Fraudulent Living

Chatroulette and you

2010-04-08T19:09:00.000-07:00

It's some evening of some day of the week and, surprise, you're bored. You've heard about this Chatroulette site and are at the point in your night where it's either talk to random strangers on the Internet, or go to bed. Since it's always a good idea to force yourself into mind-numbing exhaustion before you go to sleep, and god forbid you actually get more than five hours of sleep in a night, you should probably go ahead and fire up the Chatroulette.

One of the first things you'll notice, besides all the penis, is how terrifyingly bored everyone else looks, too. Except the ones jacking off. Because you can't see their faces. Just their penises. But, let's be honest, if you're jacking off on a webcam for everyone on Chatroulette to see, you pretty much take the bored cake.

You should make sure to never be the one to click "Next," even though you'll always want to be. Others will always Next you, and even though there's no way you'd actually want to have a conversation with any of these people, it should always make you feel a little defeated each time someone looks at you for less than two seconds and decides you're not worth talking to.

At some point, you may find someone with whom to have an actual conversation. Try to make sure this is a 17-year-old Colombian that speaks no English but tells you you're "muy bonito/a." After talking for about 30 minutes, give the Colombian child your email address as well as your physical address, last name and perhaps a little money. Then, try to find information on the Internet about Colombian laws to see if you're going to end up in jail when this is all said and done.

Your e-vagina*

2010-04-08T16:41:00.000-07:00

Every now and again (possibly several times a day), something really catastrophic happens. For instance, the insignificant other of your dreams breaks up with you in the presence of everyone you know, probably during Christmas dinner, just as your grandfather is cutting the roast. This is tragic. But also, this is perfect. This gives you the opportunity to salve your broken soul with the fake herbal remedies that are your online friends, the ones who clicked a button next to your name that said "Follow." This tragedy now opens up a tremendous opportunity to show these hundreds of people not only how poetically in pain you are but how well you're dealing with that pain on a minute-by-minute basis.

The first thing you should do after the incident is post some really cryptic sentence or fragment that says nothing but implies that something life changing has happened and destroyed your very being. Something along the lines of, "...suddenly nothing will be as green as it once was..." Make sure you use ellipses and forget to capitalize anything, as this will show your intense and profound sadness. Alternately, you might consider just posting their name as your status. As if you're crying it out in a slow, pathetic moan. Make sure you leave this up long enough for everyone to see it, then delete it later. Like some mysterious ghost.

Your next post should actually state what terrible thing has happened. "The love of my life left me, and I'm dying inside." Or something equally banal. This will give your friends the opportunity to lick your e-vagina with statements about how you're too good for that person or how you're generally great and how could anyone break up with you. The entire exchange should read as if nothing like this has ever happened in the history of the world. For the first couple of days, you should continue to update approximately every hour with self-empowering statements that pretend to show you're doing fantastically. Things like, "Nothing matters except friends and family," or, "That [exercise-related thing] made me feel alive for the first time in years!" If you're feeling especially fraudulent, you should consider mentioning something about feeling spiritual, or just using the word "spiritual" in any capacity.

After that, you should talk about how you're going to disappear from the Internet for awhile. This should last exactly forty minutes before you come back with some other cryptic post that are probably lyrics from some song about breaking up that read really poorly without an accompanying melody line. By this point, most of your followers will be considering whether they can stop following you without your noticing their absence. This is when you should thank "everyone" for listening to you, and whimsically mention how you'll get back to posting about Drupal tomorrow. Then you should bask in the fake sympathy of your followers, who will tell you it's fine when actually they're considering killing you to put you out of your shameful public misery.

*courtesy of MB.

Your first love: television

2010-03-10T09:00:00.000-08:00

Television was both your mother and your father once upon a time, so it's not surprising that you have a complicated, and often bitter, relationship with it. You should live in denial that it had anything to do with who you are when in fact it pretty much shaped your entire personality. As a child, television was your infallible deity, telling you how to dress, who and how to love, and showing you how boring your own life was. Were you a nerdy girl who got voted prom queen because you didn't realize you'd secretly become attractive? Did you have a sidekick named Boner? Did you get an addiction to caffeine pills and collapse while shooting an exercise video because you desperately needed to become valedictorian? No. This pretty much showed you how much of a failure you were before you ever even left home.

Of course, now you're older and you've partially subscribed to the hipster/pretentious-asshole mentality, where you publicly reject television as a viable source of entertainment. Ideally you should be one of those people, the ones who don't own a TV, so when a conversation about reality TV comes on you can act all scornful about popular culture. The truth is, though, you need TV. Without TV, you have no personality. Also, your conversation with friends and peers primarily consists of quotes from underrated shows that got pulled too early, and without those quotes, you're nothing. The more quotes from, say, Arrested Development you can cram into a single conversation, the cooler you appear. Worst of all, if you don't know and recognize those quotes, you might accidentally respond to someone using one as a Facebook status as if it were a genuine statement. And then you'll look foolish to the world. The whole goddamn world will know how uncool you are.

So you don't have a TV, but that doesn't mean you don't watch TV. What it means is that you watch it presented in the worst way: in 10-minute grainy uploaded clips on YouTube or some other arguably legal website based in the Netherlands that applies Dutch subtitles to everything. So for every new, cool show you watch for social survival, you waste an equal amount of time searching for it online. You also waste hours a day looking up old, nostalgia-inducing commercials and shows online for precious kitsch value. Because the more you know, the more you can pretend you have an actual identity.

What have you learned?

2010-01-11T07:58:00.000-08:00

It's time to see if you've been paying attention.

Read the scenario below and choose the correct actions from the multiple choices given. Answers are at the bottom. Good luck!

You've been working at the same company, in the same sad position, for the last three years. You make enough money to sustain your addictions and pay your rent, but not enough to put anything away for savings. In fact, you don't even know what that means. Savings. Saving money is as strange an act to you as cannibalism. Or sobriety. You've heard of people doing it, but never really had any first-hand experience with it. You drive home every night from your job and always end up having to pull over around the same area of town because it's too dangerous to keep driving while crying this bad.

You should:

A) Go home, make a drink, smoke a bunch of cigarettes until your throat hurts so bad that you're sure you just gave yourself fiery throat cancer. Call out sick from work the next day because of cancer.

B) Wipe the tears from your eyes and drive in the opposite direction of your house until you run out of gas. Figure out where you are and panic when you realize your cell phone is dead, and now, so are you. Sleep in your car and get scared at how not uncomfortable it is. Get someone to pick you up and take you to work the next day in the same clothes as yesterday, stinking of desperation and Jack-in-the-Box.

C) Devise a scheme by which the company you work for will go out of business, thereby freeing you from your slavery without you having to do the awful thing of making a decision to quit. Realize this scheme will probably land you in jail, and then get scared at how not uncomfortable that idea is.

D) Find a new job.

Answer: Anything but D.

So this is the New Year (again)

2009-12-28T07:37:00.000-08:00

Well, Fraudulent Living has been up on the Internet for over a year now. Seeing as how it's still (only) on the Internet and still being (infrequently) updated, it must mean you have a lot more to learn. Also, being the New Year, it's a really great time to remember how very short you've come up in almost everything you've attempted to do this year. It's also the right time to make fake promises to yourself that you outwardly say you'll try to keep, but inwardly can't even find a part of you that's alive enough to pretend to believe it.

At any rate, this arbitrary date in the middle of the winter is when society has decided to start counting years; and so, to celebrate the passing of one year to the next, you should attend or host a New Year's Eve party. Here are some things to remember about this party: First, you need to build up expectations in your head for it to be non-heinous, just so that when it turns out to be heinous, it will be that much more so. Also, as with anything, you need to make sure you're totally wasted throughout pretty much all of it. If you're hosting the party, this is especially important, because unless you get wasted, you'll spend all your time worrying about whether other people are having fun or are at least comfortable. If you get totally, awesomely wasted, you won't care about what other people are doing, or what they're breaking, in your house. If you're attending a party at someone else's house, it's important to be very drunk because you're drinking someone else's liquor that you didn't pay for. This type of liquor is the tastiest, so drink up.

When the midnight hour approaches, be sure to make everyone be quiet and then turn on the TV and awkwardly watch the ball drop in New York. Then, watch the people partying in the streets and take a good look around you. You're not having that much fun. You've never really had that much fun. Even if they're faking it, you'd never be able to fake having fun that well.

Get another drink and make an embarrassing toast to the New Year that's funny enough to be tolerable but sad enough that everyone who drinks to the toast will feel dirty and guilty.

Then, pass out and call it a year.

Mutual liking

2009-11-06T09:59:00.000-08:00

Rarely, ever so rarely, like when a hummingbird comes to you and sits on your finger and discourses with you about scientific inquiry, you'll find someone you like who also appears to like you. At the same time, even. You might both seem to like ("like" like) each other a lot. This situation is the best path to ensuring your own descent into a death spiral of evil-clown-type horror and misery. It's also the best way to push the boundaries of your own hypocrisy. For instance, as someone who claims to need privacy and space, you should already secretly (or openly) criticize friends with clingy, needy significant others. When discussing theoretical relationships, you need to say things like, "Well, I just need someone to tell me they like me once, and then I never need or want to hear it again. It's annoying when people do that." You should go so far as to believe this when you're not in a relationship-type thing, which you're obviously usually not. This way, when you get yourself into a mutual liking situation, it will feel more fraudulent when you convince yourself your partner hates you if they don't tell you they love you on endless repeat.

Basically, in a mutual liking situation, you should be like a goldfish, but some sort of fictional monster goldfish, where you forget every fifteen seconds every good thing your significant other has ever said or done while remembering and exacerbating all the things they've said or done that annoyed you. Without fifteen-second positive reinforcement, you should sink into total depression, where you can't think about anything except how much you don't need to be in this relationship with this person who's so obviously hateful and so obviously hates you. Their inability to sate your insane neediness should eventually drive you to crying in public while listening to Keane. Also, you can never be the one who says something positive first, because if you do, it will only prove that you're weak. So actually, you shouldn't be a goldfish so much as you should be a dependent, neurotic, unattractive, unworthy person who at least has some decent organs that should probably be donated now, while they're still in their prime. Except for your liver, which should be swollen like foie gras, and less tasty.

