around here?" SIGH. dudes never get the message that you'd rather not be talking to them while standing around in your inside bra, and this one just kept asking about my tattoos and the dog and where do i live and i seem really cool while i just stood there paralyzed, mortified to be having a conversation with an attractive human being while outdoors with dusty slave bedhead. AND HOLDING A BAG OF SHIT. and even though the thought of letting someone new get a look at my vertical smile is revolting to me right now, it is ingrained in deep in my ladybrain that when a killer dude is talking to you you at least hear him out for a few minutes. so i listened, and tried not to breathe in his direction.

after a few more minutes sammie was like, "come on asshole, FEED THE DOG is number two on your goddamned list," and i thanked hot and sweaty for running interference between me and old mother hubbard earlier and politely excused myself to go wash the smell of bed and dog breakfast off me. "we should hang out sometime," he called after me. "maybe i can find you at school? what period do you have lunch?"
while i should have been flattered that someone in the tenth grade might mistake me for a person who could occupy the desk opposite his in study hall, all i could think was "bitches in high school have this much errant eyebrow hair?!" this was obviously a young man in the slow class, because i'm pretty sure the last thing anyone who has met my surly, misanthropic ass in real life thinks is "HONORS ALGEBRA." even when i was in high school no one thought i belonged there, scowling and frothing at the mouth as i always was. also, it isn't really much of a compliment when a goddamned KID wants to hang out with you because he thinks you're impressive and cool. kids are impressed by snooki. game, set, match.

but i couldn't say "i'm too old for you." even though i felt like an asshole, i just couldn't bring myself to utter the words "I AM EASILY TWICE YOUR AGE." i tried, i really did. even sam was throwing shade and trying to bark "this bitch is thirty-one!" behind my back. i had let a dude too young for chest hair waste twenty minutes of my life, yet i couldn't say, "i bet your mother and i were classmates."

so instead i said, "i go to a different school." dumb. "a private school." DUMBER. and when he asked where i couldn't think of the name of a single private goddamned school in the metro chicagoland area, so then i just stood there like an asshole before admitting my age. i wasn't trying to bang this dude, i'm just having trouble coming to terms with all of this fucking gray hair. hair that was VISIBLE TO THIS LITTLE DUDE, i might add.

and instead of thinking i was still "fly and shit," this dickbag was like, "HOW old? you still walk DOGS for a living?! damn, my MOM is only twenty-nine!"

"your mother is a whore," i replied under my breath, then i yanked on sam's leash and dragged her past the wicked witch's gingerbread house. she was in the side yard, pretending not to watch me coaxing the dog along with promises of a porterhouse if she hurried the fuck up and spared me just a fucking OUNCE of blistering shame.

"that boy is a CHILD," she hissed at me over the fence. i seriously considered chucking the bag of shit I WAS STILL HOLDING at her. i tried to think of something to say that wouldn't land my ass in jail or on dateline. just picturing being tackled by child services in those motherfucking FLAMINGO PAJAMAS was making my chest constrict with anxiety. i don't have the kind of disposition that would lend well to my survival while incarcerated.

"for your information, we're in the same social studies class," i snapped, and then i ran down the street to tom's house so i could jump in the goddamned shower. i didn't want to get a detention for being late to homeroom.

flamingos, helen keller, and the bed linens even your two-year-old would consider garish. SIGH.

"help! every bitch i know is pregnant!"

2011-09-08T16:06:00.004-05:00

a survival guide for the hCG-challenged. holy shit, I'M AT THAT AGE. you single broads know what age i'm talking about. the age where all of your late nights and drunken partying is dangerously toeing the line between "fabulous and exciting" and "sad as a motherfucker." the age at which the whores i used to drink too much and cry with are all dressed like moms, driving minivans, and having stable relationships with dudes who wear sensible shoes and make wise investments with their whiskey and taco money. goddamn it, is there anyone left who wants to be drunk at three in the afternoon and go get manicures?! i see you, gurl: banging dudes, drinking beers, and basically whiling away your early 30s pretending that your life is an extended episode of sex and the city when all of a sudden, BOOM. every vagina within a ten mile radius of yours is shitting out an eight-pound screaming red ball of BABY. and you're still eating cheese fries and jelly beans for dinner.

i swear on infant jesus that just as i am now beginning to come to terms with being some sort of penis-repelling social pariah barely treading water while neck-deep in a frothy sea of wedding invitations being heaved at me by my so-called friends, others of them have come up with a whole new way to make me feel an emotionally-stunted teenage boy: THEY ARE HAVING CHILDREN. no big deal, right? oh, i know. everybody knows someone who was pushing a stroller to class in the seventh goddamned grade. but back then it was like, "too bad you have to take your baby to gym class, i'll just be over here wearing my velvet choker and eating jolly ranchers." now it's like, "omg, bitch, YOU'RE MAKING ME FEEL LIKE A LESSER HUMAN BEING." my dead parents aren't around to harp on me about my slow grandchild production, and while i am grateful for that little bit of orphan silver lining, no one told me that my early 30s were going to be the biggest imaginable assault on my goddamned self-esteem.

i was SO READY to be done with 29. seriously, my 20s were the absolute worst. and i fully bought into all of the shit that old bitches on tv talk to make themselves feel better, all that "i'm more settled into who i am" and "i get more confident with every wrinkle" horseshit. when i was 22 i had the confidence to take my pants off in a disco, and that is something i would never do at the ripe old age of 31. the clusters of purple spider veins on my legs notwithstanding, most things that require "confidence" just don't seem like something an adult-type person should find herself doing. so when does life get awesome for real? 40? 50?! or is there just no real relief other than death? because oprah promised me some fucking clarity to go along with these saddlebags and laugh lines, and i'm wondering where the hell that sonofabitch is hiding. because i'm not any smarter or feeling any more put together, and i can't set my goddamned bag down anywhere for fear of dropping it on one of the children you jerks insist on continuing to hatch at will. if "it gets better," imma need to know WHEN. i suppose i could just wait for your children to get hooked on meth and stab convenience store employees for a pack of starburst to feel haughty and superior about my choice to let everyone else do the breeding, but with my luck these little assholes are going to grow up to be pop stars and fed chairmen. and that's gross.

i'm lucky, because i still have a handful of hot broads who are dragging themselves into adulthood as slowly as i am, bitches who still pay rent and buy slutty shoes and smoke parliaments outside of bars at three in the morning. this is glamorous shit, people. but eventually i imagine they're going to toss out their yasmin and IUDs and attempt to propagate our species. and rather than try to convince a woman with raging hormones and a deafening biological clock to tie her tubes for me, although if you would i won't be mad at you, i figured i could write a survival guide for those of us who will be spending our foreseeable futures posted up awkwardly in a corner at a child's birthday party spiking a warm paper cup of orange Hi-C with gin and snarling at everyone who asks which kid gathered around the pinata belongs to us. good luck, girlz. at least there's consolation that your vagina hasn't been stretched out of proportion to accomodate a football. here goes.

1 always bring your own drinks. I'M NOT KIDDING. i carry a ridiculously large bag around with me at all times, because heaven forbid i be alone with my thoughts for more than ten seconds. i need two ipods, a kindle, three magazines (you know, in case i've neglected to charge the kindle), a stick of deodorant, 17 expired transit cards, a flat screen television, two satellite phones, and a complete stereo system with me at all times to keep from ever being bored, even for a second. but when i know i'm going to hang with one of my kidfriends, i have to pack that shit like i'm going to a goddamned desert island. because when you get thirsty is baby town, your choices are usually limited to: juice, juice, water, whole milk, juicebox, soymilk, water, juicy juice, enfamil. and if you get hungry there's: cheerios, baby carrots, triscuits, animal crackers, and fruit snacks. um, delicious.

you can't tell by looking, but i was a nanny for a while in high school through my early twenties. it was like "the help" with liberal white guilt and land rovers instead of jim crow and cotton gins. anyway, the kitchens in these houses all mirrored one another: individual packages of graham crackers, applesauce cups, frozen tortellini, BLARF. i would always wonder what the adults in the house would eat, and after a few times of staying over for dinner i realized that they just ate what their babies did, because they were either 1 too goddamned tired to cook food that actually needed to be cut and chewed or 2 babies rule shit with an iron fist and are like, "if i have to eat smushed peas, then bitch SO DO YOU." i went to senam's house for lunch last week and, as i sat at the table with her two-year-old twins and her kindergartener, i was served the same meal the kids were: spaghetti and tomato sauce with cut up hot dogs and some orange wedges. AND APPLE JUICE. "can i have a diet coke?" i scoffed when she was handing out disney cups. "or a vodka soda?" "listen SAMANTHA, you can have WATER, JUICE, or MILK," she sighed exasperatedly, re-listing my options in her mom voice, and i sulked and pointed to the juice. when i gave my paper plate some shade she was like, "look asshole, I HAVE THREE KIDS. eat what i put in front of you or you're going to be very sorry when daddy gets home from work." so i shut up and ate my hot dogs, because she had granola bars for dessert and she promised me that if i was a good girl and ate all of my lunch i could have one after i woke up from my nap. JAM.

2 boxed macaroni and cheese parents vs organic kale with flaxseed oil parents. figure out which kind your friends are, and figure that shit out EARLY. don't be fooled by who that girl was before she got knocked up, some asshole who used to do topless keg stands with you isn't necessarily the kind of chick that would allow you to give her young, impressionable child an earth-killing satan-filled oreo cookie harbinger of DEATH. macaroni moms are the easiest to be around, obviously. because, DUH, you can totally let their kids watch tv and order a pizza when you are babysitting them, and that is totally fucking necessary. i can't be bothered with my no-television-in-the-house flaxseed friends. for real, man, i can't be having your kid in our adult conversation because you don't want him to get high on sesame street and fruit roll-ups. GO AWAY, BABY. and i'm not going to be tearing my hair out in the kid aisle at whole foods trying to find the gluten-free carob-sweetened agave soy organic vegan oxygen wheatgrass bits or whatever so it has something to snack on while hanging in my apartment. really dudes, I'M NOT DOING THAT. i might put my knives away and hide the porn, but holistic building blocks and woven hemp burp cloths are not within my fucking purview.

you need to know this, of course, because some bitches will FLIP OUT on you if they catch you pouring anything other than evian into their child's bath water, and i want to make sure you keep all of your limbs intact. yes, that same broad who pulled a filthy dollar bill from between a stripper's ass cheeks with her TEETH while on spring break with you ten years ago will break your fucking jaw for serving her precious child some chicken that wasn't raised on a sun-bathed island near the south of france. i can only hang with kids who eat mcdonald's and have baby carpal tunnel from too much mario kart. if i can't bully a child into submission using a candy bar and remote control, then i want absolutely no part of that. and i've changed plenty of cloth diapers in my day, so i know what the hell i'm talking about. there's only so much reading and interacting i can do, parents! at some point i need that kid to stop beating me at trivial pursuit and go learn about blowjobs from jersey shore.

3 get tattoos and drink beer. the only leverage you can get on a goddamned kid is doing something that he's too young to do, and since ten-year-olds these days are already refinancing their second mortgages and have a better 401k than you do, the best way to stay ahead of the game is to do shit they're legally restricted from, like going under the needle and drinking high life for breakfast. you have to find a way in with kids and, especially if they're old enough to figure out what a total loser you are, you have to do it IMMEDIATELY. at brunch with akilah last sunday her ten year old son could have cared less that i was sitting across from him, until he saw that i have a grim reaper shooting a smoking pistol on the side of my forearm. then i wasn't just one of his mom's asshole friends gossiping about facebook bitches over waffles, i was his mom's COOL FRIEND WITH THE SCARY TATTOOS.

"dangerous" and "illicit" are the currency of youth, and the less like their responsible, bill-paying parents you seem, the better you'll get along with your surrogate children. that's why when auntie sam comes over to babysit she brings dirty heroin needles and a commonwealth edison disconnect notice in her purse; they're putty in my hands after i tell them what it's like to run out of toilet paper and how to disguise your voice when a collections agent is on the phone. the fact that you live somewhere else and aren't yelling at them to clean up their legos is usually enough to hit the cool points jackpot, but if you need a boost, tell them about the one time you got into a bar brawl. or that time you got shot. or mention the motorcycle sitting in your garage. none of it has to be true, you just have to convincingly lie to a preteen, AND THAT IS TOTALLY EASY. just make sure you don't wear any loafers or polo shirts. they're a dead giveaway that the stint in jail you mentioned might have been a figment of your imagination. or something you saw on barney and friends.

