Janel Comeau

Starting a blog is tricky.

On the one hand, I want readers to have enough information about me to care about what I say and eventually lapse into healthy, occasional worship of me. On the other hand, I don't want to give out so much information that a potential stalker could show up at my door with my favourite kind of cheesecake and five of my least-hated romantic comedies on DVD. Since I'm terrible at finding that kind of balance, I'll just start by letting you know that I like Oreo cheesecake.

My hobbies include pretending internet privacy is still a thing in 2013.

Since, I am not, to my knowledge, some kind of sentient fungus, I come complete with a back story. I was born twenty-one years ago in Moncton, New Brunswick, which, despite being a 'major' Canadian city, is the sort of place that you can only find on a map if you grew up near it.

It's here, in case you were wondering.

Unfortunately, Moncton just didn't offer the sorts of transportation-related employment that my parents required, and so they packed up their wrinkly red raisin of an offspring and went west to Edmonton, Alberta, where I currently reside. Despite its abundance of large, predatory mammals and its apocalyptic winters, I've managed to survive here for year after year without ever resorting to cannibalism; I consider that to be a personal victory.

A point of pride for any city.

Intrepid readers may have noticed the 'Publications' tab on this page, and deduced that I like to write things. Dull readers may have entirely missed that before they read the previous sentence. Yes, I count myself among the legions of struggling, unrecognized writers in the world. Yes, I have an ever-growing body of unpublished Word documents stashed away on my hard drive. No, I haven't yet started the process of submitting my literary offspring to the world. In fact, that's why I started this blog - I'm just not selfish enough to deny the voyeurs of the world the opportunity to follow my successes and many, many failures in the publishing world. Stay tuned for plenty of that.

Now, since I'm not exactly fond of living on the dog-food-and-ramen diet of most struggling artists, I have more going on in my life than a big, unpublished novel (which will be discussed later). I'm a fourth-year university student, and after a gigantic, melodramatic breakdown at the end of my second year (which would also be an excellent topic for a future post), I decided to pursue Forensic Psychology as a career. If anyone out there decided to abandon my blog after learning I'm a struggling writer, but inexplicably carried on to this paragraph, rest assured that psychology is just one of the many topics I'm interested in incessantly talking about.

After four years of school, I've learned that these work better when they're still inside your head.

For now, that's all you need to know. First blog posts are universally awkward, banal and overlooked, and I'm afraid that this one isn't much different. Since I'm incapable of functioning if I'm not given deadlines to adhere to, this blog will be updated every weekend, with posts on a variety of topics. If you'd be awesome enough to spam my blog across every social media outlet you have access to, you would earn my eternal gratitude, kindly anonymous blog readers. See you next week with something more worthwhile.

How did this introductory blog post stack up to others that you've read? Let me know in the comments.

To commemorate sending off my first-ever query letter, I'm going to answer a question that I get from friends, family, and wide-eyed, innocent beginner writers all the time: How are you going to get your novel published?

It's a valid question; writing and polishing my first novel took me almost exactly two years, and it's understandable that my loved ones want to ensure my long hours in front of the computer - and subsequent doughy physique - have not been in vain. Unfortunately, the average person seems to believe that we live in an age where publishing requires little more than shipping the half-pound of paper that makes up your manuscript to New York, and waiting patiently for a cheque to arrive in the mail.

No need for a specific address. All of New York City accepts unpublished manuscripts.

In reality, the process is a little more complicated. You can rest easy knowing that in this day and age, you won't have to struggle with postage to get your masterpiece on the shelves; the only thing that the publishing process costs is time, energy, and the few remaining dredges of whatever sanity you're still clinging to.

There are a lot of possible routes from laptop to bookshelf, but my intended publishing journey looks a little something like this:

Step One: Write a novel that's worth publishing.

This may take a few more attempts than initially anticipated.

To be completely honest, I won't know that I've accomplished this until I'm holding a copy of my book that I didn't personally make on a photocopier at Staples. But I did what I could to make sure that at least some people on this Earth won't immediately condemn my work as unreadable trash.

For one, I was careful to write into a genre that a) exists, and b) I enjoy. Don't get me wrong; I value individuality as much as the next undiscovered, unappreciated writer. But as a former library employee, I understand that every book needs to fit somewhere on a shelf. Romance books go in the Romance section. Science fictions go in the science fiction section. Metaphysical young adult space western romantic mysteries go on the head librarian's desk with a question mark post-it attached, until someone finally takes pity on the poor, confused book and flings it down an elevator shaft.

