 I don't think I've ever done a reading in the daytime before. And there is no wine here. I said wine to make you guys think I'm fancy. I drink tequila. Also, OK, so my name's Amanda Fay. I feel like before I read this, it's important for you to know that I don't have a book or a chat book. I do have a Facebook. So feel free to like, add me and we'll be friends. I write stuff on there. And also, I am working on a video project. And I've been told that I have to start fudging my age a little bit, which my feminist side is like, no, fuck that shit. And then the side of me that's been oppressed my whole life for being a fat woman of color, who now is remarkably plump and wrinkle-free, is like, no, we deserve this. This is our moment. So yeah, I'm in my late 29s. OK, so here we go. Most recently, I was working at this independent pet store for almost four years, slowly whittling down my hours from full-time to four-hour days a week, no weekends. Don't ask me how I got away with that. And don't ask me how I managed to be a stone-cold cunt to at least three customers a day without getting fired. I'm generally a nice person, but I wasn't built for retail. I have an almost pathological sense of justice. And making assholes feel small was the only thing that brought me joy some days until I started taking antidepressants. Nine months ago, shout-outs in balta. Hashtag generic. As soon as my life started going better, it got a bit easier to be nice to people who didn't deserve it, which really sucks the fun out of retail, if you ask me. It wasn't a bad job. It just was a job for a 22-year-old like my boss. For a while, I think the 20-somethings I worked with thought my whole aging party girl thing was cool, until I started telling them about all my aches and pains and trying to give them advice all the time. Last year, I began my wildly unpopular It Gets Worse initiative, in which I attempted to impress upon my young co-workers that literally everything is way more terrible and difficult as you get older. This is only partially true, as the crystal clear sense of self-awareness and lack of self-consciousness needed to realize this and say it aloud as a nice perk of aging. That's something everyone needs to find out for themselves. But I'd hope to teach them a few things from the mistakes I'd made in my 20s. Here we go. This is the lesson part of this essay. I told them that even though it's tempting, never go out drinking when you're feeling sad, lonely, or angry. Unless you want to come home from the bar and burst into the pink, roughly floral-scented bedroom of your sleeping roommate, screaming, accusing her of trying to steal all your friends. She was actually a very lovely person, but beautiful and highly heterosexual, meaning my predatory butch friends couldn't get enough of her. And I was jealous. Or also, you might wake up with a bruise under your chin from where it rested on the window frame of the passenger side of your car as intermittent eruptions of tears and vomit flow down your face, steaming in the still dark January morning, because it had just been New Year's Eve, and there was tequila. There's a tequila again. I need to work on that. And you'd watch your beloved grandfather take his last breath only two days ago. On that note, I also told them they need to get a therapist, like now, in their early 20s before they pile up too much baggage and meet their soulmate and then try to ruin it all the time. I told them they should save. I told them they should save some money. From these, they're first harder in paychecks and not spend it all on CDs. I think I really reached on that with that one. I told them they should do recreational drugs now, because by the time they're my age, a third of their friends will be in AA. Half will have kids and be judging them, and the rest will either be really fun, questionable decision makers like me, or be in their 20s, and then they'll have to give those kids the same lecture. A lot of unpaid labor goes on there. Anyways, I wouldn't consider myself a bad employee. It's just that I don't like being at a certain place at a certain time and doing things someone else wants me to do for people I don't really like with no benefit to myself other than a paycheck, which I understand is a general premise of unskilled labor. Once, a man came up to the cash register with his baby, whom I already envied because he had a cute outfit on, super long eyelashes, and a father who didn't pretend to move to another country to get away from him. You can laugh at that, it's fine. The man pointed at me in my hideous, scratchy blue polo shirt and said, she works at the pet store, she sees doggies all day, that must be a fun job. I smiled and pinched the baby's fat pink foot, looking into his gleaming eyes, stay in school kid. The father gave me a strange look, but he laughed. I didn't go to college because although I liked learning, I didn't like school that much, and back when I finished high school, it was still all the rage to be a lazy genius. No one told me that the things that make people think you're awfully clever in your teens and 20s don't exactly translate to your 30s, late 29th. I haven't edited that yet. And that eventually all the lazy geniuses either get their shit together and get a master's degree or get a government job or learn to play an instrument and sell cocaine out of their parents' back houses for the rest of their lives. My mom doesn't have a back house. She has a two-bedroom home deep in the suburbs, and I live in one of those bedrooms rent-free. I've moved out twice, but ended up back there again six years ago and never left. This is one of the few things in my life that I feel ashamed to talk about. And that's saying a lot, because I recently snapchatted myself being scolded mid-rip by my bikini waxer for waiting too long to come see her. Failure to launch sucks, but the thing that embarrasses me the most about still living under her roof is the nervous way people react to this information. It's extremely stressful to watch someone's face go through the stages of processing this. Sometimes they say, that's okay. Before I've even indicated that I feel a type of way about it, sometimes they say, well, it's cultural, which is very worldly of them, but to be honest, we're not really those kind of Mexicans. It's also super stressful to go to a 90s dance night with my friends, because inevitably, TLCs, no scrubs will play. And during the part where Chilly sings, if you live at home with your mama, oh yes, son, I'm talking to you, I always feel like I have to look at them reassuringly. Everything's okay, guys. I know she's not talking about me. I know I'm not a scrub, it's fine, I know. I know I'm not a scrub. Thank you.