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.