Depression

If you really think about it and compare it to other people, your normal state of mind is likely one of depression. Pretty much all the time. But it's not the kind of "big D" Depression that you see in the anti-depressant commercials where you're sitting on the couch in your sweats with a look of constipation on your face and a dog on the other side of the room that wants nothing to do with you. See, even your depression is fraudulent because, in all likelihood, everyone thinks you're a goddamn jolly asshole. Or at least a somewhat manic but well-put-together human citizen.

Your depression is most-decidedly "small d" and all on the inside and the only times you really let it show are those regrettable moments when you're drunk and someone happens to ask you a personal question that you would normally dodge but this time you vomit out some poisonous story from your past in horrific detail that leaves everyone who hears it, including you, reeling. You will immediately afterward realize what an awful thing you just did and find some way to backpedal out of it, like maybe by saying "But that was years ago and I'm totally on medication now." Or maybe by saying "Just kidding."

You should be pretty attached to your depression by now, because it feels like a warm blanket. A warm blanket covered in smallpox, but a warm blanket nonetheless. So when a doctor recommends that you go on anti-depressants or some other type of psychoactive drug, you should refuse and convince her and yourself that you are completely fine. You like your warm blanket and you should fight and snarl like an abused dog if someone threatens to take it away.

After some time you will give in and start taking this medication and realize that you didn't really ever need it because what was making you depressed isn't inside you, it's actually the rest of the world. You should then stop taking the medicine cold turkey, act like a dick for about a week until you come off of it, and then join another online dating site.

Your taste in things: Part I

You're pretty sure your taste in things is great. This means your movies, your music, your books, your food preferences, and the people with whom you associate. However, you realize you're also a sucker for things that automatically make you not cool. This includes anything mainstream and not critically acclaimed, anything too critically acclaimed, anything more than one in ten people on the street has heard of, and people who are socially incompetent in the wrong way (ie, socially incompetent AND unattractive). Knowing this, you should fully doubt your taste in everything, and when someone asks you "What movies have you seen recently?" your answers should be as studied as the Bible, and just as empty.

When it comes to movies, you can pretty safely mention anything foreign/made by a foreign director (This includes Uwe Boll, because he falls into the "so bad it's good" category, which is also almost universally acceptable as an answer and gives you bonus points for being hilarious.), unless it was a mainstream Hollywood movie made in English. So Pan's Labyrinth (critically acclaimed movie made in Spanish by Guillermo del Toro)=okay, whereas Hellboy (Hollywood blockbuster made in English by Guillermo del Toro)=not okay. The more obscure and/or older the movie, the better. You're also permitted to name documentaries, unless it's something mainstream like Supersize Me, which will only bring scorn from people who consider themselves aspiring documentarians and will gripe for minutes about how what's-his-face lucked out. If you have to talk about contemporary American filmmakers, you should talk about PT Anderson and how he's getting better and then Wes Anderson and how he's getting worse. Then you should mention Ingmar Bergman or the Maysles, and someone in the room will collapse in seizures with pretentious pleasure.

When it comes to music, you should never ever admit what you really listen to. For instance, even though you love Radiohead, you simply can't say you love Radiohead, because it will bring one of two responses: people will either think you're just saying it because everyone says it, or people will scorn you for liking this band that everyone loves and is thus obviously overrated. The only discussion you're allowed to have about Radiohead is concerning which album is your favorite, and then you should make some controversial choice, like Pablo Honey, which will make people think you're clever because it's so obviously not their best album that you must be fucking brilliant to say so. Your best bet is to name local underground bands no one's ever heard of, the more diametrically opposed to Coldplay the better. If you have to name anything remotely mainstream, it should be something like Death Cab for Cutie, and then you have to mention that you liked them about 8 years before they were ever on The OC. Then you should gripe about how you can't ever go to their concerts anymore because there's too many poseurs around. Also, you must never tell people that, say, Dashboard Confessional is your favorite band ever. Accept that it's your secret shame and move on with your life.

To be continued (for real this time, promise)

Online dating

At some point in your life you will decide that it's time to put pictures of yourself on a website in the sad hope that someone will see them and want to marry you. By this point you will have probably had several failed relationships under your belt and have grown tired of meeting new people for awkward first dates that don't do anything but aggravate your acid reflux and confirm your conviction that most other people suck even worse than you do. So you figure, hey, maybe I can do all the awkward first-date stuff online, from the comfort of my sad apartment, in my pajamas, with a shamefully emptying bottle of wine.

