Your home

One day you'll be sitting in your small apartment in New York City, broke because you just paid your rent and because you're just always broke, and you'll decide it's time to get the hell out and go buy a house somewhere instead of writing obscenely large checks every month to the landlord that doesn't even pretend to care about your vermin problems anymore.

At this point, you should make an impulsive decision to move out of state and find a quiet place to set down your roots. There's nothing particularly fraudulent about wanting to be someplace quiet, or even about making a split decision to move out of the big city and try someplace new. What's fraudulent is how you think having yourself as a landlord would be in any way preferable to the 20-year-old Greek landlord you used to give rent to in exchange for not fixing things.

You should have very grand plans when you first buy the house to learn how to be a real homeowner who does home improvement projects and tracks real estate values and, like, mows the lawn. But not long after you receive a notice that you will be fined by the city if you don't cut your front "lawn" (weeds) to a non-blight height, you will realize that you're just going to have to pay somebody to do this. All of this.

So now, whatever money you've saved by not paying extortion-size rent in the city is now completely spoken for with house stuff. Oh, and don't be surprised by the fact that you now get a bill for EVERYTHING. Including trash pickup. And water. And taxes. It's never ending. Your special account you set aside to put all your masses of saved cash away so you could take a trip to Belize and party with McAfee should have the same $25 you started it with, and nothing else. You should feel like your house is a needy child with a severe handicap that requires constant care, attention, and massive amounts of money and worry.

But, also like a needy, disabled child, your house will give you random moments of surprising happiness. One day you'll realize you can just walk around nude all day, or play guitar and yell (nude), or decide you think one of your dining room walls is ill-placed and drive to Home Depot to go sledgehammer shopping. And again, like a handicapped child, this will be your problem for years to come, until you can swindle someone into taking it from you.

Your lottery winnings

Sometimes, when all the reliable news sources (Yahoo!) tell you about how enormous the lottery jackpot has become, you should start feeling like you'd be pretty stupid not to spend the money you were saving for your "lean" Christmas on a lottery ticket instead.* After all, God owes you for that crippling depression He gave you, right? He'll probably pay you back in some sort of spiritual legal settlement with this particular lottery. At least, that's what you should tell yourself as you stare at the lukewarm oatmeal in your coffee cup that's congealed like some half-digested brain because you never really learned how to make oatmeal properly.

Anyway, it's time to take a trip to 7-Eleven and buy yourself $500 million dollars!

As you walk down the street to 7-Eleven, you should seriously consider how you'll spend those millions. First off, you guess you've got to shovel a bunch over to your family, which should hopefully fulfill your familial obligations for life and act as a money-rich salve for all those weddings and funerals you failed to attend and feelings you failed to emote. Then you think about how you can reward the four people in your life who let you call them friends by paying off their house loans, student debts and car payments, even though you haven't talked to most of them in months and even though everyone involved would probably feel incredibly awkward about the situation: them because you're trying to reward their friendship with money when they'd probably just prefer to know you're not actively ignoring them and you because you feel like they feel like you're not giving them enough money.

Once that's over, you have to figure out what to do with the rest of that $200 million or so after taxes. You should probably give it some charity or something, but then you think maybe it'd be better to give it to individual dying people or something, since then you'll be able to see the results of your fantastic generosity, and as far as the reliable news sources (Yahoo!) have told you, every charity ever is a gigantic fraud. But how do you find those dying people, and isn't it sort of gauche to go up to grieving people to try to throw money at them? Also, the more you think about it, the more you realize money doesn't buy off death or even, really, illness, and that winning the lottery will probably cause you to contract (more) cancer in some horrible cosmic irony.

As you find yourself standing in the 7-Eleven, looking more lost than the homeless guy looking lost by the hot dog spinner, you should come to the realization that the only reason you want to win the lottery is to buy off guilt as some cheap (well, spiritually cheap) way of making yourself a happier person. Then you should go ahead and buy a Slurpee instead, and find that that sort of works too.


*Actually, if you've been living a fraudulent life, you should have been buying them all along anyway.

Your vacation

Running away is always your goal, so one great thing to have on the horizon at all times is a vacation. You should make sure you plan enough of your vacation beforehand so that you have transportation to the destination and back home, but everything else about your trip should just be sort of hopes and fears. You should make sure to tell people that you'll definitely go to whatever museum thing they recommend you do while you're there, just so you'll have the opportunity to feel bad about the fact that you never even tried to do that.

