A few more dating tips

When it comes down to it, your ventures in dating should be fairly similar to your ventures in work. Basically you should find yourself in situations where you think you deserve better but where you're probably getting more than you deserve. And five years later (just kidding, it'll probably be more like five weeks or days later), you should step back from your vague dating-like situation and say to yourself, "Wow, I didn't see this coming." At that point, you should break up victoriously, and then, a few months later, you should begin dating someone slightly worse than the person before.

During that period, however long, of continuous dating (it really can't ever be called a "relationship" - you're not sure exactly why, even though there's no one else involved and the other person seems to consider you their significant other, but somehow you just know, the way you know that the priest across the street is a child molester), you should feel fairly ambivalent about the other person. Sometimes you might think it's possible you like them because both of you enjoy eating and watching movies. Sometimes you're pretty sure you hate them because they only claim to like sushi, and they're obviously a poseur. You should always be too embarrassed to introduce them to your friends, and you will generally prefer death to hanging out with their friends. Every once in awhile, you should tell them it's over, then continue to agree to go out with them because you can't stand to have anyone who likes you not like you anymore.

In any case, anyone who chooses to date you is obviously the wrong person for you. This is true because the fact that they find you datable shows you immediately that they're inferior.

Other people in general

Dealing with other people can be somewhat of a challenge mostly because they are not you. Not that dealing with yourself is easy; you're a huge damn mess. But it's just a familiar and constant mess. For you, wondering and worrying about other people and their emotions and hangups and neuroses and fears and inadequacies is kind of like trying to read a Jane Austen novel in the middle of a terrorist attack. Or maybe like playing Where's Waldo? while you have a bad case of crabs. It might be interesting and ultimately worthwhile, but you'll probably find it a little hard to concentrate.

So the best thing to do is stay inside. Or if you really crave personal contact, be sure your relationships have very specific definitions so that you can easily categorize them in your mind. Person A is the person I talk to about work problems. Person B is the person I have casual sex with. Person C is the person I get drunk with (and may or may not have casual sex with). 

If you feel that someone in your life is trying to complicate his or her relationship with you by erasing or redefining their category, you may be tempted to let this happen and see if the relationship can grow. Good luck with this, because pretty soon they're going to find out who you really are. You see, by pigeon-holing them in the first place, you were shielding them from the parts of you that suck the most. If they seem to be angling toward having a bigger role in your life, then it's going to become impossible to block out all the really shitty things about you. They're going to see it all. And you're going to feel naked and ashamed. This is probably not an entirely new sensation, but the outcome is not quite exactly the same as disrobing. After all, being laid bare physically usually leads to sex or at least a hernia exam. 

Your innate character flaws: Part I - Self-deprecation*

There are so many reasons you will never be a real "success." I mean, sure, you probably have talent, or you wouldn't be living fraudulently. You may have several talents, in fact. Maybe you're an artist, a writer, a musician; maybe you write poetry or some shit. Maybe you're the greatest fucking mime in the world. Or maybe you have an amazing invention that would undoubtedly make you a millionaire. Or maybe you do cool designs that would make neat shirts. The point is, you will never do anything with these talents or ideas, no matter how good they are, because you would rather die than try to sell yourself or anything associated with you. The rare times you actually do try to pitch yourself to anyone at all, it should go almost exactly like this:

You: "Hey, are you completely bored and have absolutely nothing to do?"
Your best friend: "I was thinking of watching TV."
You: "Oh, never mind, then. But, uh, if you get completely bored and desperately need something to do, maybe you can look at this thing I did, because you might find it interesting."
Your best friend: "I'd love to!"
You: "Yeah, it sucks shit."
Your best friend: "Well, where is it? I wanna see it!"
You: "Oh, I'll, uh, send it later."

You will, of course, never send it, because you'll chicken out and assume your best friend will hate you for asking them to look at this drawing you did, or whatever. In fact, you already hate yourself for having created it. This is the best-case scenario. There really is no worst-case scenario, where you ask anyone of consequence to look at your stuff and they reject it, because that will never actually happen.

Next time:
Part II - Your fear of success, your fear of failure, and your fear of being average

*Okay, fine, this should either be "self-deprecatingness" or else it doesn't technically count as a character flaw, but you know what? A completely anal attention (not literally) to syntax and grammatical inanities like "to boldly go" should also be one of your character flaws. Because what could you have been doing for those five minutes you just wasted thinking about whether this was technically correct or not? Anything.

When you're actually sick

Every now and then you will become actually sick. This means you will have actual verifiable symptoms that even other people can detect. You won't need to feel the nodes in your neck or take your temperature because there will be no doubt that you're truly sick. So what do you do in these times?

