I WAS A TEENAGED OBJECT OF OBSESSION, WHICH SOUNDS A LOT WORSE THAN IT ACTUALLY WAS

(This is a transcript of a live reading I did for The Brunch Club‘s weekly Arts & Laughs night. It was fun and makes for a v good lazy blog post.)

Before I begin, I want to make sure you all know that I’m by no means a comedian. I’m just a girl, standing in front of a crowd, hoping they’ll distractedly craft while she talks about herself. I also want to make it very clear that if I’m shaking it’s because I’m like a super cool, edgy, tortured alcoholic artist type and not because I’m nervous so fuck off, y’all don’t know me, etc. And, just FYI, I’m reading this directly from a sheet of paper because I, like, don’t even want to be here and can’t be bothered, not because I’m afraid of forgetting stuff because I mentally deficient-ed myself on New Years Eve by parachuting what was almost certainly bath salts and haven’t been the same since.

TBH, I do tons of drugs. Not in a sad Anna Nicole kinda way but in an attractive, totally non-laughable Hunter S. Thompson kinda way. They help me write about how much I hate things like, oh I dunno, my parents, my boss, alcohol, drugs, the institution of comedy, consumerist education and social justice warrior pussies. Yeah, I said it, pussies. Feel free to leave if you can’t handle it. It’s just a word you intellectual infants. To clarify, that was a joke. Again, I’m not a stand up comedian. I’m a writer. It’s what I do. It’s what I live. I’m also a very talented singer-songwriter slash actress, but we can engage with that facet of my creative self at a later date.

OK, so I hear that today’s topic is “jobs”. Quick Q from Wednesday me (yes, I wrote this a week ago): who made the obligatory Apple joke this evening? Or is this it? Present-tense me can’t answer that question because I straight up wasn’t listening to any of you. As you may have noticed, I’m very self involved.

Anyway, I, just like the rest of you peasants, have worked my fair share of jobs. Unlike you, or maybe like you because I probably don’t know you, I’m an overly accommodating person, which means that I get shat on at work, in a totally non-sexual sort of way, all the time. I know what you’re thinking – “bummer, this weirdly formal presentation almost had potential, guess I’ll just sit here and look at TubGirl on my phone”. I encourage you all to do just that for the rest of the time I’m up here. Commit that image to memory. It’s something I sincerely want to be associated with.

Being overly accommodating leads to a number of problems in the working world – you take too many shifts out of guilt. You smile when fat American tourists yell “Hey, Hooters girl!” at you from across the street. You let your creepy boss rub your shoulders for way too long after you tell him you can’t work at the restaurant that day because you’re literally purple and covered with hives, then decline his not-at-all tempting offer to come to your house and give you money “out of the kindness of his heart” as delicately and politely as humanly possible. Most importantly, when you’re too accommodating, crazy people love you.

Even when I’m putting on my absolute coldest front, the most out-there person in a twenty block radius will somehow find me and cling to me. It’s like a moth to a flame. They can see into my soul. For example, while filming a work video at Parc Lafontaine this summer, an old man clad in nothing but a hospital gown lumbered towards me like it was the Night of the Living Dead and started kind of clawing at my arms. Everyone else moved away but I just stood there and was I nervously like, “Oh, hello…” Until someone literally pulled me away from him. I’ve had this attitude towards the strangest of strangers ever since I was 15 and started working at a used CD and DVD store in a rather derelict neighbourhood in my hometown of Ottawa. The regulars were genuine freaks so, obviously, they loved me. Of course, 10 years later I’m like, “And honestly, you guys, I loved them too.” But at the time it was all super fucking creepy. For my first piece of art, I’d like to present you with a sketch of one such regular: Dean Daggett.

(Not a super accurate depiction, but whatever, I was in a rush GIMME A BREAK)

Dean was a large, sweaty and all around odious man who looked a little like a dinosaur with horn rimmed glasses, as evidenced by this sketch behind me. He would bring his own turntable into the store on a regular basis along with a number of children’s records from the 50s and 60s and play them at top volume while yelling at my co-workers and I about the time his friend shat himself “real, real bad” on the bus. Dean loved this story. The real takeaway of the tale was that Dean was an awful person who refused to let his buddy off of public transit in order to find a bathroom and then, once the duce had been dropped, literally pointed at him while laughing and screaming “THIS GUY FUCKEN SHAT HIMSELF! HA HA HA HA!” Legend had it that this was a true comedic triumph, what with the rest of the bus (driver included) joining in and mocking his friend mercilessly. In reality, I’m sure Dean just shat himself on a bus once and spent the next 15 minutes daydreaming as he awaited his usual stop at Elmvale Mall instead of seeking a bathroom immediately. He was just that kinda guy.

For my next piece of art, I’d like to introduce you to the man who served as the impetus for this whole story. This is CD Warehouse regular Milton Hunt who, as a perpetual singleton all throughout high school, I suspected may be the love of my life, whether I liked it or not.

