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Back Everything Is Awful
Chapters (25)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. EVERYTHING IS AWFUL, AND OTHER EMBARRASSMENTS
  4. ON BEING AN ADULT, OR I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING
  5. ON THE TRAUMA OF HAVING (OR NOT HAVING) HAIR
  6. ON BEING “THE BIG GUY”
  7. RULES FOR A TOTALLY HEALTHY AND NOT-AT-ALL-MEDICALLY-CONCERNING LIFESTYLE
  8. ON MY OLD AND FRAGILE BODY, OR I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY EVERYTHING
  9. ON NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES, OR THAT TIME I CHOKED ON A TAQUITO
  10. A BRIEF LIST OF THINGS THAT I DON’T KNOW
  11. ON MICHIGAN
  12. ON THE TERRORS OF NATURE
  13. ON TEENAGERS AND WHY THEY’RE THE WORST
  14. ON MY FIRST 100 DAYS AS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
  15. ON TERRIBLE FIRST JOBS
  16. ON MY TROUBLED HISTORY WITH FASHION
  17. ON BEING IN THE CLOSET, OR WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER FALL IN LOVE WITH YOUR STRAIGHT BEST FRIEND
  18. ON RELATIONSHIPS, OR TRAITS FOR MY IDEAL MAN
  19. ON THE STICKY PERILS OF HAVING A ROOMMATE
  20. ON LIVING ALONE IN NEW YORK CITY
  21. ON SELF-SUFFICIENCY
  22. ON KEEPING A CLEAN AND TIDY APARTMENT
  23. ON NOT BEING THE PEOPLE’S CHOICE
  24. acknowledgments
  25. About the Author

I moved to the Upper West Side in part because I idolized Nora’s rendition of it. My studio was only a closet compared to the apartments in the Apthorp, the famous complex down the street where Nora lived for some time. But still, I felt peppy and witty and sophisticated whenever I walked those streets, like a character in one of her movies, waiting for a young, hot Tom Hanks to reach for the same muffin as me at the bakery before sweeping me off my feet and paying off all of my student loan bills. It made my measly New York existence—my piles of takeout containers stacked in the corner, my bathroom without a bathroom door, the stench of burning meats that wrestled its way through the walls from the apartment next door—feel all the more like I was living the life of a scintillating two-time divorcée, a true woman of the city.

Most important, though, living like Nora made it all the easier to find the humor in all those terrible New York moments: discovering mold on the bottom of a breakfast sandwich I’d already half-eaten; falling down an entire subway staircase; dropping an entire container of hot food I’d carefully selected the second I stepped out of the Whole Foods in Union Square.

“Everything is copy,” Nora recalls her mother repeating, which she interpreted as a sort of battle cry. “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you,” she wrote of her mother’s quote, “but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh. So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.”

What follows in this book is a collection of all of my banana-slipping moments, retold here so that I may, perhaps, be the hero and not the victim of my plentiful embarrassments. Consider it a retelling of life’s little indignities, all the times I’ve stood in front of a toilet, desperately grasping at the buttons of my big-boy pants, when everything goes utterly awry, however cosmically deserved.

This book is my Baggie full of pee pants. And I hold it high as the urine-stained hero.

ON BEING AN ADULT, OR I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING