Courtney Stodden is either a performance artist, a hardcore YOLOer, a social crusader fighting for open dialogue about sexual diversity, or all of the above. Whatever the case, her tastes seem eclectic. In the video below, which isn’t safe for work, Stodden takes roleplaying to a sort of extreme, coughing up a hairball, faking pooping into a litter box, eating cat food? For some, the cringe-factor here will be noteworthy.

And while we’re on the subject of fetishism, here’s something else, also NSFW, in which a nice British man who likes to dress up in lady clothes while he has sex with women drinks a wine glass of VICE video-columnist Karly Sciortino’s pee.

To both of these videos my instinct is to share them and bond with my readers over our mutual disgust. But I don’t want to come across as intolerant. It is contradictory to believe as I do that judging people for their sexual preferences ultimately results in suffering and thus should be discouraged while at the same time posting a thing that can through a certain lens be metaphorized as an elementary school child at recess pointing at a kid who’s different and calling everyone over to laugh.

So then there are ways to interpret Stodden’s video that are not ‘disgust-for-that-which-we-can’t-understand.’ Maybe she and Hutchinson are balls-to-the-wall YOLOing and loving every minute of it. They’re in love and want what they want and no one’s going to stop them from trying to get it. It’s plausible. Evidence can be found in their non-conventional marriage and the fact that Stodden has posted 29 videos on her YouTube account, through all of which run a theme of unapologetic personality-voyeurism. In similar fashion, the couple allegedly not only demanded $3 million for a radio interview just after their marriage cat got out of the bag, but did it in a pretty absurd way — their sole correspondence consisting of one-line emails such as “we want 3 million to appear,” “too bad,” and “we want money.” (To Hutchinson’s credit, he claims that hackers sent these emails.)

Just as the Lady Gaga Corporation has branded itself, it is also possible that Stodden and Hutchinson’s public displays of affection are performance art intended to break our normative boundaries in the effort of one day redrawing their lines. Social change. I feel this is not likely, as little evidence of self-awareness seems to exist in Stodden — her YouTube channel featuring videos with titles such as “Crazy Courtney Bunny Buzz,” and “How Many Can I Fit In My Mouth?,” her video oeuvre doesn’t hint at even a glimmer of irony.

Ultimately I can’t deny that Stodden’s cat-food and litterbox-pooping-and-peeing fetish on display here knee-jerked me into a sort of gawking mortification. I couldn’t help it. But I think it’s important to remind myself that I am only one perception and that the narratives imprinted on me are generalized scenarios that do not account for specific people, specific personal histories, specific situations. Because the nice British man who likes to dress up in lingerie while having sex with women drinks that wine glass of the VICE girl’s pee with a straight face, showing no signs of instinctual disgust. Sciortino’s expression is inscrutable, but arguably anxiety-free.

I had my hand over my mouth.

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Pretty much since I came of age, I’ve kind of hated myself. Yeah. One of the specific ways I’ve hated myself, or one of my self-hatred’s manifestations, has been this pervasive feeling that I’ve tricked all my friends and colleagues into thinking that I’m not a totally sh-tty, stupid human being. Every time I’m ‘on’ at a party, every time someone says something about me being smart, every time I write an article that gets good traffic, something inside me won’t let me take credit for it. Instead, I secretly believe that what I did was sh-t, but that I’ve merely conned people into believing what I did wasn’t sh-t. And sooner or later, everyone’s going to find out.

That’s f-cked up, huh? Well, it is what it is. I’m admitting it. But I didn’t know this feeling was a thing, that other people felt it too, until my friend described it to me. She felt the same way, and she’s way more accomplished than me. “Wow!” I said. “You think you’re a total fraud, too?” How ironic — I had always perceived this person as undeniably talented. LOL. Coincidentally, I had been reading a book called Love’s Executioner by a psychotherapist named Irvin D. Yalom at the time, and in the book, he describes accounts with clients in which they ‘admit’ to walking around feeling like they’re continuously tricking everyone around them into liking them. So I googled it, and found this on Wikipedia:

The impostor syndrome, sometimes called impostor phenomenon or fraud syndrome, is a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments…

Despite external evidence of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be.

The impostor syndrome was once thought to be particularly common among women who are successful in their given careers, but has since been shown to occur for an equal number of men. It is commonly associated with academics and is widely found among graduate students.

So, it’s a thing.

The personal irony here is that finding this Wikipedia entry hasn’t done anything for my own complex; even now, I’m sure that I’m just barely skirting by with this write-up — this article’s employed enough tricks to affect flow, style, mastery, non-stupidity. I’m this close ([_____________________]) to being exposed. Someone will find out I faked my way through this. Somewhere out there, someone knows.

So, fellow imposters. Not to worry? There are way more frauds out there than you expected? Who, by the way — they know. They all know. There have been group email chains about how they all know. Someone in the email chain has even been tracking all the times you’ve been a fraud — they wrote them down in a list in a shared Google document and they’re all looking at it now and laughing with each other about it. Everyone is onto you, phony. We’re on to you. And we’re going to have an intervention soon, one where we all shame you for being a fraud. A big. fat. fraud.

(Just kidding.)

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How did a revered cultural commentator and two of the most notable music groups end up on last Sunday’s episode of The Simpsons? The title of The Simpsons episode that ran last Sunday was “The Totally Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again,” an homage to one of American essayist and fiction writer David Foster Wallace’s more notable essays, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” And just as Wallace’s essay goes, Bart — in an effort to escape an existential crisis brought on by the monotony of his school-boy life, convinces the Simpson family to go on what turns out to be a mundane cruise to somewhere cold. Adding to the homage, the episode features tracks from both Hot Chip and Animal Collective. The Simpsons is staying relevant!

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Here’s some sweet nostalgia for you. TMZ seems to have had set up a pretty impressive flash mob situation recently. They got Alfonso Ribeiro, the actor who played Carlton Banks on 90s television hallmark Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to lead a flash mob in his signature dance to Tom Jones’ “It’s not unusual” in LA. Only thing that could have improved the performance would have been stern glares from Uncle Phil and a Will Smith cameo. I’m a fan.

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I’m a month late on this, but there’s a newish app out for iPhone that’ll help you figure out if you should stay or go. It’s called “Should I Break Up With My Boyfriend?,” and it’ll supposedly help you finalize your decision about whether you want to make a clean break from a mundane relationship or stick it out because he might be the one. The app has you track how you feel about your boyfriend on a day-to-day basis for two weeks and allows you to record your thoughts about how things are going. After the two weeks are over, it analyzes the data and gives you a graph of how your feelings fluctuated, then offers advice about how you might want to proceed.

Sarah Gray, the app’s creator, said the idea for the app was born out of her own dissatisfaction with a long-distance relationship she was in. “I wished I had a way to track how I felt about him and our relationship, and could see a graph which would show me if things were mostly good — or mostly sucked. That way, I could do something about it.” When she ended up checking out her relationship’s graph, she found that she was only feeling “good” 39% of the time. “Sometimes, we need an objective voice to help us appreciate a good thing or accept something painful,” she said. “And this app helps us tap into the best voice of all — the one inside ourselves.”

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Love when people expose the ridiculousness of cliches and cultural trends via in-character parody. Stephen Colbert. Hipster Runoff. This guy. Maybe I’m just noticing it now; probably I’m just noticing it now. But there’s like, a whole new generation super trolls emerging! I really, really like it. Anyways, this is a common-cold-stricken rapper named Krispy Kreme, representing all the rappers that are smaller than you but that will still fight you. Have a laugh and listen to his song “The Baddest.”

