Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever burst into flames while casually scrolling through Instagram and stumbling across your wife wearing some shit you know is yours?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever finally broken down and gone to see a dermatologist?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever talked to your cat like he was a real person?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever subscribed to a magazine that has more words than pictures?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever eaten the leftovers before everyone else wakes up?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever deeply related to a nihilist meme?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever done low-impact high-intensity interval training along with a YouTube video when no one else could see you?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever had a scalp massage?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever been to Trader Joe’s right after a restock?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever given a crying baby back to its parent?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever unboxed a bunch of shit you don’t need from Amazon, broken down the box, and gotten all that unnecessary plastic that came with it into the dumpster before your wife got home from work?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever tried noise-canceling headphones?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever split a water bill?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever rubbed CBD oil on an achy knee joint?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever cheerfully woken up at 7 a.m. after going to bed at a reasonable hour the night before?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever read a romance novel?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever ordered vitamins from a subscription service that delivers them to your house every month whether you’ve remembered to take them or not?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever cared very deeply for someone you never want to have sex with?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever watched birds eat from a feeder you filled and hung for them?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever been to couples therapy?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever watched The West Wing from beginning to end?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever paid real money to read articles on the Internet?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever worn a T-shirt with words on it, then spent the entire day awkwardly waiting for people to finish reading your breasts?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever cut a toxic bitch right out of your life?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever spent more than twelve dollars on one plate?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever explained your very specific food allergy to a waiter who doesn’t give a fuck?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever tried Dijon mustard?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever bent down to ask a dog its name?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever listened to Oprah’s SuperSoul Conversations?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever bonded with the one other person on this planet who likes black licorice as much as you do?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever thrown out your high school yearbooks?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever used a really absorbent towel?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever eaten jalapeño Doritos?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever responded to a celebrity tweet?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever filled out the paperwork at a new doctor’s office and remembered all your current diseases and medications on the first try?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever had exact change?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever watched videos of Barack Obama surprising people?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever chosen to look at pictures of your twenty-year high school reunion on Facebook rather than attend it?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever gotten your phone to pair with a Bluetooth speaker?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever taken a cab when everyone else decided to walk?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever pulled your underwear all the way up to your sternum?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever put on new glasses for the first time?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever pretended to be on the phone when someone you don’t like was trying to talk to you?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever called your wife by the wrong name?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever taken more than the recommended dosage of Aleve?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever played dead at work?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever declined an invitation to a bachelorette party?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever cut your own hair?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever Shazamed a song in public?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever tried to convince a young person to care about a single thing that is meaningful to you?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever dug through the skincare bins at Marshalls trying to find the fancy shit you love on clearance?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever intentionally gotten a stupid tattoo?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever organized your sock drawer?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever swiftly avoided answering a phone call that unexpectedly came through while you were making a move in Words with Friends?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever watched one thing on your phone while your wife watches a different thing on the TV?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever designed a new IKEA kitchen in your mind?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever texted your lady to bring you something upstairs when she was downstairs?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever refused to introduce yourself to the neighbors?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever declined an invitation to a baby shower?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever kept score of how much money you would be winning on Jeopardy?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever remembered to separate all the different types of recycling?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever tried to figure out what is happening with your 401(k)?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever deleted your voice mail without listening to any of it first?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever had your spouse cosign a loan?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever covertly fed the cat human food in an attempt to win complete allegiance?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever watched a young person try to figure out the twenty-five-year-old pop culture reference you just made?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever flirted with your friend’s dad?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever licked a plate clean while no one else was watching?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever declined an invitation to a birthday party?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever tried a new anti-dandruff shampoo?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you ever …?
Sure, sex is fun, but have you …?
Sure, sex is fun.
Sure.
body negativity
I have been stuck with a smelly, actively decaying body that I never asked for and am constantly on the receiving end of confusing, overwhelming messages for how to properly care for and feed it. Healthy hair is lustrous and shiny. Those words I just used might mean the same thing. Healthy hair should also be strong, but, honestly, I don’t ever worry about that because I shave my head, and it’s not like I have to worry about it being strong enough to hold up a buoyant ponytail. I wish magazines and commercials talked more about scalps, because, wow, mine has been a horror show since the dawn of time and I am so very old and still find myself in public in a black shirt like, “Oh, please, excuse me for a minute, I appear to be molting from above the neck!” WHY WON’T CORPORATIONS TELL ME EXACTLY WHAT I SHOULD PUT ON MY HEAD? Okay, I can wash it every day, but I read websit
es and they tell you that’s bad to do. But if I skip a day, I get itchy. If I skip two days, I start to develop dandruff in my eyebrows, which is thoroughly disgusting. I can oil my scalp, but it’s already oily, which I’ve been told is also bad. Then when my hair is washed and my scalp is glistening and flake-free for five minutes, which of the 132 bottles of styling products crammed underneath my sink is the nourishing, hydrating, frizz-controlling, root-covering, volumizing, texturizing, smoothing, sculpting, shine-enhancing, color-protecting, moisturizing finishing gel-spray mousse-foam that is going to get my shit looking together?
