Chatroulette and you

It's some evening of some day of the week and, surprise, you're bored. You've heard about this Chatroulette site and are at the point in your night where it's either talk to random strangers on the Internet, or go to bed. Since it's always a good idea to force yourself into mind-numbing exhaustion before you go to sleep, and god forbid you actually get more than five hours of sleep in a night, you should probably go ahead and fire up the Chatroulette.

One of the first things you'll notice, besides all the penis, is how terrifyingly bored everyone else looks, too. Except the ones jacking off. Because you can't see their faces. Just their penises. But, let's be honest, if you're jacking off on a webcam for everyone on Chatroulette to see, you pretty much take the bored cake. 

You should make sure to never be the one to click "Next," even though you'll always want to be. Others will always Next you, and even though there's no way you'd actually want to have a conversation with any of these people, it should always make you feel a little defeated each time someone looks at you for less than two seconds and decides you're not worth talking to. 

At some point, you may find someone with whom to have an actual conversation. Try to make sure this is a 17-year-old Colombian that speaks no English but tells you you're "muy bonito/a." After talking for about 30 minutes, give the Colombian child your email address as well as your physical address, last name and perhaps a little money. Then, try to find information on the Internet about Colombian laws to see if you're going to end up in jail when this is all said and done.

Your e-vagina*

Every now and again (possibly several times a day), something really catastrophic happens. For instance, the insignificant other of your dreams breaks up with you in the presence of everyone you know, probably during Christmas dinner, just as your grandfather is cutting the roast. This is tragic. But also, this is perfect. This gives you the opportunity to salve your broken soul with the fake herbal remedies that are your online friends, the ones who clicked a button next to your name that said "Follow." This tragedy now opens up a tremendous opportunity to show these hundreds of people not only how poetically in pain you are but how well you're dealing with that pain on a minute-by-minute basis.

The first thing you should do after the incident is post some really cryptic sentence or fragment that says nothing but implies that something life changing has happened and destroyed your very being. Something along the lines of, "...suddenly nothing will be as green as it once was..." Make sure you use ellipses and forget to capitalize anything, as this will show your intense and profound sadness. Alternately, you might consider just posting their name as your status. As if you're crying it out in a slow, pathetic moan. Make sure you leave this up long enough for everyone to see it, then delete it later. Like some mysterious ghost.

Your next post should actually state what terrible thing has happened. "The love of my life left me, and I'm dying inside." Or something equally banal. This will give your friends the opportunity to lick your e-vagina with statements about how you're too good for that person or how you're generally great and how could anyone break up with you. The entire exchange should read as if nothing like this has ever happened in the history of the world. For the first couple of days, you should continue to update approximately every hour with self-empowering statements that pretend to show you're doing fantastically. Things like, "Nothing matters except friends and family," or, "That [exercise-related thing] made me feel alive for the first time in years!" If you're feeling especially fraudulent, you should consider mentioning something about feeling spiritual, or just using the word "spiritual" in any capacity.

After that, you should talk about how you're going to disappear from the Internet for awhile. This should last exactly forty minutes before you come back with some other cryptic post that are probably lyrics from some song about breaking up that read really poorly without an accompanying melody line. By this point, most of your followers will be considering whether they can stop following you without your noticing their absence. This is when you should thank "everyone" for listening to you, and whimsically mention how you'll get back to posting about Drupal tomorrow. Then you should bask in the fake sympathy of your followers, who will tell you it's fine when actually they're considering killing you to put you out of your shameful public misery.

*courtesy of MB.

Your first love: television

Television was both your mother and your father once upon a time, so it's not surprising that you have a complicated, and often bitter, relationship with it. You should live in denial that it had anything to do with who you are when in fact it pretty much shaped your entire personality. As a child, television was your infallible deity, telling you how to dress, who and how to love, and showing you how boring your own life was. Were you a nerdy girl who got voted prom queen because you didn't realize you'd secretly become attractive? Did you have a sidekick named Boner? Did you get an addiction to caffeine pills and collapse while shooting an exercise video because you desperately needed to become valedictorian? No. This pretty much showed you how much of a failure you were before you ever even left home.