The best part about your being in this soul-crushing mutual like situation is that you spend all of your single time needing to be in this situation. As you've learned already, you should consider awful things like going out and meeting people so that you can potentially get into this situation. Once you've succeeded, you'll find there are times when you and your like partner even enjoy each other's company. This enjoyment will disappear quickly as you begin talking every day or, even worse, hanging out every day. At this point, you should start panicking and wondering how to tell this person, without hurting them, that there's no need to hang out every day. Then, when the day eventually comes that you haven't hung out or talked once, you should go ahead and convince yourself that they've deserted you and also given you AIDS.

Your awesome apartment

2009-10-15T08:02:00.001-07:00

Most of your living situations throughout your life should be absolutely wretched. You should almost always be paying far more in rent than you ever believed you'd be able to pay, or if not, you should be living in the kind of squalor that would make for a great Charles Dickens novel.

But at some point in your life, you'll end up living in an awesome apartment. It will be the kind of place that everyone wants to visit, where parties will almost constantly be held, and where, for once, you won't be ashamed to bring someone home to. Once this happens, you're really fucked.

Everything that is good in your life now rides on this apartment. The only reason anyone likes you is because of your neat paint job in your kitchen. The only reason you have a boyfriend/girlfriend is that they like sleeping in your house better than in their own. If you ever lose this apartment, you'll lose your life with it. Every moment you spend not thinking about how you're about to die from throat cancer should be spent wondering how soon it will be before the one good thing in your life, your apartment, gets destroyed.

To this end, you should develop severe OCD about things like the iron and the stove. Even though you never use either of them, you must constantly worry that they're on and burning down your apartment. Also, every window in your apartment should be viewed only as a Thief's Entrance. A Thiefway, if you will. They should remain closed at all times, no matter how hot this makes your apartment or how much the air starts to smell like halitosis. If any of your Thiefways don't have locks on them you should think about lining the floor under them with broken glass and upturned nails. These will obviously only cut your own feet and give you tetanus, but in the end, getting lockjaw would probably do you good.

Your vermin

2009-09-14T10:33:00.000-07:00

So, since you live in a city, you have vermin in your house. But don't think that it's just because you live in a city. Don't think that somehow your infestation isn't your fault. Because it is. It's your fault. You're to blame for not only your own mouse/bedbug/cockroach/silverfish/snake infestation, but for everyone else's that's ever come into contact with you. Because obviously you are now a carrier. You're a vermin carrier. You're like a kangaroo, but instead of your pouch containing a cute little kangaroo kid, it carries a variety of terrifying insect eggs and spores. You're like Noah's arc, if God wanted the world to just be shit.

You don't leave food lying around and you tend to bathe somewhat regularly and do your laundry as much as the next slacker, but you'll find that none of this matters when it comes to how much vermin love you. You can maintain the cleanest little home with various bug- and mouse-killing devices located in strategic places, and none of this will help you. You're just a magnet for awful. And this is especially evident with your various vermin infestations. There's no rhyme or reason here. Just fraudulence.

One thing you can try to do to stop the problem is continue to poison everything around you, especially your own bloodstream. If you can barely survive having your blood in your body, then the bugs don't have a chance, right? This is a great strategy because it will make you drunk, high or just almost dead pretty much all the time. This is necessary if you plan on ever being able to sleep in your terrarium of a bedroom ever again.

You can also try asking your land/slum lord if he or she will please bring an exterminator to your apartment, but since you only pay this person half your monthly income for the privilege of living in their gigantic, non-functioning game of Mouse Trap(tm), they will probably just put on a fake moustache and hat, come up to your apartment with a spray bottle full of Raid, and you'll thank them profusely. Because spraying Raid in the corners of your bedroom is what you've become to accustomed to accepting as a solution to most problems in your life.

Your 9/11

2009-09-11T12:05:00.000-07:00

Every day is like 9/11 for you.

Your life is a gigantic, melodramatic tragedy that seems to repeat the same images, over and over, ad nauseum, with no regard for taste or anyone's sensibilities. Really, the only difference between your life and a terrorist attack is that no one cares about you. No one remembers where they were when you stopped by. The only ones who commemorate your anniversary are you and the liquor shop owner who nods, sadly, when you tell him it's your birthday and that's why you're buying Jameson instead of your normal $4.99 bottle of red wine that's just called "Red Wine."

Your autumn

2009-09-11T11:25:00.000-07:00

As summer fades away and you realize that you did absolutely nothing of interest to anyone, you should embrace the coming autumn as a fresh chance to waste yet another season. If you live someplace that has real seasons, you should get excited by the idea of going to do autumn-y things, like watching the leaves turn, or going for a hike in the forest, or paying attention in that class you're taking, knowing full well that you won't do any of that. The fall television lineup should be the only thing that you're reasonably sure you might take advantage of.

You should also reflect on how sweet the death in the air tastes and what that might say about you as a person. You hate the spring because of allergies; you hate the summer because it makes you feel fatter, more lonely, and decidedly more sweaty and smelly than you normally do. The only time you come close to a feeling of happiness is when the world is literally dying all around you. This, among countless other things, is what makes you awful.

Autumn also brings new opportunities for fraudulence that are weather-specific. The clothing you wear can now be layered and used over and over. If you have a light jacket you like to don when it gets a little nippy outside, make sure you never get it dry cleaned and that it has never been dry cleaned in the past. There should be split-pea soup stains on one or more of the lapels of your jacket and these stains should be from at least one year ago (preferably two). If you smoke, now is a good time to increase your intake, like when bears binge on food before the winter, since when it gets really cold you'll obviously stop smoking because going outside to smoke will be too painful. Yeah. You sure will quit smoking this winter. Mhm.

Speaking of winter, as you prepare for it, be sure not to use any of your time or money this autumn to buy anything like a winter coat or boots. These should only be purchased after the SECOND snow storm of the winter. Why second? Because only by then will you be desperate, cold and bruised enough to finally drag yourself into a Filene's Basement to spend money on a coat that will certainly not fit you since all that will be left on the racks are coats that could cover an entire house or be snug on a squirrel. Your coat should always make you look like you have severe mental problems.

The only preparation for winter that you should do this autumn is to go to the bar and set up 182372187 online dating accounts in the desperate hope of finding someone to keep you company in the winter. If you've done autumn right, by the end of it you'll be broke, still sadly single, own nothing but shorts and tank-tops and have come one step closer to full-blown alcoholism.

Feelings

2009-08-25T12:38:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-18T06:48:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-10T08:36:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-02T09:31:00.000-07:00

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.

Your goddamn iPhone

2009-07-09T08:06:00.000-07:00

Besides liquor, food and rent, the rest of your paychecks should be spent on gadgets. Or on the monthly bills you've acquired to keep your gadgets running. Your most prized gadget should be your goddamn iPhone.

You should make sure that everyone you know knows about your goddamn iPhone. They should know when you bought it, what new apps you've installed on it, and, if possible, there should be a harrowing story of some kind regarding how you finally acquired it. Maybe you were one of the douche bags that waited in line for over 24 hours. Maybe you spent an almost equal amount of time on the phone with Latwanda in the Houston AT&T call center trying to get them to give you the goddamn iPhone at the $199 price even though you're not eligible for an upgrade for another year. Something.

It's also really important that you be touching your goddamn iPhone pretty much all the time. Especially if you're alone or waiting for something, like the bus, or to be called in from the waiting room at the doctor's office. If you're in the doctor's office, it's also a good idea to double check everything your doctor tells you by bringing out your goddamn iPhone and loading up your WebMD app.

When you're walking down the street with a friend and neither of you knows where you're going, make sure to stop your friend from asking a human person for directions. Instead, insist that your goddamn iPhone will find it. Then, as you wait eight minutes for your "lightning fast" 3G connection to finally locate what street you're on, even though you have a map in your bag and eyes that can see street signs, you can feel really great about being on the cutting edge of such useful, life-changing technology.

At some point, you should realize that "there's an app for that" pretty much applies to everything imaginable. You can pay your bills, order food, entertain yourself, and answer work emails, all from your goddamn iPhone. This should elate you as you discover there's now barely any need to deal directly with anyone at all. Your goddamn iPhone has really (not) changed your life.

Your grand plans

2009-07-07T09:29:00.000-07:00

Most days, within the first minute of your waking up, you should torture yourself with the question, "What am I doing with my life?" Of course, the answer is easy, but it's good to remember your nonexistent place in the world every moment you're conscious. You know perfectly well that the answer is, "Absolutely nothing." Or, if you're feeling optimistic, "Not dying. Not dying is what I'm doing. In your face, god!" But those optimistic days should be rare, and as you're taunting the god you don't believe in, you should stop and reflect on the fact that you really are dying, just in a slow, drawn-out, and painful way.

You may find there are times, usually at 3 AM after you're sick of surfing porn sites, when you'll actually find yourself wanting to do more than nothing with your life. As you well know, you're smarter and more talented than pretty much everyone on the planet. Maybe now is the time you should put your own awesomeness into action and improve the things that are wrong with the world, like porn download times and cancer. Yes, that's exactly what you should do. This will be the turning point in your life, where you'll begin living up to your potential and using your intelligence for good things instead of Excel spreadsheets. For the first time in forever, you'll be excited, and in celebration probably take up smoking. Since you're about to cure cancer anyway, who cares?

Eventually, after a couple hours of bad sleep, you should wake up and be momentarily excited again about the prospect of your new life. However, as the day progresses, you'll begin figuring out the logistics of how you can reach the point of being a productive human being. You'll probably have to go back to school. Which means finding financing. Which means taking standardized tests. Which means filling out applications. This will undoubtedly make you shudder, but you'll find yourself surprisingly okay facing these challenges. Then you'll realize filling out applications also means you'll have to get letters of recommendation. As you consider asking anyone you've ever met to write out an essay lauding you as a person, you should will yourself into a panic attack. As you try to recover, remind yourself that you don't have to do this, that it's just a silly idea you had last night, and at least you accomplished taking up smoking. You can stay at this stupid job surfing the Internet all day, and you're still probably better off than most people in the world. Your momentary relief will keep you happy for the rest of the day, and then you can go back to your life of dying in a slow, drawn-out, and painful way. Until tomorrow, of course, when you catch ebola and begin your faster, more physically painful death.