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1. Stop glaring. The other day Ryan told me (IRL) that he didn’t believe when people say that their normal, resting facial expression is like, a frown, or a sort of depressed glare that signals everyone in their immediate vicinity to quickly move away from their location because they want absolutely nothing to do with them, but I don’t know, because I feel like my default facial expression is sort of like “F-ck you” or “I’m not interested” or, you know, “Go f-ck yourself” or “I don’t want to talk to you get away from me right now I can’t talk to you I’m allergic to you I’m having an allergic reaction to you right now get away get away get away,” maybe. Maybe. But really I’m just walking around thinking “[blank]” or “Hey those are cool shoes” or “I should be a better person” or “Life is really good right now, huh?” Not that I’m not sometimes feeling completely allergic to interaction, I can’t deny that anti-social toxicity can sometimes take control of me. Anyways, I’m not sure I agree with Ryan, I think some of us are just naturally kind of angry looking. I’m not sure what that means. Am I exposing some kind of contradiction here? Maybe the fact that we look angry sometimes acknowledges some kind of unconscious dissatisfaction suppressed by the societal pressure to always be peachy, to always answer “Oh I’m doing fine great thank you for asking how are you!!” ad nauseam. Let’s forget that though and decide that we, the chronically alienated, are actually happy, that there isn’t some kind of crude oil well of self-loathing filling the deepest depths of our shells of hearts, that we’re OK, and you’re OK. If we accept this premise and maintain a sensitivity to the negativity of our default facial expression and act to correct it in some way, to lift our furrowed brows and open our eyes a bit wider, we might be a bit more approachable at parties, a little more sympathetic looking, a little more likely to get laid.

2. Remember that people are paying way less attention to you than you think they are. It’s true, no one really even cares what you’re doing. You have no value. My rule is basically that I should divide my humiliation about anything I think I’ve done embarrassing at a party by around 90 and then use the resulting ‘figure’ to judge how much one or two people at the most may have judged my action as embarrassing. So, basically, about 10% of my humiliation, at most, is actually ‘real’ (as in, recorded in other people’s perceptions). And that’s probably a high estimate. And so yeah, I did just actually reveal that I’ve come up with a formula for how much humiliation is appropriate to feel at any given time.

3. Remember that enthusiasm is okay. This one has been a hard one for me to get over personally. There’s something so control-freaky over withholding enthusiasm from people you just meet. It’s an unwillingness to give people the normal levels of validation they expect in first encounters — an unwillingness to commit to their ‘team,’ to let them know that they are safe with you and don’t have to worry about being judged. I think people instinctually seek this out, the team-y thing, almost immediately in most first-impression type situations, and if you know that, the next step may be that you find it endearing, or at least acceptable. But one of the major downfalls of withholding enthusiasm during a first impression is that first impressions really do matter a lot and being a quiet serious person who’s all “I’m f-cking way serious don’t f-ck around” with all his body language, voice intonations and facial expressions makes people who just met you say “I thought you hated me when we first met!” and, to mutual friends, “Oh, you mean the depressed one? Yeah, I remember him.” I can’t tell if I do this anymore; actually, maybe I don’t, I think I replaced it with something, at one point, which was equally as destructive to my pool of potential friends and girlfriends, which leads me to:

4. Don’t f-cking subtly indicate that you think your small talk conversation is a joke. Because only people who are so insecure in their ability to be engaging that they have to fake like they don’t even want to engage at all — which is obviously contradictory, because why go to a party if not to engage? — try to tear the conversation down at the premise level to show the other person that it doesn’t matter if they’re no fun, they’re too cool to try anyways. Everything’s a joke, including the person you’re talking to, who cares, f-ck you. This behavior is not chic. It makes the other person think you’re making fun of them, and not in a flirty or friendly way, but in a sort of dark, unaccepting way that’s a complete turn-off. Alienated person, you have to watch out for this. I didn’t realize I was doing it until someone, a friend, told me something like, “Well, it just seems like you’re making fun of people when you talk to them.” And then I felt really, really stupid. The thing is that I wasn’t even meaning to do that, not really, it was just the first thing I turned to after realizing that withholding enthusiasm from people and actually committing to like, talking to people at parties and making them feel like I liked them or at least accepted them (which is really a whole ‘nother can of worms, that idea, because I don’t want to say that I didn’t accept anyone, which is totally f-cked up and would paint a very unsympathetic picture of me as a person, I’d come across as a real unfeeling asshole here, but the thing is that if I wasn’t willing to give anyone the basic human acknowledgement of an eye-contact-with-earnest-smile or just a conversation without a bunch of irony imposed on the whole thing, then who knows if I really accepted anyone, who knows? Who knows if I even accepted myself, when I did this? So, ah, hm.) And so the point is that you should watch out for this, make sure you’re not just uncontrollably hinting that you think your entire conversation is to be laughed at, because it can become this go-to program for social gatherings that you even don’t realize you’ve opened up and started running. It’s sort of related to this rule:

5. Don’t make inside jokes that you have with yourself. No one gets inside jokes that you have with yourself. Trust me, no one gets them. You will attract zero people by telling other people inside jokes that you have with yourself. Telling a joke that no one gets to a group of people and then laughing about it while everyone else just titters and shuffles their feet and raises their eyebrows in a sort of “OK buddy, way to go” type passive aggression makes you look like a self-obsessed, uncomfortable person with very obvious social issues. Save your inside jokes. Save them! They do not facilitate comfortable interaction, romance, sex, etc.

6. Remember your context. I’ve found that I’ve actually done things like be really quiet and aloof at social gatherings or even trailed behind someone on the sidewalk literally scared of, in a sense, passing them because it would disturb them or something. Very irrational. I think these are things people have done before and still do, they’re behaviors guided by irrational little rules and hang-ups that ignore the context of the situation and basically prevent you from feeling comfortable. For example the scenarios listed above read pretty absurdly in text even though in the moment the motivations behind them can be difficult to overcome, and the reason they read absurd is because the thoughts and feelings are just completely not-in-line with the scenario. I think that at least some of us alienated, immature, oversharing, mindless millenial types sometimes forget for example that a party is a party, an event at which people gather for the theoretical purpose of having fun, drinking, and interacting, and instead act like a party is a library, or something, where it isn’t actually appropriate to speak to random strangers. The point is to just remember your context. Don’t feel like you’re imposing on a person at a social gathering by going up to them and talking to them. They signed up for that when they decided to go to the party, and if they have a problem with you following protocol, then they’re the ones with the problem, not you. Let’s just acknowledge here that this was the least gimmicky rule of this post, for no reason other than to assure myself of my own standing, with myself, another sort of uncontrollable defense mechanism on display for readers and haters alike, which I’ll eventually have to get over, which I assure you I’m working on.

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Today in parody accounts on Twitter: Instagram reinterpreted via text. As in “Sophia Coppola-inspired beside-the-pool shot of bikini babe on chaise longue” or “flowering tree against a blue sky.” It’s pretty clever, and it’s only been live for about 18 hours, so pass this along to your friends before it’s old news so you’re the cool one, for once in your life. Highlights, thus far:

Tilt-shift fortune cookie

— Text-Only Instagram (@textinstagram) April 26, 2012

Airplane wing as viewed from two seats back

— Text-Only Instagram (@textinstagram) April 26, 2012

Portrait of a dandelion with a suspiciously shallow depth of field for a cell phone

— Text-Only Instagram (@textinstagram) April 26, 2012

Latte with foam shaped like a heart.

— Text-Only Instagram (@textinstagram) April 25, 2012

Conveniently framed self portrait of a girl with a low-cut shirt.

— Text-Only Instagram (@textinstagram) April 25, 2012

Time’s running out — as of 11:30 a.m., the account already has 10k followers. Go follow before your friends do!

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Sweet, a hilarious new Brokelandia from the cool people over at Brokelyn. This second episode of what I hope will be an ongoing series takes on the Brooklyn neighborhood name game, the G train, the East River Ferry, I think, and juicing parties. They also come up with a few new BK neighborhoods, namely, Mama Jumbo, which is “made up of all the rooftops of all the buildings in Dumbo,” and a new industrial area called Barackabilly. Classic. Now I want other cities to join in the fun. Here are cities semantically ripe for spin-offs: Oaklandia, Orlandia, Chicagolandia. And, I can’t think of anymore. Enjoy the show.

(Also, check out the article that Eric Silver — cowriter and co-star of this episode — wrote for us back in January.)

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I found something. A 300-song Spotify playlist of the most memorable 90s songs — or every song they’d play at my middle school dances — ever, ever. Warren G, Collective Soul, Counting Crows, Goo Goo Dolls, Bone-Thugs, Spin Doctors, Soul Coughing, The Toadies, Natalie Imbruglia, Crash Test Dummies… I don’t even like half these peoples’ music. It’s the 90s though so I actually do, now. I’m obligated. Here it is. It’s… virtual insanity!

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