Of course, now you're older and you've partially subscribed to the hipster/pretentious-asshole mentality, where you publicly reject television as a viable source of entertainment. Ideally you should be one of those people, the ones who don't own a TV, so when a conversation about reality TV comes on you can act all scornful about popular culture. The truth is, though, you need TV. Without TV, you have no personality. Also, your conversation with friends and peers primarily consists of quotes from underrated shows that got pulled too early, and without those quotes, you're nothing. The more quotes from, say, Arrested Development you can cram into a single conversation, the cooler you appear. Worst of all, if you don't know and recognize those quotes, you might accidentally respond to someone using one as a Facebook status as if it were a genuine statement. And then you'll look foolish to the world. The whole goddamn world will know how uncool you are.

So you don't have a TV, but that doesn't mean you don't watch TV. What it means is that you watch it presented in the worst way: in 10-minute grainy uploaded clips on YouTube or some other arguably legal website based in the Netherlands that applies Dutch subtitles to everything. So for every new, cool show you watch for social survival, you waste an equal amount of time searching for it online. You also waste hours a day looking up old, nostalgia-inducing commercials and shows online for precious kitsch value. Because the more you know, the more you can pretend you have an actual identity.

What have you learned?

It's time to see if you've been paying attention.

Read the scenario below and choose the correct actions from the multiple choices given. Answers are at the bottom. Good luck!

You've been working at the same company, in the same sad position, for the last three years. You make enough money to sustain your addictions and pay your rent, but not enough to put anything away for savings. In fact, you don't even know what that means. Savings. Saving money is as strange an act to you as cannibalism. Or sobriety. You've heard of people doing it, but never really had any first-hand experience with it. You drive home every night from your job and always end up having to pull over around the same area of town because it's too dangerous to keep driving while crying this bad.

You should:

A) Go home, make a drink, smoke a bunch of cigarettes until your throat hurts so bad that you're sure you just gave yourself fiery throat cancer. Call out sick from work the next day because of cancer.

B) Wipe the tears from your eyes and drive in the opposite direction of your house until you run out of gas. Figure out where you are and panic when you realize your cell phone is dead, and now, so are you. Sleep in your car and get scared at how not uncomfortable it is. Get someone to pick you up and take you to work the next day in the same clothes as yesterday, stinking of desperation and Jack-in-the-Box.

C) Devise a scheme by which the company you work for will go out of business, thereby freeing you from your slavery without you having to do the awful thing of making a decision to quit. Realize this scheme will probably land you in jail, and then get scared at how not uncomfortable that idea is.

D) Find a new job.

Answer: Anything but D.

So this is the New Year (again)

Well, Fraudulent Living has been up on the Internet for over a year now. Seeing as how it's still (only) on the Internet and still being (infrequently) updated, it must mean you have a lot more to learn. Also, being the New Year, it's a really great time to remember how very short you've come up in almost everything you've attempted to do this year. It's also the right time to make fake promises to yourself that you outwardly say you'll try to keep, but inwardly can't even find a part of you that's alive enough to pretend to believe it.

At any rate, this arbitrary date in the middle of the winter is when society has decided to start counting years; and so, to celebrate the passing of one year to the next, you should attend or host a New Year's Eve party. Here are some things to remember about this party: First, you need to build up expectations in your head for it to be non-heinous, just so that when it turns out to be heinous, it will be that much more so. Also, as with anything, you need to make sure you're totally wasted throughout pretty much all of it. If you're hosting the party, this is especially important, because unless you get wasted, you'll spend all your time worrying about whether other people are having fun or are at least comfortable. If you get totally, awesomely wasted, you won't care about what other people are doing, or what they're breaking, in your house. If you're attending a party at someone else's house, it's important to be very drunk because you're drinking someone else's liquor that you didn't pay for. This type of liquor is the tastiest, so drink up.

