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.

Your grand plans

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

No matter how skinny, toned, muscly, or just plain average-looking you are, you probably think you're fat. If you don't think you're fat, you should. Look at yourself in the mirror. Do you see that pudgy area? Yeah, well so does everyone else.

The best part about your distorted body image is that no amount of fasting, dieting, exercising or purging will ever change the way your body looks to you. Other people may come up to you and comment on how great you're looking and that they can really tell that you've been working out. But the way you should hear this is: Thank goodness you've finally started to do something about that body. You see, your body is like a semi-nice car. You know that underneath the many layers of dirt film and superficial engine problems, there's actually a decent car there. Except you're the only one that knows that. Everyone else just walks by and writes "Wash Me Please" with their finger in your back window.

Nonetheless, you should torture yourself by continuing to go on diet/exercise binges where you eat nothing but paprika and lemon zest for 12 days while going to the gym twice a day and sitting in the steam room until right before you pass out. Each time you put yourself through this moronic ordeal, you're getting a sweet bonus: not only will you shed a few pounds off your body, but you'll also shave a good few years off your life.

How smart you are

One thing about your personality that is pretty consistent across all its aspects is a deep, hidden shame. You are ashamed of something, somewhere, all the time. If there's an aspect of your life that you don't feel ashamed of, simply having this realization should cause you to find some reason to be ashamed. One of the best things to be ashamed of is your total failure to do anything productive with your massive intellect. 

Let's say you live in a city like New York or Chicago or Los Angeles. Any of these places is rife with museums, art galleries, opera houses, random art installations, poetry readings, book signings, theatre, concerts, lectures and lots of other stuff you never go to. Also, since many of these are free, your bad money-management skills aren't to blame. It's just the deep, fundamental fact that you suck that keeps you at home, drinking cheap wine from the bottle and watching shows on the History channel that discuss who would be the victor in a hypothetical brawl between a pirate and a ninja. 

Now, you can probably talk, off-the-cuff, about lots of cultured-sounding, politically relevant or academicish things. But you were also probably the person in college who never went to class, did roughly 1/10th of the reading, and was still able to write the final paper and get a B+. This is how you channel your smarts. Instead of doing the actual work, all your intellectual power goes into faking it at the last minute and tricking everyone around you into believing you're brilliant. Imagine if you signed up for a marathon, but instead of spending the months before training your body to be able to run for 26 miles you instead laid around in your bedroom dreaming up a plot, like a bomb threat, to get the marathon canceled. That's how you live your "life."

When you finally realize that if you were less lazy you could have gone to Harvard, studied virology, and become the person to finally create the zombie virus that brings about the apocalypse, but instead you went to a state school, majored in French and are now working a series of increasingly humiliating temp jobs, you should get lightheaded with shame. Then, you should turn on the TV and find out once and for all if a gladiator could stand a chance against a samurai. 

Getting picked up

You were most likely a geek or some other sort of social reject in high school, which means you probably didn't date anyone. Or if you did, it was because you were both desperate, and "dating" was just a euphemism for "studying for Latin midterms." So now that you've grown out of your physical awkwardness and became not blatantly ugly, you still treat people hitting on you like a big deal, no matter how often it happens. It's a similar feeling to when a cashier gives you a twenty as change instead of a dollar. You're both excited and thinking, "This can't be right. They must not be paying attention." You should also have the same serious moral qualms regarding whether to inform them of their huge mistake. "Oh, I'm sorry, you meant to hit on the attractive, nonalcoholic person over there," is what a nonfraudulent person might say. But not you. No, you want the attention, no matter how unwanted it is.

Let's say someone approaches you in the supermarket. They're jaundiced, they're unattractive, they're wearing a mesh shirt with a cutoff tank top underneath that showcases their shoe-leather stomach. They deliver a pickup line that makes no sense but somehow insults you in a deep, meaningful way. You automatically hate them. They ask for your phone number. Your brain responds with, "Ew, no," while your mouth responds with your phone number. You then have to spend the next month not picking up the phone from any unrecognized caller. Also, you're probably the type who attracts people who don't get the message when you don't respond. So basically you're in for weeks of phone calls and steadily worsening, desperate voicemails.

Now, you might be asking yourself why you can't just give a fake number. Or respond with, "No, I'm not interested," or at least, "I'm seeing someone," which would do everyone a favor. Well, firstly, you're a coward. If they call that fake number while you're standing there, you'll be so ashamed at getting caught that you'll probably end up going on a date out of guilt. Secondly, and shamefully, you want this person to like you and think there's a possibility they could have you. As previously mentioned, you need everyone to like you. It doesn't matter that you find them less dateable than margarine; you need to be desired, and if it's by this snaggle-toothed beast of a thing, so be it. In fact, you might as well go ahead and pick up the phone when they call to see what terrible idea this awful person has for a date. Then you might as well go on the date so you can post a status update about how ridiculously bad your date was. Eventually, you'll probably get married in order to entertain your friends with your story of how you got married as a joke. And then, somehow, this will end up being the only successful relationship you'll ever have in your life.

Summer

Of all the seasons, this is the one you should dread the most. By far. And this is because summer is nothing but a constant reminder of how inadequate your body is. 

Wanna go to the beach? Better buy SPF 208930 for your albino skin. Wanna go to a pool party? Better make sure you get super drunk and high first so you won't care about that awful midsection of yours that has started to fold over on itself like an American automobile company. 

We're fed a lot of propaganda about summer being "fun." You may even hear your friends or coworkers talk about how much they're looking forward to it. This is just something people say. It makes you seem like less of a broken person to the world if you claim to enjoy a double 95 (95 degree heat and 95% humidity).  Somehow, saying you don't like summer strikes other people the same way as saying "I don't like having sex with full-grown adults." 

The summer might seem like a time of renewal, hope, joy and fun. But this was only when you were a kid and didn't have to go to school. Now that you're an adult, nothing changes in the summer except that it gets so hot that you run your inefficient air conditioner all day and night, destroying your energy bill as well as the planet. And you're still hot. You should take at least eleven cold showers a day and start drinking as early as possible. You might think it sounds counter intuitive to drink alcohol, which makes you feel hot, when it's so hot outside that it takes all your willpower not to actually sob over it. Well, you think lots of things that are totally stupid, so just drink up and sit next to your AC until Summer finally passes away and you run back into the sweet, dead arms of Fall and Winter.