Hello, 911? What on Earth am I supposed to say to this bathroom attendant?
Hello, 911? I can’t figure out where to wait for my Starbucks. Okay, I know where, but there are a lot of people in here and if I stand where it looks like I should stand, I’ll be pressed against the condiment bar and I don’t want to start my day with six kinds of milk on my fucking coat. But the corral of hot early-morning bodies vibrating with rage as they wait for gigantic steaming cups of boiling-hot coffee that can spill on me is terrifying to navigate. We are going to do that awkward “you jerk left, I’ll stumble right” dance that will spiral into a never-ending chorus of apologies that I won’t be able to stop until one of us physically removes ourselves from the premises. I’ve somehow managed to make it through forty years of having no one around to choreograph these grueling situations for me, but that doesn’t mean I won’t spend the rest of my life feeling gross when it comes back to haunt me when I can’t sleep at two in the morning.
Hello, 911? I put on my jacket and got in my own car and braved the icy parking lot and picked up my own food: AM I SUPPOSED TO TIP?
Hello, 911? Am I going to break this chair? It’s happened before and I still have nightmares about it every day, because is there anything more humiliating than that actually happening to you in real life? Definitely not. I’ve vomited on myself before! And I’ve had to take a shit in the street! Nothing terrorizes me more than the continuous loop of that creaky chair seconds before it collapsed beneath me. I have the memory of brutal romantic rejections that don’t pain me as acutely as remembering the faces of the women gathered around my dining room table as I clawed my way up from the floor. And now I’m here in this unfamiliar place at a thing I didn’t even want to be at being offered a chair made of matchsticks and masking tape, and if this thing breaks under me please just shove the largest splinter directly into my heart.
Hello, 911? That lady caught me taking a selfie and walked away before I could convincingly pretend to be holding my phone at this angle for some other reason.
Hello, 911? Shout-out to targeted Facebook ads for always knowing the exact right moment to show me a cozy knit sweatshirt tunic dress for $17.99 plus shipping, but I just ordered that BS, and after clicking many links and connecting all my social media accounts, now the only page that isn’t loading is the one I just clicked “pay” on, so I reloaded and connected to Wi-Fi and closed my other tabs, and now it won’t load and I have no idea if it’s charged me eight times or not at all.
Hello, 911? I’m on the tollway. I guess I don’t have any other choice than to actively have a panic attack while the smoothest dollar in my wallet is somehow not good enough for this finicky machine, and despite the fact that I have opened the door and my actual body is halfway out of the car so I can deposit it at exactly the right angle, it keeps spitting it back out at me and my palms are just getting more and more damp, which definitely isn’t making things easier. Oh, look, I’m hyperventilating and starting to cry a little! Wow, what is this, a line forming? And now they’re impatiently honking at me over a machine I can’t control that doesn’t have a working credit card slot and no human attendant anywhere in sight? Great!!!
Hello, 911? I’m on the phone with my cell phone carrier and I actually need to speak to a representative.
Hello, 911? Am I losing it? Sometimes I sit in traffic, and when people are walking their bikes across the street in front of me or crossing with their kids, I just think to myself, “Isn’t it wild that you literally can just run over someone?” My conscious self knows it’s wrong, but you really could just do it, and I know that running people over is wrong so I don’t, but the human brain is so strange—what if my brain just decided it was okay to run over people? I’m starting to feel funny and wondering if I actually have a murderer inside just waiting to come out, please help.
Hello, 911? The elevator stopped at my floor and I am on the fourth of the five seconds between when it arrives and when it finally settles and the doors slide open, but should I scream? I’m slippery with perspiration and consumed with how much I have to pee and kicking myself for not stopping at that bathroom I passed in the lobby, and now I’m going to ruin my outfit and be found dead in this elevator with urine-soaked shoes. What if I really am trapped in here and the fire department comes and they have to use the ladder, will it be long enough? What about strong enough? Do I have the wrist strength to heave myself up from the floor of this elevator to the ceiling? How many people will be watching me? If there is a God, he would snap this cable and let me plunge to my death before everyone at this hotel saw me getting wedged out of this metal box in floral cotton briefs. Oh, wait, the doors finally opened, never mind, bye!