4 learn baby talk. not "goo goo, gah gah," you asshole, you need to learn what the fuck montessori means. seriously, you better verse yourself in homebirthing and organic diaper creams, because gone are the days when that bitch has time to listen to you whine about that one dude with the nice car who never called you again after he teabagged you in the parking lot behind a bowling alley or whatever. you are going to be talking about baby shit. all the time. its smell, consistency, color, length, taste, whatever. prepare to let your life be taken over by BABY POOP. and while we're at it, you better get accustomed to looking at some titties, because your breastfeeding friends will have zero qualms about unhooking their flesh-colored front-loading bras right in the middle of your dinner. and don't worry about being a pervert for staring, because it might be the least sexual event you will ever see IN YOUR LIFE. anna was in town this weekend with her six week old twins and spent half the time i was with her partially naked. but you can't even care, because every thirty seconds a tiny little alien was screaming its little blonde head off demanding food or a cuddle or a burp or a diaper, and all you want is for her to get her boobs out and shut that noise up.

it would also be handy for you to stop cursing so goddamned much. because some of your parentfriends will be like, "oh shit, the fucking formula is too hot!" but most of them will be all, "golly gee, sweetums, i burned the flippin' formula!" i nearly bite my sailor tongue clean off every time i'm around a little person, and it's cool to drop a few F-bombs when a baby has no cognitive ability, but if you don't start training yourself early before you know it that little motherfucker is going to say, "hey mom, get the fucking fish sticks out of the freezer. i'm hungry, BITCH," and every eye in the room is going to slowly turn around to YOU.

5 ask for a goddamned raise. omg, THE MONEY. you thought what you had to spend when the parents got married was bad? well hold on to your prepaid visa card, sister, because that was only the fucking beginning. at least weddings only happen ONE TIME. babies have birthdays EVERY MOTHERFUCKING YEAR. three times a month i'm standing in target squinting to read the instructions on some goddamned toy or another, trying to figure out whether or not it makes too much of a racket or requires too much skill or comes equipped with too many parts a little kid could choke on and die from. only to then fuck up the wrapping paper and spill whiskey on the card the kid CAN'T EVEN READ when i get home or whatever. you will need to take out a monster loan when your friends start having babies. or, if your credit is fucked up, you better start waiting tables on the side or prostitution or some shit. it's CRAY.

you won't mind, because your exhausted BFF will smile so hard and be so grateful that you picked up a pack of onesies on your way over to regale her with stories from your super-exciting, AIDS-dodging single girl life, but by the end of the month you will be seriously considering applying for a babies 'r' us card. because baby shit is cute, and seeing a little diarrhea-soaked human being dressed in a perfectly matched outfit that you bought for him is an incredible feeling, especially if he is too young to tell you how much he hates it and how all the other kids at school get their bibs from gucci. you don't need that shit. but still, you won't be able to walk by a pastel display at wal-mart without dumping half of it into your goddamned cart. you'll coo at little cows and bears and marvel at the tiny-ness of little socks, spending your way to eviction because the asshole you sat next to in US history couldn't figure out how to properly use a condom, AND YOU WILL LOVE IT. and by all means, if you feel like a sucker, wield the power of the almighty dollar to exact revenge on these bitches for being more grown up than you and BUY NOISY TOYS THAT WILL KEEP THEM UP ALL GODDAMNED NIGHT. you know how many baby boom boxes there are on the market?! literally hundreds. and they won't cost you a million dollars, either. i bought naima a yo gabba gabba turntable a couple years ago, and when maya gave me the side-eye i was like, "that's what you get for being younger than me with a husband and a child and an apartment that's nicer than mine. good luck prying that out of her graham cracker clutches." she probably still hates me. mwahahahaha.

try not to feel too salty when going through your bank statements, though. just keep in mind that eventually those kids will be old enough to drive you around and send you cards and look after your cats while you're in florida for the winter. and couplefriends with babyfriends are the BEST, because they always have extra shit just lying around for your pitiful single ass to mooch off them. ain't no single bitches going to SAM'S CLUB; that's why i keep smug marrieds around! i haven't bought my own toilet paper in three goddamned years. i just wait until one of them is like, "come eat dinner with us, you lonely piece of shit!" and while the macaroni and cheese is cooking mom and dad are busy packing me suitcases full of two-ply extra-strong kid-proof toilet paper and economy-sized bags of almonds. and the ones with deep freezers and large pantries are EVEN BETTER, because you can walk out of there with nineteen individually-wrapped chicken breasts, four bottles of toilet bowl cleaner, 1000-count boxes of swiffer cloths, a ten pound bag of frozen shrimp, and six pints of strawberries. who needs peapod? people with kids are so fucking exhausted they don't have time to notice that one of the forty-six boxes of kleenex they just purchased is missing. they literally have NO IDEA what is in their house at any given moment, and if something is gone or broken they'll just assume one of the kids did it. you think i'm kidding, but the last time i bought ziploc bags, tupperware containers, handi-wipes, sponges, dish towels, and q-tips was NEVER. that's what (baby)friends are for.

6 be the old bitch in the crew. there's nothing wrong with being the samantha of your friend group. i know everyone wants to be carrie, but her not having a child always seemed like circumstance, while sam's ho ass was old and childless BY CHOICE. and yes, i understand that having young friends is totally fucking weird, but what other option do you have? eating chicken tenders at chili's three times a week?! you can't do that, and you know it. so you better hang around some college campuses or befriend the younger siblings of your babyfriends (hey, zoe!), because there is only so much time an adorable single gal like yourself can spend pushing a doll in a stroller around the playroom at leona's.

yes, i'm threatened by youth and beauty, too. which is why i always make sure i'm carrying something by dosteoevsky when i'm out with them at the bar. you know, a little prop that says, "yeah dude, i'm old enough to have given birth to the miniskirt standing to my left, but i'm not going to force you to watch me try on clothes at forever 21." for real, bitches, cut all of the talbot's tags off your going out shirts and put some arch supports in your stilettos, then drag your ass out to the club and act like you're not self-conscious being out of your house after 2am and try to bang some college dudes. and that's lame, I KNOW, but the alternative is talking in a hushed voice at six in the evening because your homeboy is on diaper duty and doesn't want to piss of his colicky newborn. at least if you get started now, you'll be totally used to it by the time your babyfriends are old enough to get drunk in public, then you're all set to jump in your hoveround and hit the town with them.

7 stay up super late and sleep as much as you possibly can. the only recourse you have against feeling like a huge gaping asshole when all of your friends are having babies and you're still trying to snag your first real boyfriend is doing all of the things those pregnant and new mommy jerks can't do anymore: curse at the top of your lungs! eat pizza for breakfast! take seven long, luxurious showers every day! turn your phone off! watch rated R movies! shit with the door open! buy unpasteurized cheese! and pointy furniture! leave your vibrator in the kitchen! never watch public television! but also never turn the television OFF! get some mercury-laden sushi! chain smoke at nine in the morning! spend an entire day reading under the covers! go out for drinks! bang dudes off craigslist! throw away all of your bite-sized foods! make sand castles in the cat litter box! don't eat any fruit! use your outside voice inside! take a bunch of tylenol! and a bunch of advil! DRINK A SHITLOAD OF COLD MEDICINE!

you is kind, you is smart,
and you is important.

fat fuck.

2011-09-02T14:42:00.003-05:00

some dirty asshole on craigslist sparked an anorexia debate on my fan page this morning, so this is getting reposted. eat it up.

a few years ago a gorgeous man approached me at the gym while i was sweating profusely and seconds away from cardiac arrest on the treadmill. i am not now, nor have i ever been, one of those weird people who lives for the gym. i don’t think vigorous exercise is like torture, i would just much rather be eating something stuffed with butter, and cheese, and BACON, while horizontal in front of the television than trying to get my heart rate up to its maximum optimizing cardiovascular calorie burning zone. or whatever. and that is never going to be possible because i walk a lazy 18-minute mile while daydreaming and frantically searching through my ipod for something, ANYTHING to make that monotonous bullshit go by faster.

when i "work out" i wear a garbage bag. not a literal hefty cinch sack, but its apparel equivalent: the loosely gathered drawstring yoga pant and voluminous loosely fitted undershirt. and my dangerously low self-esteem thinks that’s the way everyone at the gym should dress, regardless of size. i think that the gym, just like the hospital and jail and every other hellhole into which you enter expecting to fucking die, should be the great equalizer: everyone is miserable and teetering at the precepice of hell, therefore no one gets to look better than anyone else. i don’t wear lipstick to have a pap smear, and i wouldn’t wear it to spend an hour climbing the stairmaster. not so for some other women who frequent my gym. in the locker room, while i am trying to reinforce my bra straps and unstick my thighs from one another, these other broads are clustered around the shared mirror straightening their weaves and touching up their makeup. the first time i witnessed it i thought for sure that they’d just finished a workout and were headed out to a fancy dinner or something. it never occurred to me that adjustments might need to be made prior to the actual workout.

if i have shit on my face it congeals and itches the second i start breathing hard, let alone the sticky tan paste that would form during half an hour of torrential sweating through moderately-paced calisthenics. i would claw my fucking face off. but the furious dabbing of yellowy beige makeup sponges let me know that it was NOT SO for these hoes; there are big, muscular fish to be caught swimming around the free weights, and this blush and mascara and lip gloss are the hook that will snare them.

i caught sight of one of them through the smelly after-work masses, literally posing on the elliptical machine. she was moving so slowly the machine could not possibly have been ON, making “fuck me” eyes at all of the meatheads who walked by. she had her tits propped up so they rested just below her clavicle, and she was wearing those late 90s bikershorts with an ACTUAL LEOTARD over it. my inner angry feminist was all “bitch, please,” but that ploy appeared to be working. that fake-ass jane fonda had dudes drooling all over her, while i was sitting on a dirty pilates mat in a puddle of my own drool because my dumb ass thought using that mountain climbing machine was a smart idea and had debilitating cramps snaking up my whole right goddamned side.

so i am on the treadmill next to this smoking hot girl with a body like a rubber band. lithe, lean, smooth, bendable limbs, running half-naked at a speed reasonably close to that of light, her ponytail bouncing staccato in my peripheral vision. kill me, please. the naked at the gym thing destroys me. not "locker room naked" as, for me, that is just a frantic messy whirlwind of ripped off work clothes and struggled into gym clothes with the least amount of possible exposure, plus i am amused by the sight of another woman's cellulite and full bush. but "naked on the machines naked," ie "you should just give up and go home and eat an entire snickers bar garlic mashed potato pizza," makes me want to fucking DIE. for every person drowning in clothes that look like she snatched them off the corpse of someone homeless (me), there are TWO with band-aid sized sports bras and “shorts” the size of my period underwear, lunging and squatting and doing backwards crossways upside down lateral raise lifts while balanced on an exercise ball and suspended in mid-air (THEM). and they make sure you see them in all of their tanned and toned glory: running faster than you without ever breaking stride. or a sweat.

and this girl is pounding the shit out of the fucking treadmill, running so fucking fast that i felt like i might have been walking backward in comparison. i had set the timer for forty minutes, and i was halfway there. i usually hit a groove after fifteen minutes or so, when my muscles start to feel warm and limber and i stop bothering to wipe the drops of perspiration that collect at the tip of my nose.

i never look anyone in the eye while i’m working out, for fear that one millisecond of eye contact and these health nuts will figure out that i’m a fraud, that i don’t really want to change my sedentary lifestyle, i just want to feel a little less guilty the next time i eat half a birthday cake. my usual MO is to just stare at the calories burned counter, lost in fantasyland, imagining that bag of m+ms i ate on the way to the gym being melted off my thighs.

so color me surprised when i glanced up to find the most delicious piece of dark chocolate ass i’ve ever laid eyes on making his way over to me. he was doing that thing that confident, stunningly attractive people always seem to do while you are watching them; that gliding thing that makes them look like they are on invisible roller skates or some shit. now i’m not one to sweat a motherfucker too tough, but i might have gaped a little bit. this dude was outrageously handsome. he was one of those naked people in tight-fitting shorts and tank made out of that fancy sporty material that they only sell at those fancy sporty stores i’ve never seen the inside of. he looked like he had been cut from the face of a fucking mountain: taut skin stretched over hard bulging muscles, a roadmap of veins humming beneath the surface of his hairless arms and legs; slender, spectacularly defined legs leading down to those tiny athlete ankles, pecs you could eat your dinner off of, chiseled abs rippling under that clingy bodybuilder shirt. or something like that. i can’t totally be sure. like i said, i just glanced.

even flo jo's ass next to me slowed down to drink in this tall glass of water, and that snapped me right back to fatreality. of course. he’s not coming over to talk to ME, he’s coming over to talk to THIS BITCH. his workout partner and physical equal. in that instant i pictured their life together: doing crunches and pull-ups, cooking healthy meals, giving birth to a tiny track team. so i turned up the volume on my jams and focused on trying to burn off those oreos i had eaten, too. but curiosity killed this cat, and when he was standing below me, beaming up at me with his colgate smile, i stopped the music altogether thinking, i am going to vomit and then kill myself if i have to stand here and bear witness to this american gladiator love connection. i looked at the timer, and was crushed to realize i still had twelve more minutes to go.