Going out of the country is always preferable, because for a few moments during your trip, or for several days, you'll concoct schemes to stay in that country that involve all kinds of fraud and shit. You should briefly consider just becoming a weird outlaw living off the land, or a panhandler with a knapsack on a stick, and then realize that you'd die so fast in that situation that you'd be better off selling your body for money. You should start to wonder what it takes to get into the prostitution biz. Do you need a pimp, or is that more of a suggestion? Maybe some good, sturdy hooking shoes? Since you're new to this, you're going to have the novelty thing going for you, and you'll probably get a ton of business in the beginning. You'll probably also make friends with a scrappy hooker who seems like she has a heart of gold but ends up backstabbing you at some point, probably with a knife. This will give you street cred, though. Which is like regular credit except easier to get with a bad FICO score. Maybe you'd eventually meet a generous John who comes around pretty frequently and never makes you have sex, but instead asks you to talk about your life, but really you're sort of doing this because of the sex, which is something you'll awkwardly realize one moonless night on the corner and then never think about again. But you'll need the money, so you'll do this "talk" thing.

And why will you need the money? To run away, obviously. But this time it's running away from your life of danger and hooking, and that's what you really want. You want a reason to run away that makes sense and isn't just that your life is meaningless and comfortable and suffocating you with its lack of apocalypse. Also, you really want a reason to finally wear those hooker shoes. 

Your impending professional demise

At the end of each work day, you are one work day closer to being fired. So this is sort of bittersweet, because on the one hand, you've made it one more day! You pulled that wool over the world's eyes one more time like a real master wool puller, you. But on the other hand, you're probably going to be alive tomorrow. So, there's that.

If you're doing it right, every work day should be filled with the dread that you're going to massively fuck something up, or that something you've done in the past that was massively fucked up will be discovered. It doesn't really matter if you know you've done something wrong or not. In fact, in most cases, you'll be pretty certain that you've done everything exactly right. You filed that report thing right on time. You touched base with all the right people. You've made sure everyone was tracking. You've even circled back and synergized and looped in and performed other acrobatic wonders. But that's not what matters here. Oh no. What matters is that living fraudulently is like walking across a tightrope that's held on both sides by people that don't really know/like you.

So, since you're bound to be fired sooner or later (sooner), it's best to begin planning (worrying) about how you will survive (become homeless) in your new unemployed situation. You can live without cable by stealing from the Internet, so that's an easy one. You can probably sell a lot of your old stuff, like your video games or jewelry or semen. You can even get by without food for a while. And then there's always food stamps, which you'd never get out of some completely undeserved sense of pride, but just knowing that you could get them is almost as satisfying as a sandwich. The very last thing to cut out of your budget should be your Internet. Why? You'll need it to look for a new job or whatever. But more importantly, what's the point of being unemployed if you can't spend time writing blogs or stalking Facebook or online dating? You might as well just continue having a stupid job so you can use the Internet.

And then it becomes clear why if you ever lose your job, you'll lose your life. It's just the Internet. There isn't anything left of you that isn't tied into the Internet. So, better get back to work and make some $$$ for your Internet connection (entire existence).

Your search for meaning

Well, here you are, almost four years later and still alive, somehow. Annoying. With your youthful certainty that you'd be dead by [17, 25, 30] now a part of your golden past, you've come to realize that you need to find some stupid meaning in your life, or at least a thing you do that you can pretend is some sort of "purpose." The work you do obviously has nothing to do with that purpose, so what else is there? Smoking e-cigarettes? Playing board games? Driving aimlessly? Watching TV shows you hate? Considering (but not realistically) becoming a doctor or lawyer? It's probably none of those things. Which is too bad, because you don't do anything else, except sometimes write some shitty shit or play a shitty thing or two on the guitar.

So what are the things you should do to find this missing meaning? Your first thought will probably be to volunteer and help some people who live less fraudulently than you. Maybe you'll join the Red Cross. Or even the Peace Corps. Maybe they'll even send you to some distant place that will end up changing your entire perspective on life and make you one of those intolerable people who talk about being sent to another country and having life-changing experiences. Briefly excited, you should begin to fill out forms for one of these programs before you realize two things: 1) You'll probably be sent to an aidsy-type country where you won't be doing anything except showing people who weigh 25 pounds that you objectively have one of the greatest lives on earth and don't appreciate any of it, and 2) You'll need to get a tetanus booster, and that's just probably not going to happen because you're lazy.

That's okay, there are many other fraudulent ways to look for meaning. One is continuing education. Remember how you liked learning things at some point in your life? Yeah! Well, that will cease to be a possibility once you remember it requires asking old professors for recommendations and filling out applications.

As the more realistic possibilities, including the army, close before you, you should begin to grope around for any old thing, like god. Truthfully, you're envious of people who believe in god, because god is a great replacement for having any actual meaning. Plus, He's a great excuse for doing a lot of things that would otherwise look crazy, like talking to thin air or genocide. You should fully plan on going to church or mosque or temple or whatever. But, man, they sure meet early on weekends.

When god has failed you, you should just give up and fall back on old faithful: waiting for the apocalypse and being secretly jealous of people caught in the frankenstorm.

