Have you heard of those thunder shirts for dogs to help them stay calm during loud storms? They should be made for people, to help us stay calm in situations when we have to listen to someone explain at great length why they are too busy to own a TV set. Picture it: you’re chilling in the corner at a party full of people you’ve never met before and hated on sight, humming the lyrics to a Coldplay song to yourself to drown out the Swedish death metal the hostess put on to prop up her apparition of coolness, then here comes some asshole who makes her own yogurt and just discovered Ta-Nehisi Coates condescending at you about how damaging reality shows are to impressionable youth. MAN, I FUCKING LOVE TV. And I don’t mean educational programming on PBS or crackly documentaries about important historical figures. I mean I know all of the cast members of The Real Housewives of Atlanta, past and present, and all of their children, pets, and significant others by name. I once walked blindly past my own sister on a sparsely populated train platform on a Saturday afternoon, but I could tell you who won Survivor the last few seasons without even having to google it. Television has forever been my unwavering companion and trusted friend. Every bad day, every breakup, every inexplicable 2:00 a.m. awakening: television has been there for me through all of them. I would trade every deadly hornet sting and itchy eye-causing spring bloom, without hesitation, for the warm glow of my Samsung for the rest of my life.
2. Are there enough blazers in my closet?
Years ago I decided that I was going to be a jacket person. I’m not sure it was a conscious decision—like, I didn’t just wake up one day and throw out all my long-sleeved shirts, but I remember finding this insanely well-cut cropped denim jacket with a military collar and cinched waist and the first time I wore it I didn’t take it off for the entire day. At some point the next morning, stumbling around hungover and bleary-eyed trying to get my shit together for work, it dawned on me that I could just wear that jacket again. I already knew it looked good and anyone paying close attention would just assume I’d changed the T-shirt I had worn underneath, so why the fuck not? I put that damn jacket on every single day; if Michael Kors could wear the same uniform every day, why not Samantha Irby? Now I have all kinds of jackets: leather ones, tweed ones, twill ones, the works. And you would not believe how many pajama pants you can get away with wearing to nice places if you just slap a sharply cut blazer on top of them. I went to a party recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and I almost took an anxiety shit in the charcoal Spalding Women’s Boot-Leg Yoga Pant I’d just ripped out of the plastic Amazon packaging after gazing at all the angular haircuts and avant-garde outfits teetering around on sky-high heels, their delicate ankles bound by complicated-looking straps. I was wearing a baggy V-neck, riddled with holes from moths and actual wear and tear, but I had gotten my nicest blazer from the dry cleaner. So even though I felt wildly out of place between the blush I’d put on in the cab and the jacket my dry cleaner starched the shit out of, I felt okay enough to hang out for an hour before demanding my homeboy drive me home.
Home, where I can gaze lovingly at my closet and organize my jackets. By color, by material, by the likelihood they will ever see the outside world. I’m sitting in my crib right now, listening to this Gretchen Parlato record from three years ago, ripping sheets of toilet paper off the roll I keep on my desk because buying boxes of Kleenex feels like a waste when allergy season is about to destroy my life anyway, and I am wearing a jacket. A black pleather motorcycle jacket I got for sale at ASOS that has a little fringe on it but not so much that I look like I’m going to an Aerosmith cover band audition later. That’s the thing about being an inside person who enjoys the occasional wardrobe splurge; you gotta be cool with modeling it for the cat and hoping the delivery dude from Apart Pizza Company assumes you just got home from work. You were so busy writing checks and taking important calls that you hadn’t had time to shrug it off before opening the door for your pizza, even though you both know deep down that you haven’t left the apartment all day and only put the jacket on because it’s a shame to let an eighty-dollar coat go unworn.
3. Food just tastes better inside.
White people love picnics. So much, in fact, that they’ll stop just about anywhere to have one. Why? Everywhere you look someone has turned a bus bench or statue or filthy curb into an outdoor café. You dudes just stop and bust out your wicker baskets anywhere, hmm? I know my people love a summertime cookout as much as anyone, but we don’t just set up a three-legged grill in the alley next to the dumpster as soon as the winter snow melts and throw our chicken on it. We organize, we plan. First of all, we need to know who is going to be responsible for the potato salad. You can’t just let that one lady from work you invited to be nice bring hers—it has to be known potato salad, from a vetted and reliable source.
I can’t even commit to going to a white person’s house for dinner in the summer unless we have specific plans to do something that requires four walls and a roof while I pretend to be picking at their homemade tabouleh. Because guaranteed I am going to walk into the house and be greeted with, “Hey, let’s eat this out on the patio!” And by “patio” they mean “that little scrap of cement at the base of my back stairs that holds only one chair and is right next to the trash.” LOL FUCK THAT. And I try to avoid restaurants with outdoor seating at all costs, especially with my non-melanotic friends, because when your Uber driver makes a wrong turn and they beat you to the place by a hair, they always do some slick shit like put your name in for an outside table. I don’t care how long the wait is, I’d rather wait an hour for a table that won’t get covered in pigeon shit and the airborne pathogens expelled from the mouths of curious passersby.
4. You can daydream about things in catalogs you are never going to buy.
Without fail I get the IKEA catalog every single year. Let me remind you that I currently live in a space that contains this many things:
? a full-size bed
? a television on top of a television stand
? a stack of magazines next to the bed that used to hold a small fan and my BiPAP machine because finding a bedside table seemed like too much work
? a desk whose resale value I just today discovered I ruined with a broken bottle of nail polish
? a large air conditioner currently sitting on the floor beneath the window
? a table my friend’s dad made that I keep in the dining room to hold wine bottles and plants