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.

Your vermin

So, since you live in a city, you have vermin in your house. But don't think that it's just because you live in a city. Don't think that somehow your infestation isn't your fault. Because it is. It's your fault. You're to blame for not only your own mouse/bedbug/cockroach/silverfish/snake infestation, but for everyone else's that's ever come into contact with you. Because obviously you are now a carrier. You're a vermin carrier. You're like a kangaroo, but instead of your pouch containing a cute little kangaroo kid, it carries a variety of terrifying insect eggs and spores. You're like Noah's arc, if God wanted the world to just be shit.

You don't leave food lying around and you tend to bathe somewhat regularly and do your laundry as much as the next slacker, but you'll find that none of this matters when it comes to how much vermin love you. You can maintain the cleanest little home with various bug- and mouse-killing devices located in strategic places, and none of this will help you. You're just a magnet for awful. And this is especially evident with your various vermin infestations. There's no rhyme or reason here. Just fraudulence.

One thing you can try to do to stop the problem is continue to poison everything around you, especially your own bloodstream. If you can barely survive having your blood in your body, then the bugs don't have a chance, right? This is a great strategy because it will make you drunk, high or just almost dead pretty much all the time. This is necessary if you plan on ever being able to sleep in your terrarium of a bedroom ever again.

You can also try asking your land/slum lord if he or she will please bring an exterminator to your apartment, but since you only pay this person half your monthly income for the privilege of living in their gigantic, non-functioning game of Mouse Trap(tm), they will probably just put on a fake moustache and hat, come up to your apartment with a spray bottle full of Raid, and you'll thank them profusely. Because spraying Raid in the corners of your bedroom is what you've become to accustomed to accepting as a solution to most problems in your life.

Your 9/11

Every day is like 9/11 for you.

Your life is a gigantic, melodramatic tragedy that seems to repeat the same images, over and over, ad nauseum, with no regard for taste or anyone's sensibilities. Really, the only difference between your life and a terrorist attack is that no one cares about you. No one remembers where they were when you stopped by. The only ones who commemorate your anniversary are you and the liquor shop owner who nods, sadly, when you tell him it's your birthday and that's why you're buying Jameson instead of your normal $4.99 bottle of red wine that's just called "Red Wine."

Your autumn

As summer fades away and you realize that you did absolutely nothing of interest to anyone, you should embrace the coming autumn as a fresh chance to waste yet another season. If you live someplace that has real seasons, you should get excited by the idea of going to do autumn-y things, like watching the leaves turn, or going for a hike in the forest, or paying attention in that class you're taking, knowing full well that you won't do any of that. The fall television lineup should be the only thing that you're reasonably sure you might take advantage of.

You should also reflect on how sweet the death in the air tastes and what that might say about you as a person. You hate the spring because of allergies; you hate the summer because it makes you feel fatter, more lonely, and decidedly more sweaty and smelly than you normally do. The only time you come close to a feeling of happiness is when the world is literally dying all around you. This, among countless other things, is what makes you awful.

Autumn also brings new opportunities for fraudulence that are weather-specific. The clothing you wear can now be layered and used over and over. If you have a light jacket you like to don when it gets a little nippy outside, make sure you never get it dry cleaned and that it has never been dry cleaned in the past. There should be split-pea soup stains on one or more of the lapels of your jacket and these stains should be from at least one year ago (preferably two). If you smoke, now is a good time to increase your intake, like when bears binge on food before the winter, since when it gets really cold you'll obviously stop smoking because going outside to smoke will be too painful. Yeah. You sure will quit smoking this winter. Mhm.

Speaking of winter, as you prepare for it, be sure not to use any of your time or money this autumn to buy anything like a winter coat or boots. These should only be purchased after the SECOND snow storm of the winter. Why second? Because only by then will you be desperate, cold and bruised enough to finally drag yourself into a Filene's Basement to spend money on a coat that will certainly not fit you since all that will be left on the racks are coats that could cover an entire house or be snug on a squirrel. Your coat should always make you look like you have severe mental problems.

The only preparation for winter that you should do this autumn is to go to the bar and set up 182372187 online dating accounts in the desperate hope of finding someone to keep you company in the winter. If you've done autumn right, by the end of it you'll be broke, still sadly single, own nothing but shorts and tank-tops and have come one step closer to full-blown alcoholism.

Feelings

If you should know anything about yourself, it's that your feelings are crap. This doesn't mean you should feel crappy all the time (which you do), but that in a broader sense all your non-feeling-like-crap feelings are also crap. Which is just to say that when you feel something, you're probably totally wrong. If you feel sad, you're probably actually excited. If you feel like you're happy, you're probably about to die from self-inflicted peanut and bee-sting poisoning. Your feelings are all sorts of wrong, so you should learn how to ignore them. Better yet, you should rid yourself of them completely.

Let's say you feel like you're in love. In actuality, you're about to be run over by a rusty train that goes just fast enough to kill you but not fast enough to kill you immediately upon impact. Any real person would be feeling fear and dread at this moment. But not you. You're all giddy and goofy and smiling, even though soon you'll be purpleberry goo on the tracks, and not in nearly enough shock for it not to hurt worse than group anal raping. This is how fraudulent your feelings are.

Or let's say you're supposed to meet up with a fantastic person at 8:00, and that ridiculously awesome person happens to be a minute late. Instead of doing what a real person would do, crying with gratitude and happiness that this other person even remembers your sad little name, you probably feel unjustifiable hatred. And when the person arrives five seconds later, instead of holding on to them for dear life for agreeing to be associated with you, you'll probably stab them in the stomach with a pointy stick for ruining your life with their lateness.

To counteract these potential issues, you should block out every feeling you have. If possible, you should also ignore things like hunger and thirst and maybe your need to urinate. For all you know, that need to urinate could just be another trick your body is playing on you to distract you from a pain worse than group anal raping. Also, when you accidentally slice off your thumb while cutting a bagel, that distress is nothing more than your body lying to you. Once you realize and accept that every automatic response your body gives is wrong, you'll be well on your way to creating a long, loveless existence with some person who's perpetually late.

Your sleep schedule

Since the inside of your body is like the Middle East, with all the chemicals fighting each other and everything always on the verge of total collapse, you'll find that sleep is unpredictable and usually only comes when you don't want it.

You load your body full of caffeine in the morning, to stay alive, and then you slowly add more and more chemicals to the mix throughout the day: nicotine, antacids, analgesics, alcohol, anti-depressants, sedatives, and more caffeine. You've become so adept at managing this balance, that you probably know instinctively when your body needs a little pick-me-up, or put-me-down. But when it's time to sleep, all this better living through modern chemistry is going to complicate things. Also, since the power of everybody's livers is slightly different, like microwaves, it's impossible to know exactly how much of any one chemical you need to take in order to have its effects kick in or wear off in time for sleep.