Your body

2009-06-30T10:35:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-11T05:08:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-07T21:15:00.001-07:00

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

2009-06-05T06:24:00.000-07:00

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.

Your mood

2009-05-21T10:03:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-15T06:28:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-11T10:21:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-08T09:51:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-05-05T07:45:00.000-07:00

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.

Your drugs

2009-04-30T10:46:00.000-07:00

Remember that section in To Kill a Mockingbird where Jem has to go read to the crotchety old woman as punishment, and later on Atticus tells him that the old woman wanted to get off her dependence on morphine before she died so she wouldn't be beholden to anything, and how she was strongest person Atticus ever knew? Well, that has nothing to do with you. On any given day, your bloodstream should be something like 24% ibuprofen/acetaminophen, 24% antacids, 24% caffeine, and 24% allergy medications. (The other 4% should be just enough blood to nurture and circulate your undoubtedly innumerable blood diseases.) This ratio of drugs is what keeps you alive and functioning, so god forbid you attempt to stop depending on any one of them. Because here's the thing about drugs: they're just plain great. They make you feel better and/or make you pass out so you don't feel pain. So as long as you don't suffer from dignity like old Mrs. Whatsherface, there's no reason to stop taking them.

Keeping your fragile body pumped full of drugs is easy: When you first wake up in the morning after your Benedryl-induced night's sleep, grab a large cup of espresso-based coffee and down an antacid with it to help with the heartburn that your incredibly strong coffee will probably cause. If you put off drinking coffee for more than an hour after waking up, make sure you swallow some Advil with your eventual three cups of coffee to stop the headache you're pretty sure you'll be getting soon but haven't actually gotten yet. After looking out the window to see if any trees, animals, or other plant life still exist in the world, take a Claritin to stave off your inevitable pollen allergies (or, in the winter, your lack-of-pollen allergies). If you find you have a slight sniffle, assume that you're getting a cold and take some cold & sinus medication too. The nice is that you'll end up pleasantly woozy, which makes your work day that much more surreal and less painful. To you, drugs shouldn't be about curing pain. They're desperate preventative maintenance based on your fear of all things that might make you physically uncomfortable.

With that said, even though you love drugs, you should confusingly harbor a deep, deep resentment towards drugs that might actually help you cope with life, like antidepressants. As you torture your friends and doctors with stories of how miserable you are, be sure to deliver soapbox speeches about how antidepressants will kill your creativity. Also, even though you constantly argue that everyone else is a bunch of chemical reactions, antidepressants will prove that this fact applies to you as well. When someone inevitably makes the totally invalid point that other drugs you take must also affect your mood, raise your voice angrily and insist it's not the same thing at all. Then go ahead and insult their mother. Later, after downing a beer and someone else's Vicodin, cry apologetically, tell everyone in the room how much you love them, even if you just met them, then pass out with your face in the salsa bowl.

Your dignity

2009-04-27T13:03:00.000-07:00

...

Earth Day, belated

2009-04-23T10:06:00.000-07:00

You act like you don't really care about any worthy causes, but you sort of do, secretly. Even though this is mostly out of guilt, it's still something. However, at the same time, you can barely be bothered to bathe on weekends or to eat things that are not made of candy, so the chances of you doing something for a cause outside of yourself are roughly the same as those of getting struck by lightning (unless you're in your bed eating ice cream with a metal spoon during a lightning storm, in which case your chances of being hit by lightning increase to roughly 100%).

Earth Day is one of these things that will (and just did) pass you by completely unawares. You were probably told about it at the end of the day, and then made some half-hearted attempt at recycling a bottle or turning off a light, while congratulating yourself for being so green. Truthfully, though, you wouldn't even make the sacrifice of turning off your computer an hour before you usually do to save energy unless you were actually compelled to do so by law. The only way you'll contribute to ecological efforts is by accident -- like by not having a car when you live in New York City, or being too poor to afford an air conditioner for your sweltering apartment. Still you'll shake your own fraudulent hand in secret for being so environmentally friendly, knowing full well that if someone gave you a free air conditioner that was made by Taiwanese slave children and actually worked by stealing delicious, freezing-cold ozone from the atmosphere and replacing it with soot, you'd install it and not ever think about it again.

At some point, you'll begin to see that there actually isn't anything you can do that will help the Earth, and that if it's really come to the point where your actions would make a measurable difference, we're all deeply, deeply doomed. This should liberate you somewhat from a little of your guilt, replacing it with a satisfying dread of the upcoming apocalypse. You should then start to live your life in defiance of the Earth. You should actively choose to throw your empty cans into the trash rather than the recycling bin that's literally one foot away from it. You should also drive your car, if you own one, to places that are so nearby that it actually takes you longer to get into your car, start it, drive there and park than it would to have walked there, thereby truly sticking it to the man (Al Gore). Essentially, you should strive for the largest carbon footprint you possibly can, and begin to think of it as the only legacy you'll leave behind when you die.

Your appearance

2009-04-20T01:53:00.000-07:00

How you present yourself to the world is your key to fraudulence.
There will be moments in life when you believe you're good-looking, but there's a reason for that. You know that ugly friend you have who grows more and more attractive as you talk to them because you've grown used to their third nose and green-tinted skin? Well, you're like your own ugly best friend, only you've had your whole life to adjust to your image in a mirror. Because of this, you might occasionally find yourself strutting around, pimp-like, thinking you're the best-looking human being alive. At some point, though, a friend will show you candid photos of yourself. These inevitably awful photos will destroy any confidence you ever had. Because of course it's not the camera, the angle, or the faces you're making - it's your actual face that's your problem. You're the Vanessa Huxtable to the Denises and Claires of the world.

Try to distract people from your unattractiveness by attempting to be fashionable. Unfortunately, you have no idea what "fashionable" means, but you can always pretend you're one of those people who's so fashionable that they intentionally disregard fashion trends. In fact, because you put kitsch quality on the same level as real quality, go ahead and buy a bunch of the most unflattering shirts and pants you can find. It'll be obvious to everyone that your clothes are excessively ugly, so people will congratulate you on them instead, drawing attention away from the fact that you're gaudier than Michael Jackson's face. As an added bonus, because your entire generation is as fraudulent as you are, your intentionally ugly wardrobe will probably end up coinciding with current fashions anyway.

The important thing to remember is this: Whether you grow a huge beard, wear accessories designed for 8-year-old girls, or cut yourself some thick, grotesquely straight bangs that cover your eyebrows and half your eyes, the purpose of your outward appearance is not to reflect your real self at all. Leave people wondering whether there could be an attractive person hiding underneath the poor hair, clothing, and makeup choices. There isn't, but that enigma will probably get you a couple of fraudulent dates from the same people who would choose the mystery box over the new car. Then, when they end up with a whoopee cushion, they'll only have themselves to blame.

Disasters and you

2009-04-15T12:02:00.001-07:00

Because every new day is just a subtly different shade of awful from the last, you long for something new and exciting. Maybe at one point you also included the word "better" next to "new and exciting," but now you don't really care. Better, worse, whatever...just something different.

This is why you secretly hope for disasters. This is why if you're ever in a devastating earthquake it will be the best day of your life. With buildings literally falling down around you and people screaming and running, you'll be almost unable to hide your smile. It's not that you want people to be hurt. It just happens to often be an unfortunate side effect of your joy. Generally.

Other disasters in which you'll find shameful happiness are hurricanes, terrorist attacks and financial collapses. Again, it's important to note that you don't take joy in other people being hurt, killed, financially ruined, or whatever else. But since the only thing you're really good at is surviving in the most literal sense of the word (i.e. continuing to be alive), a world in which that skill is suddenly valued and necessary is super appealing.

So it follows, then, that the best possible disaster you could ever hope for is a zombie apocalypse. Nothing would please and excite your fraudulent little heart more than being able to walk down a street with a shotgun and a bat, shooting former people in the face and fearing for your life at every moment. No more credit card debt, no more work, no more school, no more burdens. Just you, your survival skills, and a horde of hungry, shambling zombies.

Of course, the only problem with all of this is that you have no actual survival skills, have never fired a gun in your life, and would likely be dead or a zombie within the first day. This is okay, though, because you're already pretty used to stumbling around half-dead and spreading your horrible diseases.

Communication

2009-04-07T11:12:00.000-07:00

As you get older and inevitably develop anthropophobia without realizing it, your methods of communication should begin to depend solely on your writing skills and ability to deliver one-liners rather than your abilities to speak or show correct facial expressions. To start, make sure you slowly wean people off of calling you on the phone. An easy way to do this is by never actually answering your phone or checking your voicemail (which might compel you to call back if there's some sort of near-death emergency). When someone does call, text them back immediately with a "What's up?" If you accidentally answer your phone, make sure you cut the conversation short by quickly mentioning how you're almost out of minutes for the month or how you have a burning roast in the oven. Do this every time the same person calls; they'll eventually learn, the way rubbing a puppy's nose in its own poop will teach it to stop defecating on your kitschy new thrift-store couch.

Eventually, your friends and loved ones will become aware that the only way to reach you is via texting or by seeking out any online presence you have. Your real friends will have an instant messenger account; these are the people who will remain your friends and the only people with whom you'll ever communicate in real time again. If anyone else has either a Facebook, Twitter, or similar account on a website where you also have a profile, they should be taught to leave you public messages there, which will not only make you feel popular, thereby sating your deep-seated, pathetic desire for fame, but can also be easily ignored by your claiming you haven't logged in for days. This is, of course, not true, because you log in every ten minutes, but if you're ignoring someone, you have to be careful and not post updates until you feel compelled to answer this person.