“hi,” he said. his voice was a rich, deep velvet that made me die inside a little bit.

“hi!” she said brightly, slowing her treadmill so that she could talk, and it was still twice the speed i was walking. bitch. i could see the visions of their acrobatic future sex life dancing in her head.

he turned and smiled at her and nodded, and then turned back to me. “i was actually saying ‘hello’ to YOU.”

and then my heart stopped completely and my stomach fell out of my butt. “WHUT?!"

but he continued to smile and extended his hand, which i wouldn’t shake for fear of how sweaty and gross mine would be. he introduced himself and started talking, and the whole time the only thing i could think about was how i was at the point in my "workout" where breathing with my mouth open is the ONLY option. i stopped the treadmill and stood there watching his teeth go up and down, making words i couldn’t comprehend through my thick haze of disbelief. so i just kept smiling and nodding while carl lewis started her treadmill up again, running so fast this time that her shoes started to smoke.

our first date was at a starbucks, because i do not believe in food dates. and not because i don’t believe in food. i believe in food more than i believe in most humans. in fact, it’s this love of food that made me pick starbucks. because talking and eating don’t go together. either you never fucking speak or your fifty dollar steak gets cold. i've seen more than my fair share of after-school specials, and even as i was pushing open the goddamned starbucks door i expected this to be some cruel joke he and his jock friends had decided to play on the ugly duckling, that they were all in the bar across the street, huddled over their beers giggling while watching me sit by myself at the table in the window. but gym dude was already there when i walked in, dressed in form-fitting trendy clothes. i was suspicious the whole fucking time, trying valiantly not to like him too much, even though he was warm and relaxed and told hilarious stories that weren’t trying too hard. two venti mochas later i decided i was going to fuck him.
fast forward a month, and we had been on several really nice dates at swanky places that required nicer shoes than any i had ever previously owned. we made out a few times, during which i’d resisted the urge to stick my hand in his pants (which took more inner strength than you could possibly imagine). we had our first apartment date on a sunday, and he arrived with a chocolate cake. after the dinner it took me two hours to make, he asked me if I would mind eating it in front of him, which sounded weird but not weird enough to stop me. he sat on my bed and watched me intently, licking his lips. i asked if he wanted some, and he politely declined. his goddamned loss. that cake was fucking delicious.

the next time he brought brownies, which asked me to eat out of the pan with my fingers. the time after that? a rotisserie chicken, which he asked me to pick up whole and take a bite of it. then a blueberry pie. it never really struck me as strange, i just thought he had really good manners and was, like, the perfect houseguest. although he never ate anything himself, he didn’t always sit and stare while i ate. he would busy himself looking through my cds or working on a crossword, but always making sure i ate until i was full. i thought it was sort of sexy even, a dude who appreciated a woman who likes to eat. weeks of this went by, trips to the movie theater and museums and night clubs punctuated by nights spent at my place or his stuffing ourselves (er…myself) full of delectable treats.

while i didn’t really have a reason why, a huge part of me was flooded with guilt when i would think about gym dude and what it was we were (or weren’t) doing. i couldn’t quite put my butterfingers on what exactly was embarrassing about our relationship, but i knew deep down in my cholesterol-swollen soul that something in the milk wasn’t clean. i didn’t tell anyone about what we were doing. it was my scrumptious little secret.

and then he gave me a reason to be filled with searing fucking shame. four months and we still hadn’t had sex, which was fine by me as i had started to feel like a brown whale propped up on bloated feet and contortionist sexual positions seemed totally out of the question. he showed up late on a saturday with two grocery bags of goodies. at that point he had begun to figure out what i really liked, and i lit up like a christmas tree when he pulled out a pint of chubby hubby.

"eat that naked,” he admonished softly.

i don’t know if it’s stupidity or what the fuck makes you not even think twice about something like that. but I didn’t, i just said “okay!” and took all of my clothes off standing in the middle of the kitchen. “can i have a spoon, please?”

“eat it slowly,” he said, handing me a spoon, and dropped his pants.

now THIS is what the fuck i’m talking about! i'm a dirtbag in the worst way, and i had been chomping at the bit to get a piece of that action. four months is like a lifetime to a dumb slut like me, and i was itching to be validated by the hottest dude i'd ever again get my hands on. fat feet or not. i ate that ice cream while he watched me and masturbated, twice, before pulling his pants back up and apologetically skulking out of my apartment, leaving me with a frozen hand and a confused look on my face. ben and jerry should make a flavor called blueberry balls.

you always find a way to justify whatever horrific and disgusting shit you're engaged in, and i convinced myself it was worth a little sexual deviance to be that close to such smoldering manhood. plus, i was saving a ton of fucking money on groceries. so i let him come over again. we carried on like that for months, him awkwardly jerking off in my kitchen while i consumed fat grams by the thousand. i needed new pants and he bought them, telling me i was beautiful when i complained about the weight i was putting on.

at the time my crohn's hadn't yet been diagnosed, but even then i had a considerable number of stomach issues, and this little episode was murder on my guts; i would go days at a time without a formed stool, just rivers and rivers of liquid diarrhea. we still went out and did normal things, when i wasn't shooting brown fire from my anus, and that helped to enable the lie i’d formed in my head about how real our relationship was.

“the fetishistic practice of feederism can involve inducing weight gain to the point of helplessness. feederism refers to the acts of feeding, encouraging eating, or being served large quantities of food. sexual pleasure is derived from the act of eating itself, and/or from the process of becoming fatter.” i read this information, or something along those lines, in a pamphlet in gym dude’s bathroom while shitting out the half dozen or so krispy kremes i had eaten earlier that day. krispy kremes, i might add, that he had placed his erection through before asking me to eat them off of his penis and jerking off in my fucking face. that was the sugary glaze that broke this whore’s back, and after i nearly third-degree burned my fucking asshole cleaning my intestines out, i figured my blood pressure and i would be better off never calling hot gym dude ever again.

to this day i see him at the gym, flexing his glutes and pumping up his traps and delts and lats. i try to pretend i don’t see him and those glistening muscles straining against the wet fabric of his workout gear. my sphincter still shudders every time we make eye contact. he has only spoken to me once since our escapades ended. i was on my way home after a workout, sweaty and gross beneath my winter coat. he flashed that dazzling smile at me and i felt my resolve start to give.

“i miss you, sam,” he said sadly in that gorgeous voice of his. “we had something special.”

“YOU had something special,” i snapped. “what i had was early-onset heart disease.”

he smiled. “call me if you ever get hungry.”

and if i ever do i just might. it's a goddamned recession.

nightclubs are depressing.

2011-08-31T16:14:00.002-05:00

there was a pregnant bitch at the club saturday night. and i don't mean "barely visible on a sonogram" pregnant, i'm talking "if she bends over in that short skirt you can hear the baby crying" pregnant. THIRD TRIMESTER PREGNANT. at first i thought i was just drunk. and she was wearing skintight black and white horizontal stripes, so i figured the optical illusion was contorting her body into a real live funhouse mirror or some shit. but as i kept staring at her willing my eyes to focus, i realized that what i was seeing was, in fact, a young woman who just so happened to be gestating her human offspring AT A GODDAMNED DISCO. between this and the fact that kids these days refuse to read anything longer than 160 characters, we are all going to be slaves to the chinese in fifty fucking years. i just wanted to snatch the drink out of her hand and ask if she'd yet purchased a crib and a case of enfamil. or if she'd submitted her application to westwood college already.

pregnant ladies always be ruining shit: taking the good parking spots and all of the handicapped seats on the bus, sprinkling macaroni and cheese on their pancakes without anyone in the restaurant turning his nose up, getting paid for six whole fucking weeks to "stay home" and "take care of their newborns." what a sham. and now they're at the club?! what part of the game is THAT?! it's not good enough that everyone gives up his seat or pretends to be interested in your alien baby sonogram, you have to put on a tube dress and leak amniotic fluid all over my feet? selfish assholes. how am i supposed to compete with that? everyone loves babies. especially ones that haven't been born yet! tell me how to get this dude's attention when he's got his ear pressed to her belly, trying to hear a heartbeat over the goddamned DJ. dudes are buying glasses of champagne while she tosses her head back with laughter, regaling them with stories about signing up for WIC and medicaid. and OH SHUT UP ALREADY. i went to headstart, too.

i'm not hating, i actually love pregnant women. backaches and stretch marks and swollen ankles are some shit i can RELATE TO. plus, omgunicornz and i went to lockdown friday night and ate one burger with peanut butter, a carmelized banana, and bacon on top of it, and another with fuji apples and gruyere cheese on it, and goddamn i wish i had a babycake i could blame all that heavy lifting on. seriously, if only there were a fetus in my life that could be the reason i wouldn't turn down a peanut butter and jelly on rye bread. disgusting, right? totally.

anyway, i'm across the room scowling laser eye beams of hate and wondering if mama mia is taking enough folic acid. FML. i was only out in my fancy clothes on a saturday night anyway because blaxperiment 2011 is still in full effect. although why is still a mystery to me, as i am easily discouraged, so i'll be wrapping this shit up any day now. first of all, trying to find places to go is EXHAUSTING. and trying to find places to go where i don't already know (read: haven't already stalked or texted or emailed or banged) someone is FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE. everywhere i go there somebody already goddamned IS, reminding me how i fell asleep in the middle of intercourse or vomited during a blowjob or whatever. isn't chicago bigger than this?! and if it isn't some asshole who's already been disappointed by my lackluster sexual efforts, it's a dick who reads my blog and is all in my space shouting, "bitches gotta eat! tell me some jokes! TELL ME SOME JOKES!"

when is this pseudo fame going to get me laid by someone with a goddamned checking account?! not really, because i'm enjoying this long stretch of celibacy i've had going for the past eighteen months or whatever. and by "enjoying" i mean "my lazy ass doesn't have to maintain my pubic hair." but in theory i would like for someone else to have paid for that banana burger i ate the other night. at big star a couple weeks ago this adorable girl was making eyes with me across the room, and at first i thought, "well this shirt does accentuate my my cellulite," but then i realized that she recognized me from the internet and wasn't going to volunteer to hand wash my delicates or put that shelving unit together i've been staring at for three years, she just wanted to shake my hand. and that's cool, too. (also, i don't even know why i go to ikea without a lesbian, for real. it's like going fishing without a pole. SO DUMB.)

so clubs are weird now, right? or have i just reached the "quiet evenings at home" phase of my life?! goddamn it, everyone is ten years old and drunk as shit and throwing up and dressed strange and dancing in a way that is totally confusing to me, and the way they flirt with each other is disarming to a puritan such as myself. now i've gone home with my fair share of bad decisions, waking up the next day smelling like shame and a bag of white castles, but never was that exit preceded by clothes-fucking some dude on the dancefloor whom i'd just met on my way back from the bathroom. here's the thing: i like loud music, and i like dancing like an asshole in a room full of people, but that's not what's happening in 2011 clubland. here's what's killing my party boner:

1 "models." i like pretty girls, okay? i really do. and i respect the discipline and effort that goes into limiting yourself to a daily diet of broccoli spears and a handful of jelly beans. plus all of that being tan and bleaching your butthole takes a lot of goddamned work. what i don't like is the bored standing around all of you girls are doing, especially if it prevents me from 1 taking a piss or 2 getting another drink. i understand that the best place to do coke is off the toilet seat, sweethearts, but mommy had seven vodka waters and needs to put her ass there. RIGHT NOW. and what is this loitering near the bar? everyone knows that the best way to get a dude to buy you a drink is to hold the only one you're willing to pay for until some nice man who wants to bang you offers to replace it. at least that's what i'm told, because i'm too impatient to stand around waiting for someone to notice i'm thirsty. either way, blocking the one spot on the bar into which i can wedge myself between two reeking axe-holes to get another beer makes me want to cut you with something sharp. "move, bitch, i'm too sober to be in this club!"