You have a couple of choices now, the best of which is obviously to take over-the-counter sleep aides, no matter what else you've put into your body. Look at it this way: it's over-the-counter, so it can't possibly hurt you. It doesn't matter that your blood is more man-made at this point than natural--WalMart would never sell you something that could possibly hurt you if you take the recommended (or just slightly higher) dosage.

Another choice you have is to try to flush out your system with a bunch of water or maybe charcoal. But the problem with this idea is that it might work. And then you'll be left with a body in its natural state. And that's sick.

You can also just resign yourself to never sleeping well at night and spend most of your time during the day trying to find a place where you can take a 10-minute nap. Some good places for this are: your car, the cold linoleum tile of the office bathroom, the spot under your desk where you're pretty sure no one can see you, a nearby park, any vacant lot, a relatively clean dumpster, the roof of a building, the cold linoleum tile of the gym bathroom, and the subway.

Your hopes and dreams

As dead as you are inside, which is quite dead, you still have hopes and dreams. You still somehow, against all odds and evidence, think you're going to be rich, famous, or just moderately happy one day. You still pretend like your life is headed down a general path toward these hopes and dreams, and that one day you'll be the success that you've been telling everyone you're going to be (but that everyone has stopped believing you about for some time now).

But at some point, you need to start rethinking these dreams. You need to refocus your aim. That day should be today. Or tomorrow, if you're really hungover today. But then definitely tomorrow. And you've really got to pick a new hopes-and-dreams basket into which you can pour all of your rotten eggs.

And that dream should be the lottery.

You should start playing the lottery compulsively. You should know which days the Mega Millions is drawn, and you should have a set of numbers you play every time, in addition to spending ten extra dollars on computer-generated quickpicks. Your regular set of numbers should have extremely thought-out significance to you and should border on psychotic numerology.

You should also have recurring nightmares that involve your forgetting to buy a lottery ticket, and then your regular set of numbers turning out to win. In these dreams, your depression should be so deep and palpable that you walk around the entire next day looking like you just got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

You should begin to talk to all of your friends about how you're going to win the lottery. But then, you should start to become horribly reclusive and never mention the lottery to anyone, since you're sure that once you win, they will all be begging you for money, and you'll eventually have to hire a bodyguard and change your name and your appearance just to get away from your former, awful friends.

It's important to remember that your belief in your eventually winning the lottery should be so intense that you have already basically spent all the money. Also, every time someone wins who isn't you, you should feel exactly the same as if that person had come into your home in the middle of the night and robbed you of everything you own, leaving nothing but a urine stain where they decided to pee all over your living room carpet.

Your instant messaging and eventual death

Every day, you should have long, meaningless written conversations with any number of people whom you judge based on whether they write "hahaha" or "lol." These conversations should be held simultaneously with several people on completely unrelated meaningless topics. They should rarely contain anything besides links to hilarious videos and photos or brief comments which make you laugh in written form. This is how you should be getting to know people. This is instant messaging.

Aside from your regular AIM/MSN/Yahoo account, which should have on at all times in a magical IM conglomerater, you should have your IM active on every social networking site you visit. Also, when you check your Gmail every two seconds, you should have Gtalk open. Eventually, you'll be able to figure out the schedules of everyone else who uses these accounts, and you should make general, accusatory assumptions about people when they're offline or online at unusual times. This is especially important if you've recently either started or stopped seeing someone.

Let's say you've recently met someone you like, have their IM information, and see them log on. You should die a little more with every second that passes if they don't write you immediately. If and when they finally do write, you should be so depressed that your seemingly casual response of "Hey, what's up?" has so much self-loathing and hatred and relief contained in it that the other person's eyes will explode upon reading it. Also, if this person you just met doesn't have IM, you should be aware that you two will never date, because how they hell are you supposed to get to know them?

If you're in a dating-like situation with someone and they don't log on during their regular hours, they obviously think you're disgusting and don't want to talk to you anymore. This will be especially obvious if you see them log on to Gmail but not their actual IM account. Clearly they're avoiding you, because you're probably the only person on their IM contact list. If you're not, then they're probably logged on and invisible and flirting with someone else. Either way, if they log on to Gmail but not regular IM, your relationship is over. This is also true if they're logged on but have an away message up. They're not away. They just hate you.

If you've recently broken up with someone, IM will be the best way to stalk their movements on a soul-destroying real-time basis. Of course, you'll also stalk their social networking pages, but IM will be your best indicator of what's happening right this very second. For instance, if you write them to say hello (because you're still pretending to be friends), sometimes they won't respond immediately. This means that they're currently making out with someone. Every second it takes them to write back means they're getting to the next base. If they get past 60th base, this is how you'll know you're not pretending to be friends anymore.

Ultimately, the beauty of IM is that you can pretend to interact with people while living in total social isolation. For all you know, you could be talking to a robot who's decently good at imitating your friends. In fact, every time you have a conversation, you should suspect that you're actually talking to a large group of people who hate you and are messaging you solely to mock your responses. This is not only possible but likely. Luckily, since you never leave your computer, you probably won't ever be able to confirm it.

Your goddamn iPhone

Besides liquor, food and rent, the rest of your paychecks should be spent on gadgets. Or on the monthly bills you've acquired to keep your gadgets running. Your most prized gadget should be your goddamn iPhone.

You should make sure that everyone you know knows about your goddamn iPhone. They should know when you bought it, what new apps you've installed on it, and, if possible, there should be a harrowing story of some kind regarding how you finally acquired it. Maybe you were one of the douche bags that waited in line for over 24 hours. Maybe you spent an almost equal amount of time on the phone with Latwanda in the Houston AT&T call center trying to get them to give you the goddamn iPhone at the $199 price even though you're not eligible for an upgrade for another year. Something.

It's also really important that you be touching your goddamn iPhone pretty much all the time. Especially if you're alone or waiting for something, like the bus, or to be called in from the waiting room at the doctor's office. If you're in the doctor's office, it's also a good idea to double check everything your doctor tells you by bringing out your goddamn iPhone and loading up your WebMD app.

When you're walking down the street with a friend and neither of you knows where you're going, make sure to stop your friend from asking a human person for directions. Instead, insist that your goddamn iPhone will find it. Then, as you wait eight minutes for your "lightning fast" 3G connection to finally locate what street you're on, even though you have a map in your bag and eyes that can see street signs, you can feel really great about being on the cutting edge of such useful, life-changing technology.