But what do you do when you meet a new person who hasn't been taught to avoid you completely? It seems like this could be a problem, but it's not. First of all, you probably met this person online anyway, because you should never be going out and meeting real people in real life. This means that they also have little to no experience speaking or gesturing, unless staring at a computer screen has given them a nervous eye twitch that resembles emoting. This also means they'll never want to call or hang out in person either. Eventually, you'll add each other as friends on Facebook. This is handy for several reasons: Now you can communicate your minute goings-on to everyone at once without actually writing to a single person. You can also test your new friend's devotion by tallying how many responses or thumbs up they give your photos and status updates.

The very best part is you'll never have to write one another again; you can watch each other's updates and event attendings and tragic deaths of pets without having to put forth any effort apart from looking. And when you're finally killed in that freak accident by a falling street light, you'll have one more fake friend mourning your death by posting, "Holy shit! WTF?!!" when they respond to the obituary on your wall. And for you, even though you'll be dead, this one post will help justify your entire existence.

Getting laid off

2009-04-07T07:02:00.000-07:00

In these rough economic times, a lot of us are having to face the reality of being laid off from work. Let's examine some good ways to deal with this situation and with all your resultant extra free time.

First, apply for unemployment. Even though your income from these checks will only barely pay your rent, it's better than nothing. Also, any job you are offered from here on out will have to be weighed against the reality of losing your unemployment and your god-given right to stay up until until 5am eating reduced-fat Cheez-Its and downloading movies you'll never watch to your computer.

It's also good to remember that, with unemployment rates at double digits, it's actually sort of socially acceptable for you to be out of work. This is in contrast to most of the time you've been out of work and looked down on as a lazy, useless bag of flesh. Now when you tell people you're unemployed, they'll look at you with sympathy rather than that usual mix of confusion and disgust, like they just saw a thalidomide baby.

Spend about an hour a day pretending to look for a job online but getting distracted by pornography.

You should also take some time to really examine yourself while you're out of work with nothing to do. You should use a large wall mirror and a magnifying glass for this. Since you have no medical insurance, make sure you discover something that will convince you you have cancer or Crohn's disease. Then, calm yourself down about these exotic diseases by remembering that without medical insurance it's far more likely you'll be killed by strep throat.

Birthdays

2009-04-02T08:39:00.000-07:00

Once a year you'll have to deal with your birthday. You don't hate your birthday because it marks a year of getting older and, therefore, closer to death. No. You hate your birthday because everyone you know gets weird around you that day and tries to give you things. Since receiving a gift is on the same anxiety level for you as receiving blood test results, your birthday should be something you dread, mentally avoid and, ultimately, start lying to people about.

One of the worst things that happens on your birthday is that someone might try to sing fucking goddamn Happy Birthday to you. If this starts to happen, your body should begin to go through a few phases, the first of which is disbelief. Surely this can't be happening to me, you'll think. Eventually, you'll pass from disbelief into horror, especially if this is taking place in public, like at a restaurant or your office. It's similar to the type of horror you'd experience if someone were stabbed in front of you or if you found out you had Lou Gehrig's disease. Finally, and this will be toward the very end of the song, near the last, excruciatingly drawn-out "Haaaapy biiiiiirthdaaaay tooooooooo........yoooouuuuuu!", you will begin to drown in a potent, acidic shame. Your ears will burn and you'll instinctively look for open windows out of which to pitch your body.

The look on your face while all of this is happening will also, god willing, be caught on camera and shared with you via email or a social networking site. Then you will get to deal with people commenting things like "Why do you look so constipated?"

In order to avoid all of this, it's best to never tell anyone about your birthday, ever. The sad truth is, though, some people already know. And these people will post it all over your Facebook wall, so that anyone you know that didn't know it was your birthday will find out, and then berate you for not telling them sooner. You'll be made to feel like a bad person just because you didn't go around essentially begging for gifts from your friends. Because that's what telling people about your birthday amounts to. Panhandling.

Death?

2009-03-31T08:23:00.000-07:00

Death should be constantly on your mind, both torturing and soothing you, as you go through your fraudulent life. Where will you die? How horribly will you die? At what point in the next ten minutes will you die? What part of taking out the trash just now will cause you to die? Your relationship with death should be the alcoholic, abusive relationship you'd be having with your spouse if you had one, which you don't. Some days, it's all about love. Or you convince yourself it's about love. But that's just because you don't know what you'd do without the prospect of death sleeping alongside you every night, holding you tight and keeping you secure with cheap promises of how it will take care of you. On other days ("bad" days), death should leave you feeling small, worthless, and metaphorically slapped across the face and lying to your coworkers about having fallen down a staircase last night, even though you don't have a staircase and a fall couldn't possibly have given you that hand-shaped bruise over your eye.

When it's treating you right, death can be used as your fraudulent panacea. Firstly, it's the easiest solution to everything. Don't want to write a cover letter to a potential employer? Thank god there's always the option of drowning yourself in a shallow reflecting pool instead. Are you slightly depressed and somehow "too good" for doctors or therapy? Just lull yourself to sleep with dreams of accidentally tripping in front of a bus. Do you need revenge? Your own death will make a great revenge against anyone, so long as you leave a note telling them it's their fault you're dead. If you use it correctly, the idea of death solves everything.

But what about those bad days, which often coincide with birthdays, the discovery of other people's successes, or the viewing of any show/news article/bus advertisement about disease, when you can't stop obsessing over your own death? Instead of dealing gracefully with the idea that everybody dies, you should plan for it in increasingly entertaining ways that will shock and confuse the greatest amount of onlookers. Alternately, you can plan to leave behind a conspiracy, or at least the greatest amount of unanswerable questions, like how could a person physically manage to choke to death on a single piece of Swiss cheese, and should the eating of Swiss cheese now be banned from your country's children? Of course, your guilt, fear, and inability to accomplish anything will prevent you from ever following through with these plans, but with any luck, you can at least revive your love of death by dreaming of the future headline, "Commuter Loses Face and, Eventually, Life in Freak Braking Accident, Traumatizing 28."

So you have to go to a party

2009-03-30T06:31:00.001-07:00

At some point, probably many, you'll be invited to or expected to attend a party. This could be a holiday party for your job or a birthday party for a friend or even something more heinous like a bachelor party or some type of bridal or baby shower. Don't let the word "shower" fool you, though; you'll feel dirtier after it's over than you did when it started.

The first thing you should do when you find out you have to go to a party is pray that you become devastatingly ill. But since God doesn't exist (and even if He does you're pretty sure, from experience, that He enjoys answering your prayers "No."), you can be certain that no divine help is on the way. You're not going to be sick. You're going to feel great. You're going to feel horribly, shamefully great, and you'll have no true excuse for not going. And since lying about this stuff, for some reason, is difficult/impossible for you, you better get ready for this awful party.

Why do you hate parties so much? What's so awful about free food and drinks? Well, if it was really just free food and drinks, it would be great. But that's just the lure. The party itself will undoubtedly have other people there. And you'll be expected to talk to them and pretend like you care about or are listening to things they say. Essentially, the entire night should be spent making other people around you unaware of your desire to die and/or kill them, and constantly dodging new and more horrible people that will certainly only make it harder to hide that desire. It's pretty much like being in Vietnam.

Obviously, the best thing to do at parties is drink. But you need to make sure that you drink enough so that not only do you not care about what anyone else is saying, but that you stop caring about what you say, as well. At some point, secrets that aren't yours to share should start flowing as freely from your mouth as the vomit from the girl you knew would end up vomiting when you first set eyes on her, either from alcohol or her regular schedule. If you run into your friend that invited you to the party, it would be ideal if you could confess a secret love for him or her. Couch it in things like "Look, you don't have to say anything back, but..." And then stare for an uncomfortably long time at this person's eyes, as though you're waiting for them to say something back. If you don't have a secret love to confess, then begin criticizing something dear to your friend, like their outfit, their house, or their awful friends. Then laugh it off like it was a joke when you both know it was probably the truest thing you've ever said.

If this party is a fraudulent success for you, you can be assured of several exciting things the next day: total embarrassment, a splitting headache, and the near-absolute assurance that you'll never be invited to another one.

Your politics

2009-03-25T06:23:00.000-07:00

No matter what your politics are, you should profess them really loudly whenever asked about them. However, you should also make sure you do little to no actual work when it comes to advancing any agenda whatsoever. In fact, you should barely be able to find the energy to vote once every four years. You shouldn't even consider voting during the mid-term elections. But if you do go to vote during these off-year elections, make sure you know absolutely nothing about any candidate and that you strictly vote down your party line. When it comes to picking judges that don't have party affiliation next to their name, just vote "no" on every one of them. That way, any time a court ruling happens that you don't agree with, you can feel completely absolved of any involvement.

Your inability to make any kind of real decision for yourself should, nonetheless, never stop you from feeling that you can make decisions for everyone else. The fact that you don't actually lead a life, but rather follow it, lemming-like, over the cliff of failure on a daily basis -- this should have no real bearing on your ability to pass judgment on other people's screwed-up ways of life. Keeping this in mind, even when you don't vote or don't go to the rally for the cause you're really interested in, you should heap scorn on other people who don't vote or attend the rally. It sounds like hypocrisy, but really it's just fraudulent living. Other people don't have that excuse, so it's your job to judge them harshly for their socially irresponsible actions. Now that you've coerced someone into voting or doing the political thing you know you should do but won't, you can feel totally absolved for not doing it yourself.

Since your political views, no matter what they are, are absolutely true, you should feel allowed, nay, obligated, to brutally ear-rape every stranger around you with various pointed rants on controversial topics. The best place to do this is the bus or the subway. Ideally, you should get into a conversation with a friend about something like gay marriage, gun rights, the death penalty or O.J. Simpson. You should spout your utterly true view on the topic just loud enough that anyone within earshot will hear you, while simultaneously enraging and embarrassing the friend with whom you're talking. This is your sacred duty as an intelligent, sometimes-voting member of society.

Also, you should constantly note how almost every action you take in your fraudulent life should automatically disqualify you from public office in the future, yet nevertheless still believe that some day you will be the President.

Regret

2009-03-22T23:24:00.000-07:00

By now, you've probably become one of those people who says life is about learning, and you claim to regret nothing you've done, no matter how painful, maiming, or "Man, I accidentally caused the zombie apocalypse" it was. This is fine, but make sure that while you make this proclamation you're regretting what you did last night, or last year, or maybe even the last ten years. To be fully fraudulent, you should regret every single choice you ever make, no matter how negligible it seems. For instance, when you panic at the deli over what type of bread you want for your sandwich, pick rye bread over sourdough because you think it sounds healthier, then treat the bread and everything inside like poison when it's not what you wanted. And instead of saving the uneaten part of the sandwich, throw it away in defiance, an action you'll later regret when you're hungry and realize you had a perfectly good half sandwich that you paid for and wasted.

Of course, romantic relationships are the easiest and best places to overflow your life with regret. Let's say you meet someone online; make sure you openly profess your admiration and love before ever meeting them for real. Then, when you meet them in person and equate the experience with double-ended food poisoning, think back to the ridiculously glowing emails you sent and regret every action that led to your parents meeting, getting married, and deciding not to abort you. Essentially, you should regret getting into relationships, continuing relationships, and then getting out of relationships. And then, later, getting back into the relationships you already got out of once.

When it comes to the rest of your life, aside from school choices, job choices, and housing choices, your innate guilt and fear should keep you from making any hugely bad decisions, like robbing the preloaded-gun store. Instead, you should focus on regretting smaller things, like the outfit you chose to wear today that you weren't sure matched and are now totally conscious of every time someone looks at (and undoubtedly judges) you. You should also regret buying that plant you saw at Home Depot, because as you watch it slowly die, you realize you already knew you were incapable of sustaining life. As you bury it with tears of regret streaming down your face, promise yourself you will never kill another plant by owning it. Then go out and adopt a puppy.

Guilt, part 2: what you're doing

2009-03-18T18:07:00.000-07:00

No matter what situation you're in, you should not be enjoying yourself. You should always feel like your time would be better spent doing something other than what you're actually doing. And because of this, you should always feel guilty about everything you're doing.

You have many talents, but you do nothing at all with them except congratulate yourself secretly about how talented you are. So when Friday comes along and you decide to go out and get drinks with your friends (or by yourself, if you have no friends), you should feel like every moment at that bar and every sip of alcohol you take is like throwing your hands up and giving up on life. How can you enjoy that vodka tonic when you have a book you've been meaning to (and telling everyone you know you are going to) write? How can you sleep at night knowing that those are 8 hours where you could be cleaning your disgusting room or doing your back taxes or just sitting on the computer looking up symptoms for the various illnesses you know you probably have?

The worst thing you could ever do is decide to take a nap in the middle of the day. If you decide to do this, the first 30 minutes of it should be spent completely awake, worried about the horrible, but totally non-urgent, flaws in your personality and upcoming events in your life. Even if you know you would have spent these 2 hours, if awake, surfing the Internet or playing video games, you should still think that every moment you lay in bed getting the rest your body needs is a moment you could be spending saving your life from catastrophic failure. Any nap you take should comprise some of the most stressful, unsatisfying minutes in your entire life. And you should "wake up" feeling more tired and worried about your life than you did before you laid down.

Then, that night when you're completely unable to fall asleep because your body thinks it already went to bed once today, you should by no means take this time to do something productive like clean your room, do your back taxes or find out on the Internet that mouse droppings can give you hantavirus. Instead, you should just lay in bed, awake, hating yourself and watching the clock inch closer and closer to morning. If you put enough energy into hating yourself, you'll eventually tire and fall asleep. You'll get a solid 90 minutes of fitful "rest" before your alarm goes off and you're forced to engage in your most guilt-ridden activity -- going to the job that pays you more than you deserve for doing only slightly more than might be expected of a pretty intelligent ape.

Buying stuff

2009-03-16T20:10:00.001-07:00

When you make up your mind to purchase something you can't reasonably buy without actually checking your account balance, like electronics, music equipment, or a car, there are several things that should happen. First of all, you should admit that this item is something you don't need, but that it's something you really, really want this week. Convince yourself that you've earned it because your week was shitty (this will almost always be true). Next, tell yourself you'll make up for the cost by cutting all dairy, fruits, and vegetables from your diet for a month, which you calculate will save you roughly $5,000. In the meantime, you'll drink Tang to prevent scurvy.

When you finally go to the store, make sure you've done no research into what a good price is, what specifics you're looking for, or even the actual name of the product. Don't make eye contact with any salespeople, because the answers to the basic burning questions you have regarding this product are probably obvious to everyone but you. In fact, rather than ask for help, just examine the fronts and backs of the competing products for awhile as if you're some kind of expert. If a salesperson does approach you, make sure you spout all the product-specific words you've ever picked up from commercials or ads or comic-strip references. For instance, if you're buying a hi-def TV, ask something like, "So I hear this has...1080 lines of...picture, right? Not 1060b." Then, when the salesperson gives you the look that indicates you did a bad job of faking, ask a few useless questions, like, "Oh, this one is made in China? What about that one?" This will make you appear to understand that where the item was made is important to its quality.

If you're really lucky, or if you're at Guitar Center, the salesperson will also have no idea what he's talking about, and the two of you can enter a competition in which the winner spouts the most impressive-sounding fake sentences.
Salesperson: "So you're looking for the best hi-def TV?"
You: "Yeah. I thought this one looked good. Isn't Audio-Visual Integrity a good brand?"
Salesperson: "It is if you want a shitty system. You might as well just spend the extra $300 and get the one with the quad-core reverb upgrade."
You: "Oh... Yeah? My friend who has that said it kind of sucked."
Salesperson: "Well, does he have the gold-plated EGDI cables that go with it?"
You: "No, he has the BFDD cables, which are supposed to be way better."
Salesperson: "Uhhh... Dude, you can't use BDFF cables with quad-core. The picture will look like garbage."
You: "Not when you have the interchanger, I thought."
Salesperson: "What kind of... interchanger does he have?"
You: "The, uh, one recommended by Consumer Report. With the two...outputs."
(brief pause)
Salesperson: "Hey, you know what looks great on this TV? The IMAX scenes in The Dark Knight."
You: "Yeah! Are you glad they gave the Oscar to Heath Ledger?"
Salesperson: "Well, I mean, he was awesome in that role, but I think they gave it to him just because he died, and it wouldn't have mattered if he was great or not. Which is total BS."
You: "I met Heath Ledger once."
Salesperson: "That's awesome!"
You: "Okay. Yeah, I'm just gonna go ahead and buy this one."

After bringing your item home and realizing you're missing several necessary accessories, wait for several weeks, preferably until after the warranty has expired, to try out your item, because you're waiting for sales on the accessories. Make sure you get the accessories for $15 instead of the regular $18, because you didn't even bother comparing prices on your $2,000 item, and since the idea of bargaining cripples you with fear, even in a store where they expect you to bargain, you were happy to pay more than the listed amount for it. Then go out and treat yourself to some fresh orange juice and sushi, because a $20 lunch is nothing next to the amount you just spent.

Breaking up

2009-03-14T06:26:00.000-07:00

Somehow you've sustained a relationship with someone else for longer than a month. Don't congratulate yourself over this, though, because now you're really screwed. Now you have to break up. And this process, whether initiated by you or your partner, is deliciously torturous and should be savored like a bite of rancid venison.

Why do you have to break up? Well, things are probably going too well, aren't they? And what usually happens when things go really well in your life? That's right, someone dies.

But one of the most important rules to remember when you're living fraudulently is that things that are hard are bad. And usually avoidable for a while. So, with this in mind, stay in the dangerous relationship you know will destroy you or someone you love for a good while after you decide you need to break up. This will allow you to do awesome things like take out your frustration and resentment by snapping at your partner for no reason. Or maybe even purposely getting drunk enough to mentally excuse making out with three people at a bar, none of whom are your partner, but all of whom know your partner and are maybe even your own coworkers.

The best part about this approach is that, if your partner has any self respect at all, you'll likely get dumped. Being dumped is always preferable to dumping because you don't have to actually do anything but get destroyed, which is passive and something you're quite good at.

If you're really unlucky, though, you'll have to take the initiative and break up with the other person. You should take responsibility at this point for everything that was ever wrong with the relationship and do your best to make the other person see that for their own mental and maybe even physical safety they should get far away from you.

After the break up, you should spend about a month lying to yourself about how great it is to be single and how you hated having someone to answer to and how freedom is so valuable to you. Then you should get blindingly drunk, have awkward sex with your ex and begin to doubt everything you've ever believed about yourself.

As you can see, breaking up is pretty exhausting. Instead of getting into a relationship with a person in the first place, next time try to remember all the free porn sites you have bookmarked.

Revenge

2009-03-12T08:39:00.000-07:00

In your varied dealings with other people, you'll find along the way that someone may rip your heart out and bake it into a pie that makes the cat throw up, or stab your beloved parent, or just sort of really rub you the wrong way at work by constantly stealing your stapler without asking. When these sorts of things occur, the right thing to do is to plan and exact horrific revenge. Now, different problems require different solutions, but the primary thing to remember is that your plan should always either backfire or possibly put you, and not the person you're revenging upon, in danger.

So what sorts of revenge options are available to you? First of all, living well is not the best revenge. Actually, it might be, but living well is not an option for you, specifically. For an alternative, let's look at a scenario: You're driving and a car cuts you off, or someone behind you has honked unjustifiably. They might very well have been honking to warn you about the toddler on the training bike you're about to run over, but it doesn't matter. Another driver has ruined your day and spiked your blood pressure up until you're half-blind with rage. Your natural instinct now should be to follow them and try to make them fear for their lives, even if it means you're missing your job interview or the birth of your child. If you're on a highway, make sure you keep zooming right in front of them, then stepping on your brakes to make them rear-end you, because your being rear-ended and getting whiplash will show them. Or you can drive up alongside them and flip them off over and over again, despite the fact that they're not looking, and in your desperate attempts to get them to look, you should end up rear-ending the driver in front of you, because that will also show them. Alternately, you can roll down your windows and throw gummi bears at their car furiously. Whatever it is you do, make sure no one learns any lessons from the incident.

