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.