2 perpetrating pretty dudes. here's the thing about living in a town with a lot of sports teams: any dude over 6 feet with a smattering of shitty neck tattoos can get a haircut, put on some shit from kenneth cole, and pretend to be a third-string chicago bear wide receiver. we were at the shrine one night when a group of tall dudes basically insinuated their way into the roped-off VIP. i watch sportscenter, you assholes. i elbowed my girl and shouted, "do you recognize any of those gentlemen?" over the DJ. she glanced over and was dismissively like, "i don't watch sports, asshole." undeterred, i walked into the VIP on the heels of another dude who kinda sorta looked famous and sat next to a dude with pinky rings. "what team do you play for?!" i demanded, and as he sheepishly shrugged his shoulders and motioned to security, i backpedaled and told him what a good job he'd done "with all those rebounds and shit." i still hate myself.

3 thugs. i know the whole "t-shirt and gym shoe" rule was supposed to weed out the riff raff, but the species has adapted, and now they just sit around looking like rick ross and shit. and i don't care about dying, especially when i'm going to leave such a hot corpse, but more than a few times i have seen grown men either hit with garbage cans or thrown through a goddamned table, and nothing dries up a party like THAT. no one wants to hook up with the dude with the gaping head wound.

4 $12 drinks. i already know, if i want to drink $2 pbr's i can go to cole's. or any one of the million and one other dive bars in the city. I GET IT. but what if i want to hang with some grownups in clean clothes who don't pay for their beer with laundry quarters?! do i really have to pay more than i would for a decent cheeseburger for a cocktail?! i don't know, maybe drinks have always been this expensive. or when you open a tab, which i no longer do, you're too drunk to care how you got to three hundred dollars so quickly. shit is cray out here in this obamaconomy, and more than once i've found myself hesitating over the change the bartender has handed me, trying to gauge just how much of an asshole i'll appear to be if i only tip on every other drink. (answer: A GIANT SHITTING ASSHOLE.) you have to fucking budget if you're going to holler at a nightclub these days, and while i'm busy soaking dried beans for my dinner because i couldn't resist a $30 cab ride home, i can't help but think, "is this really what it takes to meet new people? that is totally fucking depressing." then i spend the rest of the night farting, which makes me glad that dude with the face tattoo apparently lost my number.

5 the shittiest music you've ever heard. THIS IS WHAT MAKES YOU OLD, complaining about "what the kids are listening to." and fuck it, i guess i'm old, because WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU KIDS LISTENING TO?! is this what my mom used to be so mad about all the time while i was blasting faith no more "the real thing" alone in my bedroom? (editor's note: I STILL DO THAT.) my nephew and i went to get tattooed a couple weeks ago, and he put his ipod on in the car and was like, "do you know who this is? what about him? what about this group?" and i felt so stupid and out of touch. thank god that dude isn't a smug little asshole, reminding me how he's young and cool and in college and listening to bands i won't hear about for another three years. he just sat there and let his silence imply that shit. WHAT A GENTLEMAN.

so i'm still going to see live music and co-host the sex show and drink at the morseland sometimes, but i think the universe is telling me i have to hang up my wristband/handstamp hand and sit in my bed listening to music that was popular in my early twenties until i'm old enough to not feel like a jackass going someplace that refers to itself as a "lounge" full of middle-aged people wearing support hose and church shoes. maybe i should invest in some blouses.

your mom looks hot in spandex.

2011-08-23T16:29:00.003-05:00

i am officially obsessed with zumba. OBSESSED, even though i loathe most forms of physical activity. yes, including sex. a few weeks ago i took some files back to the kennel area of the hospital and found all of the techs and assistants gathered open-mouthed around the giant flatscreen computer monitor that hangs in the treatment area. they were watching a youtube video of this upbeat latina standing in the front of a dance studio full of gorgeous thirtysomethings scantily-clad in brightly-colored, clingy dancewear, leading them in choreographed latin-lite dance moves. "what the fuck is this shit?" i asked betty, and she rolled her eyes and was like, "this is ZUMBA, sam," like i was an asshole for not knowing that shit. "i thought zumba was a region in mexico," i shrugged. "wait a minute, are they dancing to PITBULL?! this is my jammm." i pushed betty out of the way, tossed the files on the floor (sorry, animals!), and started to cha-cha and shake my jelly along with the sexy young things in the video. pitbull makes me want to take my PANTS OFF. we did that video three times, and by the end i was sweaty and hoarse from screaming "damelo!" at the top of my lungs for twenty goddamned minutes. and i wanted more. so kate and i decided to take a zumba class the next morning at the YMCA.

working out is a bummer. seriously. walking on a treadmill for forty-five minutes while listening to the same playlist over and over and trying to read the closed captioning of a television show you don't even care about because the gym regulars always get first pick of the channels is a TOTAL FUCKING DRAG. the elliptical machine makes uncoordinated people look stupid. the stair machine reduces mere mortals to tears within four minutes. the stationary bike feels like uncomfortable buttsex. who wants to put the twinkies down and get out of bed for any of that?!

a couple months ago my little vegan russian trainer lesbian moved to hawaii so she could run marathons and mack grass skirt bitches in a temperate climate, i guess. at first i was sad, but then i thought, "now there will be no one to scowl disapprovingly at my stomach roll! hooray!" during our last training session, right after i'd completed seven of the fifty sit-ups she'd asked me to do and declared that i was finished, she said, "you my most disappointing client." and i read that as "this tiny lesbian says it's okay for me to keep eating red meat and cupcakes in bed. excellent." we did some partner stretches (i was even bad at STRETCHING, omg), and after she adjusted my knee for the fourth time she said, "i worry about your lazy ass. we will text when i go." i nodded, but my brain said, "fine, bitch. TEXTS don't have EYES."

a week after she left i got a text from russian lesbian that read: what is for lunch, s?
i replied: lean cuisine!
russian lesbian: and what?
me, hesitantly: water...?
russian lesbian: AND WHAT?
me, breaking into a liar's sweat: um, oxygen?
russian lesbian: WHAT ELSE?! (i could hear her shouting in my brain)
me, still trying to be on some bullshit: granola bar.
russian lesbian: i know you lie.
me: okay okay. a granola bar and an apple.
russian lesbian:
me: and a diet coke.
russian lesbian:
me: oh, and i had half a doughnut this morning.
russian lesbian:

me: okay fine, a WHOLE doughnut.
russian lesbian:
me, sighing: two doughnuts.
russian lesbian:
me: and i might have also had a beer before work.
russian lesbian: i hate you.

i'm not going to lie and say that i started giving a shit, because for real I DON'T. but at some point i was just like, "holy fucking shit, i do not MOVE," and i'm not old enough to get away with that. yet. eventually a bitch has to start thinking about building some goddamned muscle and strengthening her bones or whatever. i'm lazy and research is boring, but i got on the internets anyway to try to find out whatever i could about the torture i was about to subject myself to.

"ditch the workout and join the party!" the official website shouted at my eyeballs. zumba "is the only latin-inspired dance-fitness program that blends red-hot international music and contagious steps to form a "fitness-party" that is downright addictive!" i am suspicious of words like "addictive" and "contagious." and i immediately blanched while clicking through all of the pictures of lean and toned bitches gyrating in crop tops and neon cargo pants, perfect bodies beaded with sweat; toothy, open-mouthed smiles that scream, "I AM HAVING THE TIME OF MY YOUNG AND ATTRACTIVE LIFE." blarf. i am a negative person by nature, and i typically shy away from anything that requires me to be having visble fun. i like to do stuff that i can sit quietly in the back and enjoy, and i have spent my entire adult life perfecting a bored yet slightly amused and entertained facade. and i just don't understand being excited about exercise. it's like doing a cartwheel on your way to have a root canal. my face just doesn't light up at the prospect of ab isolations. also? the pictures. look at that dude with his SHIRT OFF. i'm not trying to embarrass myself tripping over my feet doing salsa steps while some red-hot international instructor rolls his eyes in disgust and bounces quarters off of his ridiculously chiseled abs. i mean, come on.

sunday morning i got up and put socks and my old new balances on with my pajamas. i can't compete with these jerks doing a revolutionary new fitness concept *snicker* while wearing bikini tops and shit, so i decided it was in the best interest of my self-esteem to go to the opposite end of the clothing spectrum and just look like absolute shit during class. because even if i busted my melon open while trying to cumbia to the beat, is that a real thing?, at least my jibs would be appropriately covered. i took three aleve and a celebrex (not kidding) and tried to stretch my achilles so that asshole wouldn't snap in the middle of a jam. i paid the $15 drop-in fee and we went up to the gym, and i hovered with kate and our friend libby near the back of the room, anxious for all of the j. lo lookalikes to start pouring in and making me feel bad about that container of greek yogurt i'd eaten before kate had picked me up.

and then your mom came in wearing booty shorts and the shirt she wears to wash the dishes, flanked on either side by your aunt and your recently-retired fifth grade teacher. her sewing circle showed up next, as did her crochet buddies and all of the ladies from book club with the exception of kathy, whose son had strep so she decided to stay home with him. there's the woman who cuts your mom's hair, and diane who works at chico's in the mall. the school board ladies, the PTA, and the soccer moms came running in, too, clad in unfortunate biker shorts and racerback tanks with their hair pulled up in banana clips and scrunchies. hot zumba aficionados don't go to the evanston ymca, i guess. i don't know what i was so fucking worried about.

"i thought this was for attractive young people?" i wondered aloud.

a lady down the way looked me up and down as she pulled a protein bar from her fanny pack. "yeah," she said, eyeing my flabby triceps, "ME, TOO."

the music started and our teacher, a boisterous woman who was in your mom's brownie troop, started shouting and dancing and pointing out people who sucked as we tried desperately to follow along. i was winded after the first song, and twenty minutes in i told kate to call me a goddamned ambulance. i was sweating in the grossest possible way, sweat dripping from my hair into my eyelashes and shit. your mom is pretty good at zumba, but thank horus that bitch ain't got no rhythm. the only thing that kept me from looking like a complete asshole was my blackness, which kicked in right when i needed it most. i might not have gotten every single step, but at least i wasn't clapping half a second behind the BEAT. and most of the choreography can be faked pretty well if you can count to four and move your hips accordingly.

despite the fact that i really did almost keel over and die, i was fucking hooked. i can't smile while skipping and jumping and fist-pumping or whatever, but i loved that shit. loud-ass music at nine-thirty in a room full of WASPs who are coming down off a chardonnay bender?! MORE, PLEASE. these broads yell and woop and scream for an hour, then each one towels off and hops in her land rover to go get a skinny latte from starbucks. it's magical.

the minute that first class was over i vomited my right lung onto the locker room floor, then we went downstairs and i paid a hundred dollars to join the Y. that shit was fun, my heart rate was almost high enough to make me feel like an actual sentient human being, and ricky martin made a lot of good dance music for your information so bite your tongue, hater. plus, it's obvious that i need other people to hold my ass accountable for my physical fitness. and that's SO LAME, knowing that i need the withering gaze of your hot-flashed perimenopausal mother to get me to samba my way to maybe living past the age of thirty-seven, but admitting defeat is the first step, right? i despise the treadmill, but pretending i can salsa to pitbull for an hour is fucking awesome. plus your mom said she would bake me cookies and give me a hamstring massage next week. and that bitch has a tight ass. i've been noticing.

it's been five weeks. five weeks of doing this shit four or five times a week. five weeks of regular zumba with your mom, zumba toning with your aunt, and your grandma and i are about to start aqua zumba in a couple weeks. we also do kickboxing twice a week, and sometimes pilates if we're feeling ambitious. and i have only been buying lean cuisines and sugar free jello pudding, because i'm lazy and 1 i only like to cook when i might get laid afterward and 2 I HATE CHEWING. i've already lost ten fucking pounds. seriously, dudes, a bitch is wearing JEGGINGS.

i texted russian lesbian a couple weeks ago to rub my newfound dedication to working out (lolz) in her skinny face.
me: i'm doing zumba now. it's super fun.
russian lesbian: what is that? some new thing you eat?
me:
russian lesbian: sounds fattening, whatever it is.
me: i hate you.

stranger danger.