You might think, since you spend most of your time worrying about being sick, that when it actually strikes you should take a little joy in the fact that it's finally true. Maybe revel in it a little. Take some time off work. Watch movies in bed and drink tea.

That all sounds nice, but in reality, if you're living fraudulently, being actually sick is horrible and you should do anything to avoid dealing with it. This means telling everyone that you're not sick (for once) and that you just have allergies. When they ask what kind of allergies make you look like a dead person, say "seasonal." It's always one season or another, so this is always true.

Also, use remedies that sound homespun and false. The best one of these is the old "alcohol will kill the germs". Tell this to yourself and drink up. 5 or 6 Hot Toddies later and you actually WILL feel better. Whether this is from killing the invading germ cells or killing your own cells doesn't really matter at that point. You should also take NyQuil or other over-the-counter night time medicines. Don't worry about the warning that you shouldn't take with alcohol. That's directed to people who care about things like not passing out at the dinner table or forgetting how to talk in the middle of a sentence. Not you. 

Doctors say you should get a lot of sleep, but following doctors' orders is pretty much giving in to being sick. So if you do sleep in, tell yourself it's because you deserved 15.5 hours of sleep, not because you needed it. 

Pretty soon, you'll be back to feeling normal and can go on with your life of worrying about being sick with real illnesses like lymphoma or mercury poisoning.

Your inferiority/superiority complex

Let's be honest: You are great. You are pretty much smarter, better-looking, more full of talent, and less full of unpleasant odors than the closest ten people around you combined. However, let's not forget that you are also the most pathetic, least capable of doing anything, dumbest, ugliest person alive. Also, you're a total failure. This may seem like a paradox, but it's not, because you're not really cool enough to be a paradox. This is just regular fraudulent living.

The great thing about thinking you're both better and worse than everyone is that you have no real justification for either. These are things you just know about yourself, the way you know god doesn't exist but that He hates you anyway. You should be pretty good at convincing lame people you don't like and whom you only know peripherally that you are pretty much perfect, and isn't it weird how you're not taken, because obviously you're a great catch for anyone? What they don't know is that you're sort of like if a decent artist took a giant hunk of poop and sculpted it pretty well and then painted it with nice paints that made it look like a really good piece of art, but actually once you poke it, you're just sticking your finger into poop.

Still, even knowing this about yourself, you should walk around assuming that the parents of everyone you see on the street must have been siblings.

Fear

There's an awful lot in this world to fear. Think about that for a second. Think about all the stuff that could happen to you in any given situation. It doesn't just have to be body related, either. There are lots of things to fear that don't have anything to do with that multi-colored mole on your forearm (though you should really get that thing looked at).

So, much like guilt should be at the core of most of your actions and inactions, so should fear. And your fear should not be relegated only to the probable or statistically possible event outcomes in your life. If you're living properly, your fear should reach far into the realm of what other people call "unlikely" or "fucking impossible."

Take your morning commute, for instance. If you drive, then you're well aware of the likelihood of a car wreck. But have you ever considered the other things to fear about driving? Like what happens if you go under a freeway overpass and an earthquake strikes at that precise moment? What if the "check engine" light that won't turn off is actually a slow gas leak into the interior, poisoning you with every breath? What if you hit and kill a pedestrian? What if you hit and kill an animal? What if you hit and kill a small child pedestrian carrying an animal? What if your car spontaneously explodes?

If you take public transportation to work, you can think about pretty much all of these in addition to wondering if the homeless man on the other side of the subway car is "benign" crazy or actually "kill you" crazy.

Most social interactions should be fraught with fear, especially meeting new people. Most of this fear will be centered around how idiotic/ugly/smelly/obviously high you must seem. And even if you don't like the person you're talking to or have no intention of ever speaking to them again, your worst fear should be that they feel the same way.

You might think that living with all this fear is unhealthy. Good. Now you can be afraid of your fear, too.

Guilt

Guilt should be the one prime defining force in your life (and should always be closely accompanied by shame and fear). It should be the reason you don't do anything you want, and it should be the reason you do everything you hate. Every decision you make should be decided by your own interminable guilt over existence, and all the little guilts in between.

For instance, as a kid, you should force yourself to get good grades not because you want to exceed but because of guilt over disappointing your parents with anything but perfect report cards. When you go to college, you should choose a major that sounds good (something science-y, maybe) but in which you have no actual interest. (Or ensure your future failure by picking the most masturbatory subject you can. Like English. Or Philosophy. In a way, that's almost preferable, because then you get to spend the rest of your life seeing the awfulness that happens when you make a decision not based on guilt.)