At some point, you should realize that "there's an app for that" pretty much applies to everything imaginable. You can pay your bills, order food, entertain yourself, and answer work emails, all from your goddamn iPhone. This should elate you as you discover there's now barely any need to deal directly with anyone at all. Your goddamn iPhone has really (not) changed your life.

Your grand plans

Most days, within the first minute of your waking up, you should torture yourself with the question, "What am I doing with my life?" Of course, the answer is easy, but it's good to remember your nonexistent place in the world every moment you're conscious. You know perfectly well that the answer is, "Absolutely nothing." Or, if you're feeling optimistic, "Not dying. Not dying is what I'm doing. In your face, god!" But those optimistic days should be rare, and as you're taunting the god you don't believe in, you should stop and reflect on the fact that you really are dying, just in a slow, drawn-out, and painful way.

You may find there are times, usually at 3 AM after you're sick of surfing porn sites, when you'll actually find yourself wanting to do more than nothing with your life. As you well know, you're smarter and more talented than pretty much everyone on the planet. Maybe now is the time you should put your own awesomeness into action and improve the things that are wrong with the world, like porn download times and cancer. Yes, that's exactly what you should do. This will be the turning point in your life, where you'll begin living up to your potential and using your intelligence for good things instead of Excel spreadsheets. For the first time in forever, you'll be excited, and in celebration probably take up smoking. Since you're about to cure cancer anyway, who cares?

Eventually, after a couple hours of bad sleep, you should wake up and be momentarily excited again about the prospect of your new life. However, as the day progresses, you'll begin figuring out the logistics of how you can reach the point of being a productive human being. You'll probably have to go back to school. Which means finding financing. Which means taking standardized tests. Which means filling out applications. This will undoubtedly make you shudder, but you'll find yourself surprisingly okay facing these challenges. Then you'll realize filling out applications also means you'll have to get letters of recommendation. As you consider asking anyone you've ever met to write out an essay lauding you as a person, you should will yourself into a panic attack. As you try to recover, remind yourself that you don't have to do this, that it's just a silly idea you had last night, and at least you accomplished taking up smoking. You can stay at this stupid job surfing the Internet all day, and you're still probably better off than most people in the world. Your momentary relief will keep you happy for the rest of the day, and then you can go back to your life of dying in a slow, drawn-out, and painful way. Until tomorrow, of course, when you catch ebola and begin your faster, more physically painful death.

Your body

No matter how skinny, toned, muscly, or just plain average-looking you are, you probably think you're fat. If you don't think you're fat, you should. Look at yourself in the mirror. Do you see that pudgy area? Yeah, well so does everyone else.

The best part about your distorted body image is that no amount of fasting, dieting, exercising or purging will ever change the way your body looks to you. Other people may come up to you and comment on how great you're looking and that they can really tell that you've been working out. But the way you should hear this is: Thank goodness you've finally started to do something about that body. You see, your body is like a semi-nice car. You know that underneath the many layers of dirt film and superficial engine problems, there's actually a decent car there. Except you're the only one that knows that. Everyone else just walks by and writes "Wash Me Please" with their finger in your back window.

Nonetheless, you should torture yourself by continuing to go on diet/exercise binges where you eat nothing but paprika and lemon zest for 12 days while going to the gym twice a day and sitting in the steam room until right before you pass out. Each time you put yourself through this moronic ordeal, you're getting a sweet bonus: not only will you shed a few pounds off your body, but you'll also shave a good few years off your life.

How smart you are

One thing about your personality that is pretty consistent across all its aspects is a deep, hidden shame. You are ashamed of something, somewhere, all the time. If there's an aspect of your life that you don't feel ashamed of, simply having this realization should cause you to find some reason to be ashamed. One of the best things to be ashamed of is your total failure to do anything productive with your massive intellect. 

Let's say you live in a city like New York or Chicago or Los Angeles. Any of these places is rife with museums, art galleries, opera houses, random art installations, poetry readings, book signings, theatre, concerts, lectures and lots of other stuff you never go to. Also, since many of these are free, your bad money-management skills aren't to blame. It's just the deep, fundamental fact that you suck that keeps you at home, drinking cheap wine from the bottle and watching shows on the History channel that discuss who would be the victor in a hypothetical brawl between a pirate and a ninja. 

Now, you can probably talk, off-the-cuff, about lots of cultured-sounding, politically relevant or academicish things. But you were also probably the person in college who never went to class, did roughly 1/10th of the reading, and was still able to write the final paper and get a B+. This is how you channel your smarts. Instead of doing the actual work, all your intellectual power goes into faking it at the last minute and tricking everyone around you into believing you're brilliant. Imagine if you signed up for a marathon, but instead of spending the months before training your body to be able to run for 26 miles you instead laid around in your bedroom dreaming up a plot, like a bomb threat, to get the marathon canceled. That's how you live your "life."

When you finally realize that if you were less lazy you could have gone to Harvard, studied virology, and become the person to finally create the zombie virus that brings about the apocalypse, but instead you went to a state school, majored in French and are now working a series of increasingly humiliating temp jobs, you should get lightheaded with shame. Then, you should turn on the TV and find out once and for all if a gladiator could stand a chance against a samurai. 

Getting picked up

You were most likely a geek or some other sort of social reject in high school, which means you probably didn't date anyone. Or if you did, it was because you were both desperate, and "dating" was just a euphemism for "studying for Latin midterms." So now that you've grown out of your physical awkwardness and became not blatantly ugly, you still treat people hitting on you like a big deal, no matter how often it happens. It's a similar feeling to when a cashier gives you a twenty as change instead of a dollar. You're both excited and thinking, "This can't be right. They must not be paying attention." You should also have the same serious moral qualms regarding whether to inform them of their huge mistake. "Oh, I'm sorry, you meant to hit on the attractive, nonalcoholic person over there," is what a nonfraudulent person might say. But not you. No, you want the attention, no matter how unwanted it is.

Let's say someone approaches you in the supermarket. They're jaundiced, they're unattractive, they're wearing a mesh shirt with a cutoff tank top underneath that showcases their shoe-leather stomach. They deliver a pickup line that makes no sense but somehow insults you in a deep, meaningful way. You automatically hate them. They ask for your phone number. Your brain responds with, "Ew, no," while your mouth responds with your phone number. You then have to spend the next month not picking up the phone from any unrecognized caller. Also, you're probably the type who attracts people who don't get the message when you don't respond. So basically you're in for weeks of phone calls and steadily worsening, desperate voicemails.