2011-08-18T16:06:00.002-05:00

i am the master of the bitchface. if you're going to spend half of your adult life commuting on buses and trains in a city full of assholes, you have to learn to perfect the "no bitch, i do NOT know where you get off to go to water tower" scowl. i wear sunglasses and headphones and glare at anyone who looks like he might even think about asking me what time it is or which connecting train is the one that goes out to o'hare. i know you're thinking, "man, what a jerk." and i am, but it's really a measure of self-protection more than it is unrepentant assholishness. more than once i have kindly removed my earbuds to answer the question of a seemingly innocuous fellow passenger, only to have my ears assaulted by some asshole who wanted to yell at me about jesus or say something lewd about ass-fucking my dead corpse or whatever. not anymore.

last weekend my friend tuesday and i decided to see the new planet of the apes, because i 100% enjoy shitting ten dollars down movie theater toilets. tuesday is my main platonic male jam. anyway, while i am never on time for anything else in my real life, i am totally that crazy person who gets to the movie theater forty-five minutes before the show starts. i like to pee, wash my hands, get a fountain coke (extra ice), and be the first one through the door to make sure i can sit on the end of the top row. i like to get myself situated: movie sweater draped over the arm of the chair in case i get cold, snacks firmly set up in the empty seat next to mine, the whole thing. i like to be prepared. and yes, i am your grandmother. but fridays are a total shitshow at the hospital and i knew i wouldn't be out in time to properly set up camp at the movies, so i dispatched tuesday to the theater in my stead so he could get our act together before i got there.

here's the thing: i don't want to be that asshole standing in the aisles of a packed theater trying to orchestrate the seating arrangement of strangers who are glaring hate beams through the side of my face because i came late and still think i have the right to sit next to the nine goddamned people who came with me. YOU KNOW WHO I'M TALKING ABOUT, the dickballs who stands over you dropping buttered popcorn in your lap while he tries to convince two bitches halfway across the room to move over a seat so that he and his wife can sit next to each other. who wants to be that piece of shit, stepping all over everyone's goddamned toes while inching toward the middle seat and trying not to spill your tray of nachos, king-sized hot dog, tub of buttery popcorn, pretzel bites, giant cherry coke, and sno-caps?! I HATE THAT GUY. and i don't ever want to be him, so i get there with goddamned time to spare.

tuesday is one of these boisterous, friendly people that i typically avoid at all costs. he'll talk to fucking ANYONE, which would be fine if he weren't introducing himself to regular boring people with nothing interesting to say. if i leave that dude alone for even a second he's doing the used car salesman on the nearest unsuspecting stranger, so i was not at all surprised when i found him sitting in the nearly empty movie theater chatting with a relatively good-looking dude a few seats over. "hey sam, this is my new friend, julius!" he said, and i stood there for a minute trying to gauge if julius was a dude he knew in real life and had decided to surprise me with at the last minute or whether he'd just made his acquaintance in the five minutes that had elapsed between texting me "i'm here" and my arrival at our seats. i noted tuesday's new BFF's massive amount of manjewelry and wearing of a baseball cap while indoors, then fixed my eyes on his jorts. come on, son. DO BETTER.

"hey julius, i'm sam," i said politely, and he responded to my breasts, "i'm really bad with names." OH, BLARF. why not just introduce yourself by saying, "you are insignificant to me, please die?" because that is how my brain translates that shit, you asshole. "i hate this dude," i whispered to tuesday as i got my sweater ready. they resumed their in-depth analytical conversation about some shit i don't give a fuck about, and then i decided i wanted popcorn. tuesday is a gentleman, and he offered to go get it. well, i might have said, "why the fuck don't you act like a gentleman and go get me some motherfucking popcorn?!" but that is beside the goddamned point.

i knew from 1 the way dude sized me up when i first got there and 2 the way his multiple silver rings glittered under the movie theater lights that at some point in the evening we were going to be engaged in a who is the more alternative black person? BATTLE ROYALE. i was exhausted at the thought. first of all, i usually slaughter the competition before it even begins. i have all of these death skull tattoos and natural hair, and i own three pantera records. winner and still champion, people. this makes some black dudes crazy, because they want to be the only ones who've ever heard of richard linklater. and second of all, you may as well just ask, "which of us is the bigger oreo?" and that is so GROSS. we need a secret handshake or something, some way to let others of us know that they're not going to be accused of "talking like a white person" or whatever. maybe we could just trade ipods upon meeting? "you have the new grizzly bear record?! OMG I'M ONE OF THOSE BLACK PEOPLE, TOO," and then you don't have to worry about a surprise BET pop quiz later on in your relationship.

so dude turns to me and says, apropos of nothing, "i'm the most eclectic dude in my group of friends." ECLECTIC, for those of you who don't know, is often code for "you're safe with me. i, too, listen to bjork." in other words, your diction is telling me you've got a lot of white friends. what the fuck was i supposed to say to that? so i just cartoon blinked at him and waited for him to say something else. "see, i listen to rock music and wear a lot of jewelry and stuff," he's holding up his arms and shaking his many bracelets while saying this, "i don't have a problem seeing movies by myself and, just so you know, I'M NOT A HOMOSEXUAL, I JUST LIKE BRACELETS." um, WUT.

"i can appreciate a dude who throws a good arm party," i said, because what the fuck is an appropriate response to "i'm not gay, i just like bracelets?" GODDAMN IT, did tuesday go to china to get the goddamned popcorn? WHY HAS HE BEEN GONE FOR SO LONG AND WHY DID HE LEAVE ME HERE WITH THIS WEIRDO NOT-GAY DUDE?! "what does that mean?" he asked, confused. "what does what mean?" i was speaking english and hadn't used any big words. "what is an ARM PARTY?" oh, sigh. even if you'd never heard that phrase before (thank you, manrepeller!), weren't there enough context clues to put one and one together?! jangling bracelets + your arm = arm party. was that so hard?

"do you like movies?" came next, but before i could point out that we were SITTING IN A MOVIE THEATER he decided on his own to give me a brief yet exhaustive history of modern cinema. arm party was talking so fast his tongue was smoking, all while i sat there mentally calculating how much cooler than him i happen to be. he told me about his childhood in texas, the plot of all three bourne identity movies, being recently divorced, and how much he HATES people who talk and text through movies, and just as i was fashioning a noose out of twizzlers, tuesday returned with a bucket of thank god i don't have to talk to this dude anymore. i know you girls are always blathering on and on about how you want a man to TALK to you and COMMUNICATE his FEELINGS and TELL YOU what's ON HIS MIND, and that begs the question: have you ever really talked to a dude? i mean really sat through a discourse of what some dude thinks is interesting and important? because i feel like if you really had, the LAST THING YOU WOULD EVER WANT TO DO is have a neverending conversation with some dude's penis.

this is why i love lesbians. because the minute some hot lady starts droning on about what her horoscope said and how she went over her weight watchers points and how she's really stressed out that her book club pick isn't good enough i can be all, "hey girl, i saved last week's episode of law and order SVU on the tivo. let's get our hargitay on," and she'll zip that noise right on up and go fix me some tv-watching pajama snacks. talkative dudes are so enamored of their own voices that unless you're coming at him with an open butthole, chances are he will NEVER STOP TALKING OF HIS OWN VOLITION. i clutched my dots to my chest, terrified that arm party's big mouth was going to ruin my monkey movie.

i like to sit in the last row mostly because i hate listening to the inane conversations other people tend to have during movies. they're either incorrectly predicting the plot or fighting over who has to drive the babysitter home later, and those things are irritating. i like to sit in dead silence staring at the screen until the movie is over, and while arm party worked the shit out of my last nerve, he'd at least salvaged some of my good cheer toward my fellow man with his disdain for theater talking. and for the first hour of the movie, he deserved it. AND THEN. a woman in the row directly in front of ours decided to sext her boyfriend or whatever.

i saw it, because how could you not see it, and ignored her. but arm party, who had obviously been itching for a reason to let more hot air out of his balloon, decided to comment loudly about her inappropriate moviephone. and then the floodgates crashed open. BECAUSE HE ISN'T GAY he'd left two seats between himself and tuesday, which meant he had to whisper-shout over them every time he wanted to point something out in the movie. WHICH WAS COMICALLY OFTEN, especially for a dude who felt it necessary to yell at some lady who just wanted to glance at her emailz. tuesday spent forty-five fucking minutes leaning over the empty chair next to him, nodding politely while i hissed, "that's what you get for talking to strangers," in his other ear. seriously?! that's some shit i expect to see on seinfeld, the nice gesture of making uncomfortable pleasantries with a dude because he just happened to be sitting alone near you coming back to bite you in your polite ass for the rest of your goddamned night. blarf.

the minute the lights came on i gave tuesday my most stern LET'S GO face, but arm party immediately started comparing this movie to the old ones, and my homeboy totally obliged him and got sucked into yet another endless conversation. is that a white thing, this unfaltering patience? holy damned dirty ape. so we sat there until the credits finished rolling, because tuesday doesn't have the get the fuck out of my face gene. as we left the theater my heart started racing. arm party wasn't going to let us leave without a phone number exchange, and tuesday is too nice to say, "i'm amish, i'm forbidden to use a telephone," which is how sam gets out of this kind of shit and we'd be stuck listening to this dude for THE REST OF OUR LIVES. just as he was about to say "facebook me," or whatever i swooped in and shouted, "i have to take a shit." visibly relieved, tuesday bid adieu to his grossed-out new bro and we ran/walked toward the bathrooms.

i cornered him as soon as arm party disappeared from my sight. "why did that popcorn take so long? were you trying to make some magic happen?" and HE WAS. even though i was tempted to teach tuesday a lesson entitled, "just because we're both black doesn't mean we want to fuck on each other," i thanked him for thinking of my vagina during this peconomic recession and reminded him that i'm not interested in people who have ideas about things and want to voice their opinions all the time. "next time, sit near a dude who grunts. or blinks once for yes and twice for no."

we waited a few minutes for the coast to clear before heading over to the parking garage. tuesday offered to go get his truck so that i could stand on the curb and text amanda (I SHOULD HAVE JUST DONE IT DURING THE MOVIE), and just as i was trying to get my autocorrect to recognize "cuntbag" as a word, i heard screeching tires and a horn blaring within the parking structure. i peeked inside hoping to see someone splattered across the pavement before the ambulances got there and instead saw tuesday running through the lower level away from an old lady car being driven by a not gay dude with sparkly finger accessories. a not gay dude who was leaning out of the window of an oldsmobile shouting, "hey! tuesday! TUESDAY!" while chasing him through a parking garage. trying to lure him into taking a bite outta crime, obviously. *crunch*

dudes make me sick.

2011-08-09T16:43:00.001-05:00

i haven't been in the hospital for over a year. which is a major feat considering that at one point in my history i was there so often that nurses knew my name and what i was there for without having to look it up and shit. i'd just walk into the ER with my overnight bag and they'd be all, "let me warm up the CT scanner. gurl, you still prefer vegetable broth? let me get your room ready." i haven't written about the charred wasteland that is my intestines lately, and i'm sure that's keeping most of you up at night with worry. so let's talk some shit.