At your job, you should work overtime despite the fact that you don't get paid for overtime, and you should work harder when everyone around you sucks because you feel guilty over letting anybody down. You should donate money, extra organs, blood, and anything else you can that doesn't actually involve time not because you're a good person but because of your guilt over being a bad person. You're a bad person because your life doesn't suck quite as bad as the people who need these donations. You're a bad person because when you look at a fat person, you think to yourself, "Wow, that person is fat." You're also a bad person because you hate all the assholes around you.

As previously mentioned, guilt should also keep you from doing anything that makes you happy. Or it should at least lessen the pleasure you get from anything. This includes, among other things, smoking, drinking, drugs, eating, sex, watching TV, driving, buying things, not buying things, laughing at people, using the Internet, sleeping. You should consider all the bad consequences of all of these things as you do them, thereby nullifying whatever you enjoyed about them in the first place.

Yes, guilt should be behind every action and inaction in your life. But as bad as that sounds, remember that guilt is also probably the reason you haven't killed yourself yet.

Friendships

Friendships are, in many ways, the key to fraudulence. Because interpersonal relations (or lack thereof) provide us so many opportunities to live fraudulently, it's important to look at how we can have the correct type of friends and what to do to keep them. 

Making friends can be hard. Most times you'd probably rather go home and eat cookies than try to chat up a new person in an effort to befriend them. Cookies don't tell long, boring stories about people you don't care about. Cookies don't expect you to remember their names or whether or not you've met them before. Cookies don't--without the help of drugs--ask you what you do for a living and expect to hear something interesting. And with cookies, there's never a serious question about whether or not they'll end up being touched and in your mouth. 

But what about the friends you already have? I'm glad you asked. These are indispensable because if they've stuck with you for a good amount of time, that means they're not disgusted or horrified by your neuroses and can generally be counted on in good times and bad. In this way, the friends you already have, unlike ones you're trying to make for the first time, are very much like cookies.  

But true frauds should test the limits of their friendships all the time. Call your friends to discuss every bout of hypochondria, even if you're sure they're no longer listening. Discuss controversial matters about which you know you'll disagree simply to see if your relationship can withstand a blowout argument. Ignore them when things are going well in your life and then desperately attempt to reconnect when tragedy strikes. 

True friendships should be able to stand up to even the strongest of tests: your personality. 

Winding down

You've had a long day that started hungover or at least cripplingly exhausted and the only reason you made it all the way through is due to coffee and the thought that you'd sometime soon be back at home, in your bed. Once you get home, what should you do to relax and shake off the dust of the day?

First, drink something. You've been sober (probably) all day. This is a lot of why your day has sucked so hard. Before you eat anything, get a couple glasses of red wine in your belly. If you have severe acid reflux, this is even better. 

Also, stay in your work clothes as long as possible. If you can fall asleep in your bed or on the couch completely dressed for work then it will make it all that much more disorienting when you wake up the next day. Also, sleeping with dress shoes on has been proven to make people into complete assbags.

Now, since you've spent probably the whole day staring at the computer at your desk, the best thing to do with your night once you get home and get drunk is to turn on your computer.  You should definitely check your email as well as your favorite blogs because the time it's taken for you to get home is enough for a lot of really interesting things to have taken place in the world. When you notice that nothing interesting has taken place in either your email or any other site you visit, just keep hitting refresh until something changes.  No matter how long it takes. This is a form of hypnosis which will help you sleep.

Once you're too tired or drunk to see straight, think about hitting the hay. Try to make sure not to get 8 hours of sleep, though. Think about how much more awful the world will be the next day if you're actually awake enough to experience it.

One last (hopefully) note on public crying

After months of shameless flirting and confessions of crushes and liking, when the person you're ridiculously smitten with (who claims to reciprocate) ultimately rejects you in favor of their current or ex significant other, make sure you get caught tearing up in a thrift store because the song "Someday" by Mariah Carey is playing over the loudspeakers, and you're sure every single word was written for you. About them.

Also, consider asking the half-derelict people who work there to please turn off the goddamn radio, please, because don't they realize how that song could really upset some people?

P.S. After leaving the thrift store, notice that there's a cut on your hand and panic for the next few days about how you caught a horrible disease through that cut from the clothes, which probably all belonged to highly contagious, now-dead people.

Some thoughts on dating

For a person living fraudulently, dating is pretty much all-around horrible. I suspect even for non-frauds, dating is at best a mixed bag. But, unfortunately it's a sometimes-necessary step in the process of having sex. (Sex itself is also a very dubious goal, though, because although you want it, you know that you'll probably spend the next several weeks after checking yourself for early signs of syphilis.) 

