Dear Amritsar,
Can you please use your cutting wit on me?
Anna-Julianna Ananda
Hey, Babe,
No.
advertisement Glomper's Chompers: the nuclear powered dentures that give you a 50 gigawatt smile! advertisement
Dear Amritsar,
Oh! I'm sorry! I didn't mean to imply that you were in any way insensitive to your readers! You only use cutting wit on people who are deluded, people who really know what their problem is, but do not seem capable of admitting it to themselves. In short, people who deserve - oh!
Anna-Julianna Ananda
Hey, Babe,
Was that a...an advertisement? Seriously? Brenda, Tell me that I'm wrong, that that wasn't an advertisement!
[BRENDA BRUNDTLAND-GOVANNI: Umm...you're wrong. That wasn't a, umm, you know, advertisement.]
advertisement NEW at Tim Horton Hears a Who: break pad crullers. Tastes great, and, when installed in your hovercraft, gets 35 millimetres to the calorie! advertisement
Dear Amritsar,
I...I've done kind of a...bad thing. My robopet Phyllis (he's a cross between a cocker spaniel and a giraffe) was almost seven, which is 1,784 in human years, and he was going a little...senile. Instead of scanning the morning papers for articles I would be interested in, Phyllis piddled in my cornflakes. Instead of scanning the TV for shows I would want to watch, he piddled on the converter. Instead of chasing his ball in the park when I threw it, Phyllis piddled on a Rottweiler.
Granted, Phyllis' piddle smelled like strawberries and forgotten dreams of youth; still, when it's all over the house (and parts of the neighbourhood, and neighbours' pets - especially neighbour's big, angry pets), the scent tends to lose its emotional resonance. And, I'm allergic to strawberries.
I wasn't ready to let Phyllis go, though, so I...I took him to a Pet Semenary.
Anna-Julianna Ananda
Hey, Babe,
Advertisements in the middle of an advice column? Really, Brenda, this is outrageous! In fact, this is far outside the boundaries of rageous!
[BRENDA BRUNDTLAND-GOVANNI: I'm sorry, Am, really, I am, but the marketing department has found that people pay no attention to ads around articles. In fact, readers pay negative attention to those ads: they imagine that space is taken up by images of gigantic alien space squids fighting battle cruisers in the Oort cloud. Seriously. The marketing department's research is very detailed. The only way marketing could see to make our online offerings pay was to insert the ads directly into the copy. And, I shouldn't have to remind you - despite the pleasure that doing so gives me - this income is part of what pays your salary.]
advertisement TWEETEDIT: We read through the interminable stream of self-promotion, self-revelation and ungainly non-sequiturs so you don't have to. advertisement
Dear Amritsar,
People warned me against leaving Phyllis at the Pet Semenary, but I was desperate not to lose him, and I thought if anybody could help him with his decaying logic routines and faulty memory circuits, it would be somebody who hadn't lived outside a place of quiet, meditative contemplation for several decades.
After an absence of a week, there was a scratching on the window of my bedroom on the third floor. (Cockeraffes have really long necks.) It was Phyllis! He had returned to the family! I was overjoyed. Until I noticed that his eyes were a strange shade of vermillion, but I shrugged that off as a sign that he was happy to be home.
It didn't take long for strange things to start happening in the neighbourhood. People found their morning newspapers were delivered with letters cut out of the headlines, while my family received notes about our computer caches being kidnapped if we didn't leave batteries in a brown paper bag in a garbage can in a nearby park. Wifi towers were sprayed with graffiti that featured eyes on a really long neck looking over a wall and read "Killjoy was here." One morning, everybody for three blocks found their car radios had been turned to a local techno station.
Clearly, the Phyllis who returned from the Pet Semenary was not the one I had left there the week before.
How long should I continue living in denial before I have to decapitate Phyllis in a frantic middle of the night melee with a vinyl LP my ex-boyfriend - who, I am now strong enough to admit, is a music snob - just happened to leave around the house?
Hey, Babe,
Need I remind you that my contract has a no interruptions of my writing for fire, flood, political assassination, act of god or advertisements clause?
[BRENDA BRUNDTLAND-GOVANNI: You want to do that? Really? Lawyers is the direction you want to take this in? Because, frankly
advertisement TWEETEDIT: Because life's too short to waste reading bad Tweets. Really short. Over before you even know it. So, say "Pah!" to bad Tweets. advertisement
Oh, wow. That really was annoying, wasn't it? Ferking advertisements think they can interrupt me do they? Well, we'll just have to put a stop to that!]
So, umm, about my problem?
Hey, Babe,
First, I don't wit on demand.
Second, you expect me to respond to an advice column letter writing wannabe whose fabrications don't rise to the level of a warmed over Stephen King plot? You've shown about as much creativity as a three legged bolintar running the Falouppian Marathon in a space suit and high heels! Get back to me when you have a real problem!
Thanks! You're the greatest!
Hey, Babe,
Don't mention it. Please.
Send your relationship problems to the Alternate Reality News Service's sex, love and technology columnist at questions@lespagesauxfolles.ca. Amritsar Al-Falloudjianapour is not a trained therapist, but she does know a lot of stuff. AMRITSAR SAYS: confession is good for the soul, not the sole. Theologians are divided on the question of whether or not fish have eternal essences, except, for some reason, for groupers, because, as the title of the film truly tells us, All Groupers Go to Heaven.