(This sketch, on the other hand, is eerily accurate and perfectly captures Milton’s essence)

Milton Hunt was 40-something going on 105 and lived with his mother, whom he, on more than one occasion, claimed to be either dead or ailing. On the days she was alive and well, she was just a quote “fucking bitch”. He would call the store numerous times each day, always asking to speak to me. If I wasn’t there, he would reluctantly speak to another female employee, but only for half as long as usual. Milton would keep me on the phone for upwards of half an hour looking up DVD titles for his favourite actors, among them Steven Segall, Arnold “Swartzshegger” and QUOTE “that jiggaboo… what’s his name… Snipes”. Sometimes, a few minutes into our conversation I’d hear the slight splashing of water because, well, he was calling me from his mother’s bathtub. Super cas, no big deal, right? And for some reason he was always telling me to order pizza. More specifically, he’d say things like “you shouldordera pizza. Sit down, you know, with yer boyfriend an’ pop in an old DVD and then ya open the pizza box, ya know, puts his arm around you, you go with the little controller thing and go watch the DVD with yer pizza, maybe a coke?”

After two years of dealing with this guy on the phone and in person, he calls the store crying. Apparently, he’s dying. Milton Hunt, the accidental love of my life, is dying and he’s leaving me all of his stuff. He promised me all of his silver and gold that definitely didn’t exist and all his shitty, nicotine stained DVDs that most certainly did. He told me to get my boyfriend’s truck, come over to his house and pick up all of his stuff. Hmmm… not to be a dick to a dying guy, but this is when I started getting a little suspicious. Just a little bit. He gave me his address and told me to call and check in on him later that week. Then, he hung up. I didn’t hear from him for a full week. A record seven days had passed, and no word whatsoever. I went to see that movie Half Nelson, where Ryan Gosling is addicted to crack or whatever and found myself crying – not over his first-world, cismale bullshit bougie meth habit, but over the awful person I had become. How could I let Milton die without fulfilling his final request? A dark cloud hung over me – I was 17 and had basically killed a man by making him feel like there was nothing left to hold on to.

But, days later, who walks into my downtrodden CD store without a care in the world but ol’ Milton himself. He made no mention of his near-death experience, aside from unzipping his fanny pack and flashing his fluids at me. He asked me about a few DVD titles, but didn’t stick around too long. I guess he was a little bummed that I foiled his whole plot to kidnap me thing, or whatever that was. I guess the moral of the story is something along these lines: everyone is out to get you, intentions are never simply “good”, trust no one, and don’t feel bad about being a dick if it means possibly avoiding certain death or a lifetime chained up in Milton Hunt’s bathtub being forced to watch Arnold Schwartzshegger movies.

(Sarah Davidson, artist and high school confidante, spells it out for me)

WHAT I’VE LEARNED ABOUT LOVE FROM WATCHING CATFISH: THE TV SHOW

(if you didn’t make it to/livestream VAN HORNE VARIETY LIVE, the beginning part of this post won’t make much sense)

We learned a lot about relationships this evening, haven’t we folks? Yes, we’ve covered a lot of ground tonight, but I think we should take a few moments to acknowledge the darker side of this evening’s chosen theme. I feel like we’ve been a bit irresponsible in our approach to the subject of relationships tonight – what you’ve seen in the last 3 hours probably restored your faith in true love conquering all, as well as the notion that, at our deepest cores, we are all genuinely decent people. As a member of Van Horne Variety, I would feel awful if you all left here thinking that now is the time to take a chance on love. Remember, everything you’ve witnessed tonight has been an act, played out by meticulously rehearsed non-professionals – you just might have been to drunk to realize it. Ladies and gentlemen, the reality of romance is a much darker beast, capable of exposing even the most unassuming among us as the dickheads we truly are – if you don’t believe me, just ask world-renowned sociological anthropologists Max Joseph and Nev Schulman, creators of THE GREATEST SOCIAL EXPERIMENT EVER FORCED UPON PERSONKIND: MTV’s Catfish: The TV Show.

A wise woman bearing the inexplicable name of Patrick once referred to love as a “battlefield” – that may have been an apt comparison back in the 1980s, but in 2015, the pursuit of happiness via romantic entanglement is more like navigating a cyber-terrorist attack that we all kinda contributed to, but can’t fully be held responsible for. Catfish: The TV Show is concrete proof that, in an age where we can watch porn while jerking it in the company bathroom and almost universally accept smoking alcohol as a “pretty dope idea”, we don’t really deserve to be loved.

MTV has never shied away from letting us know when we’ve gone a little too far with something – remember when we were all getting fucked on 40s on the regular back in 2009? Bam! Jersey Shore. And do you recall 2011, when we all started wondering whether or not the Brits could go as hard as we did two years prior? Bam! Geordie Shore. Needless to say, when we all joined OKCupid in 2012, even if it was “just to meet friends”, MTV producers took it as an occasion to teach us a few lessons about romance, relationships and fucking other people over. And just fucking people period. And fucking people, period.

But who would serve as an appropriate vehicle for the hash-ass reality check they were about to thrust upon the generation who once looked up to the generation their own network had raised, but failed to contribute child support to even once? Finally, a eureka moment – “What about that guy with that name that wasn’t spelled like it sounded that we all found mildly irritating in that documentary he made emphasizing the fact that he was a guy with a name that wasn’t spelled like it sounded and… I don’t remember, something about Facebook or something? And then he had to admit that his documentary wasn’t fully legit because of some copyright issue relating to the soundtrack that nobody cared about in the first place? He needs work, right?”

And need work, Nev most certainly did – because Max Joseph (presumably) helped him cover up that whole getting expelled from college for punching out a female cohort thing, I guess Nev was like “UGhghghhghg, I guess you can cash in on this too, but only cause I owe you, bro.” Together, the douchetastic duo has helped MTV spread whatever the opposite of “the good word” about hooking up might be. Thus far, here’s what they’ve taught us:

1. It’s OK to repeatedly hit a woman with very little reason if she happens to be, and I quote, “short, stocky and crew-cut styled”. You know, like a dude! It’s always OK for a dude to hit a dude, brah.

