Readers often ask me how one goes about becoming an advice columnist. They say that being an advice columnist looks very glamourous and sounds terribly exciting and wouldn’t it be better than working at the Hangover Insurance Company where all they do all day is explain to distraught customers that we’re very sorry, but your homes are not covered under your policy for alien invasion even though there may be an act of alien gods clause in it because –
Well.
The life of an advice columnist isn’t all movie premieres and romantic entanglements with golf pros. In fact, the only movie premiere I have ever been to was called My Dinner With Idi, in which Wallace Shawn and a certain Ugandan dictator sensitively shout at each other for an hour and a half, and the only reason I went was because my boyfriend at the time “won” tickets because he knew that the person who invented the electric prune was Terry “Just Harry” Smelts, and he wasn’t afraid to answer a question about it on the radio. As for Tiger, well, he was a sweet guy, but I would never be involved with a married man…who could no longer be competitive in golf’s Triple Crown.
So much for glamour.
The other day, I got so caught up in writing an article on the pros and cons of using nanobots to sculpt your pubic hair that I broke a nail. A couple of weeks ago, I spent an entire afternoon playing phone tag with Milosz Karentsky, the inventor of pneumatic chewing gum (“Centrifugal Bumble Puppy Pops – the gum that chews you!”), who, oddly enough, didn’t want to answer questions about involuntary jaw surgery.
This is what a person with an IQ higher than the national debt (in colour corrected 1934 dollars) does as an advice columnist.
So much for excitement.
Frankly, if your parents support you in your efforts to become an advice columnist, I would report them to the Dream Police.
Becoming an advice columnist was never my dream. I was originally in the University of Doonesbury, Redfern Campus’ Moving Large Objects Really Fast programme (known, in a gentler age, as Jet Propulsion for Beginners). In my fourth year, I was supposed to get an internship with NASA; unfortunately, due to a clerical error, my internship ended up at the Alternate Reality News Service. (I understand that after his internship at NASA, Andrew Oblatsky, the journalism student with whom I was mixed up, made a career selling gleoat hotdogs from a cart outside Mission Control in Houston. So, I guess it worked out well for both of us.)
My internship at the Alternate Reality News Service consisted mainly of making sure the Dimensional PortalTM‘s Ovulation Underthruster didn’t undergo an identity crisis that would strand journalists in other dimensions. You think your four year-old computer is “fussy?” Mister, you don’t know the half of it! Maybe a quarter of it, maybe a third of it, maybe as much as fourteen twenty-ninths of it, but definitely not the half of it!
I probably would have spent my entire internship in quietly seething anonymous frustration (a suburb of Buffalo) if Editrix-in-Chief Brenda Brundtland-Govanni hadn’t gotten into a spot of trouble over the credentials for the Spattzenflutzen Ambassador’s trip to New Delhork for the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Gehenna-Wentworth. Fortunately, a transdimensional incident was narrowly averted because I was handy with a photocopier, scissors and duct tape (you have to be when you’re planning on a career at NASA).
Even this would have only gotten me a gold star with maple walnut clusters (a tasty decoration that helps keep your cholesterol low) on my intern report if the Alternate Reality News Service’s previous advice columnist, Lily Channing-Barcode, hadn’t accidentally fallen down a flight of stairs, lighting herself on fire with her cigarette, stabbing herself in the chest with the Swiss army knife she was using to core a pear and crashing her head on an iron gargoyle that had been used as a prop in a report on festive architecture in 7th century Mongolia and was being stored in the stairwell because nobody in the office wanted to look at it. When the hospital said it wanted to keep her overnight for tests, Pops Kahunga suggested that I replace her. The rest, as they say, is hysteria.
So, becoming the Alternate Reality News Service’s advice columnist was a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Having the wrong hair and wrong emotional makeup didn’t hurt, either. If you thought it was just a matter of being nosy and having an opinion about everything, well, my advice is: good luck with that!
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: that lump in your throat is probably a reaction to watching It’s a Wonderful Life. If you haven’t watched It’s a Wonderful Life lately, get yourself to an emergency room, stat!