You should try to put your best-looking pictures up, but since you hate the way you look in every single photo of you, you should instead choose the photos of you where you're making weird faces or where you look mentally crippled. You think that putting these up shows people that you're funny and not shallow enough to care too much about looks. But really what this shows people is that you're ugly.

You also need to fill out a profile of information about yourself. There will probably be several different questions to answer, all of them differing slightly depending on which website you're using. But pretty much all of them will have one very vague, open-ended topic for you to write on which will just say "About me." You should take this opportunity to either talk about how you hate writing about yourself, to say something completely asinine, or to totally rip on yourself. You think this shows people how witty and irreverent you are. But really, what this shows people is how horribly insecure and possibly dangerous you are.

Now all that's left to do is sit and wait for responses. You should obsessively refresh your inbox at this point. You should also minimize the window and purposely do something else on your computer, like look through your iTunes music list, for what seems to you like a really long time but in reality was 11 seconds, and then go back to your inbox. When this becomes too frustrating to deal with, you should start looking at other people's profiles and sending out blind emails to them. You should also start sending messages to people that you don't find attractive in the least just to prove to yourself how awful you must be when even these people don't message you back.

If you have any Xanax, now is the time to take two of these and hope there's enough wine left in the bottle to wash them down.

The News

You probably like to know what's going on in the world, but not because you care. You just need to be able to hold small-talk conversations about current events without letting everyone around you find out that your social skills are as fake and deep as the Los Angeles river. The worst thing that could ever possibly happen in your entire life is to have your fake social skills tested by someone you don't know. Having nothing at all to say when this happens will probably cause you to die or move to another city.

One of the best methods of keeping yourself informed is the Internet. And one of the best places on the Internet to get your news is from the Yahoo! home page. This page gives you the headlines of the five most important things going on in the entire world at that moment. Sometimes one of those five things happens to be that monkeys have attacked old people in New Delhi. Or that a Russian ex-model has gone missing. Or that scientists have found out why people like chocolate.

Reading only headlines should be considered a sufficient substitute for reading the actual article. And this is all you need for most everyday conversation. If a coworker asks you, "Have you heard about what's going on in New Delhi?", all you need to answer is,"Yeah. I can't imagine how scared old people must be there now, what with all the monkeys." Sometimes, if you're really unlucky (which you are), someone will talk about more details than you could glean from the headline and expect a response. In this case, you can always change the topic really quickly and desperately, or fake a seizure.

Another great way to find out about what's going on in the world is to look at people's status updates on Facebook. You are likely already addicted to this anyway. But if you don't follow sports at all, this is a great way to find out, sometimes in real time, about how various sports teams are doing. Your ignorant friend in Cleveland probably updates his status to say things like "Bobby is so damn proud of his Browns right now!", or "Bobby wants to find the coach of the Browns and kill his whole family." This is also a good way to find out which of your friends to be the most ashamed of.

Compliments

Every once in awhile, you may find yourself in the position of having accomplished something trivial, like putting on nonugly clothes or finishing the task you were supposed to do. Sometimes you accidentally smile at a person walking by because you're having an entertaining conversation with yourself in your head and shamefully made yourself crack up in a public space. You should avoid doing these things, because they may lead to your becoming the recipient of a compliment, and you would easily rather blow up your city and its surrounding suburbs than have this happen.

Receiving a compliment, no matter how small, should make you feel like a terrified bird in a cage who starts flapping around in a frenzy, and who finally flees the cage and bolts towards the great outdoors only to find there's a window in the way, and you've smacked straight into it. When your coworker, in an attempt to make small talk, says something like, "Oh, that's a nice scarf," you should automatically reply with an excuse for why you don't deserve credit. You might mutter, "My friend who's really good at picking things out got it for me as a present because she hates all my clothes." There's really nothing they can add to this conversation. Crisis somewhat averted.

Sometimes you might receive a more personal compliment. If a friend or future ex tells you how great you look, you should reply with a quick, "Fuck you and everyone you love." If a stranger or acquaintance does this, you should debate for many awkward seconds over whether to reply with a dishonest, "You look good too," or stand there and give them a point-by-point argument of why they're wrong. You should do this often and even when you know you're pissing off the people complimenting you, even when you agree, and even when you know they don't care.