2. Every single potential partner you meet online is secretly married. If they aren’t married, they’re enormous. If they’re not fat, they’re hideous. And if they’re not hideous, they’re obviously just trying to fuck with you.

3. The only appropriate soundtrack for wallowing in heartbreak is Florence and the Machine. Considering we are all destined to experience this specific strain of despair every Wednesday at 10e/7p, we should thank our lucky stars that there are 12,000 bands currently operating that sound almost exactly like Florence and the Machine – close enough to bring about that “objectively everybody hates me but for some totally illogical reason I feel understood by the masses” feeling that tricks us into believing we share a powerful-yet-totally-intangible connection with other humans, but different enough to keep us from firebombing MTV HQ on the regular.

4. TV is the best way to bring out someone’s inner asshole. One minute, you’re adorably contemplating whether or not you’re too old and too white to start calling your internet girlfriend “bae” and next thing you know, you’re on some grassy knoll, surrounded by cameras and shaming a trans woman for “deceiving” you. You might not know it in the heat of the moment, but you’ve just been outed as an asshole. Shame on you for deceiving us like that earlier!

5. Plebes like us all want our 15 minutes and will jump at any opportunity to get it, even if it happens to come about when we look our absolute shittiest. To quote Kim Kardashian in that T-Mobile Superbowl commercial most of us never saw, “Tragic”. If there’s one person who knows that shelling out a couple thou to tweak your face is more of a requirement than a suggestion when carefully calculating your slow, painful rise to world domination, it’s Mrs. Dr. Kanye West. In all seriousness, I’d like us to take a moment after the show to praise her accordingly.

In conclusion: Don’t do love because it’ll do you right back. All hail and praised be our all powerful illuminati overlord North West, the only figure deserving of any and all adoration we can muster as worthless humans with no real agency or capacity for individual and/or critical thought whatsoever. The end is, like, way nigh-er than you’d think. All hail MTV and the network executives who raised our babysitters who made a half-assed attempt at raising us when we weren’t busy being like “A/S/L” to some aging pedophile on Yahoo chat. And, most importantly, all Hail Maniks, who I’ve tried to Catfish like 17 times but who has only fallen for it twice.

I Creep Facebook And So Do You

(This is a first attempt at writing a non-pop culture related short story kinda thing. If this doesn’t interest you, you can stop reading now.)

I have spent years creating fictions about my cousin Andrea Butt. She was cursed with an unfortunate family name, below-average looks, an awkward demeanor and the ability to alienate anyone remotely normal that crossed her sleepy-eyed path. To make matters worse, her younger sister Alexis Butt, despite the shitty familial name, was slender, bright-eyed, conventionally attractive and, worst of all, incredibly affable. Andrea Butt was the closest thing to painstaking normalcy I’d come across in my lifetime – at the risk of sounding like a total dick, the notion of her having a future in any sense of the word totally confounded me.

I met Andrea Butt for the first time as a pre-teen, and would encounter her only once or twice in the flesh after our initial introduction. The details of our few afternoons spent together are vague in my memory – I recall a long drive to the country, and cars – an abundance of cars – parked outside of her family home. An above-ground swimming pool, maybe? Some kind of John Deere tractor? A large, one story home with plenty of breathing space surrounding it. A living room. A fireplace? Pokemon cards. Awkward forced friendship. And clinginess — God, was she ever clingy.

Andrea was a year older than I, and our parents agreed that, considering all their daughters were so close in age, they might as well meet. At that age, a year or two makes all the difference when it comes to which family member you get stuck conversing with – given the fact Andrea and I were both eldest siblings, we were expected to hit it off by default. I was jealous of the bond my younger sisters were developing, or at least trying to create, with Alexis – she seemed like the kind of girl you’d actually like to be friends with, and was likely too young to realize the damage her natural, biological gifts would inflict upon her sister, especially as the two aged alongside one another.

As previously mentioned, nothing spectacular would occur over the course of our brief shot at something like friendship — if a particularly noteworthy event had taken place, writing this would be a hell of a lot easier. Instead, the thought of my strange second cousin would just occasionally wash up on the shores of my crowded consciousness for the next number of years, leading me to wonder, “What the fuck is Andrea Butt doing right now?” Sure, Andrea had became a something of a family punch line, sporadically pulled out around the dinner table to elicit a giggle from my mom or my sisters, but none of us had bothered to reach out to either of the Butt sisters since childhood. We had no idea where they ended up – until Facebook.

Like many other alt-teens, I was skeptical about social media from the get-go – why was my Hotmail inbox flooded with invitations to sign up for this two-bit communications service when MSN chat was perfectly A-OK? Like many other alt-teens, the digital peer pressure got the better of me and I figured I’d give this thing a try. I didn’t know/care much about Internet safety, but I did know one thing – I was not giving these people my full name because I did not want anyone, specifically members of my family, to find me online. Much to my surprise, it worked – for a while. After a couple of years and (presumably) a few hundred tweaks to the social networking platform’s inner and outer workings, my long-lost cousin found me on Facebook and, from the moment I accepted her innocuous-seeming friend request, the incessant attempts at chatting began. That clinginess, that inability to connect with others despite an intense desire to develop deep, familial bonds – it all came rushing back.