Now let's look at a different example: You've broken up with your significant other-type person, and you want them to slip and fall Three Stooges-style into a pot of rusty knives and oil. Revenge options worthy of Satan should go through your head for days or possibly weeks, like writing, "You suck!!!" on the wall of their Facebook page (the problem being that you deleted them as your friend the second you broke up (this should have been your first devilish revenge)). Then you should go on a few dates or at least hook up with your ex's best friend or enemy, whom you don't find remotely attractive, and who will give you more imaginary STDs to layer upon your existing imaginary (but probably real) STDs. After plotting several levels of death and writing numerous insulting emails you don't send (or possibly send while drunk or pretending to be drunk) that only make you look stupid, you should finally fall into depressive despair and forget to eat, eventually getting sick. While lying in bed half-conscious, you'll realize that your illness and inevitable death are clearly the best revenge, because you should be deluding yourself into thinking your ex still cares about you. Also, your ex has no idea that you're sick and dying anyway, but you're pretty sure someone will tell them about the funeral, and that's when you'll be vindicated.

When it comes to less urgent daily matters, make sure that you internalize your anger at your annoying coworkers or work extra hard until you give yourself an ulcer, because your pleasant demeanor and hardy work ethic will surely prove to them once and for all that they suck, which, in the end, is the only real revenge you've got.

Family

2009-03-09T06:41:00.000-07:00

If you still have any family left that's alive and speaking to you, then you will on occasion have to interact with them. Usually, this happens around the holidays. But there are other times when you'll be forced, obligated or guilted into dealing with them. Here are some acceptable reasons for reaching out to your family.

You need money. You really, really need it. You just got laid off, maybe. Or perhaps the $19.00 that Netflix is about to automatically take from you is going to overdraft your bank account. Or maybe you owe money to someone who has threatened to hurt you if you don't pay it back. Whatever the reason, you really need money. So give those parents a call. They can't deny you, you're their child! All of this (meaning: you) is basically their fault. The least they can do in return for making you alive is to give you some money.

You need advice about something. Usually this will be because you found mouse droppings in your kitchen and have no idea whatsoever how to handle this. This is a good time to panic and seriously consider burning your own apartment down. But what you really need is for someone to yell at you and tell you that you're acting like an idiot and just go to the damn store and buy some traps and stop interrupting Jeopardy. This is exactly what grandmothers are best at doing.

You need someone to fix your car. This might be because you've owned this same car for five years and have changed the oil so infrequently that you don't even know where the nearest place is that does that sort of thing for people. Or maybe you were rolling down the car window to light a cigarette and accidentally veered into the center divider on the freeway, causing your car to spin out and slam into a freeway sign. Or something. Uncles and/or older brothers that didn't go to college tend to be the best at fixing broken cars. Give one of them a call and be prepared with a six pack of domestic beer, preferably in cans. Also, get ready to pretend like you're understanding them or even listening when they try to tell you about carburetors or valves or how a car needs oil.

You're in jail. This seems to be the best reason to call your older brother or sister who did go to college. Just remember, as long as you're in for something non-violent, only a horrible family member will not accept the charges for the collect call. Or not offer up the pink slip of their car to the bail bondsman on your behalf. Hold a grudge for a long time against this older sibling until you end up back in jail. Then simply repeat the above steps, ad nauseum.

If you ARE the older brother or sister who went to college, your degree in Philosophy or Theatre has probably not prepared you for the constant bombardment of problems from your ungrateful family members. You can look for answers in Nietzsche or in the dysfunctional-family dramas of Edward Albee, but it's probably best to just pack up and move to another city with no forwarding address.

Change

2009-03-07T20:32:00.000-08:00

Since you constantly feel that everything in your life is wrong, it's good once in awhile to make changes to show you're "doing something." These changes might include finding a new job, dating someone new, or starting some new diet or exercise routine. When you're feeling exceptionally stagnant, consider moving to a new place. This might mean a new apartment or, when things couldn't be any worse, a new city. To do it the correct fraudulent way, check your reasons for moving; you should be running away from something intangible, like heartbreak or angst, not moving towards something concrete, like a new job or friends/family. Ultimately, you should always be running away from yourself, only to find that, surprisingly, you've followed yourself to your new destination.

Several months (or years) before your move, start by telling everyone how much you hate your current city and how you can't meet people there. Insist that people aren't this shallow in the rest of the world and harp on all the negative things around you. Then talk about how you're thinking about moving to City A, City B, or Portland, despite the fact that you've never been to Portland (but have been told by everyone you know how awesome Portland is, even though half of them have never been there either). If it's close to election time, talk about how you're going to move to Canada if the wrong candidate wins, despite the fact that you'll still be a U.S. citizen under U.S. rule even if you're physically in Canada.

Eventually, you should start focusing on City A more and more, talking about how the ____ scene there is great, and how you loved the city when you visited (though you probably only had a layover there for a half-hour and never left the airport). Begin telling everyone you know that you're going to move there, like it's a threat. Tell them so often that you'll have no way out of it except by looking like a complete asshole if you don't actually do it. Later, when you leave, people will laud your courage for taking a big step rather than realizing you're leaving because you're now too ashamed to stay.

Before arriving, make only the most minimal of plans and gather only a rough estimate of how much money you'll need to get started. Treat this experience like you're tossing yourself into the ocean to see if you can swim, even though you can barely, metaphorically or otherwise, avoid drowning in day-to-day experiences like riding the subway. Laud your own survival skills when you don't die within a week, then realize that without the Internet you would have been dead by the end of the first day.

Once you're in your new home, the rest is easy: Set up your Internet connection immediately, talk to your friends online all day exactly the same way you did when you lived in your last city, then walk around the city listening to your iPod nonstop, complaining to yourself about how you don't meet any new people, for some reason, except the ones who think you're a hooker.

Public bathrooms and you

2009-03-06T06:17:00.000-08:00

The problem with you, besides everything else, is that you worry so much you probably have a really awesomely fucked up stomach. You should basically be, at this point, so extremely gastrointestinally screwed that you will develop a minor panic attack any time you don't know where the nearest clean bathroom is. If you live in a city like NYC where there are virtually no public bathrooms except for the ones with queues outside of them in Starbucks that smell like a werewolf just had an abortion inside, then this will make daily life for you almost unlivable.

So, let's say you're out and about and the unthinkable happens--you have an urgent need to use the bathroom (for purposes other than to cry) and you don't know where one is. The first thing you should do is completely panic. You should start sweating profusely and your eyes should begin darting crazily around your field of vision. You should also begin to mutter to yourself. By this point, any person passing by that sees you should figure you are in the middle of a psychotic break.

Next, you need to find a bathroom. Make your way toward the nearest place of business that seems likely to have a public restroom. If you're lucky enough to be near a Target or K-Mart or something like that, you're golden. These places always have large public bathrooms that are totally covered in urine but functional. If not, and you find that your only option is a nearby restaurant, the best thing to do is to compose yourself and act like you're meeting your party at the back of the restaurant. Walk right in, look straight ahead, and make your way directly to the back where, please god, the bathroom has to be.

Once you're in the public bathroom, this is when the fun really starts. If anyone at all walks in, you have to stop. No matter what point you are at in the process. No one can hear your shameful bodily functions. Even if this means you are literally doubled over in pain, your face resting on the putrid bathroom stall wall, and every inch of your body begging for death, you must never, ever let anyone else hear you poop. Ever.

If you make it out of this alive, you deserve a treat. Go to McDonald's and eat a Big Mac and some french fries and a shake and then act surprised when you do this all over again in 45 minutes.

Your taste in things: Food

2009-03-05T11:35:00.000-08:00

You already know what your regular diet should consist of when it's only up to you. However, you'll often go out to eat with other people, in which case a gallon of coffee, cheese and gum won't be acceptable. When, say, you go on a date with someone new, one of the first chances you'll have to fraudulate is through your expressed interest in unusual and/or ethnic food.

When your date forces you to respond to "Where should we go for dinner?" make sure you name something generically but obviously foreign, like "Japanese" or "Ethiopian" (or, preferably, "You pick"). Whatever you do, don't specify any meat-related foods, because if you live in a major metropolitan area, your date will likely turn out to be a vegetarian. If they are, make sure you say something like, "Yeah, I'm basically a vegetarian, although I don't know if I could give up fish. I never eat red meat and rarely eat chicken or pork." You should declare this vehemently, even though you recently won a free meal at a steakhouse by consuming their 150-oz. steak in one sitting and then had chicken nuggets later that night. This statement is a good way to start a relationship, because you'll find that every time you go out, you'll be forced into not ordering what you want and you'll develop a bitterness and eventual hatred towards your significant other, who probably doesn't really care that you eat meat anyway. Even if your date isn't vegetarian, you'll have set up a precedent for eating at new and sometimes weird places when all you really want is a piece of pepperoni pizza.

On the other hand, you'll often go out with friends as well. When this happens, make sure you only go to places for kitsch value, like Red Lobster, or Wendy's, or Chuck E. Cheese, where the food is terrible and the people who aren't there for kitsch value are depressing shades of gray or massively overweight. Then, later, when your intestines are bloated and gooey and you've wasted the same amount of money, or more, on what could have been a really good meal not comprised of pure lard, make sure you promise yourself never to pick a restaurant for kitsch value again. Then, two days later, suggest Sizzler when your friend asks you where you want to go out to eat.

Your personal security

2009-03-04T12:59:00.000-08:00

Part of being truly fraudulent has to do with being fully aware of the backwards and virulent things you do, but doing them anyway. It's an almost out-of-body experience where you look at yourself from some other plane and watch, helplessly, as your body goes through the familiar and sickening motions of fraudulence. It's like being bitten by a cobra and losing the ability to move your body while you remain fully conscious, feeling trapped by a body that won't obey you, until your heart stops. Only instead of the process taking 60 minutes to kill you, it takes 60 years.

