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.

So this is the New Year (again)

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.