If you go to bars a lot, as you should, especially on week nights, then this is the likely place you'll meet your future ex. Bars are a great place to meet people you might end up having sex with because it will probably be so loud that you won't be able to hear whatever asinine thing the person is bound to say that will make them suddenly completely unattractive. Most people, when given the chance to talk, will do this. So drink a lot so that you misunderstand them or just simply start tuning them out. 

After you have awkward drunk sex with this person, you should evaluate the situation in terms of whether or not you ever want to do that again. If the answer is a resounding "NO!", then just leave. Quickly. Do not spend the night. I know this may seem trashy, but believe me, it's much better than lying in a stranger's bed, waiting for the sun to rise.

If you decide, foolishly, that a relationship may be worth pursuing with this person, then you should still leave right after sex. Cuddling with someone you just met isn't cute, it's weird and borderline crazy. Having intense drunken sex is fine, but then cuddling afterwards and falling asleep in each other's arms when you don't even know the person's last (or maybe even first) name is just wrong. Get out and save your dignity so that it can be destroyed later, in a less-weird way.

Work!

Speaking of money, you should, in fact, have a job from which you obtain that money. You might think that unemployment sounds like the perfect method of fraudulent living, but that's only true when it's sporadic and a result of your own indecisiveness as to what the hell you're doing with your life. Actually, it's crucial that you have a job that is completely socially irresponsible and trite and never pays as much as you think it should but actually pays much more than you deserve for what you actually do. If your job is in an industry that actually hurts society in some way, even better (example: advertising).

For our purposes, finding the perfect job means never finding the perfect job, and probably not even knowing what the perfect job is. Your job should be a result of your having skimmed around on Craigslist or Monster and finally applying to the least-worst-sounding thing you can find, or the one you think you can fake best. Five years later, you should be sitting at your desk thinking about what you do and saying, "Wow, I didn't see this coming." And based on the schools you attended and your scholastic record, no one should have seen this coming. Your job should be a total letdown to everyone who ever expected anything of you. Also, 90% of that job should be spent indulging your own hypochondria, depression, and need to check Facebook (which you at some point refused to join and then became more active in than anyone else you know) until you begin to sicken yourself with how meaningless your existence is.

At this point, you should begin staying up till 3 or 4 in the morning every night in defiance of the fact that you have to work. You should torturously drag yourself through the workday not caring about your work. You should quit victoriously, telling yourself you're going to get a job that's important, that you care about, that helps humanity, or that you even sort of like.

Then, three months later, after being a shut in and panicking about money, you should start applying to every horrible-sounding job you can find and accept one that pays slightly less than before, in which you do exactly what you did in your last job because you have no qualifications to do anything else.

How to have the best credit ever

This piece of advice might end up outdated pretty soon since we may all be living on whatever food we can grow in our cigarette butt-strewn back alleys and dirtless balconies due to the Economic Crisis. But, assuming life doesn't take a Mad Max turn, here are some suggestions on how to manage your finances.

So you're spending $100/month on a gym membership you never use. This is a good first step, but there's probably a lot more money in your paycheck that needs to be put to use. First thing you should do is figure out exactly how much money you have to spend. So take your paycheck amount and subtract however many $30 overdraft fees you probably incurred during your last pay cycle. Just never, ever look at your actual bank account balance to do this. That's way too depressing. Instead, just guestimate. And the way you know that guestimation works is because it's a made-up compound word that sounds funny. Think about it. When has anything like that ever led you astray?

Next step is to stock up on the necessities. You're going to need food and vice supplies. If you like to cook, you should go to the store and buy a lot of perishable fruits, vegetables and meat. Throwing them all out in six months when you can't stand the smell anymore will be a great source of catharsis.

Whatever happens, make sure you have enough liquor and cigarettes or whatever it is you use to get through the week before you start thinking about utility bills. The electric and gas companies will let you go for months without paying before they start shutting off your lights. And, worst case scenario is that you're getting drunk and eating take-out in the dark. This is almost preferable to doing it in the light, right?

Use your credit cards when you get in a pinch. And by a "pinch" I mean "whenever you want something." They gave you a limit for a reason. Not reaching it would be failing to reach your true potential.

The absolute best part of living this way is that each and every payday will become a sacred day. A day you've looked forward to desperately since 3 days from the last one. Life gains more worth when you give yourself tiny goals to reach. Surviving until two Fridays from now seems as worthy a goal as any.

Exercise

When you're living fradulently, one of your most pressing personal conflicts should involve the gym. 

Ideally, you want to buy a gym membership at an inflated price, not because you want to spend more money, but just because talking to the gym membership salesguy is so uncomfortable that you'll pay anything to make it stop. Your gym should be close to work and close to your house. The reason for this is that it will make you feel extra pathetic as you walk right past it most days without going inside.