When the midnight hour approaches, be sure to make everyone be quiet and then turn on the TV and awkwardly watch the ball drop in New York. Then, watch the people partying in the streets and take a good look around you. You're not having that much fun. You've never really had that much fun. Even if they're faking it, you'd never be able to fake having fun that well.

Get another drink and make an embarrassing toast to the New Year that's funny enough to be tolerable but sad enough that everyone who drinks to the toast will feel dirty and guilty.

Then, pass out and call it a year.

Mutual liking

Rarely, ever so rarely, like when a hummingbird comes to you and sits on your finger and discourses with you about scientific inquiry, you'll find someone you like who also appears to like you. At the same time, even. You might both seem to like ("like" like) each other a lot. This situation is the best path to ensuring your own descent into a death spiral of evil-clown-type horror and misery. It's also the best way to push the boundaries of your own hypocrisy. For instance, as someone who claims to need privacy and space, you should already secretly (or openly) criticize friends with clingy, needy significant others. When discussing theoretical relationships, you need to say things like, "Well, I just need someone to tell me they like me once, and then I never need or want to hear it again. It's annoying when people do that." You should go so far as to believe this when you're not in a relationship-type thing, which you're obviously usually not. This way, when you get yourself into a mutual liking situation, it will feel more fraudulent when you convince yourself your partner hates you if they don't tell you they love you on endless repeat.

Basically, in a mutual liking situation, you should be like a goldfish, but some sort of fictional monster goldfish, where you forget every fifteen seconds every good thing your significant other has ever said or done while remembering and exacerbating all the things they've said or done that annoyed you. Without fifteen-second positive reinforcement, you should sink into total depression, where you can't think about anything except how much you don't need to be in this relationship with this person who's so obviously hateful and so obviously hates you. Their inability to sate your insane neediness should eventually drive you to crying in public while listening to Keane. Also, you can never be the one who says something positive first, because if you do, it will only prove that you're weak. So actually, you shouldn't be a goldfish so much as you should be a dependent, neurotic, unattractive, unworthy person who at least has some decent organs that should probably be donated now, while they're still in their prime. Except for your liver, which should be swollen like foie gras, and less tasty.

The best part about your being in this soul-crushing mutual like situation is that you spend all of your single time needing to be in this situation. As you've learned already, you should consider awful things like going out and meeting people so that you can potentially get into this situation. Once you've succeeded, you'll find there are times when you and your like partner even enjoy each other's company. This enjoyment will disappear quickly as you begin talking every day or, even worse, hanging out every day. At this point, you should start panicking and wondering how to tell this person, without hurting them, that there's no need to hang out every day. Then, when the day eventually comes that you haven't hung out or talked once, you should go ahead and convince yourself that they've deserted you and also given you AIDS.

Your awesome apartment

Most of your living situations throughout your life should be absolutely wretched. You should almost always be paying far more in rent than you ever believed you'd be able to pay, or if not, you should be living in the kind of squalor that would make for a great Charles Dickens novel.

But at some point in your life, you'll end up living in an awesome apartment. It will be the kind of place that everyone wants to visit, where parties will almost constantly be held, and where, for once, you won't be ashamed to bring someone home to. Once this happens, you're really fucked.

Everything that is good in your life now rides on this apartment. The only reason anyone likes you is because of your neat paint job in your kitchen. The only reason you have a boyfriend/girlfriend is that they like sleeping in your house better than in their own. If you ever lose this apartment, you'll lose your life with it. Every moment you spend not thinking about how you're about to die from throat cancer should be spent wondering how soon it will be before the one good thing in your life, your apartment, gets destroyed.

To this end, you should develop severe OCD about things like the iron and the stove. Even though you never use either of them, you must constantly worry that they're on and burning down your apartment. Also, every window in your apartment should be viewed only as a Thief's Entrance. A Thiefway, if you will. They should remain closed at all times, no matter how hot this makes your apartment or how much the air starts to smell like halitosis. If any of your Thiefways don't have locks on them you should think about lining the floor under them with broken glass and upturned nails. These will obviously only cut your own feet and give you tetanus, but in the end, getting lockjaw would probably do you good.