2011 marks the sixth year of living with this dreaded crohn's disease, and for the first time in a long time i've been feeling pretty good on a pretty regular basis. last summer i was totally stressed the fuck OUT: working all the time, not taking good enough care of myself, keeping people in my life who drove me fucking apeshit, and that stress manifested itself into one big giant knot dead in the center of my stomach, followed by a week spent flat on my back watching "up" and "the time traveler's wife" on constant repeat while getting shot up with dilauded and steroids and insulin. because although a bitch is not diabetic, too much prednisone sent your girl into diabetic shock. HOLY SHIT.

it's nearly impossible to sleep when you're in the goddamned hospital. i go to a really nice one where i get my own room and my own cable television and my very own personal assistant to help change my shitty diapers and flip my pillows over or whatever else i am too lazy, or entangled in tubes, to do for myself. anyway, it's 2am and i'm on so many drugs and have a port in my arm and i had dozed off sitting up like your granny does, and four nurses come crashing into my room and shake me awake because apparently i've stopped breathing and a bunch of alarms are ringing and bitches are shouting, and they're yanking my gowns off, and all i could think was, "how smelly are my underwear?!" while they're shooting shit into my veins and holding the oxygen mask down on my face. i fully expected to go into cardiac arrest, because i don't know if anyone's ever told them, but shaking a bitch awake at 2am in a hospital is some terrifying shit. when all of the drama died down i could care less about my blood sugar or my inflamed intestines, i was just mad that they'd cut off a FIFTY DOLLAR GODDAMNED BRA. blarf. it pisses me off just thinking about it.

one of the problems with not dying in the hospital is that real life still goes on outside those sterilized walls. the cat needed to be fed! my dry cleaning needed to be picked up!! my directv bill needed to be paid!!! i never end up in the hospital right after the ONE TIME i clean my goddamned apartment every year, and after my sister went to my apartment to rescue helen keller and drop her off at the kennel she called my room and was like, "are you okay? i mean, is your life okay?! how could you be living like this?!" listen bitch, had i known i was going to need for anyone other than that cat to see what i do with my empty beer cans i would have maybe taken out the recycling. just step over the piles of laundry and magazines and get the fuck out. i know that's how i'm going to die, surrounded by all of my poor choices and bad habits. but at least if you're dead people feel guilty about talking shit about the porn you don't even bother hiding anymore.

i was there for a week. graduated from ice chips to broth to broth with three peas in it to broth with three peas and one noodle in it to applesauce to please let me the fuck out of here this shit is costing me $10,000 a fucking day. on release day everyone is extra super nice, skipping into my room with the menu that people with broken legs get to choose from and sneaking me extra apple juices. the "intestinal distress" menu looks something like this: a variety of unsalted broths, apple or cranberry juice, jello that i never order, black coffee, and textureless oatmeal soup. "who in the hell gets to order chocolate cake and roast beef while they're in the hospital?!" i asked the PCT who stood awaiting my food order. "really?! FRIED CHICKEN DINNER?! who gets that shit?!" she smiled patiently and said, "what about a hard boiled egg? you can have that. you want a piece of dry white toast with it?" what a tease. no, asshole, i want a double fucking cheeseburger with it, not some goddamned toast. but i just snapped the menu shut and said, "for seventy thousand dollars, i want TWO pieces of dry white toast." all of you people who shit normally don't know just how lucky you have it. next time you feel like complaining about something dumb, i want you to think "OATMEAL SOUP." see how awesome your life is? that there is called perspective.

in october i vomited down the front of my sweater while talking to this woman about prescription dog food, but until then i'd been feeling perfectly fine. well, diarrhea every few days perfectly fine, but fine nonetheless. that warranted a trip to the ER, where i got two bags of fluids, some zofran, and some dilauded. my feel-better cocktail. i was only there for a few hours, which means that either i was doing pretty well or that my insurance was like GET THAT BITCH OUT OF THERE RIGHT GODDAMNED NOW OR WE AINT PAYING SHIT.

there's no known cure for crohn's. i just kept dutifully taking my pills and trying not to drink so much and trying even harder to stay away from fancy french cheese. right now i'm not on steroids or rheumatoid arthritis drips, and i'm no longer on immunosuppressive drugs, either. i haven't had to depend on special undergarments (see what i did there?!) in months. no rubber sheets. no scopes, no xrays, no scans, no colonoscopies, NOTHING. and the only thing that has really changed in the last year, because let's face it, i still get drunk and stress out sometimes, is that i haven't been messing around with any goddamned DUDES. celibacy cured my shit disease. alert the new england journal of medicine.

seriously, man. it can't be a fucking coincidence! we already know that when i raised my fucking standards a while back that all but dried up my romantical prospects. for reals. and i was a little salty about it at the time, but what an amazing trade-off. swapping raggedy knuckle-dragging assholes for a clean bill of health for my own precious asshole?! YES, PLEASE. every time i've saddled myself some lie-faced, under-performing wack piece of shit "boyfriend," i've ended up in the hospital two or three or ten times during the course of said relationship. i need to call my hot butt doctor and tell him why my camera endoscopy had unclear results. because ASSHOLE DUDE obviously doesn't show up on an intestinal rad. this is a revolutionary medical breakthrough i'm making here, people. think of all of the money i could've saved! all of those colonoscopies i could've avoided! the first time i had a barium series i wanted to slice my wrists open on the goddamned table. if the doctor would have said, "listen bitch, you can avoid being subjected to another one of these if you just get rid of that human garbage texting some other broad out in the waiting room," i would have done so in a HEARTBEAT.

who knew that not having to worry about the state of my pubic hair at any given moment would result in no longer shitting myself in public? i'd never talk to another person AGAIN if it meant i could stop spending half my paycheck on maintenance drugs. FOR CEREAL. besides, sex is boring and totally gross. and i'm obviously growing up, despite whatever reflection my ailing credit score might be of my adulthood, because every time i think about banging i just think, "GONORRHEA." and about how i don't have it. and about how other people do. and about how easily i could catch it. especially now that there's a drug-resistant strain of that shit. sex is stressful and ridden with disease and people are soul-sucking opportunists just waiting to rob or betray you, so is it really that surprising that now that i don't have to worry about blemishing my otherwise perfect STD tests that my stomach doesn't hurt all the fucking time?

i'm just saying. constantly worrying about who a dude is calling when he takes his cell phone into my bathroom in the middle of the night = SHITSPLOSIVE RAGING STOMACH PAIN DIARRHEA BUTT DISEASE. see also: when he doesn't call me back, or sees me only once a month, or hits on my friends, or fucks wrong, or basically does any of the million things some asshole could do to make you want to hit him with your car. meanwhile, only having to worry about what time basketball wives is coming on = I HAVEN'T BEEN SICK FOR A GODDAMNED YEAR. i finally have something to say to these assholes who keep asking why i ain't got no mans. "well yes, nosy bitch i went to high school with, i most certainly would like to be married with six and a half children and a golden retriever right now. but, you see, it turns out that i have a physiological reaction to men and their insipid nonsense. relationships give me baby guts. it's downright dreadful."

so that's that. i'm not horrible and intolerant and physically unappealing. men don't hate me and think i'm stupid. I'M ALLERGIC TO ASSHOLE DUDES. man, i'm so relieved. and so is my asshole.

you got plans this weekend?

2011-07-29T15:34:00.001-05:00

goddamn, this is a lot of posts this week. one of my biggest fears in life is being ANNOYING, because i hate people who are annoying so much it hurts my stomach. so my big head is in the comedy section of this week's time out chicago, and while i have a subscription to time out, um i guess i never have really looked at this page until today. because i'm in it. yes, i'm an asshole. okay, so if you 1 live in chicago and 2 aren't busy banging someone awesome or committing petty larceny or whatever, you should please and thank you come to one of my upcoming shows. first up, i'm reading at the sunday night sex show, which is where i got my start. it's the three-year anniversary, and the lineup includes snss powerhouses: robyn pennacchia! allen makere! rachel collins! amanda glasbrenner! maggie ednie! and THIS BITCH RIGHT HERE. it's this sunday, july 31. 730 pm at the burlington, 3425 w. fullerton ave, chicago. you really have no excuse, people. it starts early and is free to get in, plus the drinks are cheap and most of the chicks who show up are sluts. so your odds of getting laid are INCREDIBLY HIGH. (some of that might not be true.) allen and robyn host, and it's a pretty good goddamned time: trivia, sexy questions, and hot readings by chicago literary greats. including me. if you've never seen me read before you totally should. i'm awesome. plus there's a dance party afterward, but i usually skip that and go get tacos. because, well, tacos > dancing.

but i TOTALLY UNDERSTAND if sunday's a bad night for you. you worked all week, you went out and got hammered saturday night, work up at five sunday evening, scrambled to get a load of laundry done and wash a few dishes, and then before you could snap your fingers it was monday and you were back at that job you fucking hate, waiting for the HR bitch to take her lean cuisine out of the microwave so you could reheat the bland dinner your boyfriend made last night. but don't worry, sister, all is not lost! because i'm reading at funny ha-ha on tuesday night, and you get another opportunity to come out and watch me SWEAT IN PUBLIC. tuesday august 2 at 7pm, hosted by my good pal claire zulkey at the hideout, 1354 w. wabansia av, chicago. featuring all of the people on this poster, who are all hilarious and outstanding human beings. it's five bucks, which is almost the same as free. especially if you've ever bought concert tickets or gone to the movies ever before in your life. i'm going to read something childish and idiotic, of course, and then you can go get some tacos and whiskey shots with me and tuesday or whatever. unless you're sick of tacos already. OR you can leave without speaking to me at all, but i'll have you know that i'm quite friendly and will be super nice to you. so if you come, say hello. my friends are all like kittens. they'll lick your face and shit. come talk to us. PARTYTIME.

okay. i promise to get back to my regular schedule of watching television, reading magazines, and lazy posting so you don't get sick of me.
happy weekend!

dealbreakers!

2011-07-27T17:00:00.005-05:00

issue three. the war on women continues, friends. undaunted by our counterattack, the enemy has added two new pieces of heavy-duty artillery to its arsenal: a deodorant whose primary function is to make your armpits more attractive (wtf?) and individual vaginal cleansing wipes that you are supposed to carry around in your purse, just in case you need to freshen up before your mid-commute cervical exam. please tell me you've seen these new scolding, ethnically-diverse vagina commercials some genius (read: heterosexual male) came up with to shame women into believing that we aren't taking proper care of our vaginas. "hail to the v!" this human hand masquerading as a talking vagina proclaims, masking this self-hatred propaganda as female empowerment, right after she insinuates that you and the flies circling your smelly ladyparts are TOTALLY GROSSING HER OUT. i've always thought this was the silliest fucking thing a bitch could ever be worried about, because it's the one thing you have the absolute least control over. there's nothing you can eat, no futuristic panties you can wear, no not a goddamned thing that can change the way your "vertical smile" (another gem from the commercial) smells after a long day of chasing after babies and sitting through board meetings and slamming three cocktails during happy hour. are there any of you who've been thrown out of bed for smelling too much like a real human being with sweat glands and vaginal bacteria? yeah, neither have i.

the pretty armpit thing is another head-scratcher. seriously, who among you has ever been brought to tears by what your ARMPITS look like?! so they don't come right out and call your armpits ugly, but everyone knows that's the subtext. i thought skin grafts and laser hair removal were the only real hope for the five inch circle of scorched earth i go to great lengths to keep concealed under my arms, but you mean to tell me that after only five days of using dove go sleeveless that tough elephant bacon hidden beneath my cardigan is going to be softer, smoother, and ready to reveal?! hot damn. HELLO, SUMMER.

dealbreakers. magazines always know why you just got dumped, and if you'd only listened to them you'd probably be married by now, you fucking dummy. if only you hadn't cut your long hair, or voiced your opinion, or embellished your sex skills, or asked him not to wear shorts to your sister's wedding, or gotten wasted at his office party, YOU WOULD BE IN A SUCCESSFUL RELATIONSHIP. or at least something closely resembling one. i don't even know what they're talking about sometimes, shit like "how to flirt with him without being too obviously flirtatious because men hate that but they do like a forward, flirty girl." WHAT?! someone please tell me what that means; i can't decipher it. so i'm supposed to act like i want to have sex with this dude, but i'm not supposed to act like i really want to have sex with this dude or else he'll get mad and not want to have sex with ME? it's so confusing, and i'm too dumb to figure it out. dealbreakers i understand: hitting, kicking, punching, karate chopping, non-sexy biting, non-sexy choking, lying, cheating, stealing, leaving the toilet seat up more than once, bad grammar, not liking tacos, smoking indoors, TEXT PORN, and eating the last pint of chubby hubby when he KNOWS i was saving that shit to eat during the law and order marathon on sunday. dealbreakers i do not understand: pretty much anything else. and i don't mean, "i have no idea why you wouldn't want to sleep with that heavyset girl," i mean, "i don't know how it is at all possible to prepare for someone else's idiosyncrasies." and it's misleading to pretend you can. i think we all need to just write a list titled "shit i would dump you for," and as soon as you're feeling serious about someone you should go to a nice dinner and trade lists. no more than ten things, so shit don't get crazy, and if i think i can adhere to yours, and you to mine, then BAM. relationshipped. um, or not.

