Your addictions

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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.