Rarely, possibly mistakenly, you will get an extreme and overly personal compliment for things you care about, like your homemade wax sculptures of '70s-era Elliot Gould. "Man, I have to tell you - you are really talented at making wax sculptures of '70s-era Elliot Gould. Maybe better than anyone I know," a friend will say, quietly and with respect, as your internal organs implode with horror and panic. In this situation, your best bet is to change the subject to spelunking or begin your oratory on Elliot Gould's later years in a lightheaded rush, ignoring the comment and failing to make eye contact with your friend for the next half-hour. The whole time, you'll want to offer a sincere compliment on something you've always thought was great about your friend, but you'll decide ultimately that anything you say now will sound phony, and that you're obviously only saying it because they said something nice to you, and if you ever say anything nice to them ever again, they'll see that you're doing it only for reciprocation. Then you should never hang out with them again.

As a general rule, remember this: You're incapable of accepting compliments, so act as if every one is an attack against babies, kittens, and grandmothers who bake cakes for everyone.

Diet

If you're living correctly, then you should almost never think about your diet except for passing thoughts at the end of the night like "Have I really had zero glasses of water today?"

The reason for this is that you are lucky if you consume anything at all during the day besides Altoids and coffee. Thinking about what types of things you should be eating is like looking at your bank balance before buying that box set of DVDs on Amazon. Chances are you'll end up thinking your way right out of anything to eat at all.

When you're hungry, it's best to go out and eat whatever sounds good and don't stop eating until one of your arms goes numb. Considering how little you eat, every time you're hungry and actually have the temerity to go out and fulfill that need, you should act like a caveman who just slew a giant boar but hasn't yet discovered refrigeration. When you reach that point in your guts where you know every bite from here on out is a bad mistake, push through that wall. 

Since it's likely that on any given day you could realize that the only thing you've consumed that had any caloric value was the milk in your coffee and the coke in your cocktail, you can justify disgusting eating binges. 4 pounds of mac and cheese? No problem! You'll make up for that by starving yourself tomorrow. An entire carton of ice cream in one sitting? Psh! That doesn't mean much in the grand scheme when you think of how last weekend the only nutrients your body got were through smelling other people's food.

The other thing that's really good to do is, every now and then, take an entire fist-full of vitamins. Considering all the drinking you do, doesn't your body deserve 10,000% of its daily recommended allowance of magnesium? 

Your uncalled-for optimism

This probably sounds like a completely ironic subject, since irony is your means of survival, and oftentimes when you make a statement, even you're not sure if you're being ironic or sincere. Or, when you're being sincere, you make it sound ironic to throw people off. You've generally fooled yourself into thinking you're the most cynical person on the planet, who will say mockingly optimistic phrases for laughs, like "I'm finally going to do something this year!" But your real problem is that you're ridiculously, embarrassingly optimistic, and you have to feign cynicism so that when you're proven wrong about life on an almost daily basis you don't look like a naive asshole. If you're living to the fraudulentest, you should be a super-secret, barf-making romantic who believes everything will turn out for the best and that every endeavor you undertake will gain you fame and success and happiness. And you should have no cause to believe this whatsoever.

Basically, your outlook on life and life events should resemble the following scenario: Let's say you're an American who gets into a car in England. You automatically pull into the right-hand side of the road, because you're sure this is where you should be. A car crashes head-on into you and you get horribly maimed. Once you're out of hospital (forget the article; remember, you're in England), you get back into the car and pull out onto the road and into the right-hand side. Another car crashes head-on into you. After awhile, on the phone and at parties where you don't want to be, you start talking to friends about how you're going out driving later, and you jokingly say things like, "Dude, I'm totally going to get into a goddamn awful car crash today, because that's what always happens to me" when you're really thinking to yourself, "I'm going to be fine, because I'm supposed to drive in that lane, and I'm an excellent driver." And then you go out again and pull into the right-hand side of the road, and a truck hits your car, flies up into the air, flips over, and lands directly on top of your car, causing your head to be asymmetrical because part of your skull has been bashed in. And this happens about five times a day for the rest of your life.