I wasn’t the first Facebooker Andrea had attempted to befriend in my immediate family – in fact, I was the last. My mother and sisters regaled me with tales of their incessant, thoroughly irritating encounters with Andrea online – all three of them would receive alert after alert, day after day from you-know-who, always asking the same banal questions prefaced by pronouns that emphasized blood-ties, like “Hey Cuz, wassup?” “Hey cousin, how’s it going?” “Hey auntie, how u doin?” As far as chatting was concerned, Andrea never got very far with me – I did my best to ignore her first few messages and, for one reason or another, she gave up uncharacteristically quickly. Despite my unwillingness to politely participate in the back-and-forth she craved so desperately, she kept her virtual claws in me through numerous, frantic spells of “cleaning out tha haters” – she was just fed up with “all the drama”, whatever that meant. Little did she know, I had developed a strange obsession with her clumsily curated social self – that drama she so desperately sought to dispel from her day to day life was exactly what fueled mine. I clearly had too much time on my hands.

Sure, it’s a little creepy that one of my favorite pass times during this period was falling into deep, wine-fueled Andrea Butt-related Facebook holes with my roommates, but it’s hard to ignore someone’s screams of frustration – even if they’re just online. There were so many questions that just needed answering – for example, who were these “haters” of whom she spoke and what in the world could she have done to offend them so? How did she get a hold of so many different babies to pose for selfies with? Could they hers? Do they belong to that lanky man with the trucker hat and wiry, poorly grown facial hair? Did they burst through the womb of one of her various female friends (all of whom seemed to be concerningly over-or-under weight) – perhaps the hefty one with the eyebrow piercing and penchant for Smirnoff Ice? While trying to get to the bottom of these small, seemingly simple mysteries, I bore witness to a world I would likely never be a part of – a world where the bitches backstabbed, the players pulverized hearts and no conversation really took place unless it went down online. It fascinated me.

This is the part where you call me privileged. This is the part where you call me an ignorant asshole and stop giving a shit about anything I say. Most likely, this is the part where you call me classist. I get it, but you’re wrong – I could continue to explain our families’ financial situations in an attempt to prove some kind of horrendously boring point, but then I’d have to divulge some information that could get me into some serious trouble with certain particularly organized people who may or may not be partially or fully involved in activities that may be classified as criminal. It seems like a bad call to continue on that train of thought, so I won’t.

In Andrea’s world, no day was too uneventful to comment upon – whether she was making things Facebook-official with her boyfriend or simply “rlly wanted a timmies lol”, she took it upon herself to make the internet at large aware of her every thought. There were good times (most of which involved Iced Cappuccinos and a friend named Tina, who also happened to be friends with my roommate’s older sister) and bad times (most of which involved the aforementioned haters or “bitches who are moving in on my man”), but the majority of Andrea’s posts were short, simple odes to a seemingly incessant state of boredom – maybe boredom was the real reason she reached out to me in the first place.

And maybe that’s why I felt so shocked when she finally removed me from her friends list a few years back – a move that I saw as both insulting and absolutely absurd at the time. We were family, weren’t we? That was important to her, wasn’t it?

I finally understood what it felt like to assume a future of being underappreciated and intentionally ignored — I was overcome with a feeling of desperation and inferiority I once thought was reserved for the likes of people like Andrea Butt.

Then came the anger. After a few reflexive moments of being unjustly offended, I became straight up outraged – what did she have to gain by unfriending me? Could my carefully considered (and, I’d like to think, occasionally interesting) presence on her feed have added so little her to life that she most absolutely had to deny me the perverse pleasure of peaking into hers? Did she somehow find out what I was up to and add me to her list of haters that seemed to growing longer with every passing day? How the fuck was I supposed to stave off my own boredom without reveling in hers? This, I feared, was going to be a problem.

Since she cut me off, I’ve realized that my one-sided, online relationship with my second cousin was, for lack of a better term, fucked up. I had taken this strange ownership over her profile, as if I had rustled through a billion bargain bins and discovered an album I desperately needed to share with the world – when it was taken away from me, I felt robbed. I don’t have to tell you that that’s the problem with social media – we start seeing people as pages, pictures, interests and things, as opposed to complex living, breathing, and likely suffering beings. There’s also an enormous possibility that everyone’s A-OK, living the dream and I’m projecting my own (mostly) unjustified inner turmoil on everyone I encounter online, because that’s the kind of thing I am wont to do whenever I see an opening.

These days I don’t see much of anything after pulling up Andrea Butt’s profile. I fight the urge to look up Tina, or Andrea’s maybe-ex-boyfriend/maybe current fiancé Brad Wiper (side note: I will never not be amused imagining their official union and subsequent decision to hyphenate their two last names) just to get a more substantial, satisfying glimpse into her world again. For the time being, all I know about Andrea is that her relationship status on Facebook is set to “engaged” – for real or to whom, I can’t be sure. Sadly, I’ll probably never know who she married (if she ever got married at all) or why — despite being family, I’ve got a hunch I won’t be invited to her wedding. Or maybe, blinded by sentimentality, she’ll see it as another opportunity to connect with me — in the flesh, or otherwise.

5 Reasons You Don’t Want Maroon 5 At Your Wedding (Also, Is That Video a Fake?)

Today, the group formerly known as Kara’s Flowers released a music video for their not too sweet/not too salty/not too anything single, “Sugar”.

The boys thought it might be fun to crash a few weddings “for reals” (more on that later), forcing their friend Jeff (or whatever his name is) into the most uncomfortable situation imaginable – stalling a number of ceremonies around Los Angeles while the band gets their shit together and, eventually, play a tune for the bride and groom. Predictably, people lose their shit — or, at the very least, do an OK job of feigning excitement.