To prevent my story from ending up homeless in a dark basement, I wrote it as a YA sci-fi. It's a pretty straightforward thing to do: my characters are teenagers on an ever-so-slightly angsty quest for identity, and they get to use technology that even Japanese teenagers don't have yet. Easy. But I didn't write a YA sci-fi just so I could one day see my books wedged next to the Artemis Fowl series on a library shelf; it's a genre I actually enjoy. Is it the most lucrative genre I could have gone for? Of course not. If you're in the writing game for money, you'd better get started on a romance novel about a Scotsman/Native American/Cowboy/Vampire/Wealthy Oil Sheik and a beautiful Slave/Advertising Executive/Early Religious Settler/Bubble-Headed Idiot right away. Since I'd rather write the warning labels on chemical solvents than churn out genre romances, I figured I'd have a better shot at success if I enjoyed what I was writing.

Putting a half-naked male torso on your cover is the key to success.

The last thing I did in an attempt to make something of quasi-publishable quality was proofread. I've read a lot of currently-being-queried manuscripts that look they were typed with a pair of snowshoes, and I didn't want to make the same mistakes. It took a lot of time, effort, and Google searches to grammar websites to make everything look nice, but if my manuscript doesn't make agents want to scoop out their own eyeballs with a spoon, I'll know it was worth it.

Step Two: Do research.

As I previously mentioned, there's a lot more to publishing than turning up at Random House with a printed manuscript and a pen outstretched to sign your book deal. The major publishing houses got tired of wading through piles of unsolicited literary garbage decades ago, and now require unpublished authors to seek out a middle man: the almighty literary agent.

The funny thing about literary agents is, no matter how much money you have or how many luxury exotic cats you own, you can't just phone one up and demand she represent your novel. Agents earn a living through the ~15% commission they take on the books they sell, so it doesn't matter how devilishly good-looking you are, or how many tigers you have in your living room - if agents don't want to live on ramen, they can't represent unsellable books.

Unfortunately, Mr. Snuggles cannot get you an agent.

Although agents all play a similar role in every author's career - they sell manuscripts to publishers and prevent writers from being trampled to death in the wildebeest stampede that is the publishing process - not every agent is alike. Agents are more than just faceless gatekeepers to literary fame and fortune; they're people too, and they're not about to spend weeks or years of their lives advocating for a book in a genre they consider to be little more than expensive toilet paper. Some might like to represent only science fiction and fantasy. Others may be exclusively seeking memoirs from ex-Amish motorcycle gang members. Long before any writer starts sending out queries to agents, he or she needs to do some homework. Look up an agent's tastes, past sales, and favourite books. Find out what they're willing to represent. When it comes to literary agents, people tell me, there's no such thing as "too much research".

No, I lied. There is such thing as too much research.

During the months I edited my manuscript, I spent a lot of time looking up agents. I read blogs, bios, Twitter feeds, Publishers Marketplace and QueryTracker comments. The only way for me to learn more information about some of these agents would be to actually hack into their private medical records. By the time I'd finished cyber-stalking all of them, I'd come up with a healthy list of 58 agents whom I felt might be interested in taking a look at what I'd written.

Step Three: Write submissions material.

As I mentioned before, even if you've written the next "Harry Potter and the Fifty Shades of Hunger Games", you can't just phone up an agent to pitch them your book. Since publishing is a business, business correspondence is expected: in this case, you'll need to write agents a special kind of letter called a query.

In theory, a query letter is something that could be written while waiting for the bus - it's a short, formal letter that tells the agent who you are and summarizes the dazzling brilliance of your literary masterpiece in just a few short sentences. There's not really a right or wrong way to do it, so long as it makes someone want to immediately read your story. Easy enough, right? You should be able to scratch one out on a fast food napkin in the time it takes you to cram a McGreasyBurger into your face. The only issue is, of course, that you might need to make an adjustment or two before your letter is just right.

Just a few of my early drafts.

Oh, wait, did I say that queries were simple and easy? I meant to say that they're the hardest fucking thing you'll ever write in your life. Mine is only 266 words long, and I put more thought and effort into it than I'll put into my future wedding vows. The only thing I agonized over more than my query was my synopsis. For those who aren't familiar with the term, a synopsis is a one- or two-page document that presents the plot, characters, story, setting, backstory, tone, voice, themes, and soul of your novel in a clear, concise manner. They usually top out at around 1,500 words, and they take two to three long, grueling months to write and perfect. And after all that, the best part is, around half of the agents you query won't ask you to include a synopsis at all.

Step Four: Make agent lists.

Carpet-bombing as a strategy is very rarely successful, and agent submissions are no exception. Sending out a query to every appropriate agent you researched at once is a bad move. Sure, it might help you get the whole process over with faster, but consider this: between the sleepless hours and crippling alcohol dependency you doubtlessly developed during the query writing stage, you may have overlooked some problems in your letter. What happens if you send out a query to every single agent you know of and realize the next day that they're all hopelessly flawed? You're screwed, that's what.

If at all possible, avoid writing your query on an iPhone.