are your eyelashes too fat?! HOORAY FOR HEALTH SCARES. i thought i was feeling pretty good until i walked into the goddamned newsstand. could your constant texting be causing finger cancer?! could your pantiliners lead to vaginal tentanus?! how dangerous are the carcinogens in your breakfast cereal?! is that terrifying birthmark on your lower back a sign of the plague?!?!!?! HELP ME. every summer i get whipped into hysteria, convinced that the bazillion moles covering my body, most of which i was born with, are all infected, cancerous barnacles just waiting to leech their way into my vital organs and rob me of my boring life. i sit in the bathroom with a copy of glamour (or self, or cosmo, whatevs) and a magnifying mirror, trying to determine whether the spots, most of them the size of a pin prick, have grown in size or changed in diameter. and in the fall i'm laid out on the bed, one arm wrapped around the back of my head, the other trying to feel my breasts for lumps as i strain to read the tiny magazine print detailing eactly how one must conduct this in-depth gynecological exam. and, of course, by the end of it all i'm hyperventilating because all of my moles are obviously festering boils full of disease. and my boobs are ONE GIANT LUMP of imminent death. not that i ever do anything about it, of course. i self-diagnose my cancer, along with my depression and bacterial vaginosis and latent anorexia, then i forget about it all until next month, when i realize i'm not just tired from working all day, THE MALIGNANT TUMOR IN MY HEAD IS OBVIOUSLY EATING MY BRAIN.

celebrity beards. i write this blog for women and gay men. and lesbians, my favorite, who are like an amazingly wonderful and intoxicating combination of a gay man and a straight woman. anyway, i've gotten a couple salty-ass emails and comments from hetero dudes (i assume) who've obviously taken offense at my outing their idiocy on the internets, and to them i say: WOMEN AND GAY MEN, okay?! oh come on, sirs, i don't really mean that. but i do really mean that i love the homos the most, which is why i'd devote every centerfold to a man in sparkly booty shorts or a bearded lady riding a tractor. seriously though, all of the beauty and fashion columns would be courtesy of snippy gay men. i have two dozen gay boyfriends, and while they all remind how "FA-BU-LOUS, gurl" i am all the goddamned time, they're the first ones to be like, "no, boo, that dress doesn't work on someone with your hips. get the wrap dress like i told you." and somewhere in my crew of lesbians is a bitch who can write some DIY home renovation shit. and of course we'd dish about all of the obvious queens dancing on tiptoe through hollywood while married to fat broads they met in high school. i'm looking at you, hugh brosnan. and pierce jackman. ooh, SNAP.

photoshop lotion. if i could make a list of dream beauty products, photoshop lotion would be number one on that goddamned list. i stole the idea from my friend lena, because it is BRILLIANT, and 100% necessary. it would clear up all of your flaws and dark patches while imparting a healthy, sun-lit glow, plus there would be a built-in face crop tool to edit out all of your extra chins. i would also like a couple pairs of plastic surgery pants. these, of course, would slenderize all of your meaty bits and tighten them up, without the agony and duress of getting into, and keeping on, a spanx. and they'd come with a prescription for vicodin because, well, YOU KNOW. somehow somewhere we've got to get some real-life product reviews, and if that means i just have to buy every new thing and test it out for you then i guess that's what i'll have to do. i simply cannot read another lie about some $500 miracle neck cream and how it's worth not paying my rent to purchase. i want to know what really fucking works on a painful and oozing ingrown hair that makes it nearly impossible to walk across a room without falling. i need to know what conditioner is all hype, or smells like it's for a nine-year-old. i need to know whether or not i'm going to smell like a goat at the end of a work day, soap manufacturers! can you please tell me THAT?! you know what, i'm going to go get some of those cleansing wipes i was snatching about earlier and tell you whether or not my chemically-scented vagina understands just how much i care about her well-being. STAY TUNED.

cat ladies. listen. isn't it about time we abandoned this cruel and outdated stereotype? when will people who love adorable little kittens get the librarian treatment?! i mean, SERIOUSLY. prim know-it-alls with too-tight buns and cat-eyed glasses are sexy, but not a woman who is routinely startled by tumbleweeds of cat hair rolling across the floor in the middle of the night is NOT?! pffft. the stigma is really quite awful, and those of us who share our homes with a feline companion don't deserve to be maligned in this way. i understand that not everyone likes to pick cat hair out of his teeth (and off of his shirt, and pants, and shoes, and hair), but does that mean we all have to get a bad rap? i'm tired of pictures of happy couples smiling their toothpaste smiles as they walk dogs together at dusk! i don't want to see anymore images of men and women flirting (BUT NOT TOO MUCH) and exchanging numbers at the dog park! is there no place feline friends can gather and extol the virtures of our tiny hirsute children? their wily whiskers! their clicking claws! sigh. i know, i know. not sexy at all. but at least i'll have someone to eat my skin when i die alone in my apartment. so take that, dog jerks. CATS ARE SO SMART.

the asshole dating game.

2011-07-26T16:38:00.003-05:00

it's illegal to be super excited about anything these days. everything is so goddamned boring, I KNOW. i'm bored, you're bored, and even mahmoud ahmadinejad is over here bored out of his fucking skull. AND FOR GOOD REASON. he'd probably rather be stalking his ex-girlfriend's photo albums on facebook or listening to some rap group too new and underground for you to have ever heard of in the sticks where you live or shopping for jeans the diameter of a tampon that cost $300 a pair. here's what i hate about life right now: everyone is too cool for every fucking thing, and that's a goddamned drag.

twice in the past week i have had nearly identical coversations with two of my gorgeous ladyfriends, both of whom are involved in exciting new romances with super hot specimens of beef. first i was like, "boo to that. jealous." but then came the play-by-play of every interaction heretofore, no matter how minute or seemingly insignificant, followed immediately by the gut-wrenching agonizing that accompanies wanting to call or text someone you'd like to see naked again (or see naked for the first time, whatevs) who is giving you lukewarm clues about whether or not he even thinks you're INTERESTING. and then i was like, "oh yeah. this is why i'm not jealous. i hate this shit." trying to fuck people would be fun if motherfuckers weren't so ambivalent and nonplussed by everything, if bitches could just be enthusiastic without fear of repercussion for said enthusiasm. and by "repercussion" i mean "staring into the bored and vacant eyes of a person too self-centered to admit he might want to see another movie with you." WHAT IS THIS? WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?!

thursday night i stayed out way past my 930 bedtime because my friend was spinning records at empire liquors at goddamned MIDNIGHT. seriously, dude? i heard that shit and my eyes welled up with anticipatory tired tears. at this point in my life even the thought of being awake when the evening news comes on stresses me out, holy shit. it was big fun, and the highlight of the evening was that i exchanged telephone numbers with not one but TWO decently-dressed, above average attractive gentlemen. now i know you're all, "psssh bitch, they probably looked like herman munster," and i'm totally with you on that, but we were still there at last call, when the harsh overhead lights of reality bask everyone beneath them in the blinding glow of i cannot fucking believe i was just about to go home with your raggedy ass.

when i was a kid i would always straggle out of the club twenty minutes after they scraped the last drunk bitch off the vomit-covered bathroom floor, drinking with thd bartenders and trying to rally some bitches (read: wake my drunk friends up) to go to the nearest 4am. now that i'm in my late seventies i get to the bar at 11 and am in the street hailing a cab home at 1145. bitches gotta sleep. so this was a rare and special occasion to be vertical and wide awake at two in the goddamned morning. okay, so here's how the romance went down: bachelor number one shout-talked at me almost the entire time ginger and i were posted up next to the dj booth, yelling in my ear about how awesome my tattoos are and how he'd just come from an art gallery opening, which is the kind of thing dudes say when they can tell you're from the suburbs. i don't know how he could tell just by looking at me that my high school had both an arts wing and a swimming pool, but he told me two separate times how much he likes "culture." sigh.

bachelor number two stopped me as i was leaving and inquired, "do you do comedy?" PAUSE. whenever someone on the street stops me and asks, "do you have a blog?" or "have i seen you read somewhere before?" i always hesitate before answering and try to infer from his clothing whether he might be a member of the clergy whom i've offended with all this cursing. or someone i've disappointed in bed before, then talked shit about on the goddamned internet. since i didn't recognize his face, in hindsight i should've asked him to drop his pants to check for familiar birthmarks and moles, i tentatively said, "um, i guess so?" WAY TO STAND BEHIND YOUR WORK, SAMANTHA. then he was all, "i sent you an okcupid message a while ago and you never responded." to which i laughed and laughed and laughed, because there's no way that i spent two weeks reading messages from a dude who barely cleared my kneecaps and ignored this football player looking motherfucker right here. "not possible," i said, getting my phone out. "i don't ignore hot dudes." then he said, "you're hilarious, and i really want to get to know you and trade some jokes. I'M AN ASPIRING COMEDIAN." *groan*

i hate dudes who think they're funny. you know why? because they usually are NOT. and even if they are they're fucking impossible to be around, because men can never just sit back and let a woman be the hilarious one. when i'm with a funny broad i know how to play the goddamned straight man. i don't have to be hitting all the punch lines all the time; i know how to shut the fuck up and DEFER. jokey dudes always try too fucking hard; they either have a stupid gimmick, like screaming "YOUR MOM" after anyone says anything, or they tell too many long, rambling stories, teasing out the punchline over 30 fucking minutes while your eyes glaze over with boredom. and you can always tell it's some shit they've rehearsed, because you can't interrupt or ask a question because it would throw his whole goddamned trajectory off and he'd have to start over from the beginning. i had a drink with a comedy dude last week, and he just barreled through anecdote after endless anecdote. it didn't even feel like a conversation. dude only stopped to sip his beer and wait expectantly for me to provide the laugh track. which i would've if he'd been funny. listen, i don't come to your football parties acting like i'm an expert on pass yardage, so why you gotta fuck up my laugh party with your stupid dick jokes?

so lucky for this asshole that i haven't had sex since obama took office (that might not be true), and my vagina is looking for some change it can believe in. now i just have to sit through some amateur stand up in his living room (holy mother of god i will probably DIE) and pretend that i can somehow help him further his comedy career at least until i have sex with him. oh, you thought i was better than that? well, i'm not. i mean, i'm not going to make any PROMISES, i'm just not going to say "look, dude, i've gotten where i am through deceit and cronyism. good luck finding a show, if you holler at any of my contacts i will KILL YOU," until after i've seen his balls a few times.

i am so hateful and suspicious that i didn't expect to hear anything from either of them, and contrary to my negative expectations, i was only half right. saturday morning i got a bunch of texts from #1, and just when i was about to thank my lucky stars for my unlimited text message plan now that i had someone other than ginger to respond to my texts, i read them all and my heart sank. MAYBE I'M A BITCH, but if you use "dat" and "wat" and "nite" and "R U" as real words i can't help but think that you might be slightly retarded. or a twelve year old girl. the first thing i thought was "GODDAMN IT, i should've said, 'hey wat's up? how old r u?' before i gave him my number," but being out that late robs me of my mental male checklist. ginger said not to be such an asshole and judge the texter by his text, so i took my ass off my shoulders and held my nose while responding to such gems as "wat r u up 2 dis wknd?" and "ur going to a play?! girl, i love da theater!" my fingers could barely formulate a response. i mean, SERIOUSLY. why even punctuate that goddamned sentence?! i didn't even know what to say back; would he understand real english words? or would i be forced to write shit like "i cant wait 2 c u l8r" and "ur da best, 2nite is gunna b fun" for the duration of our correspondence?!