My question to you is, would you really want Maroon 5 trampling all over your big day? The answer – probably not, especially if Levine insisted on sporting those goddamned blue-tinted shades that went out with Stefani-style bindis and butterfly clips. Here are just a few reasons why the couples in this new video should regret ever signing a waiver, assuming this whole thing was legit.

1) They Will Make You Dance Even Whiter Than Usual

Adam Levine may have moves like Jagger, but trust me, in a state of shock, you definitely don’t. I get it – you’re confused, you’re excited and you have T-minus 2 minutes and 30 seconds to “do your thang” while the cameras pay you a modicum of attention. This may be the stuff dreams are made of, but if you choose to go all-out with your moves (and you will), you’re gonna look like an idiot. Just know that it’s not your fault, and you’re not alone.

2) Your Hotter Friend Will Overshadow You

No matter how attractive someone may be, they always have a friend who’s objectively 2-5 times hotter than them – that’s just how life works. Whether they were invited or not, they will probably show up on the day that all eyes are meant to be on you and they will make you feel a little bit horrible about yourself. Every compliment they pay you will feel more condescending than usual, and the enviable attention they’re receiving from the opposite sex will make you regret ever making a commitment to this one dull-ass person who claims they will love you forever. Congratulations, the next big event in your lifetime is either getting huge and popping out a kid or a slow, painful, unattractive death.

Anyway, this surprise documentation of your knot-tying ceremony will serve as a constant reminder of your inferiority – the lens will be on your babely nemesis for significantly longer than you can appreciate.

3) Your Special Day Will Inadvertently Become An Ad For The Voice

Uh, this. “Sneaky!”

4) You’re Probably Boring, So This Will Be The Highlight Of Your Life

Thought you peaked in high school? You should be so lucky! No, this is the high point of your existence – you didn’t work for it and you didn’t want it, but at least you were adequately dressed for the occasion. Big ups to societal pressure for making sure you lose 10 pounds before getting caught on camera and sprawled across screens around the world to make Adam Levine and co. look like fun dudes. Things just have a way of working out, don’t they?

5) If You Have No Friends, You’re Pretty Much Fucked

If this were a Wedding Crashers approach to music video-making, you’d think Adam and the boys would hit up at least one sad-sack wedding in their pursuit of interrupting as many ceremonies as they possibly could. Unless the band brought in a crew of extras keeping in mind the possibility that lonely people exist in this world, you’d feel pretty shitty about yourself after popping up in this vid with a lackluster crew of, like, your mom, Uncle Mort and a flower girl for hire. At least Jeff will be there.

Luckily, you probably don’t have to worry about something like this ever happening to you, because it seriously seems like a big ol’ fake – like, does this blushing “caught off guard” bride look like Raina Hein of America’s Next Top Model fame to you, or is it just me?

A Serial-ized Investigation of Avril Lavigne’s Mystery Illness

Last week, a presumably tweenaged Twitter user broke some of the years most irrelevant news – Avril Lavigne is supposedly suffering from “undisclosed health issues”. All things considered, this is a useless piece of information to be made public – this revelation only affects you if you happen to be a pre-teen (which, if you’re reading this, you probably are) who enjoys the musical stylings and/or other totally un-noteworthy projects of Avril Lavigne (which, whether or not you’re reading this, you probably don’t).

Unsurprisingly, no one gives enough of a shit about this sort-of-story to dedicate more than a headline plus one or two sentences to it – because I’m forcing myself to write something “just for me”, that’s all about to change. Guys – what’s going on with Avril and why have we been asked to #PrayFor her? One thing’s for certain — I’m going to feel pret-ty bad when she publicly comments on her cancer diagnosis (or something even more awful) next week.

As previously stated, there’s essentially nothing to this story so far — it isn’t even all that interesting. To make this into something it’s not, I’ve chosen to compile a series of speculations in a format that somewhat resembles that of Serial, the popular NPR podcast that prevents all your overworked, tightly wound, upwardly mobile acquaintances from offing themselves week after week (IF I DIE BEFORE FINDING OUT WHETHER OR NOT ADNON DID IT, I WILL FUCKING KILL MYSELF).

Could this be a massive PR stunt designed to force the singer back into public consciousness? Does Chad play a role in all of this? What exactly happened in Japan? All this and more on this week’s Sk8erial.

      1. Inconsistencies

Avril Lavigne recently turned 30 years old and, according to super-fan @AvrilMusicChart, she’s sick. After DMing Lavigne on Twitter completely out of the blue (or so she claims), @AvrilMusicChart found herself in surprisingly intimate conversation with her idol. Here’s what happened.

What can we learn from this exchange? @AvrilMusicChart had questioned the singer about her activities over an extended period of time (we’re talking a full year, not mere months), and the language Avril uses seems to adhere to that timeline – note her use of terms like “absent” and her willingness to incorporate emojis into this conversation.

While the wording of Avril’s DM seemed to suggest this illness has plagued her for the better part of a year, the situation couldn’t have seemed all too dire in the summer months. The proof? Lavigne was performing festival shows in Japan as recently as August of this year. She also started experimenting with hats – this willingness to try new things could suggest optimal health, or the exact opposite.