When I was initially researching the proper way to query an agent, the writing denizens of the internet advised me to query in rounds, and since I believe everything I read on the internet, that's exactly what I'm doing. It's a clever concept - you send it out to just ten or so agents at a time, and wait for feedback. If you get a unanimous string of cold, impersonal rejections, you know that you need to put your query through the shredder and write a better one.

Now, I'm not exactly known for making high-calibre decisions, so the logic I used in making lists of agents for each round might be heinously flawed. But since I have my name at the top of the website, I get to talk about me, and I came up with my own system for determining rounds of agents.

I'm about two more bad ideas away from having to wear this at all times.

For one, I avoided picking out a "dream agent". Frankly, if an agent likes my book enough to represent me, I don't care if they have a law degree or a community college certificate in basket-weaving. Instead, I took a look at QueryTracker stats and ranked agents based on responsiveness. My first round of queries all went to new agents who give a response, good or bad, to every query they get. I reasoned - perhaps inaccurately, but that remains to be seen - that new agents would be the most eager to build a client list and the most willing to give a debut author a chance. Response rate is also crucial - if my query is a flawed, hopeless mess, I'd rather learn that right away than wait around in three months of query purgatory for a response.

My next round of queries is going to ten agents who mentioned that they're seeking some specific quirk or trait that my novel has, such as an unusual voice or a gender-bending cyber-nurse (No, seriously, I have one in my story). Response times and notoriety among this group vary, but I want to make sure that anyone who may have been staying up late into the night, crying out for a story just like mine, has ample time to read it over and consider it.

The third round is going to agents who mention a specific interest in my exact genre. These agents aren't just fans of YA and sci-fi; they specifically yearn to see the two combined, and I can deliver that for them. Again, these agents range from people who always, always email replies to people who respond so infrequently that they might actually be mythological figures, but if we share a love for a specific, hybrid genre, they might be interested in what I've got.

Above: How I picture non-responsive agents.

All subsequent rounds of queries are going to agents who show an interest in "general" YA or all types of science fiction. They might not be biting their nails to the quick, waiting for my exact snarky teen virtual reality manuscript to show up in their inboxes, but there's a chance that they might be open to taking a look, and really, one look could be all it takes to launch my career.

Step Five: Send out queries.

I've done a great deal of whining and complaining up until now about everything, but this, by far, has been the hardest stage of the querying process. In fact, I was more than capable of never reaching this stage at all. Before I sent out a single query, I went back over the manuscript a dozen or more times, desperately searching for some sort of error that could needed fixing before I could unleash my little story on the world. Eventually, I realized that I was just stalling for time by making arbitrary changes, swapping a good word for an equally good synonym or just staring blankly at commas, wondering if any of them were violating some long-forgotten law of spliced punctuation.

Shredding your letter to confetti and hurling it at agents is festive, but not recommended.

The first query I sent out sat in my inbox for nearly forty-five minutes as I checked, double-checked and re-checked for the slightest spelling error or formatting problem that could drive the agent to print off my letter and set it on fire in disgust. Eventually, the waves of nervous nausea subsided, and I was able to click 'send'. Once that was done, it got easier - I managed to send out a total of seven more queries before I finally lapsed into a neurotic cycle of endlessly checking my email. By the time I'm ready to send the next round, I'm hoping the urge to fear-puke will have dissipated entirely.

Step Six: Wait.

This is the stage I'm at right now. Agent response times vary from three minutes to never, so waiting patiently while complete, total strangers living thousands of kilometres away decide whether or not you get to chase your lifelong dreams is a skill that every writer needs to develop.

What you really need to make it through the query process.

Of course, even if, wonder of wonders, an agent does email me back to let me know that they'd like to be sent the massive Word document that makes up my young life's work, there'll still be more waiting left to do. It's not unreasonable for an agent to take up to six months to review a potential client manuscript, leaving the nervous writer to wear out the left-click button on her mouse from pressing the "refresh" button on her email.

I might need a little bit more wine.

Even if, in some best-possible-case hypothetical future scenario, an agent agrees to deal with me, that won't be the end of my waiting. The publishing industry moves at approximately glacial speeds, and after signing with an agent and making all the subsequent recommended revisions, a writer can still expect to wait between several weeks and forever for a book deal to appear.

Bonus Possible Future Step: Revel in the ethereal glory of success (maybe).

The important thing to keep in mind here is that most fledgling writers don't make it past the query stage, especially with their first manuscript. In all likelihood, two years of work, editing and anxiety will amount to a pile of rejection letters in my inbox and some newfound bitterness to pour into the next book.

With that said, this is still the goal. Every time I hit 'send' on a query, I know that there's an ever-so-slight chance that the agent will be intrigued enough to ask for the full thing, and then subsequently fall so head-over-heels in love with it that they demand to represent me, and then promptly secure me a multi-book publishing deal, which leads to a movie franchise, allowing me to retire in a pile of money at the age of twenty-five.