Your dead dad

So, yeah. At some point recently, or maybe a while ago, your dad decided to fuck up your year and die. Which is pretty typical of him, and really would you have expected him not to do something like that? No. That's his style. Or it was, rather.

Well, now what? Your first reaction post death should be to briefly question your grip on whatever belief system you have. You're an atheist? You should debate becoming a believer briefly because you were thinking about your dad once the other day and the wind kicked up and rustled some tree branches and that was definitely your dad giving you a sign from beyond and not just the sound leaves make. But this will be brief, and the only times you will consider believing in God again will be when you win $280 from a $5 scratch-off lotto ticket when you really, really needed a new goddamn iPhone. Thanks, God.

The first anniversary of the death will be bizarre, and you'll go to some grave, or maybe someone's house, and have a good laugh at some dumb shit your dad used to do. As you go along, you will start to only remember the hilarious stuff your dad did and not the times he drunkenly swore at you or refused to pay for your AP English textbook because it wasn't a baseball glove. Instead you'll just remember the times when he drunkenly wore a beret and biking shorts with a hole in the crotch to the supermarket and showed everyone his balls. Or maybe the time he drunkenly fell down. That once.

Eventually, you'll get to a place where you can see all of your dad for what he was. You will see the good things a little better than the bad things, because they're easier to look at, and that's been kind of your rule of thumb regarding what to look at in life anyway. You'll blame the appropriate character flaws of yours on your dad; but you'll stop blaming the obviously wrong ones on him. You'll be able to talk about him honestly, and when people apologize about bringing up dads when they find out yours is dead, you'll be able to truthfully tell them it's no big deal. And then, one day, you'll resurrect a two-year dead blog to write a post about him that no one will read and it will feel like a step toward something non-fraudulent.

And then you'll realize just how fraudulent that is.

Chatroulette and you

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*

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

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?

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.

Mutual liking

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

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

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

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

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

If you should know anything about yourself, it's that your feelings are crap. This doesn't mean you should feel crappy all the time (which you do), but that in a broader sense all your non-feeling-like-crap feelings are also crap. Which is just to say that when you feel something, you're probably totally wrong. If you feel sad, you're probably actually excited. If you feel like you're happy, you're probably about to die from self-inflicted peanut and bee-sting poisoning. Your feelings are all sorts of wrong, so you should learn how to ignore them. Better yet, you should rid yourself of them completely.

Let's say you feel like you're in love. In actuality, you're about to be run over by a rusty train that goes just fast enough to kill you but not fast enough to kill you immediately upon impact. Any real person would be feeling fear and dread at this moment. But not you. You're all giddy and goofy and smiling, even though soon you'll be purpleberry goo on the tracks, and not in nearly enough shock for it not to hurt worse than group anal raping. This is how fraudulent your feelings are.

Or let's say you're supposed to meet up with a fantastic person at 8:00, and that ridiculously awesome person happens to be a minute late. Instead of doing what a real person would do, crying with gratitude and happiness that this other person even remembers your sad little name, you probably feel unjustifiable hatred. And when the person arrives five seconds later, instead of holding on to them for dear life for agreeing to be associated with you, you'll probably stab them in the stomach with a pointy stick for ruining your life with their lateness.

To counteract these potential issues, you should block out every feeling you have. If possible, you should also ignore things like hunger and thirst and maybe your need to urinate. For all you know, that need to urinate could just be another trick your body is playing on you to distract you from a pain worse than group anal raping. Also, when you accidentally slice off your thumb while cutting a bagel, that distress is nothing more than your body lying to you. Once you realize and accept that every automatic response your body gives is wrong, you'll be well on your way to creating a long, loveless existence with some person who's perpetually late.

Your sleep schedule

Since the inside of your body is like the Middle East, with all the chemicals fighting each other and everything always on the verge of total collapse, you'll find that sleep is unpredictable and usually only comes when you don't want it.

You load your body full of caffeine in the morning, to stay alive, and then you slowly add more and more chemicals to the mix throughout the day: nicotine, antacids, analgesics, alcohol, anti-depressants, sedatives, and more caffeine. You've become so adept at managing this balance, that you probably know instinctively when your body needs a little pick-me-up, or put-me-down. But when it's time to sleep, all this better living through modern chemistry is going to complicate things. Also, since the power of everybody's livers is slightly different, like microwaves, it's impossible to know exactly how much of any one chemical you need to take in order to have its effects kick in or wear off in time for sleep.

You have a couple of choices now, the best of which is obviously to take over-the-counter sleep aides, no matter what else you've put into your body. Look at it this way: it's over-the-counter, so it can't possibly hurt you. It doesn't matter that your blood is more man-made at this point than natural--WalMart would never sell you something that could possibly hurt you if you take the recommended (or just slightly higher) dosage.