Anyway, one of the things that you'll notice about yourself eventually is how cavalier you treat pretty much every situation you get into, no matter how great the personal danger. In fact, you rarely, if ever, think about how much danger you are in before getting into a given situation. This is always an afterthought. Considering how profoundly fundamental fear is in your life, this lack of forethought should cause you to seriously question your basic mental health.

Take, for example, your insistence that riding the subway to any part of the city at any hour is totally fine and safe and not at all sketchy. You probably feel this way basically right until the gigantic man with the trash bags that are filled with something you can't see but are pretty sure smell just like fetid human remains boards the train.

Or maybe this manifests for you by doing things like going skydiving, bungee jumping, having unprotected sex, driving drunk over a mountain, doing drugs with people that have rabies, walking barefoot down Ninth Avenue, walking barefoot in your gym locker room, leaning against your third-floor, poorly constructed balcony railing, drunk, not disabling your phone before getting drunk, or any number of other things that could cause you to die.

The important thing with this, though, is to recognize it and then continue on with your life. Like those lucky people who got to see the signs on the freeway that some hacker manipulated to say "Zombies ahead! Run!" Some people might pull over, even just for a second, to think about what that means and maybe to try to find some kind of confirmation or denial of the alleged zombies. Then there were the people that are just like you and just kept driving. And hoping.

Happiness!!!

2009-03-03T18:34:00.000-08:00

All your life, you think you've been striving for happiness. Happiness has been your undefined, ultimate goal, where everything will be great for forever and ever and ever with little to no effort. But because you know this state is impossible, happiness is your enemy, in the way that depression, by giving you an excuse to hide under the covers and do nothing, is your best friend. Your attempts at happiness should be flushed down the toilet like an unwanted prom-night baby. Real happiness would mean you'd have to go out and do something with your life because depression wasn't holding you back anymore. Real happiness, to you, would mean waiting for all your happiness to collapse and leave you curled in a ball on the floor mumbling, "Why?!"

If you must go looking for happiness, make sure you look in all the wrong places, like Bed, Bath & Beyond. Here, you'll find your sudden obsession with soft towels can be momentarily sated by paying $11 for a decently nice towel. Then, when you take a shower and use it for the first time, you can think, "Wow, this is soft!" Then you'll think, "Wait, I just paid $11 for a towel?" Your momentary not-unhappiness will be balanced out by your confusion over why you wasted your money, and things can continue on like normal after the incident is over. Another wrong place to look is any fast food restaurant, where you'll pretend french fries will give you happiness, not a raging stomachache after eating two fries.

The truth is, if you live fraudulently, you should never let yourself be overly happy, unless it's for a short moment, and only if it's to show how awful the rest of your life is in comparison. Because as dreadful as a constant, dull, droning existence is, you never really get to see its full glory until you've had that brief moment where you made eyes with the hot stranger from a distance, and for once they made eyes at you simultaneously, and then you got closer and realized the hot stranger was really Don Knotts, only less appealing. At that point you're able to look over the bigger picture and tell yourself, "Oh! Yeah... This is really for shit." And then, as time goes on, you'll find yourself trying to re-create that moment of joy, and the contrast will grow deeper until you finally find that you've fallen secretly in love with Don Knotts, even though he's not attractive and no longer alive.

Depression

2009-02-28T06:12:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-26T20:19:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-25T06:17:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-23T06:58:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-22T22:42:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-19T12:39:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-18T21:34:00.000-08:00

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)

2009-02-17T13:17:00.000-08:00

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

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

2009-02-17T08:57:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-11T06:21:00.000-08:00

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)

2009-02-10T21:22:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-06T11:05:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-05T21:53:00.001-08:00

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

2009-02-03T06:53:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-02T21:34:00.001-08:00

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.

A few more dating tips

2009-01-28T22:15:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-27T06:00:00.000-08:00

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*

2009-01-22T22:31:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-20T18:20:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-18T20:57:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-17T12:41:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-15T18:01:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-15T09:18:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-14T06:18:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-12T21:25:00.001-08:00

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

2009-01-10T12:44:00.000-08:00

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!

2009-01-09T10:20:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-08T19:03:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-07T10:25:00.001-08:00

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

2009-01-06T23:23:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-05T08:29:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-04T19:58:00.001-08:00

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.

Gift giving

2008-12-23T12:01:00.000-08:00

Gift giving

Real Frauds don't give or get gifts. You don't give them because the anxiety involved in picking out something and hoping it's sufficient, original and most of all, thoughtful, is utterly excruciating. You don't get gifts because, well, frankly you don't deserve them.

So what do you do when you're forced to do this for either an office party or some family obligation or even worse, you have a new significant other? First of all, if you have a boyfriend/girlfriend/whatever, you've already gone wrong somewhere. Think about that.

Gift certificates are the easiest and least thoughtful thing you can give someone. So if you're forced to give gifts, this is a great option. You can even get them from Target and give the same gift to everyone you need to give a gift to, because who doesn't need something from Target? They have food, clothes, electronics and hair care products. That pretty much covers everything.

You can go for a gag gift if you're really feeling creative. But remember this: the money you just spent on that joke is gone forever and the person you gave it to will likely laugh and then discreetly throw it away. Was that laugh worth the $15? Better to take that person out to a nice dinner at Chipotle.

If you're given a gift, this is the worst. We both know you don't deserve it. And now whatever's inside that wrapping has to evoke the desired reaction in your face. All the pressure is on YOU now, baby. You better muster up that perfect look of surprise, elation and gratitude. That's right. All of those. In one face. At once. Sound impossible? That's because it is.

This time of year, I find the best present to get and give is the timeless gift of 364 days until you have to deal with this again.

Christmas time is here

2008-12-20T16:04:00.000-08:00

Christmas time is here

Yeah, it is.

More than any other time of year, this one offers some of the best opportunities for fraudulent living. It also affords an occasion to think about what it means to be alive, fraudulently.

If you're like me, you have no home to go to for Christmas. Or if you do, then it sucks in so many ways. Problems with your parents. That deep dread of having to sit through stories about times past from the uncle with the weird breath. And, of course, inevitable fights. Because how can all these people come together under one roof with all their various lives that used to be intimately connected but now don't share much in common except a last name and expect to regain some non-existent Christmas moment from the past? This is a fucking five-star recipe for strife.

The number one most important thing you must, MUST remember about Christmas, whether you spend it alone or you go back home, is that you should not be able to drive or operate any heavy machinery legally. You should be out of it. Somehow. Most people use alcohol. This is pretty common and accepted and can be done right out in the open with the rest of your self-medicating family. If pills are more your poison, go for it, but be discreet. The worst thing that can happen is for Aunt Ida to smell them in your pocket and then corner you as you come out of the bathroom, shamelessly blackmailing you and sucking up half your stash. You already have enough reasons to hate Aunt Ida.

Dinner should come and go pretty easily since you probably won't be able to eat much. You may get some "What's wrong with you?"s or even some "Please wake up, your hand is in my food"s, but this is a small price to pay to be able to get through a horrific family dinner without so much as a memory.

But this is all for the people with families to go home to. What about the rest of us who are hoofing it solo on C-Day? Well, it's pretty much the same story. You'll be tempted to feel extra sad on Christmas day, mourning the loss of everything that's good in your life from when you were a child. Just remember that, for the most part, childhood was utter shit. You remember certain things fondly, but mostly just because you didn't have to pay bills and your main worries of that time seem frivolous and, frankly, desirable to you now. Resist this. You were fucking miserable as a child and you know it. So quit pining for some perfect life you never had and that no one ever has.

You need to get out of your apartment. But first have a drink.

Then, slap yourself, put on some clothes and pretend like you're jewish. Unless you really are jewish. In which case none of this made any sense to you at all.

P.S. God

2008-12-17T22:14:00.000-08:00

If you ever need a prayer to lull yourself to sleep, it should be this: Even though god does not exist, He is a total shithead for making me who I am.

God

2008-12-17T08:23:00.000-08:00

God

So, any good Fraud has to have some kind of conflict about God. Usually it involves being pretty certain in his non-existence but vehemently hoping you're wrong because your fear of death is rivaled only by your hidden desire for it. Fraudulent living is complicated.

Your hypochondria has kicked into overdrive. You are absolutely certain you're going to die in a month or a year of your brain tumor or hepatitis C. What's the next logical thought? That's right. Where am I going? What is going to happen when I die? What will it feel like? Will anyone care?

Though your brain tells you there's nothing beyond death, your fear tells you not only is there nothing but that the nothing will probably really suck bad. It tells you that "nothing" will likely be you, alone, in a pitch dark room with nothing to do or look at for eternity. Just you and your thoughts. Alone. Forever.

"Nothing" is actually "hell", turns out.

So you start to pray to a God that you don't believe in just because you somehow think that he won't be able to see through your little ploy and will grant you a cure from your brain tumor or admittance into heaven or that the student loan database will have a glitch and erase your $30,000 debt. There are so many reasons to fraudulently pray to God when you really need Him. It's best to say these little prayers and then when things turn out to not be as dire as you thought or somehow something goes in your favor to completely forget that you ever prayed to any "god" and continue bashing the idea of religion or a higher power to anyone who will listen.

There may be no atheists in foxholes, but there are plenty in cubicles.

Hypochondria and OCD

2008-12-16T22:57:00.000-08:00

Now, hypochondria is not only a great tool for fraudulent living in itself, it also mixes really well with other disorders, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder. The two of them are a devastating combination, like Jack and Coke, and should leave you reeling and in a half-comatose state most of the time. It should also be noted here that obsessive-compulsive disorder is a must-have tool if you want to achieve fraudulence. You must have it. If you don't, you must acquire it immediately. You must acquire it immediately. You must acquire it immediately. You must acquire it immediately.