Let’s talk about glowing skin. I don’t drink water and my blood type is pizza, but my skin looks good from a distance, mostly because I put three different oils on it and occasionally rinse off my blush before bed. Your face skin needs to be smooth yet supple yet stretched like a fresh canvas, and you’re supposed to pretend that you haven’t thought about it since you were nineteen. You have to clean it, shave it (perimenopause gang, represent!), tone it, then use a treatment on it, then press a serum into it, then moisturize it, then screen it from the sun, and, bitch, are you kidding me, that is just the skin on your fucking face!!!!!
Eye care is weird, because you don’t do anything proactive for your dumb eyes and, when there’s a problem, you flip the fuck out and remember how delicate and sensitive they are and wonder why you never cared about them before you got some moldy mascara in there and made them pink. I have worn glasses since I was nine years old, so, by default, I have taken care of my eyes at least once every two years. I’m nearsighted with an astigmatism, so I go to an ophthalmologist and get that yellow light shined in my cornea and take that scary test where they blow bursts of cold air directly onto your eyeball while screaming at you not to flinch and ruin the test. I try to wear fashionable glasses and that shit is expensive? But worth it. Because of them, people will decide you are cool, before you open your mouth and shatter their illusion. Because I stare at a screen fifteen hours a day, I invested in UV-protection lenses, which serve as a constant reminder that I had to adjust something in my real life because of all the time I waste in my fake life. That’s sad!
Your eyelashes should be long and fluttery, which can be achieved by painstakingly gluing faux mink ones on top of your own and jabbing yourself repeatedly in the eye with a brush coated in black wax, as you try to paint each individual lash with lengthening, volumizing, water-resistant color. Or you can fork over sixty dollars to a trained lash professional who will attach synthetic lash fibers onto your wimpy lashes with medical-grade adhesive. I have one tube of mascara that I bought from a vending machine in an airport when I was pretending I might be a different kind of person for the two days I was in Minnesota. I wasn’t.
I have plucked, I have tweezed, I have shaved, I have waxed, I have threaded, I have microbladed, I have trimmed, I have tinted, I have filled in, I have styled, I have contoured, and I have microfeathered my stupid eyebrows and none of those things has ever had a discernible impact on my life. Now I do nothing, and it’s fine!
I have my dad’s nose. It has been covered in blackheads and tiny little, I don’t know, blood marks ever since I can remember looking at it in a mirror. I know from years of training from the pages of Glamour that these blemishes are little spots of oil that come to the surface of your skin and oxidize, but after years of squeezing them privately at home and occasionally paying a licensed aesthetician to squeeze them out in public, I don’t think I have ever seen a not-clogged nasal pore. You buy pore-shrinking cleanser when you’re young and naive and believe that a six-dollar tube of over-the-counter face wash is capable of performing science on your face in your messy bathroom. After that, you graduate to the strips, which are extremely satisfying if you enjoy ripping shit and/or inspecting gooey things that come out of your body. As a devout Q-tip inspector, I understand the stomach-lurching appeal of looking at the little speckles of nose junk dotting a bright white pore strip. It helps to get the pores cleaned out, you see, because your nose is supposed to be smooth and matte, except at the tip, which should sparkle because that makes you look young.
Do you think about ear upkeep? I used to hang out with this dude who got the insides of his ears waxed, which was W I L D because we weren’t even thirty at the time, and just imagine what his senior citizenry is going to look like! He was a fucking teen wolf with tufts sprouting from his ears, which I thought was kind of sexy, but it wasn’t my body. Anyway, I produce a lot of earwax, and every time I go to my nurse practitioner, I ask him to look inside my ears. He does and says it’s fine, even the times they feel pretty itchy and sticky. Honestly, something could have crawled in and died in there, but I never push the issue because (1) TRULY, what is more disgusting than talking to another person about your “excessive wax,” but also (2) I feel like every medical professional I talk to is two degrees from saying “you’re too fat” no matter what you’ve made an appointment for them to check. I don’t know the correlation between gummy ears and weight, but if you give a doctor enough latitude, they will find one.
I do not have all my teeth. There is so much shit you have to do for your mouth alone that I refuse to believe anyone I’ve ever met is doing all of it. You’re supposed to have: clean, straight teeth; healthy gums; a vibrant pink tongue; fresh breath. I have: zero things on that list. Teeth are impossible because you literally have to (1) have good genes or (2) BE RICH to have good ones, and even if you’re blessed with both, it doesn’t always work all the way out for you. I am the kind of person who deftly weaves 30 Rock quotes into my everyday lexicon, and my favorite among them is when Liz says to Tracy, “How do you know I’m not rich?” and Tracy replies, matter-of-factly, “YOUR TEETH.”