Now, you might be asking yourself why you can't just give a fake number. Or respond with, "No, I'm not interested," or at least, "I'm seeing someone," which would do everyone a favor. Well, firstly, you're a coward. If they call that fake number while you're standing there, you'll be so ashamed at getting caught that you'll probably end up going on a date out of guilt. Secondly, and shamefully, you want this person to like you and think there's a possibility they could have you. As previously mentioned, you need everyone to like you. It doesn't matter that you find them less dateable than margarine; you need to be desired, and if it's by this snaggle-toothed beast of a thing, so be it. In fact, you might as well go ahead and pick up the phone when they call to see what terrible idea this awful person has for a date. Then you might as well go on the date so you can post a status update about how ridiculously bad your date was. Eventually, you'll probably get married in order to entertain your friends with your story of how you got married as a joke. And then, somehow, this will end up being the only successful relationship you'll ever have in your life.

Summer

Of all the seasons, this is the one you should dread the most. By far. And this is because summer is nothing but a constant reminder of how inadequate your body is. 

Wanna go to the beach? Better buy SPF 208930 for your albino skin. Wanna go to a pool party? Better make sure you get super drunk and high first so you won't care about that awful midsection of yours that has started to fold over on itself like an American automobile company. 

We're fed a lot of propaganda about summer being "fun." You may even hear your friends or coworkers talk about how much they're looking forward to it. This is just something people say. It makes you seem like less of a broken person to the world if you claim to enjoy a double 95 (95 degree heat and 95% humidity).  Somehow, saying you don't like summer strikes other people the same way as saying "I don't like having sex with full-grown adults." 

The summer might seem like a time of renewal, hope, joy and fun. But this was only when you were a kid and didn't have to go to school. Now that you're an adult, nothing changes in the summer except that it gets so hot that you run your inefficient air conditioner all day and night, destroying your energy bill as well as the planet. And you're still hot. You should take at least eleven cold showers a day and start drinking as early as possible. You might think it sounds counter intuitive to drink alcohol, which makes you feel hot, when it's so hot outside that it takes all your willpower not to actually sob over it. Well, you think lots of things that are totally stupid, so just drink up and sit next to your AC until Summer finally passes away and you run back into the sweet, dead arms of Fall and Winter.

Your mood

Your general mood should fluctuate between two basic outward states that can be characterized as: "meh" and "oh, fuck." You should vacillate between these two moods both frequently and pretty much indiscriminately. 

Sometimes, you'll wake up in the morning and have a general sense of "meh." You're tired, but not too tired to actually be miserable from it. You'd rather stay home than go to work, but that's essentially a truism for you. There's nothing spectacularly terrible about the way you feel. You should, at this point, be measuring your well being on a sliding scale between quickly and slowly dying. "Meh" days are on the slow end. They should be spent sending random, unsolicited IMs to your online friends, like, "I took seven Facebook quizzes today." Or, "I really want to be asleep." These days should feel like a fog made of vaporized crap has descended on your face area. But it's a light crap fog. Just enough visibility to make it through your day, but not enough to prevent you from stepping into the inevitable pothole or missing your subway stop.

Other days, you will wake up with the unmistakable feeling of "oh, fuck." When this happens as your first waking sensation, you know that you're in for a doozy of a day! Yay! So just slop on some clothes, skip a shower, and head straight into it. It doesn't matter what you're wearing or if you feel greasy and unshowered -- your day is destined for the toilet no matter what you do! If it's an "oh, fuck" day due to your having some massive presentation at work or some paper due for school that you haven't started yet, then you can sort of calm yourself by knowing that it will all be over soon. But the best is when you wake up with that feeling for no discernible reason at all. In this case, you can tell yourself it will all be over soon, but chances are you will be alive well into your 90s. So. It really won't be over soon. At all.

Throughout most of your days, you should find yourself going back and forth, relentlessly, between your two moods; and the connection these mood swings should have to actual events around you should be as loose as your recent troubling bowel movements. The tiniest things should, if you're living fraudulently, be enough to send you into a shame or rage spiral. Did your sandwich from the deli not have the provolone cheese you clearly asked for? Well, fuck them. And also, fuck everyone else, too. You should torture everyone around you with your awful moods until they've just about had enough. Then you should quickly turn on a fake smile and a feigned joie-de-vivre to reel them back in. When it's safe again and your friends and coworkers have been lulled into thinking you're a cool person, you can, with secret triumph, go back to being that familiar, semi-miserable person living in a permanent poop cloud. 

Your drinking solution

By this point in your life (whatever point that might be), you should be just on the verge of being a full-blown alcoholic. However, since alcoholism is an actual treatable disease, and being diagnosed with it would cause you to have to seek help, you must never actually cross the line to alcoholism. 

You should find yourself in most situations wishing you were drunk. It's not that you really crave a drink like an alcoholic might. You just feel like most situations could use a little liquoring up. As you sit at your desk at work you should find yourself sometimes reflecting on how much less heinous your job might be if you and everyone around you were a little drunk. Then you should take that thought experiment to its logical conclusion and realize that if you had it your way, regular life would be borderline insane and totally chaotic, just to treat your boredom. 

And right here is the key to why you have a drinking "problem." Alcohol is the best medicine for the disease of living. It's the easiest cure for boredom. It's not a "problem" at all, really. It's actually the solution. Even doing literally nothing, such as staring at the blank wall in your bedroom, can be made less stupid just by drinking. All social interactions are easier to deal with or at least forget when you're drinking. Everything, including you yourself, is easier when you're drunk. The only thing that's made harder from drinking is waking up in the mornings. And also your liver.

Just be sure that you don't develop actual alcoholism. This would be bad because it would cause you probably to stop drinking. And that would really fucking goddamn suck. To this end, it's good to remember that sometimes the best way to make sure you never get diagnosed with a disease is to never go to the doctor.

Your general knowledge

Thanks to your Internet addiction, you know about a lot of obscure stuff. You've seen a lot of obscure stuff. You've heard a lot of obscure stuff. You've sent links to other people that impressed them because they were introduced to whatever hilarious and/or shocking picture/article/video/song through you. But somehow, despite all this stuff that's packed into your head, you're not sure you have any real knowledge at all. In fact, you're not entirely sure what real knowledge is anymore. You vaguely remember that somewhere in your past, learning involved some process of studying one topic in depth so that you could converse about it in a linear, educated fashion with another person who'd studied that same topic. But now, as far as you're concerned, learning just means you've read an entire Wikipedia article straight through.

