How To Convince People That You Have A Life

 

  Look, let's cut the crap here. I've met you as a shivering, sniveling blob of goo with a toffee-like consistency and through a few blog posts and far too many great hugs have turned you into a successful, athletic, seductive, socially aware, harassment free individual (who can write quite well). Armed with so much skill I suspect that you plunged straight into the act of wild and unbridled artistic creation.

However, sometimes you'll find that plummeting head first into endeavors will leave you alone and confused. When you venture out of your hovel on occasion, you find that people have started to speak in strange tongues and perform unusual ritualistic equestrian themed dances. The women have become more attractive. The men, have not. In this new mold of your existence with some things added and many thrown out you'll find yourself without what the cool kids are calling "a life". This bothers you because you have not yet reached a self-aware ninja status. I don't blame you for that because, I haven't written a blog post about how. Soon.

It's not as if I don't have a life either and I'm writing this as some sort of therapeutic experience, but it just so happens that I'm in a position to tell you what to do to show the world that you're living it up and being relaxed and groovy all over the place. Since writing list based articles will cause you to be greeted with a condescending 'Oh, I see..." by the writer folk, I have written this as a list based article using bullet points instead of numbers. I tremble with glee at this loophole. "What list is a list without numbers?" I demand, cheekily. You may observe this mutant non-list below:

• Social Networking is your friend : To truly be a person who is outgoing and social, you must be online, glued to a social networking website at all times. This means sharing things on Facebook and whatever it is that people do on twitter (which I think is talking without listening, but refined to an art). However quiet your real(?) social experience is is exactly how loud you need to be on an online social network. The best part about this is none of what you share needs to be true at all. Maybe now is the time to make a quick trip to Thailand?  

• Associate with aspiring photographers : I am given to believe that photographers love to take black and white pictures of things from very close or very far away, and all the best photographs have subjects that are old and dirty. If you're willing to get old and dirty then this should be no problem as you will be quickly surrounded by slightly professional photographers in silly sleeveless vests. If you aren't, however, then you will mostly be around the amateur photographer crowd( 2014 has better cameras) and you will have many a picture taken during the period of your association with them. Ask for a per-Photoshopped copy of these photos and release them on Facebook in small chunks to maintain a steady stream of photo activity.

• You are super busy right now : Once in a while, some unfortunate soul will insist on inviting you to gyrate to the remastered remix of the remix of the song based on the looped ten second sample of an actual song recorded in 1956 by someone with talent. You could go of course, but you're enjoying the state of ineffective homeostasis that you've created at home, which is thinking about doing something amazing, and not doing it. Going out will make it even less likely that you get around to doing the thing that you have planned to do but are absolutely not going to do, and this is something you'd like to avoid. This is where you being to insist that you would have come if you weren't busy. Use the words "so" and "totally" multiple times for efficacy and realism. 

• Lie : This will come in handy when you do have to speak to people. They will ask you what you are up to, as this is the default thing that people ask in any situation. You will find that this is a horrifying question for someone with no life, and you are not content by saying "oh, you know...uh" dreamily. In this case you can just lie. Mention that during your daily sensitive meditation and quiet reflection hour, you had an epiphany about your purpose in life, and you can't really talk about it because it's very raw. You can also tell a lie that is so obviously a lie that it couldn't possibly be a lie. You could be composing songs for rock stars or a secret identity one blonde wig away from being a rock star. The sky is the limit.

• Write blog posts : Write blog posts that dispense expert advice on how to do a host of things that you have no idea about. This will cast the impression that you have done all the things that you speak of, and thus must have a very eventful life. If you are unsure of what advice or solutions to offer, you will find all that and much more in the pages of Archie Comics.

If you're confused and slightly itchy, I don't blame you. This is a lot to take in. Now tell the world that you're confused and slightly itchy because of all the tonnes and tonnes of reading you've been doing of late, and return to vacantly staring at pictures of cats.
Don't worry, your secret is safe with me.

P.S. Some people have sidled up to me in public places and said that they believe that most of these blog posts I write are ploys to attract women. I'd like to dispel this notion by stating the fact that everything I ever do at any time is a ploy to attract women.

I'm glad that we've got that out of the way.