     2. To Be Suspected

Over the last few years, Avril made some questionable career choices, many of which have a direct correlation with her blossoming relationship and eventual marriage to Nickelback front man Chad Kroeger – we’ll talk more about him in a later episode. While her last few albums did decently overseas, things at home weren’t quite as peachy. 2013’s Avril Lavigne received mediocre to decent reviews on the whole, but critics started to question the authenticity of Lavigne’s rebellious persona – an egregious insult to hurl at anyone who has dedicated their lives to the punk princess ethos.

Could Avril have just needed some time to regroup and reformulate her image in a way that would demand respect from these naysayers? Was she simply busy plotting the perfect retort? A mysterious illness could be the perfect way to buy back the hearts of American media sources, especially when #Ebola has been trending as of late.

 3. The Best Defense Is A Good Defense

Sometimes the simplest explanation is the best one – in this instance, that doesn’t seem to be the case. “Hello Kitty”, the only Avril single to make a splash in recent memory, has been accused by some of being intensely racist. Avril fought these claims tooth and nail, explaining that it couldn’t be racist because she “loves Japan” — that was the end of that.

Others simply felt the single to be overwhelmingly stupid, and took to the web to make these sentiments known – Avril has received this type of critique regularly throughout the course of her career, and it has never stopped her before. While blaming “Hello Kitty” for the singer’s downfall and subsequent showbiz hiatus (aka “undisclosed health issues) would be the easiest way to conclude this investigation, I just can’t help but wonder if there’s something more to this story than meets the eye.

    4. The Case Against Chad

How does the husband fit into all this? Well, early on in this gripping saga, reports speculated that Lavigne may be pregnant with the couple’s first child — her representation has since spoken out against these claims. Remember how I mentioned those festival shows Lavigne played back in August? Well, that was right around the time Nickelback announced via Twitter that their latest studio album, No Fixed Address, would be released in November. While the group continues to churn out what can only be described as “rock hits”, No Fixed Address’ lead single, “Revolution”, was a little on the political side – this would be a first for Kroeger and co.

Considering literally no one has listened to No Fixed Address since its November 17^th release, it very well could be jam packed with controversial material – maybe the motivation for Avril’s stepping out of the spotlight has something to do with the embarrassment and shame her husband has brought upon their family unit. Delving deeper into this theory, I sincerely suspect that No Fixed Address may contain anti-Asian sentiments, an enormous problem for Lavigne’s career considering her gigantic Japanese fan base.

There’s also a significant possibly that, whether due to embarrassment or lack of companionship, Avril cheated on Chad while overseas – after discovering she had taken another “boi” while on the road, Chad might have started spiking her drinks with CLR (or some other, less-heavily-advertised-on-late-night-TV cleaning product), a habit he just hasn’t been able to shake.

     5. Rumors

I’m sure we’re both asking ourselves the same questions this far into the investigation – just what happened in Japan? Did she, in fact, cheat on Chad like any quasi-intelligent person of questionable taste would? Did a local take offense to her likely offensive representation of Japanese culture in various music videos, promotional stills and moments of living and try to end the singer’s career for good? Did she just get food poisoning?

After reaching out to @AvrilMusicChart, I feel like I’m less certain about this whole thing now than I was at the beginning of this case. “I… I just don’t know. What happened? Like, I thought she was sick. Like, really, really sick and I wanted to help,” the Tweeter told me over the phone. “But now… ugh! Maybe she isn’t? Like, what about Chad? And Japan? Wow, I just figured… Maybe she… Wow. Just wow. I have no idea. This is… hard.”

“Honestly,” I replied, “I’m just about as confused as you are.”

 Next time, on Sk8erial:

-We get an update from @AvrilMusicChart after reaching out to Avril a second time, and receiving absolutely no information in return.

-More about the peripheral members of Nickelback – might those nameless freaks have something to do with this?

-We get exclusive access to Avril’s medical history and speak to the Japanese doctor she visited that one time she thought she might be allergic to gluten.

-We finally get a phone call from Jay, but hang up immediately because, seriously, fuck that guy.

I Reviewed The 2015 Pirelli Calendar Because Judging Other Women Makes Me Feel Better About Myself (NSFW)

For one reason or another, every few months, my body’s like “You’re a 14 year old boy, remember? You have uncontrollable acne and anger issues – don’t worry, it’ll pass. This is all part of growing up.” In these moments, my brain swings to the other extreme, and I start acting out like the bitchy teenaged girl I never was (until recently) – I clumsily paint my nails while hate-browsing the Facebook profiles of almost-acquaintances and nearly crying about the beautiful relationship Lana Del Rey has with her devoted fan base. Oh right, I’m also convinced that I am bad at absolutely everything, which, of course, includes this lil’ write up I’m “expertly crafting” right now.

Somewhere in my journey switching back and forth between these two extreme, equally regressive mindsets, I stumbled upon porn – okay, calling this shit porn is pretty conservative of me. I stumbled upon NUDES. That’s right — classy, sassy nudes, all laid out in calendar format for the world’s viewing pleasure. Maybe you guys all already know this, but the Pirelli calendar is this big deal thing that comes out once a year and features some of the top names in fashion in various compromising positions. Is it art? Sure, but in the words of critically esteemed poet turned religious scholar Aubrey Graham, “I was still staring at the titties, though.”

In an attempt to profit (not financially, obv — no one would pay to read this shit) off the buzz surrounding these 12 naked women, I’ve stolen the sick pixxx and reviewed each selection just for funsies. Warning: if you didn’t already get the memo, this is mostly NSFW, unless you work at a hip-ass office where everyone’s down with the groovy cause of ogling nekkid models instead of working on a Friday afternoon.