To stock up on fraudulent knowledge, you should spend most of your time on sites that bring the most interesting parts of the Internet to you, like Reddit or Digg. If you're not quite cool enough to know about those sites, visit some lamer buzzy sites, like Yahoo! news or MSN's homepage. You'll see the cat who can do a backflip into a box two weeks later than the cooler people, but at least you'll see it. And when that inevitable two-second conversation comes up, in which someone asks if you know about the cat who can do a backflip into a box, you can triumphantly say yes. Yes, you know about it. And speaking of cats, has the other person heard about that colony of death cats in Borneo that dominate wild dogs and make tools out of coat hangers? No? Well, there's a colony of death-related cats that dominate wild dogs, somehow, in Borneo. Also, they apparently can make tools out of coat hangers. Well, holy shit, that's amazing, the other person will say. When you hear this response, you can pat yourself on the back for being such a worldly person.

Unfortunately, to make your fraudulent knowledge functional, you can't have friends who visit the same buzz sites as you do on a regular basis, because instead of being able to start every conversation with, "Have you heard about...?" in that slightly smarmy way, you'll have too many conversations that go, "Did you read about the...?" "Yeah, I read it this morning." "Oh, my god, but did you see the...?" "Yeah, I just saw that." "Jesus." "Yeah." Then both of you will sit around feeling like failures, and the only way you'll be able to make yourself feel better will be to go and find some elderly people on a bench to impress with your stories about death cats who make tools.

Your Facebook account

You started off a couple years ago adamantly refusing to join Facebook. Why would you do that when you already have a Myspace that you barely ever check? Also, why would you want to reconnect with a bunch of people from your high school that you hated the first time around? Finding out the slutty girl in your senior class now has two babies at the age of 28 isn't exactly an earth-shattering revelation. Why do you need your predictions and judgments of these people from your past validated and confirmed so desperately?

It's unclear why, but the fact is you do.

Facebook, though you once spat on the very idea of it, should now be your homepage. It should be the number one most-visited site in your whole sad Internet life. You should check your Facebook when you wake up, then several thousand times throughout the day, and it should also be the last image your eyes see before falling asleep at night. Throughout the day you should constantly think about how your various goings on and thoughts can be best parsed as a status update. You should also begin taking pictures with your phone at the most mundane of events, like lunch with your coworkers, or a particularly long and boring stint in the bathroom, just so you can upload them to your Facebook where approximately nobody will be interested in them.

You should also be currently in the midst of taking the myriad quizzes that have infested Facebook like lice on poor people. You should now know which Star Wars character you are, what chemical element you're most like, the likely date of your own death, which non-recurring Golden Girls character you are, which type of clam chowder you most resemble, which Super Mario 2 villain you're most compatible with, and which prehistoric era you'd best thrive in. You should also know all of these things about every person on your friend list. And the fact that you know this should make you seriously question if your life is worth the resources it takes to sustain it.

You should also become a fan of everything. You should be a fan of ketchup, Phylicia Rashad, not being on fire, Detroit, thunderstorms, the Beatles, churros, puppies, words that begin with "q", space travel, the 1950s and Sears. 

One of the most important and fraudulent things you should do with your Facebook account is stalk people. If you have a recent ex-boyfriend/girlfriend, your entire life should revolve around constantly refreshing their Facebook wall. You should intently scour it for any sign of either their remorse in breaking up with you or evidence of their being a goddamn cheating whore. Because Facebook is now basically your only connection to this person (it's also your only connection to almost every other person in your life), you should start to think of visiting their wall as the equivalent of having real interaction with them. Clicking on their photos is like getting a really sad Internet hug. Reading their updates while eating dinner alone is almost like having a conversation with them again, only you don't have to talk, which is sort of what you've wanted all along. And then, on that special moment when you click on their name and all you get is a small thumbnail picture and a notice that says you must be so-and-so's friend in order to see their full profile, you can finally breathe a sigh of relief and start in on the pile of work you've let gather on your desk for the last three weeks. And then you can join another online dating site.

Cinco de Mayo!

This "holiday" is a great excuse to get drunk (if you still find yourself needing those). It's also a time when you'll be forced to socialize. Thank god the only place you feel remotely comfortable socializing is in a bar. And that's only because you're liquored up. All your other social interaction should take place behind a computer screen, where you feel safe being who you really are (i.e. a total asshole).

When you're at the bar, if you're alone, make sure you stand with your arms crossed and your head down. By no means should you ever look approachable, friendly, or like you even speak English. Anyone who sees you and mistakes you for someone attractive should be discouraged from approaching you by your body language and general aura of "I don't fucking want to be here." While this is going on, make sure you constantly have a drink that you're sipping. As soon as you finish one, go to the bar and get another. This will make you look like you're doing something. It will also make you drunk.

You may overhear a conversation to which you think you can maybe contribute. Only do this if you can satisfy at least two of the following criteria:

1) You are drunk

2) You will possibly offend someone with what you'd like to say

3) You see an opportunity to explain the true meaning of Cinco de Mayo

If possible, you should let as many people as possible know that Cinco de Mayo isn't really Mexican Independence Day. Since you don't know what it really is, and since no one will remember anything you've said tomorrow, make up a fantastical story for Cinco de Mayo about lost cities of gold and Aztecs. You should also throw in a reference to Cortez or Zapatistas, because that will make it sound authentic. Then you can say, "Just kidding. Cinco de Mayo is the Mexican phrase for May 5th." 

By the end of the evening, you should have met several people whose names are now as lost to you as your dignity. You should also have consumed enough tequila to kill an American buffalo, which we all know from Planet Earth is the world's largest and most dangerous mammal, with teeth made of dynamite and a fur coat composed entirely of sulfuric acid and killer bees. The buffalo was almost hunted to extinction by the very same Indians who would soon learn Spanish and the Bible in a misguided attempt to civilize themselves, which tragically backfired when instead they became Mexicans.  Your trip home should be hazy, at best (especially if you're driving). You should fall into bed, alone as usual, and pass out into what could easily be a true coma. When you wake on the morning of May 6th, your whole body should feel as diseased and broken as your spirit. You should vow to never even say the word "tequila" again, secretly knowing that the word "margarita" is still totally in play.

Your drugs

Remember that section in To Kill a Mockingbird where Jem has to go read to the crotchety old woman as punishment, and later on Atticus tells him that the old woman wanted to get off her dependence on morphine before she died so she wouldn't be beholden to anything, and how she was strongest person Atticus ever knew? Well, that has nothing to do with you. On any given day, your bloodstream should be something like 24% ibuprofen/acetaminophen, 24% antacids, 24% caffeine, and 24% allergy medications. (The other 4% should be just enough blood to nurture and circulate your undoubtedly innumerable blood diseases.) This ratio of drugs is what keeps you alive and functioning, so god forbid you attempt to stop depending on any one of them. Because here's the thing about drugs: they're just plain great. They make you feel better and/or make you pass out so you don't feel pain. So as long as you don't suffer from dignity like old Mrs. Whatsherface, there's no reason to stop taking them.

