yes please(20)

Chapters include:

?SHE DOESN’T CRY ENOUGH

?HE SEEMS GAY TO ME

?THIS WON’T GET YOU OUT OF A SPEEDING TICKET

?I’M SORRY TO INTERRUPT, BUT WHEN DO YOU THINK YOU WILL BE OVER IT?

3.





DIVORCE: TEN WAYS TO NOT CATCH IT!


Divorce is contagious! Haven’t you heard? It’s like cancer but worse because no one really feels that bad for you. This book will teach you how to discuss your divorce with your currently married friends. Some married couples get freaked out when you talk about your divorce and like to tell you how they aren’t going to get one. Usually they point to their hard work through therapy, their fear of being alone, or their total acceptance of a dead marriage devoid of sex and love. This book will help you not strangle them when they both stand in front of you and talk about how great their relationship continues to be. This book will also help you deal with the divorce voyeur, the friend who wants to hear every detail and live vicariously through your experience. This book will point to ways you can talk about your divorce without feeling like it’s a fancy fur coat that people like to try on but then throw back at you in disgust because they would never wear something so vile. This book contains illustrations of happy couples looking at you with pity, and some weird aphorisms that intimate it’s somehow easier to get divorced than to stay in an unhappy marriage.

Chapters include:

?DIVORCE IS NOT AN OPTION FOR ME, BUT I AM HAPPY FOR YOU

?C’MON, WHO HASN’T CHEATED?

?I JUST COULDN’T DO THAT TO MY KIDS

?MAYBE YOU GUYS JUST NEED TO GO TO OJAI FOR A WEEKEND

4.





HEY, LADY, I DON’T WANT TO FUCK YOUR HUSBAND!


Newly divorced and attending a wedding for the first time alone? This book is for you! Inside you will find ways to deal with the strange stares and drunk accusations that come along with not having a date. You will find tips on how to gently break it to women that you don’t want to f*ck their flabby baby-faced husbands. You will find pointers on how to deflect advances made by their husbands in full view of the wives so you don’t have to get involved in other people’s weird relationship shit. You will read about the experiences of other men and women who bravely attended events without a plus-one and came out alive. Check out our special section on what to do when friends try to awkwardly set you up, and our newly added bonus chapter dedicated to those who want to be gay for a weekend.

Chapters include:

?NO ONE AS GREAT AS YOU SHOULD BE SINGLE

?IS IT HARD TO BE AT A WEDDING?

?YOU’VE NEVER LOOKED BETTER

?HAVE YOU SEEN MARK ANYWHERE? I CAN’T FIND HIM

5.





GOD IS IN THE DETAILS!


This book will help you navigate all the intimate details that people want to know and, frankly, have a right to know. This includes how did you break up and where you are living now and who wanted it more and how long did you know and what is going on with the kids and how did you tell the kids and was it sad and is he mad and are you sad and does everyone know and who have you told and who can I tell and when will you make an announcement and does Margaret know and is it okay for me to call her and what’s going on with the house and who is getting the money and how much money is it, exactly, and does Margaret know because I feel like she needs to hear it from me and do you have a boyfriend and does he have a girlfriend and what are their names and how much do they weigh and are weekends lonely and are you happier and do you think you will ever get married again and are you going to have more kids and could you just tell me exactly every detail from the beginning especially the bad stuff?

6.





THE HOLIDAYS ARE RUINED!


This book is one page long and just contains that one sentence.



My hope is these manuals will help you navigate such a supremely shitty time. I promise you, someday happy couples won’t make you cry anymore. Someday you may be in one again. Someday you will wake up feeling 51 percent happy and slowly, molecule by molecule, you will feel like yourself again. Or you will lose your mind and turn into a crazy person. Either way, let’s just hope you avoided tattoos, because most are pretty stupid anyway.





talk to yourself like you’re ninety


I SUPPOSE I AM PRE-PERI-MIDDLE-AGED. At forty-three, I feel right in the middle. I am no spring chicken but I am not an old lady. I know the names of all the members of Odd Future but I didn’t have the Internet in college. I can party like a twenty-year-old but it takes me almost a week to recover. Sometimes I am a tired mother taking her kids to the park, and other times I am a petulant teenager giving the finger to a speeding FedEx truck. I idle right in the middle.

I don’t know when middle age starts, exactly. According to my current edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, middle age is “the period of life between young adulthood and old age, now usually regarded as between about forty-five and sixty.” Sixty? Nice try, Oxford.

I think middle age begins once you start looking forward to eating dinner before six thirty, or when you call the cops when your next-door neighbor has a party. I know my body feels older. I recently hurt myself on a treadmill and it wasn’t even on. I was adjusting my speed and stepped wrong and twisted my ankle. I felt a moment of frustration filled with immediate relief. I didn’t have to actually work out, but I still got credit for trying. It was a gym snow day. You know those exercise pools where the water comes at you strong and you have to swim against it to build up your strength? That’s what the social pressure of staying young feels like. You can either exhaust yourself thrashing against it or turn around and let the pressure of it massage out your kinks. Fighting aging is like the War on Drugs. It’s expensive, does more harm than good, and has been proven to never end.