Now, the point of this likely scenario is that experience should teach you nothing. Even if you understand "if A, then B (where B=crap)" in an intellectual sense, you believe your own rules, like, "if A, then lollipop (where lollipop does not equal B (crap))." This is all to say that, despite your being fairly intelligent, you're actually incredibly not smart at all.

Ethics, again (your relationship with the truth)

So even though you have no religion or innate moral compass, you still behave in the same way as a good person does as a side effect of your fraudulence. This has been discussed in depth elsewhere.

One of the ways in which you will often find yourself coincidentally choosing the same actions as a genuinely good person would is with lying. And this is because you really suck at it. You suck at it like you suck at managing money or cultivating lasting relationships or not being neurotic. It's a part of you and you've come to accept it and probably work out some ways of getting around it.

But again, it's good to remember that the reason you tell the truth pretty much all the time has nothing to do with any sort of moral duty any more than it's the moral duty of the gazelle to run away from the lion or the priest to take out his repressed sexuality on children -- it's just nature.

So let's say you're asked to go to a party with someone you know pretty well, but you know this party is going to be a seriously torturous ordeal full of inane people with nothing but asinine and uninteresting stories to tell about other horrible people who you don't know but must be pretty horrible to have participated in the events of this story. You can't lie to get out of going to this party, so you will either: 

a) be honest and risk a confrontation with your friend about why you refuse to do this one thing after all the many things this friend has done for you and that these people aren't that bad and you are a selfish prick

or

b) you don't say anything and you just go to the party and steep yourself in misery and resentment

See, if you do b), on the outside, you haven't lied AND you performed this self-sacrificial act, seemingly for the benefit of your dear friend. But really, what everyone else doesn't know is that you only didn't lie and say you were busy because you are a failure even when it comes to lying, and also that you sacrificed yourself to go to this party not out of some sense of duty or ethical obligation, but just because it's your first instinct when put in a bad situation. Like a mother throwing herself in front of a bus to push her child out of the way. Except in this situation it's as though what moves the mother to do that is not the instinct to protect her child but rather that she has some severe and dramatic motor skills problem.

Your addictions

While you are probably not a heroine addict yet (though you assume it will happen someday...someday), you should have collected a number of sad little addictions by this point in your life. Alcohol is certainly one of them, but you don't count it as an addiction so much as the method in which your body obtains life-sustaining water. Maybe you have a little thing for over-the-counter cold medication, which makes you somewhat woozy, which makes your day slightly less intolerable. Maybe you have a compulsive need to go out and buy things every night in order to spend the money you make at the job you hate, throwing it away like it's blood money, and you can't stand the sight of it. The most important addiction for fraudulence, though, is a life-wasting, disgusting addiction to the Internet.

Your Internet addiction should be such that when you finally lie on your deathbed, your main regret in life is that you spent 70% of it online. In other words, all of the time you spend not sleeping should be spent online looking at, oh, videos of people accidentally hurting themselves, nostalgic items you could buy on eBay, and, of course, social networking sites. The rest of the time, you have no idea what you just looked at for the past two hours, or else you just refreshed your email a hundred times to see if you had new messages from friends you never actually talk to anymore in person or even on the phone. Your friendships should be at the point where, if one of your friends uses a fake name on their social networking page, you forget what their real name is.

Even when you do manage to tear yourself away to go use the restroom or actually venture out to a place where you're required to put on pants, you find yourself incredibly anxious until you get home and can check your email (no, you have no new email) and update your status, telling everyone about the minor car accident you just witnessed. And if there goes a day where, holy shit, you are actually unable to access the Internet because the wireless connection you steal is down or because you've been forced into going on a road trip, your anxiety levels should reach the point where you actually feel like your head is going to explode and you're in a surreal state of existential lostness. When you finally manage to get online again, you should be like a man in a desert oasis, drinking greedily until you've checked every single site you've ever visited in your life. Then you should sit around feeling ashamed.

Love

Other people fall in love. For you, though, it's more like a crash. And it usually pretty much destroys everything. But once in a while you'll do a Hudson River landing and somehow make it off completely unscathed and with a new appreciation for life. 

