Uber is going to bankrupt me. Did you know that for sevenish dollars, you can ride to work in the luxury and comfort of the backseat of a 2009 Toyota Camry driven by a bored old guy who will ask way too many questions and will safely deposit you right at the door of your destination without your having to dodge a single double-wide stroller or knife-wielding bum? Compared to the threeish dollars it’s going to cost you to run-walk—a backpack full of three-for-$10 frozen dinners and the (now soggy) library book you’re going to read in the closet you eat lunch in jostling against your shoulder blades—through pouring rain to the unpredictably late or early elevated train. You will ruin your top with anxiety sweat, the expensive cotton of your best work shirt clinging wetly to the hairs at the small of your back, as an increasingly angry rush-hour mob forms behind you and your ineffective swiping of the Ventra Card you put twenty bucks on last night. The train rumbles into the station overhead, and you step in what you’re pretty sure is liquid human waste as you hustle up the stairs, only to have the doors clamp shut just as you reach them. Yes, that woman in the fur coat pushing a grocery cart heard your strained pleading for her to hold the door as you limped across the platform, and, yes, she absolutely chose to ignore you. So now you’re shivering, soaking wet, and you can’t sit down because someone left a soiled baby diaper next to a dirty hypodermic needle on the bench. The announcer just informed everyone that the next six trains are running express past your stop, so, yeah, maybe it’s a better idea to just jump onto the tracks in front of one rather than continue with this miserable day. I lost a perfectly good hat one winter as I walked from the brown line to Union Station when a 75 mph blast of arctic wind blew it off my head and across three lanes of traffic. Standing impotent on the corner as icicles hung from my lashes, I watched a grimy cab squash it into a pothole thick with muddy slush and whispered softly into my scarf, “Man, fuck the train.”
Socialize at potluck meals instead of at restaurants!
WHAT DO THESE WORDS EVEN MEAN? You know how I know my friends love me? Because they’ve never asked to come over to my apartment. Going to other people’s houses is terrible. What if the food they made from one of those thirty-second instructional videos is gross? What if their dog is super annoying? What if you have to poop and the bathroom opens into the room you guys are all chilling in, so you’re basically shitting with an audience? You can’t just subject innocent people to your butt! The real problem with going over to Craig’s Saturday night for a little get-together is that there is no way for you to leave without looking and feeling like an asshole. You wouldn’t have to worry about holding in a turd all night if your homie would just let you bounce after dessert (i.e., a half-eaten box of Girl Scout cookies he found in the freezer, because people our age never remember to buy a fucking pie when they invite you over). But nooooooooo, he just set his projector up and you have to watch a movie on the living room wall and I’m sorry you hated that movie but don’t leave yet! We haven’t even played Cards Against Humanity!!!
I just want to go down to the bar, listen to three beers’ worth of your problems, then claim that my stomach hurts so I can leave and get in bed before nine. And, yeah, we could probably get a case of home beers for the price of the ones I’m tipping two dollars apiece on, but then I’d have to sit in your house for the time it takes to drink all those beers. The cost-benefit analysis of brunch versus trying to find a polite way to tell you I’m about to fall asleep on your couch has shown that twelve-dollar eggs win every single time.
Clearly, what I need to be is rich. I need to invent something rad or get hit by a city bus so I can get enough zeros in my bank account to ensure that I will never have to touch any icky loose change. I gotta start playing the lottery. Except if I win, I definitely need a trustee or Britney Spears’s dad to get me some municipal bonds and dispense a weekly allowance, because I am not to be trusted. I would buy half a dozen pairs of glasses and legally download a bunch of movies I don’t even like before the check even cleared. I would buy that Rainbow Brite doll I never got Christmas 1986 and drive her around in my new car full of gasoline with my windows electronically rolled down and the air conditioner blasting, eating fistfuls of Life cereal and sipping a motherfucking Capri Sun.
You Don’t Have to Be Grateful for Sex
I saw my first adult human penis when I was thirteen years old. My mom had been gone for approximately thirty-seven seconds, and I heard a lilting patois call from the bathroom: “Sweetheart, come in here and give me a hand. I want to show you something.”
This maintenance guy had been working in our apartment all morning; his work boots thundering down our hallways, his aggressive stench filling my nostrils every time he swaggered past the bedroom where I sat, blissfully ignorant, in a backward Kansas City Chiefs cap with a library book held an inch from my face. Even though I was five-foot-eight and had my motherfucking period already, I was not allowed outside without adult supervision, and the multiple sclerosis that my mom was diagnosed with before I was born left her too disabled and too tired to properly supervise. I spent my summers indoors on hot, musty days like these, watching Cubs games on WGN and earnestly singing “More Than Words” along with the Top 9 at Nine countdown on the radio every night.
I carefully folded a corner of the page and slid off my bed. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, handy. I cannot:
Fix a flat tire.
Change the battery in my smoke detector.
Correctly hang a picture on a wall.
Tell you which cord goes into its corresponding hole on the back of my television.