Since the gym is close to work, you'll think, "Maybe I'll make it there on my way in or on my way home." Keeping this in mind, every day you should bring your gym clothes to work with you. This is what we in the business call, "lying to yourself." 

It's not that you don't want to look better or feel better by going to the gym. In fact, the few times you've gone you've probably noticed a measurable uptick in your general demeanor and state of mind. The problem is, it sucks so bad to go. It's hard. It's really boring. It requires more energy than you could possibly muster in the morning before work or especially after 9 hours sitting at a desk and daydreaming about your bed. 

On the weekends, you'll be tempted to want to go to the gym. Go with this thought. The best thing about it is that it will stop you from doing anything else with your day, because the entire day will be based on the statement "After I get out of the gym..." If you never end up going to the gym, then no real plans can ever be made, and you'll have pretty successfully wasted one of your only two days off from work. 

And then you'll feel like a lazy piece of shit. You can then lay down on your couch with a box of White Cheddar Cheez-Its and a bottle of wine and do some self examination.  Mostly of that thing on your foot that looks like it's changed color.

More public crying

Another great place to cry in public is at work. The best thing about crying at work is that even though you hide yourself while the tears are physically cascading down your soggy cheeks, the aftermath still shows clearly on your face when you go back to your three square feet of "private" space. Everyone knows you've been crying; they just pretend you weren't. Even so, they're talking about you behind your back. Yeah, they are.

Now, the best and most obvious place to hide when you're crying is in the bathroom. Your best bet is the handicapped stall, because that's the farthest from the door and the stall that will be least missed. And you will sit on that toilet and cry your little eyes out, constantly pulling off more and more TP to try to prevent puffiness later (which, as previously discussed, is pointless). Also, you will feel totally unsanitary and assume that you're catching lupus for sitting in a public toilet for so long.

But then someone will come in to use the bathroom for regular purposes. Make sure you freeze and stop sniffling and pull your feet up to crouch on the toilet seat so that no one knows you're there (or at least can't peek under the stall to recognize your shoes). Chances are 1 in 10 that the person will be in and out in twenty seconds, and you can go back to falling apart. In a truly fraudulent world, though, that person will come in and start grooming and brushing their teeth and blow-drying their hair, and you will have gotten yourself stuck in the bathroom crouching on a toilet seat for a good twenty minutes. The best part will be that the person knows someone is there. It's obvious that the stall door is closed; and everyone knows that people don't use the handicapped stall except to do #2. So basically, you now either have to crouch on a toilet seat trying not to move or breathe and pray that no one sees you outside when you eventually leave the bathroom, or else you have to rush out quickly and have this person assume you did #2 without washing your hands afterwards. Either way, you're a winner.

Public crying

I'd like this to be an ongoing topic where we share our stories of where, how and why we've cried in public.

I'll start with one good suggestion: the subway.

Yeah, this is one of the best public places to cry, because everyone near you is watching your public breakdown, which makes you feel like even more of a loser than whatever is causing you to cry. Sometimes the embarassment can help override the sadness you're experiencing, but usually it will just add to it. Now you're crying both because your life is horrible generally, AND specifically at this moment it's hyper-horrible as you are a public spectacle of fraudulence and loserdom. 

Add to this the fact that you have Keane or some other british-accented gloom pop in your iPod and that you're curled up on two seats in a fetal position and you're essentially now "that person". Every subway train has "that person". Now it's you. Congrats. You finally did something.

So This Is the New Year

Well. If you expected a "Happy New Year," you are clearly reading the wrong blog. In fact, if you live fraudulently, the New Year and, especially, New Year's Eve should not in any way be considered holidays. They are days in which you should be sitting at home alone reflecting back on your failures over the past year. If you're out with people, it should only be because you're so deathly afraid of being alone on this day of all days, and only because people will later judge you on the fact that you were alone on New Year's Eve. On the most successful of New Year's Eves, whether you're alone or among hundreds of people, uncontrollable tears should be streaming down your face.

Let's make a list, then. Still, we don't need to be completely cynical: Fraudulent living isn't all about cynicism, despite what you might think. In fact, a lot of fraudulent living involves being unjustifiably optimistic and, believe it or not, a die-hard romantic about life. And that's what makes the crashing that much harder and teeth-breaking in the end. But enough about that. Let's tally our successes over the past year:

Successes:
1) Surviving
2) Not dying (physically)

Now let's tally our failures:

Failures:
1) Not accomplishing a single goal
2) Surviving

Let's be honest; it was a pretty good year.