Why is it so devastating for you? Lots of reasons, all related to your fraudulence, are at play here. For one thing, you will fall in love with someone when you have no real reason to do so. And this person you fall in love with for no reason will be the most obviously wrong person for you ever. It will seem to an outsider that you actually held interviews with a search committee to find the most nonsensical and incompatible fit available.  Unfortunately for you, though, this isn't true. It just happens that this is the type of person you find yourself attracted to. It's one of life's many cruel jokes that include you as part of the punchline. Your life is like watching a dog devour a bag of chocolate.

Also, most of the time this person you fall in love with, in addition to being completely wrong for you, will also be already coupled or of a different sexual orientation than required for your coupling. 

When it all ends, you'll probably have never done more than flirt with the other person in reality, even though in your mind you were already in a full-fledged, dysfunctional relationship. In a way, this is great, because the fallout from the ending of the relationship won't really exist since the relationship never really existed. The debris exists only in your head. But so does your fear and your guilt and your shame and your cancer and your whole entire life. 

Don't worry too much about it, though. This is all part of the fragrant fraudulence of your life. Savor it. Drink it in like a big glass of battery acid. You deserve it.

Responsibility (or, blaming yourself for everything)

Feeling responsible should be important to you. What's even more important is feeling responsible for things that have very little consequence or things for which other people are clearly responsible. For instance, if you're at, say, McDonald's, and you order a quarter pounder without mustard or cheese, and then you go home and find that you've gotten a quarter pounder with ONLY mustard and cheese, you should first blame yourself because you must have ordered wrong. If you decide to go back to the store to exchange it, you should always start your conversation with, "I'm sorry. It's totally my fault, but..." Then, when you look at the original receipt and see that it clearly reads "quarter pounder w/o cheese or mustard," you should say, "Oh, of course, you thought that 'w/o' meant 'with only.' I'm sorry." Then, when they give you a new quarter pounder, and it still has cheese on it, you should take it with an overly gracious "Thank you so much!" like you've really put them out and they've done you a huge favor and then rip off the cheese yourself outside of the store, blaming yourself for somehow confusing everyone by having made an unthinkable request. Then, later, you should realize you're to blame anyway, because you're the one who chose to go to McDonald's in the first place. Then you should sit around feeling ashamed.

Note: Hopefully it's clear that you're only to take responsibility when things go wrong. The above especially applies in relationships. For instance, if your partner cheats on you and then feels the need to discuss it at length, you should always work the phrase "It's my fault" into the conversation as many times as possible. When they finally ask, "How is it your fault?" you should respond with something along the lines of, "It's my fault for liking you in the first place" or "It's my fault for having found out about it." Then, after you've broken up and it's too late to say anything without being completely out of context, you should realize, "Oh, right, it was actually their fault for being an ass pole who cheated on me." Then you should sit around feeling ashamed.

Sex

Yeah, you knew this was coming. We've skirted around this topic for months now. But this sort of evasion on our part is really pretty appropriate considering what your attitude toward sex should be. Sex may have something to do with a lot of your daily life, but yet it should never actually be something that really happens in any meaningful way.

The main thing you should always remember is that sex is bad and you're a really bad person for having it. Well, it's not that sex itself is bad, but the sex that you have is bad. Other people can have regular, healthy sex. They can even do the exact same things in bed as what you do. But for some reason what they're doing is hot and normal and what you're doing can only bring evil.

A lot of this has to do with your crippling hypochondria. The result of this sex you're having is going to include a disease of some kind. You just know it. It doesn't matter if you use a condom on every part of your exposed skin. It also doesn't matter that you've never caught a disease from anyone before in any other sexual situation. This time you're gonna get it. AIDS, The Clap, crabs, a flu, flesh-eating bacteria, frostbite, lyme disease, viral hepatitis and SARS should all cross your mind as possibilities. And the next few days should be spent checking your bits incessantly for discharge.

When you're actually having sex, don't bother trying to not look upset. Your partner will probably just view it as a contorted face of pleasure rather than you wondering if it's possible to get Feline AIDS from the cat dander on the sheets.

Basically, you should view sex like doing your taxes. You should avoid it until you can't anymore; and you should always hope it's going to come out in your favor but be prepared for the eventuality that you're going to pay. 