Keeping your fragile body pumped full of drugs is easy: When you first wake up in the morning after your Benedryl-induced night's sleep, grab a large cup of espresso-based coffee and down an antacid with it to help with the heartburn that your incredibly strong coffee will probably cause. If you put off drinking coffee for more than an hour after waking up, make sure you swallow some Advil with your eventual three cups of coffee to stop the headache you're pretty sure you'll be getting soon but haven't actually gotten yet. After looking out the window to see if any trees, animals, or other plant life still exist in the world, take a Claritin to stave off your inevitable pollen allergies (or, in the winter, your lack-of-pollen allergies). If you find you have a slight sniffle, assume that you're getting a cold and take some cold & sinus medication too. The nice is that you'll end up pleasantly woozy, which makes your work day that much more surreal and less painful. To you, drugs shouldn't be about curing pain. They're desperate preventative maintenance based on your fear of all things that might make you physically uncomfortable.

With that said, even though you love drugs, you should confusingly harbor a deep, deep resentment towards drugs that might actually help you cope with life, like antidepressants. As you torture your friends and doctors with stories of how miserable you are, be sure to deliver soapbox speeches about how antidepressants will kill your creativity. Also, even though you constantly argue that everyone else is a bunch of chemical reactions, antidepressants will prove that this fact applies to you as well. When someone inevitably makes the totally invalid point that other drugs you take must also affect your mood, raise your voice angrily and insist it's not the same thing at all. Then go ahead and insult their mother. Later, after downing a beer and someone else's Vicodin, cry apologetically, tell everyone in the room how much you love them, even if you just met them, then pass out with your face in the salsa bowl.

Your dignity

...

Earth Day, belated

You act like you don't really care about any worthy causes, but you sort of do, secretly. Even though this is mostly out of guilt, it's still something. However, at the same time, you can barely be bothered to bathe on weekends or to eat things that are not made of candy, so the chances of you doing something for a cause outside of yourself are roughly the same as those of getting struck by lightning (unless you're in your bed eating ice cream with a metal spoon during a lightning storm, in which case your chances of being hit by lightning increase to roughly 100%).

Earth Day is one of these things that will (and just did) pass you by completely unawares. You were probably told about it at the end of the day, and then made some half-hearted attempt at recycling a bottle or turning off a light, while congratulating yourself for being so green. Truthfully, though, you wouldn't even make the sacrifice of turning off your computer an hour before you usually do to save energy unless you were actually compelled to do so by law. The only way you'll contribute to ecological efforts is by accident -- like by not having a car when you live in New York City, or being too poor to afford an air conditioner for your sweltering apartment. Still you'll shake your own fraudulent hand in secret for being so environmentally friendly, knowing full well that if someone gave you a free air conditioner that was made by Taiwanese slave children and actually worked by stealing delicious, freezing-cold ozone from the atmosphere and replacing it with soot, you'd install it and not ever think about it again.

At some point, you'll begin to see that there actually isn't anything you can do that will help the Earth, and that if it's really come to the point where your actions would make a measurable difference, we're all deeply, deeply doomed. This should liberate you somewhat from a little of your guilt, replacing it with a satisfying dread of the upcoming apocalypse. You should then start to live your life in defiance of the Earth. You should actively choose to throw your empty cans into the trash rather than the recycling bin that's literally one foot away from it. You should also drive your car, if you own one, to places that are so nearby that it actually takes you longer to get into your car, start it, drive there and park than it would to have walked there, thereby truly sticking it to the man (Al Gore). Essentially, you should strive for the largest carbon footprint you possibly can, and begin to think of it as the only legacy you'll leave behind when you die. 

Your appearance

How you present yourself to the world is your key to fraudulence.
There will be moments in life when you believe you're good-looking, but there's a reason for that. You know that ugly friend you have who grows more and more attractive as you talk to them because you've grown used to their third nose and green-tinted skin? Well, you're like your own ugly best friend, only you've had your whole life to adjust to your image in a mirror. Because of this, you might occasionally find yourself strutting around, pimp-like, thinking you're the best-looking human being alive. At some point, though, a friend will show you candid photos of yourself. These inevitably awful photos will destroy any confidence you ever had. Because of course it's not the camera, the angle, or the faces you're making - it's your actual face that's your problem. You're the Vanessa Huxtable to the Denises and Claires of the world.

Try to distract people from your unattractiveness by attempting to be fashionable. Unfortunately, you have no idea what "fashionable" means, but you can always pretend you're one of those people who's so fashionable that they intentionally disregard fashion trends. In fact, because you put kitsch quality on the same level as real quality, go ahead and buy a bunch of the most unflattering shirts and pants you can find. It'll be obvious to everyone that your clothes are excessively ugly, so people will congratulate you on them instead, drawing attention away from the fact that you're gaudier than Michael Jackson's face. As an added bonus, because your entire generation is as fraudulent as you are, your intentionally ugly wardrobe will probably end up coinciding with current fashions anyway.

The important thing to remember is this: Whether you grow a huge beard, wear accessories designed for 8-year-old girls, or cut yourself some thick, grotesquely straight bangs that cover your eyebrows and half your eyes, the purpose of your outward appearance is not to reflect your real self at all. Leave people wondering whether there could be an attractive person hiding underneath the poor hair, clothing, and makeup choices. There isn't, but that enigma will probably get you a couple of fraudulent dates from the same people who would choose the mystery box over the new car. Then, when they end up with a whoopee cushion, they'll only have themselves to blame.

Disasters and you

Because every new day is just a subtly different shade of awful from the last, you long for something new and exciting. Maybe at one point you also included the word "better" next to "new and exciting," but now you don't really care. Better, worse, whatever...just something different.

This is why you secretly hope for disasters. This is why if you're ever in a devastating earthquake it will be the best day of your life. With buildings literally falling down around you and people screaming and running, you'll be almost unable to hide your smile. It's not that you want people to be hurt. It just happens to often be an unfortunate side effect of your joy. Generally.

Other disasters in which you'll find shameful happiness are hurricanes, terrorist attacks and financial collapses. Again, it's important to note that you don't take joy in other people being hurt, killed, financially ruined, or whatever else. But since the only thing you're really good at is surviving in the most literal sense of the word (i.e. continuing to be alive), a world in which that skill is suddenly valued and necessary is super appealing.

So it follows, then, that the best possible disaster you could ever hope for is a zombie apocalypse. Nothing would please and excite your fraudulent little heart more than being able to walk down a street with a shotgun and a bat, shooting former people in the face and fearing for your life at every moment. No more credit card debt, no more work, no more school, no more burdens. Just you, your survival skills, and a horde of hungry, shambling zombies. 

