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.