First of all, it’s important to note that this product is technically called “The Cal”, so we’re off to a douchetastic start already.

January – Adriana Lima
A less than thrilling way to kick off something of this magnitude, but this photo is fine. I like that they turned Lima’s head into an accidental egg by making her wear a jaunty leather swim cap and matching gloves.

February — Natalia Vodianova
This is disgusting. Morally, it’s whatever, but this looks like the wet dream of an 8-year-old boy who grew up in the gaudiest part of the 1970s. If I came across this while I was eating, I might fucking barf – I feel like this picture smells like baby formula and I don’t like it. Not. One. Bit.

March – Joan Smalls
The hair! The hair! That is some serious Vidal Sassoon shit – it’s so distracting! I think the coif’s biggest issue is the tip flip – not a great look on anybody. Like, I probably stared at this picture for about 10 minutes before I noticed she was topless. Oh yeah, and her boots look cheap.

April –Candice Huffine
I like this picture but that corset makes her boobs look weird. People are making a big deal about how Huffine is a plus-sized model and what that means for fashion and bla bla bla, and I think the route she’s taking here is the most effective in putting those conversations to rest. Like, “Okay, that’s nice, now shut up and be my slave.”

May – Carolyn Murphey
Oh God, must we? Sexy soldier shit, especially when accompanied by an atrociously dated bikini bottom, just doesn’t do it for me. Also, is that a fucking beer in her gun holster?

June – Anna Ewers
While this looks incredibly uncomfortable, I kind of like it – this is what girls my age consider tasteful and classy, in a throwback-y kind of way. Do with that information what you will.

July – Cameron Russell
No. Thank. You. Okay, I’m the typically the last person who wants to hear how X pop culture product is offensive because of Y, but I sincerely hope some Facebook feminists get on this photo’s case for its appropriation of the ukulele, tans and flowers — I dislike it that much. C’MON GUYS, SHE’S FROM BOSTON! Doesn’t that rile you up? No? Nothing? Goddamnit, nothing goes my way!

August – Sasha Luss
This is horrific. This is the shit nightmares are made of. This shiny, plastic frog woman will haunt my dreams forever more. But I… can’t… stop… looking… at… it.

September – Karen Elson
I have a LOT to say about this one. True to childlike form, I’m obsessed with whether or not I find my birthday month image satisfactory. Because September isn’t the most headline-worthy month (it might be summer, but could also just as easily be classified as fall… ugh, so rough to deal with), when a calendar is full of, say, cute animals, I get stuck with the common squirrel instead of something sick like a monkey or a leopard. In a Tiger Beat calendar, I’m stuck with a Scott FUCKING Speedman instead of a Britney Spears or Leo DiCaprio — this sort of commonality can has a profound, negative impact on a kid’s self esteem.

Anyway, back to the issue at hand – Karen Elson. I was thrilled to have my birth month represented by Jack White’s weirdo ex-wife – this is an absolute triumph for calendar representations of September. I don’t even give a shit that this picture is a little dull – for once in my life, I feel loved and appreciated by the manufacturers of personal organization and date keeping products.

October — Isabeli Fontana
Hahaha, FUCK YOU, OCTOBER!

November – Gigi Hadid
If you ask me, this pic is a little to January to be given to a basic month like November, but I’ll respect Pirelli’s choice to cut the month some slack. I guess we all need that little extra push toward the end of the year, and a photo this glorious and severe reminds us to pick up the fucking slack – it’s almost the end of the third quarter so GET CRACKING! That’s a business thing, BTW.

December – Raquel Zimmerman
Dear Miss Zimmerman – your nipples make me intensely confused about how gravity works, but Happy Holidays to you and yours all the same.

Beware, George Jung: Johnny Depp is a Bad Man

Yesterday, infamous coke smuggler George Jung was released from prison and, quite frankly, we should all be worried. And not in the ways you would expect either- not to be judgmental or anything, but the man lost the aesthetic prerequisite that being a flashy ass coke dealer demands years ago. We should be worried because in our media saturated age of worshipping so-and-so for no real reason, he has become an overnight celebrity upon his release. This means public interest. This means book deals. This means press. Ultimately, this means public appearances. And these appearances will probably be with Johnny Depp. And that, my friends, is a problem, as a friendship with Johnny Depp is the darkest, most unforgiving route to becoming a public laughing stock.

(Johnny pretending to look like he doesn’t know what he’s doing. But he knows he’s there to plant the seed of friendship that destroys even the strongest of men.)

Jung and Depp became friends while filming the movie Blow and, knowing the conniving tactics Depp uses to trick unsuspecting weirdos into BFF-ship, the two will most likely be reunited VERY publicly just days after Jung’s release. How do you reject a custom-made fedora from a man who understands you better than anyone on a very surface, Hollywood-biopic level? How do you refuse a trip to Universal Studios or Turks and Caicos or some kind of Jack the Ripper walking tour from a man who has literally READ about your struggles MAYBE TWICE? Resistance is futile. Johnny Depp is a bad man.