These two disorders have a brilliant symbiosis, and it's really better to experience it for yourself, but in essence, what happens is this: You convince yourself that you have a horrible disease or condition, like, say, a brain tumor. After convincing yourself of this, the OCD will kick in, and you will begin to, for example, repeat a certain phrase to yourself over and over again and convince yourself that if you say it, the tumor will go away. Or you'll breathe in a certain way. Or blink a certain number of times. And then you will convince yourself that you're doing this because you have a brain tumor. So you'll stop, because you think if you stop, it will mean you don't have a brain tumor. And then the OCD will create a tension in you that makes your head want to explode until you do all these things again. And then the funny breathing and the blinking will make you lightheaded or at least give you a headache, once again convincing you that you have all the symptoms of a brain tumor.

And then, in the midst of this, if there is a god, you will be smote by lightning, because He will want to put you out of your misery. If not, then you finally have proof that god doesn't exist, because why would He let this happen? (P.S. God is a separate blog post. God probably deserves at least one Post all to Himself.)

More on Hypochondria

2008-12-16T08:21:00.000-08:00

More on Hypochondria.

We've already talked a bit below about how and when hypochondria should strike in a normal situation. It also merits discussing a little bit about how you can keep it going to ensure you remain in a hypochondria fear spiral for as long as possible. Maybe even indefinitely.

When you notice that you're dying of an illness because you read about it on Wikipedia or heard second-hand about someone who had it, some very important things take place in your body. Let's take the example of an inoperable brain tumor. Once you decide you obviously have one, your body will back you up by giving you things like headaches, vision problems and the inability to think coherently. It doesn't matter that these symptoms are caused by the stress you're putting yourself under by planning how you're going to tell everyone that you're dying, these symptoms should line up pretty much identically with the ones you read about on WebMD. (Note: WebMD is a MUST-HAVE for all hypochondriacs and should probably be your home page.)

When the actual physical symptoms start rolling in, this is the perfect time to indulge them and start taking your body temperature at least 8 times a day. Anything above or below 98.6 degrees should deeply alarm you and also confirm your self diagnosis. Feeling your glands in your neck at least 15 times a day is also really crucial, because the more you massage them, the more inflamed they become. If you have a slight cold, this is even better, because your glands will stay inflamed sometimes for months just by rubbing them every spare chance you get. Rashes are also a great thing to flip out about, because they are also a key indicator of viral infections. (It's true, look it up. Go on. You know you want to.)

If at all possible, call out from work during these episodes so that you can spend all day pacing your apartment in fear. If your primary care physician tells you that he will no longer draw blood from you to test it for AIDS or liver cirrhosis, remember that there are free clinics that will do this for a lot longer before they catch on to your abuse of the system.

And always, ALWAYS remember that SOMEONE has to be that 1 in 100,000,000 who gets the disease that way. Why can't that someone be you?

Hypochondria

2008-12-15T19:55:00.000-08:00

This topic is crucial in fraudulent living and will require many, many posts. It may even deserve its own blog. But at F. Living, it's painful enough trying to get one measly post done a week, so clearly it is too much of you to ask for another. So stop asking. Like wolves, you are, with the asking.

HYPOCHONDRIA

So...hypochondria. Hypochondria is a key step to failure. It generally should kick in when you're close to reaching a lofty goal, or perhaps when you've already, briefly, reached it and experienced the glory that can be your life. It's at that moment, when living seems most golden, that you will probably see a headline warning that AIDS has increased 30% in the past two years, and you will suddenly convince yourself that yes, you have AIDS. And everything is over. Even worse, by already having shared a sundae with friends, you've spread the disease to everyone you care about.

And now you would kill for last week, when everything was briefly beautiful, because now all you can think about is the fact that you have an incurable disease, and everything you've nearly accomplished is tainted by this fact. In fact, everything that was good is now a slap in the face, because its joy been so deftly taken away.

The best part about being a hypochondriac is knowing that you're a hypochondriac but submitting to its wiles anyway. Because of course this is going to be the one time that you're not making it up. Yes, you're clever at fooling yourself into disease, but the fact that you're ASYMPTOMATIC obviously means that you are in the early stages of the disease. Also, you cut your lip the other day, and it is NOT HEALING. Because your white blood cells are fucked. You are fucked. Who the crap cares if you're in the finalist stages of the short story contest when you've shown who you really are by contracting a deadly disease? No one is going to be talking about your successes at your poorly attended funeral. They will be whispering to each other, "Is it true he died of...?"

And yes, it will be true. Because this is the one time it's not in your head.

Speaking of weekends

2008-12-10T08:34:00.001-08:00

As was mentioned by my fraudulent counterpart, weekends are a double-edged sword. You might be happy to not have to toil at work, but now you have 48 hours of opportunity to ruin your life. If you work it out correctly, you should wake up on Monday morning with enough guilt about the weekend to consume almost half your next week.

Drinking is key. If you can think or talk or look at a bright light or walk without falling over or do not wish that you were dead on Sunday, then something went wrong on Saturday. Horribly wrong. Sunday should be spent sleeping/drinking away your hangover. How can you do that if you don't have one?

Go out on Saturday night. Even if you don't feel like it. And if you're too poor to go out, find someone who's rich enough or lonely enough to take you out. Or if you're not into going out, then grab a bottle and sit on the couch with a box of tissue and a guitar. Don't let this night go to waste. Instead, lay waste to it.

On Sunday, you should wake up in a cold sweat and not be able to function until the evening. At which point you will have successfully passed the entire weekend. Eat some greasy food and wash it down with a swig of regret. You deserve it.

Starting Your Day Counterpoint

2008-12-08T12:40:00.000-08:00

Starting Your Day. Part Two.

It's true, what you've been told: Starting your day is really an incredibly important part of starting your day. And there are so many ways to do it the fraudulent way. Let's define a standard weekday morning. (The weekend morning is critical in its own way and deserves its own section. That will come later. So calm down, you.)

The most crucial thing about starting your weekday is waking up, and the best way to wake up is by failing not to think immediately about something that really, really annoys or frightens you about the day ahead. Or existence in general. Do this before you even open your eyes. Think about that special someone who f***ed you over last night, or about the presentation you have to give your boss tomorrow that you don't even know what it's about, and why the hell are you supposed to give a presentation but if you don't you will never ever get a raise ever in your life. Think about that.

Then open your eyes. The day is already a real poopcake, and you sort of want to die. This is the correct way to start your day. Then you go to work, and the rest of the day is poopcake too. That can take care of itself. You don't need our help there.

Weekends.

Weekends have an awful specialness all their own. Yes, there is the inherent joy that comes with knowing you don't have to wake up for work. But in its place is the knowledge that you have to fill an entire day on your own. If you do it correctly, you will wake up well past noon, automatically making you feel like a failure for wasting most of one of the two free days that you wait for the entire week. Your head should be reeling from too much sleep, and you should spend at least an hour staring at your wall wondering if you should fall back asleep. But waking up should already be the worst part of your day. You'll only confuse things by having to wake up again.

Stumble to the coffeemaker and take a minute or two to lean against the refrigerator, unable to keep going because the weight of existence is burdening you and only you. Then sigh out loud and continue on making the coffee. The coffee is important. It's free at work, so you're addicted to it, and if you don't drink it, that awesome headache will come. So do it, you. Make that coffee.

By now, it should be well into the 3:00 hour, and you've done nothing but make coffee and possibly stare at the walls. To anyone else, this would be an utter crapstyle life, but to us, you and I, this is success. Because we're not dead. Yet.

Starting Your Day

2008-12-06T10:34:00.000-08:00

Starting Your Day.

So today we're going to look at how you get up in the morning/afternoon and what you can do to try to improve your day from its beginning. These first couple of hours after you slide out of bed or off the couch or from the bathtub are the most critical of your entire day. The decisions you make at this point are going to affect you (and those around you) for the entire day. It's important to take some time to evaluate routines and make sure you're building a solid, sturdy foundation.

After you snooze your alarm several times and finally face the sick truth that you're probably going to have to wake up, what's the first thing you do? It's probably smoke a cigarette, right? I want to first suggest that you consider holding off. I find that if you go to the bathroom first, you avoid the chance that the early-morning cig will work its digestive-track magic and cause you to soil yourself. While shitting yourself is almost never fun, it's an especially awkward way to begin your day.

After you use the bathroom, feel free to light up that delicious morning cigarette. If you don't smoke, then you might want to consider starting.

Now, it's time to eat something. A lot of people just drink coffee in the morning and expect this to sustain them until lunch. This is pretty flawed logic, though, considering that you haven't probably eaten in hours, or even days. They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Usually they're completely wrong, but in this instance, they're right. Eat something. Something big. Take a little extra time in the morning to cook eggs, toast, pancakes or a pie. You may be late to work habitually because of this, but let's be honest, you were habitually late before this and work has likely gotten used to it by now. They'll probably thank you when you come in more energized and smelling of bacon instead of vodka.

What about the shower? Do you do it in the morning or at night? I suggest the morning. Going to bed filthy isn't fun, but going to work without a shower is just going to turn your already miserable day into one that's also physically uncomfortable. Itching your filthy, oily skin under your dress pants or Burger King uniform is only going to get you weird looks from coworkers and customers. And not weird in a cool, David Lynch way, but more of a Michael Jackson's face way.

If you take a car to work, you should really start taking the train/bus/whatever you have in your city. Relying on public transportation will provide you a good few excuses for being horribly late to work. Also, you'll get that sort of respect from your peers, especially if you live in a city with shitty public transportation, like LA. They'd never do it, but they're happy that you are. This is the kind of goodwill that can be banked and used against them later.

And when you get to work, if at all possible, spend a good, long time doing nothing. Adjust to your new environment. This requires more coffee, banter with coworkers, surfing the internet, checking your personal email, shopping on Amazon, checking your personal email again, going to the bathroom to masturbate or stare at your face in the mirror for a really long time, or just sitting at your desk and holding back your tears.

When you're good and ready, jump in to work and get your day going. If you follow the tips above, you're sure to make it through your day alive enough to go out and get drunk and start the whole thing over again the next morning.

2008-12-05T06:59:00.000-08:00

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