Hello, 911? One of the 137 lights on this dashboard just came on, and honestly, I don’t know whether it means I need to stop for gas soon or immediately barrel roll out of this motherfucker in the middle of the highway.
Hello, 911? I have to cancel an appointment.
Hello, 911? My brain is a prison, and anxiety is the warden. I am besieged by the undeniable urge to peel off my skin like it’s the layers of an onion until death claims me and I find relief in its cool embrace, and I know it took me a long time to finally call and I’m not 100 percent sure that this qualifies as an emergency, but I think I’ve reached my limit and I might need some help.
Okay, sure, I’ll hold.
an extremely specific guide to publishing a book
Here is how I got my books published so far. It is not that helpful!
I started my blog, bitches gotta eat, in 2008. Or maybe 2009? I’m not sure. I could look it up, but that’s boring! Actually, I first started a blog on MySpace because I wanted to impress this kid I thought wanted to have sex with me. I mean, he did the thing where he was very flirty, and seemed like he wanted to have sex with me, but he wasn’t overt about it, so I felt like I had to do something else to win him over. Okay, the truth is that he was very flirty, but not overtly so, and I don’t believe that people are honestly attracted to me without my first having to put on some elaborate show. And by “elaborate show,” I don’t mean “dress nice” or “deal with my seborrhea”; I mean “make them very specific playlists full of songs that prove how interesting I am.” From his MySpace, I gleaned that he was dating a poet. I cannot compete with a poet! I feel things very deeply, sure, but instead of making art out of those feelings, I cry inappropriately at commercials for new medicines. So he was dating a poet and she seemed cool and mysterious as poets do, and I immediately was like, “Wow, how did I waste so much time messaging a dude I can’t get with?”
I haven’t gone to therapy yet because I’m too fucking tired, but if I did my issues would boil down to:
Extensive childhood trauma caused by poverty, danger, illness, and grief
Callous detachment and fear of intimacy
Hours of time wasted on people who pretended to be romantically interested in me but just wanted me to tell them a joke
I don’t know that I have the resources to solve this crisis on a national scale, but listen, everyone: you can just ask people to tell you a joke. Leading people on is a hate crime. Especially when you could just say what you want and let them decide whether or not they want to give it to you without getting their romantic feelings involved. This is a careless thing that is probably unintentional sometimes, but, goddamn, just ask for what you want without looking up at me from under your hair (or whatever your chosen flirtation method might be), unless you’re truly trying to have clothes-on hand-sex, say what you want in a normal way so I don’t have to feel tingly and weird when I say no.
*
I started writing short stories my sophomore year in high school. I had this amazing teacher, Nancy Kellman, who made us read Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery” (just, like, wow), and then assigned us to write short stories of our own. Mine was about a teenage girl who kills her mother because (a) I have always been incredibly dark and (b) I was afraid to write the tragicomic love story my
heart desired, because what if she read that shit aloud to the class? Mrs. Kellman liked my story, and also sent me to the social worker for being disturbed, and throughout the rest of the year encouraged me to write more and met with me after school to work on all my nightmare fantasies.
Junior year I had a different teacher but I kept sneaking back to Mrs. Kellman’s classroom to slide my weird stories under her door, and she would give them back to me with very thoughtful critiques, and sometimes she left me little notes that were like, Bitch, are you okay? Not exactly, but you get it. My home life at the time was extremely chaotic, and my grades were definitely a reflection of that. By the time I dragged myself to senior year, my counselor and a couple teachers I actually turned homework in to were determined to help me limp across the finish line no matter what it took so I could graduate and officially become the universe’s problem. To do this, they filled up my class load with independent studies, which basically meant I took gym, choir, Spanish, and a few electives, then filled the rest of my gaping schedule with free periods during which I was supposed to be writing, guided one-on-one by a teacher of my choosing. Naturally, I asked Mrs. Kellman to do it, and I set a goal of writing eight short stories per semester. If I completed them all, I would get an A regardless of their quality. I did that, and I won an award at the end of the school year for one of the stories and it came with a four-thousand-dollar cash prize that I spent on Mike and Ikes (probably?), and I stopped writing as soon as I graduated.