#2 didn't text a goddamned thing. and then sunday i broke my fancy phone. IT NEVER FAILS, the minute i have something to do with my shit other than watch streaming internet porn and play angry birds rio i drop it in the toilet or throw it out of the window of a moving car. always some dumb shit. so i only had my little baby phone over the weekend, and despite the fact that this phone exists 1 for bill collectors and 2 for people i might be able to trick into getting into bed with me, that is NEVER the phone i have handy when i meet someone whose number belongs in it. and i can never remember the number, which doesn't matter anyway because dudes have gotten wise to our ploys and now stall you while they dial the number you've given them to make sure it lights up your phone. crafty bastards.

yesterday i got a text forward from #1, with whom i have not yet had a single conversation of substance, that read "i fainted from the heat. thank goodness this woman was there to perform cpr." and attached was a porn still of a greased-up white woman with water balloon boobs sitting on the face of what appeared to be a human ken doll. IS THIS WHERE WE'RE AT, GODDAMN IT?! three days in, no exchange of last names, no this is where i like to eat, no this is what i do for a living, no THIS IS HOW OLD I AM, but it's already PORN TIME? i suppose this is the real reason i don't get fucking excited about shit, because deep down i know the minute i get giddy about something it's going to prematurely porn spam my ass. listen, i'm no prude. but i don't like that shit when i've actually banged a dude, let alone when all i know about him is "lmao u r so funny."

no one wants a boyfriend who sends stupid text forwards. deflated, i wrote back "gross. don't forward this kind of shit to me. not funny," and in return received "i thought u mite c da humor in it." oh, i totally do. and if i'd seen him sending that to his homeboy in the hallway after eighth period chemistry i would've just rolled my eyes and chuckled or something. BUT WE'RE GROWN. and i don't introduce myself by making pussy jokes and cursing like a sailor; as far as he's concerned i'm a born again zealot who prefers my cell phone correspondence with a side of the holy spirit. needless to say, my replacement phone was fed exed to me today and i haven't heard a word. or even a pitifully mangled HALF of a word. and #2 still hasn't said a goddamned thing, and i don't care. i forget how depressing and exhausting and terrible this whole ridiculous process is.

it's either them doing something wrong or my saying something wrong or neither of us wanting to act like we care. this shit used to devastate me, but i'm so jaded these days i just throw up my hands and give the situation a big ol' SMH. honestly, though, i'm kind of relieved. i have the reassurance that someone somewhere finds me at least attractive enough to ask for my telephone number and send me a picture of some other bitch's titties. and let's be honest, the first thing i thought was, HOLY SHIT. NOW I HAVE TO GET A FUCKING PEDICURE. and shave regularly. clean up my fucking apartment. change the sheets more often. trim my fingernails. throw the five old dried ketchups sitting in the back of my refrigerator away. hide my hitachi magic wand. wash the dishes every time i use them. go to the gym more than once a week. learn how to share the remote again. pretend to laugh at someone else's jokes. explain that what i do on the internet is JUST JOKES. cater to an ego that isn't my own. interrupt my television-watching schedule. BLARF.

wat? is dat rude? not funny? i thought u wud c da humor in dat?!

summer beauty tips for the gross and lazy.

2011-07-20T15:20:00.003-05:00

this is my real sink. and i want you to know that because i'm so well-mannered and considerate i wiped down all of the toothpaste spots and lipstick marks with comet and picked off the dried splatters of hair gel before i stood in the bathtub and took this crystal clear cell phone picture, because YES MY BATHROOM IS SO SMALL THAT I HAVE TO STAND IN THE TUB TO TAKE A SINK PICTURE. any straight dudes can just go ahead and check out of this post, because there will be no talk of anal sex or derek jeter's stats or whatever it is you want to talk about. this is for the vaginas.

do you hoes read beauty blogs? i usually don't, because the internet is filled with so much porn and celebrity gossip that reading what some asshole has to say about coral lipstick this season is that last thing on my browser's mind, but last weekend i was sitting in the bed that i pushed right up next to the window unit so that it might blow frigid air directly onto my sweaty summer skin, scrolling through a million fashion and beauty blogs written by "real" women instead of venturing outside to have my face fried off by the sun's laser rays, and i was getting super stoked because there were so many that were like "summer beauty essentials!" and "hot weather makeup solutions!" because i need to know what regular kind of deodorant regular bitches sweat through the least and what pantiliners really keep a damp girl bone dry on a hot day. so imagine my surprise at the first blog i checked, whose NUMBER ONE tip for looking good in the heat was to carry one of those evian brumisateur EIGHTEEN DOLLAR CANS OF GODDAMNED WATER around all day and mist yourself to "keep your complexion looking fresh." wut. can you imagine my face?! first of all, what would you do if you were on a packed bus whose windows were dripping with condensation crammed next to a bitch who was gently spritzing herself with water? punch her in the face? hit her over the head with that goddamned can?!

all of the posts i read were similar in their frivolity, and it made me feel like a gross asshole. like everyone else on the internets is all, "thank god she told me about that eyebrow highlighting kit!" with their perfect skin that's as cool as a popsicle, while my foundation is a shade too light and congealed in my face creases like bacon fat where it's not migrating down the side of my neck. and google was no fucking help, either, as my search for "beauty tips for sweaty bitches who glisten like roasted pigs in the middle of august" yielded zero results. SERIOUSLY. by the time i get to the train every morning i already look like i spent the night on a goddamned rotisserie. where are the helpful tips for THAT?!

then, of course, after my fruitless search for alternatives to stuffing dish towels in my bra when the humidity is above 80%, i decided instead to just write my own shit and share it with everyone else who is totally lazy and dirty and would be trying to spray that evian face water on their tongues. most of these broads lined their products up all nicely, surrounded by cute towels and shit for them to professionally photograph, but i don't have anything cute. fuck cute, no one comes over to my place anyway. plus i took this picture with my phone. i mean, come on. also, i didn't even realize the clorox wipes and candle were still on the sink until it was too late. HOLY SHIT, i couldn't move the goddamned air freshener?! what an asshole. and after my artful product installation tipped the fuck over THREE STUPID TIMES i just threw it all in the fucking sink. i tried, though. i really did.

your stinky ass. no one ever writes about how your meat and cheese get all rotten and disgusting in this nasty weather. WELL LET ME BE THE FIRST. this is probably too honest for the internet, but poo and pee comes out of there, plus it's all dank and swampy and warm. let's be for real, your vagina smells. so i like having a lot of soap options because it makes me feel like royalty even though i don't waste time washing any of my extremities, and i like kiehls coriander liquid soap because it smells good and i like to have a reason to go into barneys because i can neither fit nor afford the clothing. plus there's one near this jamaican restaurant i'm into in lincoln park and "i'm out of soap" is as good an excuse to get curry goat as any. there's also some kiss my face shower gel there, but i really only bought that shit because being in whole foods makes me feel like i want to live better and get my life together and use earth-friendly products, but then i get home and remember that I REALLY DON'T. so i shave with that shit because it cost twelve dollars and i can't bear to throw it out. and i like the smell of itchy eyes and hayfever, so i always keep a bottle of lush grass handy. but my real jam is l'occitane verbena bar soap, which makes your vag smell good and clean even when you have your period, i'm not kidding. so go buy some of that. TRUST.

your disgusting armpits. first, a confession: i finally shaved under my arms. crazy, right?! and i'm not too proud to say that i did 3/4 of the work with a beard trimmer because my razor was all, "bitch, please." i've spent months cultivating that armpit foliage! i think hairy pits are earthy and sexy, and if you don't i guess i understand. no, i really don't. here's the thing, the alternative is nicked-up gross skin that is perpetually black-ish green with stubble. that's attractive?! NO, IT IS NOT. i write all the time about how much i love to put my face in an armpit and inhale a person's homegrown musk (hippies LOVE THAT SHIT), so it was with great sadness that i used a miniature lawn mower to cut down my overgrown hedges. but i had to, because i was sweating like some sort of barnyard animal every day and it occured to me that maybe my secret lemongrass mineral anti-perspirant might not be effective through my armfro. two days with pits like a bald fucking eagle and i am still the sweatiest bastard EVER, so there goes that theory. and i will never buy that clinical strength deodorant because 1 i don't want to admit that my odor-causing bacteria is next level disgusting and 2 NINE DOLLARS FOR ONE STICK OF DEODORANT IS CRAY. so you dudes can taste test deodorants and email me if there's anything that works without burning the armpits out of your goddamned shirt.

your horrifying thighs, legs, and feet. my biggest pet peeve, of course, was the refusal of these lovely ladies to acknowledge that bitches need to attack their grody hooves with power sanders right before they liberally sprinkle themselves from bra to calf with gold bond powder. they obviously get some sort of sick joy out of pretending that they don't produce enough chub rub friction to power a generator and they never get crusty white heels. and that's cool, jerks. my beat-the-heat tactic is to never wear pants, and my beat-the-incredibly-painful-raw-skin-plus-ingrown-hair-thigh-chafe tactic is in that little blue tube behind the candle, monistat fat girl cellulite gel. oh, that's not really what it's called, but let's pretend. FOR FUN. you buy it in the yeast infection aisle, which i am no longer embarrassed to be caught loitering in, and it's this clear jelly that dries to a powdery finish and keeps your touching thighs from smelling like cooked bacon when you wear a dress. GO GET YOU SOME.

professional pedicures cause me to develop stress diarrhea, so i try to limit myself to getting one only if i think i might be having sex. which i haven't been, so it isn't an issue. instead i use that big purple mr. pumice bar on the right to whittle my feet into being acceptable for public consumption. i'm not sure why those OPI bottles are there, because as much as i enjoy purchasing nail polish i hardly ever paint my nails. here's a trick for filthy, lethargic people who hate bending at the waist unless it's absolutely necessary: keep your toenails short and don't paint them. seriously, nothing looks gnarlier than chipped polish, so unless you're going to buy topcoat and apply three base layers and use fancy drying oil (essie to dry for pictured here) omg holy shit, I'M ALREADY TIRED. just the thought of crunching my guts to try not to slather "vodka and caviar" all over the side of my little piggies makes me want to die, let alone trying to keep it looking nice. that's for fancy people with flat stomachs or whatever.

here's something i love, though: EXFOLIATING. in addition to removing every possible layer of foot callous with that pumice bar, i keep, like, five jars of h20+ sea pure under my sink. it's greasy, and you'll definitely fall and nearly crack your skull open trying to use that oily, salty shit, but cheating death is TOTALLY WORTH IT. i love sloughing all my dead skin cells down the drain, and scrubs are the new fountain of youth for poor bitches who can't afford botox and chemical peels. lotion is lotion so who cares, but i like kiehls coriander because it smells like someone you'd want to snuggle up to, and i'm trying to use every tool at my disposal. it's desperate out here.

your flat, stringy hair and dried-out man hands. when i was sixteen i shaved off all my hair, and ever since then my natural curly hair has been in various stages of growing out and getting cut. so if you kinky-haired black girls want to know what i use i'll email you, but i have no universal tips other than i clarify my shit once a week with aveda shampure, and you probably should, too. the rest of the week i alternate between terax and nizoral, which is for bitches with yucky scalp drama. my hands are the worst, and i take terrible care of them, but i do keep a bar of lush sandstone in the soap dish to scrub all the nastiness off of them. it's also good on scaly knees and elbows which, if you're like me, you know way too much about.

your greasy face. i have the best real person skin you've ever seen in your life, and here are my tricks: tacos, carbonated beverages, lady gaga's "heavy metal lover" on blast at all times, occasionally sleeping with a face full of blush, and philosophy the microdelivery exfoliating wash. it's incredible. it's like slime mixed with sand, and you wash with it once a day (i use purity made simple for the second wash if i remember to before i go to bed) and use hope in a jar afterward, then your skin glows like a baby angel's ass and is as soft as a baby duck. AMAZING. and i'm not gonna front, i have to use clinique clarifying lotion (numbers 3 and 4) to soak up the exxon spill that is my t-zone, and for the rare occasion that i anticipate being in the sun for longer than 30 seconds, i have a bottle of kiehls facial moisturizer spf 15. that shit is fifty bucks, though, and for that amount of money it should be giving me orgasms or something, and it DON'T.

my most favorite face things, though, are smashbox primer (worth the money) and mac blush. i like big red doll cheeks, and i have a pallette full of mac blushes. devil, dolly mix, azalea, EVERYTHING. they are the brightest, and they won't sweat down your fucking face. i don't use eye makeup because it's impossible to make it look nice in this wretched heat, and if you want to know about false eyelashes and tweezers lip pencils imma have to refer you to one of my tranny pals. BUT i will say that i know you girls love lipglass and juicy tubes, but the best lip gloss on the market HANDS DOWN is dior addict. the shade here is called pink flash or something (i really don't know), and the shit is PERFECT. no gloppy semen mouth, no chunks of glitter crusted in the bow of your lip, no sticky super glue impossible to eat a sandwich effect. i hate talking to a bitch with lip gloss herpes all over her mouth. BLARF.

in cuntclusion, it's nearly impossible to be even marginally attractive when the weather feels like the inside of someone's mouth. you're sweating and radiating heat, you smell bad, your clothes are sticking awkwardly in your crevices, and you're probably breathing with your mouth open and wiping condensation from your upper lip every thirty seconds. i know everyone is obsessed with the idea of a hot and steamy summer romance, but do you really want to be having sex with a brand new person during the grossest season of the year? NO YOU DO NOT. so stop trying to be sexy, just do the bare minimum and strive for "presentable." and even then you'll fail, as we all do, but at least your vagina will smell like lemons. it's the little things.

speaking of hot summer beauty, read this sexy article about me:
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ourtown/2010/07/chicago_crush_samantha_irby.html