Whenever people accuse me of having money I am quick to point them to the damp, pulpy hole where the first premolar on my upper right jaw used to be or to my gappy front teeth and pronounced overbite. Baby, if I was rich, I would have all my rotted stump teeth cut from my skull and replaced with piano keys. I am obsessed with rich people who don’t fix their crowded, overlapping teeth, because my teeth have always been a dead giveaway that I have nothing and came from even less. Just imagine the wealth and power you’d need to feel free enough to keep your brown teeth despite being able to afford an in-home orthodontist. It’s staggering.
Who has time to take care of their teeth? I’m supposed to brush for two minutes, then floss, then rinse, then swish with Listerine for a full sixty seconds even though it makes my sinuses burn and my eyes water, and occasionally do a whitening strip? Come on. I’m not flossing because I will never floss, Listerine is painful, and two minutes is a very long time. I got this Aesop mouthwash that feels like it’s doing something to my neglected, gingivitis-ravaged gumline every time I swish it around, so that’s something. That I can do.
At last count, I had no fewer than forty-two lip balms between my bedside table, tote bag, office, and car, and for what?
Uncreased, unlined foreheads and cheeks are a prerequisite for tricking people into believing you have a good life. But life is fucking stressful and too goddamn long, and I am afraid to get needles in my face, because I know me, and I know that the minute I make some drastic alteration to my face, my hands and neck and other dead-giveaway parts are going to shrivel up like a raisin and I’m going to be the only shiny, moon-faced bitch out here still looking old because the rest of her body immediately started running away from her doctored face.
Rarely do I feel myself channeling either of my old, country-ass parents, but one of the times I feel them the most is when faced with a tub the size of a Carmex container full of fancy wrinkle cream that costs upwards of five hundred dollars. I’m not cheap, and I love flushing money down the toilet, but nothing brings the “child, that’s just overpriced Vaseline” out of me quicker than the skincare counter at Saks. I mean, there are multiple times during the day when I can actively feel my body dying (sitting on the side of the bed after I first wake up in the morning, checking my text messages a
t literally any point during the day, when I accidentally catch the evening news), and if there is a cream strong enough to counteract the existential dread woven through every cell in my body, I’d buy it. If it exists, I bet it’s at NASA or some shit. They’re using it to power rockets.
Your neck is supposed to be firm and long, but I thought that was only asked of penises. Why does my neck have to do anything other than hold up my head? I do not, and will never, use any specific treatments for my neck. I cannot be bothered to care about my neck. Of all the things I have to check off this endless list, “neck maintenance” is not going to be one of them. Between whatever slides down it when I’m scrubbing my face and hair and whatever is slathered across it when I’m trying to moisturize all the other parts I can reach before the bathroom gets cold, that is all I can fucking be bothered to do.
What’s happening on your back right now? Do you even know? How much hair is on it? Is the skin soft? Has years of spending every day in a straitjacket-tight bra left weird marks on it? How are your moles doing? What’s up with that weird scaly patch? Are you already so tired from all the other shit you have to keep track of that you can’t be bothered to worry about the part of your body you can’t even fucking see? I FEEL THAT.
I think the last time I actually thought to myself, “Hey, I wonder what’s going on on my back?” was in 2002 when I was sleeping with this dude who lived in the apartment downstairs from mine. He would moan weird shit during sex like, “You are so warm inside,” and “I love looking at your back” while making love to my rear end. I laughed the first time he said the warm thing because, I’m sorry, what? Have you been fucking corpses? Do I have undiagnosed measles?? Anyway, I’m not such an asshole that I wouldn’t try to make my back nicer for someone who enjoyed looking at it, so I bought a back-scrubbing loofah stick and almost dislocated my fucking arm trying to scrape the dead layers of skin off my back with so much force that it bled. Then I would squirt lotion on the wand end after my shower and try to slather it on, because I hadn’t anticipated how dry and raw the trickiest part of my body to reach was going to feel after having twenty years’ worth of dead cells scrubbed off it. I ended up having to back up to the towel rack and gingerly rub myself up and down like a dog against a dry towel to try to get the lotion to absorb into my wounded skin. My freshly unearthed baby back ribs didn’t feel right for weeks, but the next time homeboy tapped on my door inappropriately late at night bearing nothing but lidded eyes and a throbbing erection, he did stop accidentally slipping into my anus long enough to ask, “Ouch, babe, did you fall on your back? You want me to put some liquid bandage on this?” Good ol’ thermometer dick reminding me that no good deed goes unpunished and you should never do anything nice, ever, for anyone.
Wow, No Thank You. Page 11