(That cowboy hat is evil incarnate)

We’ve seen this story play out before. Remember Damien Echols, alleged leader of the West Memphis Three? You know, the guy who was accused of ritually sacrificing young boys for Satan/Metallica? Some people thought he was a horrific monster, while others considered him dark, brooding, interesting and misunderstood. Not in a poseur way, though- whether or not he committed those crimes, he was totally legit. And WHAT happens the SECOND he gets out of prison after 18 years of being an intensely interesting public figure? Johnny FUCKING Depp scoops him up and takes him to FUCKING Disneyland where they got MATCHING TATTOOS or some shit. I think it was either a Hunter S. Thompson quote done in Chinese caricatures or a sad clown with a dagger lodged in its face, I can’t remember which one. They are scheduled to release a dark, bluesy album of original duets and Marilyn Manson covers sometime in my upcoming nightmares. All that being said, no one cares about Damien Echols anymore. Damien, if you’re reading this, STAY STRONG. Matching tattoos may be forever, but shitty friendships don’t have to be.

(The tattoos were actually lines I guess. They were like “Dude, rectangles? Totally obscure. Let’s go chug vials of each others’ spit. SO GOTH, BRO!)

The list of jokers who dared to publicly spend time with Depp is endless. Human skeletor and former badass Keith Richards was reduced to some sort of peasant Darth Vader in not one, but TWO Pirates of the Caribbean movies (maybe more but I stopped paying attention 12 billion years ago). Charlie Sheen turned to a life of strippers, bathsalts and Two and a Half Men, which DEFINITELY sounds like a symptom of Depatitis C-list to me. And last but not least: TIM BURTON. Enough said.

So George, if Johnny calls you while you’re all up in that halfway house, don’t pick up the phone. You’ve had a rough enough go at it as it is. Start painting or get a bonsai tree or something. Because when you fall into friendship with Johnny, you fall DEPP! Get it? Whatever.

How I Have Grown Since I’ve Been Gone (I HAVEN’T)

I’m just getting pretty fucking good at talking business bullshit. So please both pity and be proud of me. This is yet another post of me being all “Oh, I’ve got a job, bla bla bla, I don’t have time to do bla bla bla” but, as I have essentially dissolved into human garbage, I may as well start forcing myself to write about it. And about other things that are more interesting. So consider this Step 1 in my 12 Step program to becoming a mildly less miserable human being with some semblance of a creative life outside of profeshinal wurkin 9-7 lyfe. #nofilter #BLESSED

“The Girl Can Give Head, But Not Face.”-Karl Lagerfeld on Kim Kardashian (in my dreams)

While I have watched every single season of America’s Next Top Model (some more than once), I am in no way, shape or form a ‘fashion person’. Whenever I catch a glimpse of my shadow in public, I often mistake it for a teenaged metal-head dude following me a little too closely (without the accompanying B.O., fingers crossed).  While some seasons I might not know Hermes from Ed Hardy, I’m not blind. Therefore I can tell you that the recently surfaced CR Fashion Book Karl Lagerfeld x Pregnant Kim Kardashian photos are (mostly) a fucking mess.

A pregnant celebutante letting her shit hang out for everyone to see doesn’t phase me. Whatever, I’m down. And, unlike a huge chunk of pop culture junkies, I’m a Kimye enthusiast and will almost definitely worship at the altar of North West when the Illuminati crown her supreme ruler of the Free World in the not-too-distant future. Despite all that power radiating from her belly, it’s undeniable: Kim just can’t give face.

While the incubating North West (all hail) looks great in this picture, Kim seems to be having a hard time ignoring her and/or Karl’s severely atrocious gas. Rule of Modelling #1: Don’t eat before a shoot. In fact, don’t eat ever. Rule of Modelling #2: If your fashion overlords happen to have eaten prior to shooting and emit noxious fumes, SMIZE BITCH and pretend it’s a spritz of Chanel No. 5.

After a couple of photos, Karl was obviously like “Oh shit, this isn’t working” and tried covering K’s face with a classic Cap ‘N Veil combo and a tasteful ‘Merican flag t-shirt. While this tactic quasi-worked (Kim looks legit sad because she’s faced with the fact that she LITERALLY embodies the death of American culture in this photo and IRL), the whole thing is just… no. When I looked up this picture in the first place, people were like “GASP, she looks so CHIC!”, which made me question just about everything that exists in this dream we call life.

This one she’s just like “I’m pregnant so I’m eating DEAL W/ IT (but no solids, FYI)”, but she doesn’t look too pleased or displeased about it because she can’t register emotion at this point in time.

This one is boring. Her head is tilted up slightly giving the illusion of face/emotion/intrigue. Rookie move, Kardashian.

Her cover is actually pretty rad. I like everything happening in this photo. The only word I can use to describe it is ‘Dope’. Sorry, language.

So, Kim, if you’re looking to continue in the modelling game my super-helpful and totally founded in knowledge of the fashion world, etc advice to you is JUST BE PIMP. It suits you.

A feminist critique of feminist critiques of Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’

QUIT BEING SO FUCKING BORING.

Also, invest in some more comfortable dancing shoes.

I cannot believe that THIS is the song people are losing their shit about. A HUGE chunk of contemporary pop music is just as degrading (probably more so) in its attitudes towards women, but for some reason this joker is public enemy number 1.

Why you would give so much power to Robin Thicke, an artist whose public image basically screams “CLOWN OF A DIRTY OLD MAN”, is beyond me. We’re the ones making this song into some kind of weapon of mass misogyny, when it’s really just a joke. Why waste your breath complaining about something that is so OVERTLY STUPID to the point of being cheeseballs? Like, really Facebook Feminists, THIS is going to be the ONE women’s rights issue you ever publicly get behind?

P.S. I’ve seen y’all shake it to ‘Bitches Ain’t Shit’ before, don’t try to deny it.