Of course, the only problem with all of this is that you have no actual survival skills, have never fired a gun in your life, and would likely be dead or a zombie within the first day. This is okay, though, because you're already pretty used to stumbling around half-dead and spreading your horrible diseases.

Communication

As you get older and inevitably develop anthropophobia without realizing it, your methods of communication should begin to depend solely on your writing skills and ability to deliver one-liners rather than your abilities to speak or show correct facial expressions. To start, make sure you slowly wean people off of calling you on the phone. An easy way to do this is by never actually answering your phone or checking your voicemail (which might compel you to call back if there's some sort of near-death emergency). When someone does call, text them back immediately with a "What's up?" If you accidentally answer your phone, make sure you cut the conversation short by quickly mentioning how you're almost out of minutes for the month or how you have a burning roast in the oven. Do this every time the same person calls; they'll eventually learn, the way rubbing a puppy's nose in its own poop will teach it to stop defecating on your kitschy new thrift-store couch.

Eventually, your friends and loved ones will become aware that the only way to reach you is via texting or by seeking out any online presence you have. Your real friends will have an instant messenger account; these are the people who will remain your friends and the only people with whom you'll ever communicate in real time again. If anyone else has either a Facebook, Twitter, or similar account on a website where you also have a profile, they should be taught to leave you public messages there, which will not only make you feel popular, thereby sating your deep-seated, pathetic desire for fame, but can also be easily ignored by your claiming you haven't logged in for days. This is, of course, not true, because you log in every ten minutes, but if you're ignoring someone, you have to be careful and not post updates until you feel compelled to answer this person.

But what do you do when you meet a new person who hasn't been taught to avoid you completely? It seems like this could be a problem, but it's not. First of all, you probably met this person online anyway, because you should never be going out and meeting real people in real life. This means that they also have little to no experience speaking or gesturing, unless staring at a computer screen has given them a nervous eye twitch that resembles emoting. This also means they'll never want to call or hang out in person either. Eventually, you'll add each other as friends on Facebook. This is handy for several reasons: Now you can communicate your minute goings-on to everyone at once without actually writing to a single person. You can also test your new friend's devotion by tallying how many responses or thumbs up they give your photos and status updates.

The very best part is you'll never have to write one another again; you can watch each other's updates and event attendings and tragic deaths of pets without having to put forth any effort apart from looking. And when you're finally killed in that freak accident by a falling street light, you'll have one more fake friend mourning your death by posting, "Holy shit! WTF?!!" when they respond to the obituary on your wall. And for you, even though you'll be dead, this one post will help justify your entire existence.

Getting laid off

In these rough economic times, a lot of us are having to face the reality of being laid off from work. Let's examine some good ways to deal with this situation and with all your resultant extra free time. 

First, apply for unemployment. Even though your income from these checks will only barely pay your rent, it's better than nothing. Also, any job you are offered from here on out will have to be weighed against the reality of losing your unemployment and your god-given right to stay up until until 5am eating reduced-fat Cheez-Its and downloading movies you'll never watch to your computer. 

It's also good to remember that, with unemployment rates at double digits, it's actually sort of socially acceptable for you to be out of work. This is in contrast to most of the time you've been out of work and looked down on as a lazy, useless bag of flesh. Now when you tell people you're unemployed, they'll look at you with sympathy rather than that usual mix of confusion and disgust, like they just saw a thalidomide baby.

Spend about an hour a day pretending to look for a job online but getting distracted by pornography. 

You should also take some time to really examine yourself while you're out of work with nothing to do. You should use a large wall mirror and a magnifying glass for this. Since you have no medical insurance, make sure you discover something that will convince you you have cancer or Crohn's disease. Then, calm yourself down about these exotic diseases by remembering that without medical insurance it's far more likely you'll be killed by strep throat.

Birthdays

Once a year you'll have to deal with your birthday. You don't hate your birthday because it marks a year of getting older and, therefore, closer to death. No. You hate your birthday because everyone you know gets weird around you that day and tries to give you things. Since receiving a gift is on the same anxiety level for you as receiving blood test results, your birthday should be something you dread, mentally avoid and, ultimately, start lying to people about.

One of the worst things that happens on your birthday is that someone might try to sing fucking goddamn Happy Birthday to you. If this starts to happen, your body should begin to go through a few phases, the first of which is disbelief. Surely this can't be happening to me, you'll think. Eventually, you'll pass from disbelief into horror, especially if this is taking place in public, like at a restaurant or your office. It's similar to the type of horror you'd experience if someone were stabbed in front of you or if you found out you had Lou Gehrig's disease. Finally, and this will be toward the very end of the song, near the last, excruciatingly drawn-out "Haaaapy biiiiiirthdaaaay tooooooooo........yoooouuuuuu!", you will begin to drown in a potent, acidic shame. Your ears will burn and you'll instinctively look for open windows out of which to pitch your body.

The look on your face while all of this is happening will also, god willing, be caught on camera and shared with you via email or a social networking site. Then you will get to deal with people commenting things like "Why do you look so constipated?"

In order to avoid all of this, it's best to never tell anyone about your birthday, ever. The sad truth is, though, some people already know. And these people will post it all over your Facebook wall, so that anyone you know that didn't know it was your birthday will find out, and then berate you for not telling them sooner. You'll be made to feel like a bad person just because you didn't go around essentially begging for gifts from your friends. Because that's what telling people about your birthday amounts to. Panhandling.

Death?

Death should be constantly on your mind, both torturing and soothing you, as you go through your fraudulent life. Where will you die? How horribly will you die? At what point in the next ten minutes will you die? What part of taking out the trash just now will cause you to die? Your relationship with death should be the alcoholic, abusive relationship you'd be having with your spouse if you had one, which you don't. Some days, it's all about love. Or you convince yourself it's about love. But that's just because you don't know what you'd do without the prospect of death sleeping alongside you every night, holding you tight and keeping you secure with cheap promises of how it will take care of you. On other days ("bad" days), death should leave you feeling small, worthless, and metaphorically slapped across the face and lying to your coworkers about having fallen down a staircase last night, even though you don't have a staircase and a fall couldn't possibly have given you that hand-shaped bruise over your eye.

When it's treating you right, death can be used as your fraudulent panacea. Firstly, it's the easiest solution to everything. Don't want to write a cover letter to a potential employer? Thank god there's always the option of drowning yourself in a shallow reflecting pool instead. Are you slightly depressed and somehow "too good" for doctors or therapy? Just lull yourself to sleep with dreams of accidentally tripping in front of a bus. Do you need revenge? Your own death will make a great revenge against anyone, so long as you leave a note telling them it's their fault you're dead. If you use it correctly, the idea of death solves everything.