Your system of ethics: a primer

Because you don’t believe in god and have only learned basic religious tenets through television, your system of ethics is complicated. This is because it’s not really a “system” so much as it is a confusing popsicle sculpture designed by a 5-year-old and barely held together with half-eaten paste. Luckily, your senses of shame and guilt are so dominant that essentially you live the same life that a “good” person would lead. This means that you don’t kill people or actively cause other people harm (other than spreading your imaginary diseases to them). Still, you’re probably fine with the idea of most crimes, and are probably a closet kleptomaniac, even if you only steal, say, office supplies, justifying it to yourself because it makes up for the salary you should be making. In fact, the idea of being a criminal is probably incredibly appealing, if only you had the balls or drive to plan it out and do it. But of course you don’t.

Still, in moments you generally won’t discuss with other people, you might find yourself wanting to be an actual “good” person, not just a non-bad person. Maybe you’ll read an article about how much life sucks in Africa or Asia and decide that you want to “help.” Hooray! You’re not as shitty as you thought! You’ve thought about someone other than yourself for once! Well, don’t get excited, because after you’ve reached this self-discovery you will proceed to do one of two things:

1) You will way overthink who deserves help most and ultimately become so overwhelmed by guilt and helplessness over not being able to save everybody that you’ll actually end up doing nothing but wallowing in guilt over your own easy life. Because there’s the people who are starving from the flood and the people whose village just burned down, but then there’s also the kids who need immunization but there’s also the earthquake victims, and then there’s all of Africa, which, Jesus Christ, let’s not even talk about that right now. Jesus. H. Christ.
2) You will go online and donate $20 to, well, whomever, and hope that someone else manages to save a million people with it.

Good work.

Discipline

In order to achieve your goals/aims in life, you'll find you need to focus energy and time. You need to budget resources. This is called Discipline. It's one of the things in this world that you totally lack.

You can gear yourself up for certain things at certain times, but the staying power of your discipline is completely unpredictable. You might find it relatively easy and even fun sometimes to, say, pick up a book and get a hundred pages read in one sitting. But after you put that book down, will you finish it? It's about a 50/50 chance. Now, if the last page you read out of the 100 happened to be a little on the boring side, then this goes down to about 20/80. 

The same goes for creative endeavors. Sometimes you'll bust through an entire painting/song/poem/craft/story/blog post in one dynamic burst of creation. This is usually when you actually finish things. If you hit even the most minor snag in the process, you can pretty much kiss the entire project goodbye and accept that the rest of your night/day will be spent doing anything except the work you started (this will usually mean calling  everyone in your address book and leaving messages and then finally going online and chatting with anyone who will type at you until your eyes feel like badly baked flan.) 

This might seem like ADD, but it's not. Like most of the rest of your life, this behavior can't be explained by something that's actually treatable.

The fact that you are utterly bankrupt of discipline will never be more apparent than when you look at the actual state of your life. When you go back through the last 10, 15, maybe even 20 years, you won't help but be able to notice that almost everything that's gone wrong in your life can probably be traced to not following through. Laziness, the propensity to succumb to the most trivial of distractions and a general fear of seeing the consequences of your actions are all  contributing forces. 

So you can sit there and dwell on this and get upset and come up with an action plan, but we both know you won't. 

Tallying your accomplishments

As you well know by now, you have no real accomplishments to speak of. When people you haven't seen in five years ask you things like, "What have you been up to?" you generally have no good answer for them, because "I've been trying not to 'accidentally' drown myself in the shower" doesn't impress anyone. Every once in awhile, you might dig up something like, "I moved recently" or "I started a new job" or "I bought a new TV," but these aren't accomplishments, they're just sad, trite things to say so that the two of you don't stare at each other blankly once the question is out there hanging in the air like an accusation.

Basically, your life should revolve around obtaining an answer to this most horrible of questions. However, you should resign yourself to knowing the best you can hope for is finding an answer that has great kitsch value. Because you'll find that when you live fraudulently, kitsch value is interchangeable with actual value. In your fraudulent universe, you'll find that statements like "I saw Theo Huxtable the other day" will garner you as much admiration as "I isolated the gene that determines whether or not a baby will get schizophrenia." In some situations, "I've been considering joining Scientology" may even trump "I invented a street-legal flying car." The best part is that these things involve no accomplishment whatsoever on your part; they just require your looking at or thinking about something. And then, the next time you run into someone who wants to know what you've been doing with your life, you'll receive copious fake admiration for your copious fake accomplishments, and then you don't have to see that person again for another five years, when hopefully the Olsen twins will have rear-ended your car at the supermarket.