Advice without the "Advice"

Listen. It’s 2009. Today it’s all about constant communication. Our social lives depend on multitasking: working, texting, sending personal emails during office hours, going to happy hours, discussing how the show Weeds makes no sense anymore and continues to unravel like a bad lifetime movie, and still making it home in time for a good rub and/or tug with your significant other or significant battery powered device. If you’re anything like Lindsay and me, you know how burdensome it is to be a beacon of hope in most people’s lives. And if you’re not, you are probably tired of all your friends using you for your wise words and proverbs to get them through their boring day to day woes.

Today we would like to help you give quality advice to your friends and still maintain your busy over-communicative lifestyle.

It’s Monday morning. You are at your desk. Your boss comes in right as you sit down and says something like “I need to you make me 500 copies of this worthless report, and you need to create a project excel sheet by lunch.”

As you are about to change your G chat status to “Ugh my boss makes me wanna poop on her keyboard,” you see that your friend from middle school just sent you the funniest e card from someecards.com: “Sorry we haven't kept in touch twat. But I really never liked you. Love, Suzie from 3rd grade.”

Feeling nostalgic, you check your facebook account only to see that your parents have joined facebook! Then, you check your cell phone and see that someone invited you to a trivia happy hour! As you feel the popular juices take over your serotonin levels, your mind begins to enter into sensory overload.

A few seconds later a blinking message pops on your screen. It’s from your friend Laura. “Hey, are you busy?”

“No..what’s up” you reply, even though you are very, very busy.

“Ugh it’s just that I really don’t know what to do about Gary. I want him to like me but he hasn’t called, and I think I’m itchy…down there. Why does this always happen to me?!”

You are now in a bind, my friend. You might as well switch your ‘to do’ list with Hillary Clinton's. In one day, you have to:

1. Update your status to showcase how awkward and completely insane it is that your parents have joined a social networking site designed for tweens and overcompensating young professionals AND go through all your facebook photos and take down the ones where you are sucking a beer bong like you sucked your mom's teet (tit).

2. Find an equally witty ‘someecard’ to send to your old friend that makes you look more ‘evolved’ than you were when you were 9.

3. Brush up on your “80’s movie” knowledge for trivia night.

4. Begin to compose actual work for your boss, and then tell him/her your Microsoft application is malfunctioning and you have to take the afternoon off.

As this list showcases, you have zero time to make your friend feel better about her random PBR hook up and potential venereal diseases.

There is only one line that is 100% guaranteed to diffuse a situation like this so you can get back to being the most popular consultant in the dc/metro area.

“You know Laura…”

“You just gotta make it do what it does”

This approach is highly effective. It lets your friend take control of the conversation, yet it gives you all the credit for any positive outcome. The sentence is extremely repetitive, and punctuated with a lighthearted “gotta” in the predicate. It is casual enough to make light of the situation, yet also disguises itself as something deeper.

Your friend will reply “What? What does that mean?”

This next part is crucial. To achieve the quote’s full effectiveness, you will need to provoke your friend and inflate her ego at the same time:

“Laura you graduated suma cum laude, you really can’t figure it out?”

(long pause.)

Laura: “Ohhhhh. You mean I should learn to love myself, rather than let my hook ups define me???”

You: "and?"

Laura: “get tested?”

You: “There ya go. Laura you’re beautiful. Get back to work.”

Now you can get back to feverishly nursing your personal life like a new born fetus, while maintaining the status of a sage. Use this tactic when necessary and live a satisfying, healthy, numinous life.

(This post inspired by friend, John Clemons)