Another choice you have is to try to flush out your system with a bunch of water or maybe charcoal. But the problem with this idea is that it might work. And then you'll be left with a body in its natural state. And that's sick.

You can also just resign yourself to never sleeping well at night and spend most of your time during the day trying to find a place where you can take a 10-minute nap. Some good places for this are: your car, the cold linoleum tile of the office bathroom, the spot under your desk where you're pretty sure no one can see you, a nearby park, any vacant lot, a relatively clean dumpster, the roof of a building, the cold linoleum tile of the gym bathroom, and the subway.

Your hopes and dreams

As dead as you are inside, which is quite dead, you still have hopes and dreams. You still somehow, against all odds and evidence, think you're going to be rich, famous, or just moderately happy one day. You still pretend like your life is headed down a general path toward these hopes and dreams, and that one day you'll be the success that you've been telling everyone you're going to be (but that everyone has stopped believing you about for some time now).

But at some point, you need to start rethinking these dreams. You need to refocus your aim. That day should be today. Or tomorrow, if you're really hungover today. But then definitely tomorrow. And you've really got to pick a new hopes-and-dreams basket into which you can pour all of your rotten eggs.

And that dream should be the lottery.

You should start playing the lottery compulsively. You should know which days the Mega Millions is drawn, and you should have a set of numbers you play every time, in addition to spending ten extra dollars on computer-generated quickpicks. Your regular set of numbers should have extremely thought-out significance to you and should border on psychotic numerology.

You should also have recurring nightmares that involve your forgetting to buy a lottery ticket, and then your regular set of numbers turning out to win. In these dreams, your depression should be so deep and palpable that you walk around the entire next day looking like you just got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

You should begin to talk to all of your friends about how you're going to win the lottery. But then, you should start to become horribly reclusive and never mention the lottery to anyone, since you're sure that once you win, they will all be begging you for money, and you'll eventually have to hire a bodyguard and change your name and your appearance just to get away from your former, awful friends.

It's important to remember that your belief in your eventually winning the lottery should be so intense that you have already basically spent all the money. Also, every time someone wins who isn't you, you should feel exactly the same as if that person had come into your home in the middle of the night and robbed you of everything you own, leaving nothing but a urine stain where they decided to pee all over your living room carpet.

Your instant messaging and eventual death

Every day, you should have long, meaningless written conversations with any number of people whom you judge based on whether they write "hahaha" or "lol." These conversations should be held simultaneously with several people on completely unrelated meaningless topics. They should rarely contain anything besides links to hilarious videos and photos or brief comments which make you laugh in written form. This is how you should be getting to know people. This is instant messaging.

Aside from your regular AIM/MSN/Yahoo account, which should have on at all times in a magical IM conglomerater, you should have your IM active on every social networking site you visit. Also, when you check your Gmail every two seconds, you should have Gtalk open. Eventually, you'll be able to figure out the schedules of everyone else who uses these accounts, and you should make general, accusatory assumptions about people when they're offline or online at unusual times. This is especially important if you've recently either started or stopped seeing someone.

Let's say you've recently met someone you like, have their IM information, and see them log on. You should die a little more with every second that passes if they don't write you immediately. If and when they finally do write, you should be so depressed that your seemingly casual response of "Hey, what's up?" has so much self-loathing and hatred and relief contained in it that the other person's eyes will explode upon reading it. Also, if this person you just met doesn't have IM, you should be aware that you two will never date, because how they hell are you supposed to get to know them?

If you're in a dating-like situation with someone and they don't log on during their regular hours, they obviously think you're disgusting and don't want to talk to you anymore. This will be especially obvious if you see them log on to Gmail but not their actual IM account. Clearly they're avoiding you, because you're probably the only person on their IM contact list. If you're not, then they're probably logged on and invisible and flirting with someone else. Either way, if they log on to Gmail but not regular IM, your relationship is over. This is also true if they're logged on but have an away message up. They're not away. They just hate you.

If you've recently broken up with someone, IM will be the best way to stalk their movements on a soul-destroying real-time basis. Of course, you'll also stalk their social networking pages, but IM will be your best indicator of what's happening right this very second. For instance, if you write them to say hello (because you're still pretending to be friends), sometimes they won't respond immediately. This means that they're currently making out with someone. Every second it takes them to write back means they're getting to the next base. If they get past 60th base, this is how you'll know you're not pretending to be friends anymore.

Ultimately, the beauty of IM is that you can pretend to interact with people while living in total social isolation. For all you know, you could be talking to a robot who's decently good at imitating your friends. In fact, every time you have a conversation, you should suspect that you're actually talking to a large group of people who hate you and are messaging you solely to mock your responses. This is not only possible but likely. Luckily, since you never leave your computer, you probably won't ever be able to confirm it.

Your goddamn iPhone

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.