When I dropped out of college after the first year, I started working on a novel late at night in the bakery where I worked after we closed for the night. The only sounds were the shuffling and clanking of the bread makers working the night shift drifting up to the office where I was typing on an old computer my boss let me use. I don’t know how good the novel was considering I was eighteen and had slept through the only college English course I had taken up to that point, but I liked the book well enough. I didn’t do anything with it, just plugged away night after night, because I didn’t want to go home to my shitty apartment and eat one of those “10 for $10” Lipton rice mixes while staring at the TV until I fell asleep. When I finished it, I printed the whole thing out, one chapter at a time because I didn’t want to conspicuously use up a ream of paper in a day and get my paycheck docked, and I three-hole punched it and put it in a binder and kept that binder in the trunk of my car, because who cares?!
Anyway, dude-I-was-into’s poet girlfriend was hot and cool and wrote deep, meaningful stanzas, and by the time I met him, I was just a donkey going on coffee runs at one job and a monkey scheduling cat dentals at the other, falling asleep facedown in sports-bar nachos in between. Needless to say, I was intimidated by her. One day he casually mentioned being ~into writers~ to me, and because everything is a test, I immediately gave up. I knew that if there was a fight, I was absolutely going to lose it, but wait: there was a binder buried under a bunch of “what if I crash my car in the snow?” blankets in the trunk of my car, and my best friend Anna had also stashed a folder in her parents’ attic of all the creepy stories I’d written while not learning high school geography. This is writing! I was a writer!! Maybe I could be a writer who had sex!!!
What are some superficial ways you can impress someone handsome in a hurry?
Buy them something luxurious and expensive.
Have the very specific body type of a person they’ve fantasized about.
Possess an exhaustive knowledge of some obscure thing they care about.
Show off a physical skill, like popping a wheelie on a dirt bike. (Is that a real thing?)
Pretend you need their advice or expertise. (Ha-ha, no!)
Do volunteer work, and go out of your way to tell them about it. Tap dance??
What is a way you might not?
Hand them a hundred out-of-context pages from a novel you wrote and expect them not only to read it, but to do so and fall hopelessly in love.
I don’t have any confidence in myself, so it seemed unlikely to me that I was going to win homeboy over just by saying my normal words to him. I needed a way to get some of my writer words into his hands, so he would like me more. In hindsight, don’t ever do anything for anyone, but especially not a man who already has a girlfriend, whose relationship terms seem inconsistent at best. Thinking about how much effort I put into this rather than, um, learning anything at all, ever, is extremely embarrassing!
I alluded to being a writer, or at least having written, knowing full well that the response was going to be some combination of “What do you write?” and “When can I read it?” Sure, I could call Anna’s mom and ask if I could go digging through her old clothes and lawn furniture to find a story I’d written at fifteen about the scamming children of a traveling tent revival preacher who prey on vulnerable congregants and swindle them (WHAT), or I could try to select the perfect handful of crumbling, moldy pages from the book I refused to retype on a new computer because I misplaced the floppy disk (again, WHAT) I’d saved it on and expect him to read them and return them to me while actively swooning. Isn’t that how things work? Absolutely not.
Okay, so let me remind you that this lazy courtship was taking place on MySpace, a website for friends. Facebook was for people with .edu college e-mails and I had no idea it even existed, so my social-media home resided on a rainbow polka-dot background where the song “Shake That” by Spank Rock assaulted your ears every time you clicked on my profile to see what mood I was in. MySpace had a blog feature, and I’m going to be honest with you and tell you that I didn’t have the faintest idea what a fucking blog was.