But what about those bad days, which often coincide with birthdays, the discovery of other people's successes, or the viewing of any show/news article/bus advertisement about disease, when you can't stop obsessing over your own death? Instead of dealing gracefully with the idea that everybody dies, you should plan for it in increasingly entertaining ways that will shock and confuse the greatest amount of onlookers. Alternately, you can plan to leave behind a conspiracy, or at least the greatest amount of unanswerable questions, like how could a person physically manage to choke to death on a single piece of Swiss cheese, and should the eating of Swiss cheese now be banned from your country's children? Of course, your guilt, fear, and inability to accomplish anything will prevent you from ever following through with these plans, but with any luck, you can at least revive your love of death by dreaming of the future headline, "Commuter Loses Face and, Eventually, Life in Freak Braking Accident, Traumatizing 28."

So you have to go to a party

At some point, probably many, you'll be invited to or expected to attend a party. This could be a holiday party for your job or a birthday party for a friend or even something more heinous like a bachelor party or some type of bridal or baby shower. Don't let the word "shower" fool you, though; you'll feel dirtier after it's over than you did when it started.

The first thing you should do when you find out you have to go to a party is pray that you become devastatingly ill. But since God doesn't exist (and even if He does you're pretty sure, from experience, that He enjoys answering your prayers "No."), you can be certain that no divine help is on the way. You're not going to be sick. You're going to feel great. You're going to feel horribly, shamefully great, and you'll have no true excuse for not going. And since lying about this stuff, for some reason, is difficult/impossible for you, you better get ready for this awful party.

Why do you hate parties so much? What's so awful about free food and drinks? Well, if it was really just free food and drinks, it would be great. But that's just the lure. The party itself will undoubtedly have other people there. And you'll be expected to talk to them and pretend like you care about or are listening to things they say. Essentially, the entire night should be spent making other people around you unaware of your desire to die and/or kill them, and constantly dodging new and more horrible people that will certainly only make it harder to hide that desire. It's pretty much like being in Vietnam.

Obviously, the best thing to do at parties is drink. But you need to make sure that you drink enough so that not only do you not care about what anyone else is saying, but that you stop caring about what you say, as well. At some point, secrets that aren't yours to share should start flowing as freely from your mouth as the vomit from the girl you knew would end up vomiting when you first set eyes on her, either from alcohol or her regular schedule. If you run into your friend that invited you to the party, it would be ideal if you could confess a secret love for him or her. Couch it in things like "Look, you don't have to say anything back, but..." And then stare for an uncomfortably long time at this person's eyes, as though you're waiting for them to say something back. If you don't have a secret love to confess, then begin criticizing something dear to your friend, like their outfit, their house, or their awful friends. Then laugh it off like it was a joke when you both know it was probably the truest thing you've ever said.

If this party is a fraudulent success for you, you can be assured of several exciting things the next day: total embarrassment, a splitting headache, and the near-absolute assurance that you'll never be invited to another one. 

Your politics

No matter what your politics are, you should profess them really loudly whenever asked about them. However, you should also make sure you do little to no actual work when it comes to advancing any agenda whatsoever. In fact, you should barely be able to find the energy to vote once every four years. You shouldn't even consider voting during the mid-term elections. But if you do go to vote during these off-year elections, make sure you know absolutely nothing about any candidate and that you strictly vote down your party line. When it comes to picking judges that don't have party affiliation next to their name, just vote "no" on every one of them. That way, any time a court ruling happens that you don't agree with, you can feel completely absolved of any involvement.

Your inability to make any kind of real decision for yourself should, nonetheless, never stop you from feeling that you can make decisions for everyone else. The fact that you don't actually lead a life, but rather follow it, lemming-like, over the cliff of failure on a daily basis -- this should have no real bearing on your ability to pass judgment on other people's screwed-up ways of life. Keeping this in mind, even when you don't vote or don't go to the rally for the cause you're really interested in, you should heap scorn on other people who don't vote or attend the rally. It sounds like hypocrisy, but really it's just fraudulent living. Other people don't have that excuse, so it's your job to judge them harshly for their socially irresponsible actions. Now that you've coerced someone into voting or doing the political thing you know you should do but won't, you can feel totally absolved for not doing it yourself. 

Since your political views, no matter what they are, are absolutely true, you should feel allowed, nay, obligated, to brutally ear-rape every stranger around you with various pointed rants on controversial topics. The best place to do this is the bus or the subway. Ideally, you should get into a conversation with a friend about something like gay marriage, gun rights, the death penalty or O.J. Simpson. You should spout your utterly true view on the topic just loud enough that anyone within earshot will hear you, while simultaneously enraging and embarrassing the friend with whom you're talking. This is your sacred duty as an intelligent, sometimes-voting member of society. 

Also, you should constantly note how almost every action you take in your fraudulent life should automatically disqualify you from public office in the future, yet nevertheless still believe that some day you will be the President.

Regret

By now, you've probably become one of those people who says life is about learning, and you claim to regret nothing you've done, no matter how painful, maiming, or "Man, I accidentally caused the zombie apocalypse" it was. This is fine, but make sure that while you make this proclamation you're regretting what you did last night, or last year, or maybe even the last ten years. To be fully fraudulent, you should regret every single choice you ever make, no matter how negligible it seems. For instance, when you panic at the deli over what type of bread you want for your sandwich, pick rye bread over sourdough because you think it sounds healthier, then treat the bread and everything inside like poison when it's not what you wanted. And instead of saving the uneaten part of the sandwich, throw it away in defiance, an action you'll later regret when you're hungry and realize you had a perfectly good half sandwich that you paid for and wasted.

Of course, romantic relationships are the easiest and best places to overflow your life with regret. Let's say you meet someone online; make sure you openly profess your admiration and love before ever meeting them for real. Then, when you meet them in person and equate the experience with double-ended food poisoning, think back to the ridiculously glowing emails you sent and regret every action that led to your parents meeting, getting married, and deciding not to abort you. Essentially, you should regret getting into relationships, continuing relationships, and then getting out of relationships. And then, later, getting back into the relationships you already got out of once.

When it comes to the rest of your life, aside from school choices, job choices, and housing choices, your innate guilt and fear should keep you from making any hugely bad decisions, like robbing the preloaded-gun store. Instead, you should focus on regretting smaller things, like the outfit you chose to wear today that you weren't sure matched and are now totally conscious of every time someone looks at (and undoubtedly judges) you. You should also regret buying that plant you saw at Home Depot, because as you watch it slowly die, you realize you already knew you were incapable of sustaining life. As you bury it with tears of regret streaming down your face, promise yourself you will never kill another plant by owning it. Then go out and adopt a puppy.