Quietly Hostile: Essays

Being perceived is excruciating, especially if you can't go person to person explaining why you look like that. I'd go to a lot more stuff if I knew I could take each person aside and explain to them why I look and dress the way I do.

HOSTILE is how I would describe my public personality; I am mild-mannered and super polite, but just beneath the surface of my skin, my blood is electrified and I am one inconsiderate driver away from a full Falling Down–style emotional collapse.

I want to push back against this idea that it's not real love if you're not passionately chattering at each other all the time, that it's just as valid (and romantic!) to know instinctively when to shut the fuck up.

We gotta normalize the idea that people who live together and work near each other and know all the same people are eventually gonna run out of shit to say to each other and acknowledge that that’s natural and healthy.

then sit back and watch your judgmental friend splutter and try to choke out a response, because what people like that really want is to show off how much more cultured and evolved they are than you, and saying “I like it!” (include the exclamation point, I mean it!) robs them of that opportunity

Don’t you wish you’d had a kid?” Do I wish I could stand idly by and witness all the things I hate about myself manifested in, and mirrored back to me by, a person it’s against the law for me to kill? I absolutely do not!

You can use "I like it!" (the exclamation point is necessary) any time some freak questions a regular-ass thing you enjoy, and it'll swipe their legs out from under them every single time, and you can stand over their quivering body with your subpar tastes and laugh your face off.

I'm so embarrassed by everything all the time, humiliated even by the need to breathe air where other people can see me

I live every single day in fear that a stranger might yell at me for some normal community thing I am doing wrong, like pulling up to the gas pump at a weird angle or exiting out of the wrong door. So, I cannot imagine being brave enough to take my time giving explicit instructions about my latte while people who are close enough to touch me get mad at me.

Bodies are an off-limit subject for me in general because if I have to talk to you about your body, then you're gonna very courteously ask me about my body, and then I have to watch you struggle to be polite as I launch into a laundry list of my physiological issues while you try not to say "Have you considered dying?" to my face.

Let me save you from the heartbreak caused by the withering look on your nephew's face when you attempt to make small talk about anything invented in the last ten years: don't.

Damn, she uses a lot of exclamation points. The eagerness to please was palpable. What a huge mistake.

I hate being attended to, even when I’m paying and tipping 25 percent for it, because not only do I not deserve it, but I will also never maintain it.

I lived in blissful solitude for a long time...and you learn a lot about yourself and what you require for life when it's just you that you have to think about...You can buy frozen fish sticks and eat them directly from the cookie sheet you never really scrub all the way clean while sitting six inches from a television to to whatever the fuck you wanted that is turned all the way up.

Never earnestly ask for their opinions on literally anything you enjoy. Have you ever been watching, like, the most incredible show of your life? The kind of show where you’re saying to yourself, “I can’t believe they made this show that’s fuckin’ perfect for me, I love it so much, how did I get so lucky.” You call your best friend about it, and you text your crush about it so they start watching it and give you an excuse to keep talking to them, and for a time you make this show your entire personality because that’s how exhilarated you feel about it, and then a kid walks by the television and glances at it for a millisecond, then goes, “Ew, what are you watching? Haha, dude, it looks like it suckssssss,” and you suddenly feel like you just took a shotgun blast to the chest? Yeah, me neither.

And because I try to stay off the bad places on the internet, I spend a lot of time watching people argue about sports or clips of whales on BBC Earth, weeping because I get to be on the same planet as both wide receivers who can run twenty-three miles per hour and also seventy-year-old humpback whales. This is some stoner shit, for real, but have you ever just sat and thought about how there is an animal as big as a city bus and we’re alive at the same time as them, and we can look at videos of them doing things? Yes, I am absolutely out of my fucking mind, but also, while you’re on land reading this, there’s a hundred-foot-long, 400,000-pound blue whale in the ocean right now about to eat forty million krill and migrate from Antarctica to the tropics probably! Isn’t that amazing?

[...] and my face is sore from smiling so hard in an effort to appear friendly and nonthreatening.

I can't believe you go there!" she repeated, and it became clear to me that she wanted... an explanation. An apology. Unfortunately, I was in no mood to be forced to atone for a place I: - did not conceptualize. - did not build. - do not own. - do not live in. - do not profit from. - frequently use with satisfaction. - told her about as a courtesy because she asked me!

[on jumpsuits] I’m not even sure why I own a single article of clothing with buttons, let alone something you gotta hike up to your cervix just to get it over your goddamned shoulders

If you come over to eat my homemade coleslaw and talk some shit about the size of the carrots, I’m gonna dump the entire bowl in your lap.

Has anyone ever gotten divorced citing "too many assorted milks"? Is this the "for worse" to which I am resigned???

When you go into anaphylactic shock, they have to keep you for four hours, because, apparently, when the epinephrine wears off, the symptoms can come back. Life is hell. Every time I learn new shit about the human body, it makes me yearn for the grave.

I have just taken my first sip of water today at 2:57 p.m., I cannot be a person who reliably gets treatments done to herself.

I was talking to a man (first mistake), reminiscing about old shit (that's a trap, never do it), and he said to me, with the kind of brazenness only handsome people can get away with: "Level with me, baby: Don't you wish we'd gotten serious back in the day and had a kid?" I damn near choked on my own tongue.

Why can’t I be a grown-up and order a cocktail that tastes like an alcoholic juice box? Literally what is the point of growing up and going into credit card debt if I still have to get the approval of weird booze snobs rather than buy what I actually want?

I’d happily pay the fine to Sad Kermit for my crimes.