I was born in 1980, and I bought my first computer in 2011. I didn’t have the Internet in my home until four or five years ago, because I fucked around and got my cable disconnected in my old apartment and Chicago has that weird thing where you can get Cable Company A on one side of the street and Cable Company B on the other side of the street, and navigating all that when you don’t regularly pay your bills is a nightmare. So, when missing the New York Housewives forced me to get cable again, I got DirecTV (excellent customer service, by the way), but they didn’t offer Internet, so I just didn’t have it. Did you know you can live like that? It’s possible!
All that to say that I’m not hyperliterate when it comes to the Internet. I’m not ~extremely online~ even now, you know? I had to google that one SpongeBob meme because I aM oFtEn LaTe To ThE PaRtY. But I’m getting ahead of myself; in 2008, I didn’t know what blogs or LiveJournal or any of that really was, because I only had access to the Internet at work. I used the Internet to read Television Without Pity forums about Project Runway, and to snicker at Dlisted and What Would Tyler Durden Do? and Go Fug Yourself when the phones at work were slow. Even now, 99 percent of my Internet usage is reading Vulture recaps and fancy celebrity profiles and lifestyle blogs. Back then, I was messing around on MySpace one day during a lull and happened upon the blog option, and a tiny cartoon light bulb appeared over my head and blinked to life. At the same time, I exclaimed, “Aha!” and started typing some dumb thing about an art class I once took.
After a few entries that I intentionally spaced out so as not to look super thirsty, I casually alerted him to its existence like, “Oh, hey, I didn’t see you lurking online there, but if you’ve got a couple free minutes to be seduced by this little thing about spoiled milk I just wrote, then here it is, if you want to read it, but I don’t, like, actually care if you do, because I’m so cool and aloof.” Then I breathlessly refreshed the page and counted the pageviews until I was sure that at least one of them was him.
Let’s skip to the end: he read it, and liked it (or pretended to because I was open to anal). Then we had an intense relationship, but not really, because he wasn’t entirely honest, and, man, I hate finding out a Thing is just a thing, especially when I had to type all those words to make it happen. I’m nothing if not good-natured, so when it ran its course and blew up, I was like, “Okay, that was something. I learned a lot. Let’s move on.�
�� Then I thanked my blog for its service and started making preparations to join the rest of the non-college-educated world in a shift over to Facebook, which had finally opened its doors to us plebes and also didn’t have a blog feature. Laura, who worked across from me, and to this day serves as my shrewd career adviser and moral compass, was like, “Dude, you can’t shut it down! So many people read it!” It was true; so many people other than the intended recipient were reading my nonsensical jokes. But I didn’t want to still be on MySpace with all the emo bands and moms. WHAT COULD I DO?
Laura and I went to get cheeseburgers and mai tais after work one night, and she said, “You should try Blogger, it’s free,” and I said, “Okay, sure,” and then when I got home I looked up how to start a blog on the HTC smartphone I’d gotten for free because Sprint, by the way, didn’t carry iPhones yet and I couldn’t afford to switch cell phone carriers, because have I told you enough times how your credit can get fucked before you’re even living a real adult life yet? I still have Sprint, because they were the only ones to offer me a chance to make staticky phone calls while fully operating a dangerous vehicle on the highway back when my credit score was literally 2, and I am loyal to a fault.
I started a blog, and I called it bitches gotta eat because of the movie Boyz n the Hood. Some people know exactly what I mean when I say that, and other people look at me like I’m speaking Klingon. In case you’re in the latter group: there’s a scene in the beginning of the movie when the titular Boyz are all at a backyard barbecue celebrating Doughboy’s release from prison. Doughboy is played by the rapper Ice Cube, an actual angel. Anyway, Doughboy’s mom, Mrs. Baker, comes out with those giant foil pans that let you know the food is FLAMES full of chicken and ribs, and as she’s setting it out, all the dudes at the party start shoving their way toward the table, elbowing women and children out of the way. Which I understand, as I, too, love a hot link fresh off the grill. The scene continues as follows, transcribed by me while watching it on my phone in the bathroom, wearing headphones I might have dropped in the bathtub:
Wow, No Thank You. Page 24