Also, being a published author will give me the power to leap across canyons.

I can dream. Ultimately, whether my first novel ends up printed on a shelf, or occupying a space of honour in my desk drawer, I did a pretty neat thing by writing it and having the courage the send it out.

And to me, that's what really matters.

I have a dog.

Well, actually, to be honest, I have two. Fortunately, only one of them did something awful enough to earn a public shaming on my blog.

Behold, the harbinger of chaos.

This is Max. He's three years old, and he's the product of an unholy union between a female beagle and a male shih tzu. As you can see, his front half is that of his long-haired, Chinese father and his back half comes from his short-haired, English mother, because genes are strange and mysterious things.

Despite that fact that he looks like a tiny, buck-toothed bison, we love Max, and in exchange, he tries to not destroy too many of our things. Usually, this arrangement works just fine for everyone involved.

Usually.

Two months ago, our family decided that we just didn't have enough dog poop to pick up, and we decided to adopt an eight-week-old Newfoundland puppy we came across online. Introducing the two dogs went smoothly; 30 lb Max growled once to assert his dominance over the soon-to-be-bear-sized newcomer, and all was well.

With a face like that, I'd be willing to clone her and adopt her twice.

Now, the thing about having two dogs is that it's a lot like having two kids: whatever you give to one, you have to give to the other. If one gets dinner, the other one also wants dinner. If one has a toy, the other one wants the toy too. If one digs up the half-decomposed carcass of a squirrel in the backyard, the other one wants its own mouthful of smelly rodent carrion. And a few nights ago, what the puppy had (that Max desperately wanted) was my attention.

Guinness the puppy had trotted up to me with her leash in her mouth, and, not wanting to put on pants and venture out into the cruel world outside, I made her settle for a hearty game of fetch in the hall. The sound of a forty-pound Newfie thundering up and down a hallway effectively drowns out any sounds of mischief going on in the house, and so when I went to check up on little Max five minutes later, I was surprised at what I found.

I think I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

He does not look the least bit sorry.

On the bright side, the couch looks much more comfortable now.

He was at least considerate enough to leave us half the roll.

Comfortably surveying the carnage.

Needless to say, I was less than thrilled. Toilet paper, as you're probably well aware, is the flimsy material to which all other flimsy materials are compared, and it doesn't take a whole lot of dog saliva to turn it into a mushy white paste. After half an hour of scraping damp, balled-up tissue off the couch cushions, I was forced to give up and let it dry overnight. Max closely supervised the cleaning process, and even made a few valiant efforts to eat the pieces left behind.

While we're glad to see Max get a little extra fibre in his diet, this was a performance we'd rather not see an encore of. Rest assured, from now on, bathroom doors will be closed and all rolls of consumable household papers will be kept up on shelves that his stumpy little shih tzu legs can't reach. This, of course, will force him to seek out more expensive things to destroy. Stay tuned for updates.

What's the worst thing your dog has ever done? Leave it in the comments.

As I mentioned in my earnest, self-disclosing first post, I'm a university student working on a degree in psychology. Since I'm aiming for a career in Forensic Clinical psychology, most of my classes are devoted to the study of psychological disorders; I spend my time learning how to recognize the classic signs of schizophrenia and coax hyperactive patients off the ceiling. Learning to classify and diagnose patients is an important first step in learning how to treat them someday.

Before starting my degree, I assumed that this was the only therapy technique I'd need.

Of course, even if you have no formal background in psychology, you can probably name most of the major disorders off the top of your head. Bipolar disorder. Schizophrenia. Major Depressive Disorder. Social Anxiety Disorder. Tourette's Syndrome. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. ADHD. The list goes on, and on, and on, and with recent pushes for mental health awareness, you've probably been exposed to these disorders more than you ever have before.

The portion of my audience that is made up of struggling writers and avid readers is probably especially aware of mental disorders. They pop up everywhere in literature, from the oh-my-God-my-son-shot-everyone novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, to the adorably clinically depressed donkey, Eeyore, in Winnie the Pooh. Finding something original to say about mental illness is tough, and approaching such a heavy topic without drinking yourself into a sadness coma isn't easy. Luckily for you, hypothetical struggling writer, there are still plenty of fascinating, non-heinously-debilitating disorders out there that are still waiting to be mentioned in literature.

Regrettably, 'drunken sadness comas' have not yet been recognized as disorders.

So whether you're here for psychology facts, writing inspiration, or just plain old curiosity, enjoy reading about:

1. The Capgras Delusion

This has 'delusion' right in the name, so you already have some idea of what's involved here. By definition, delusions are beliefs about the world that have absolutely no basis in reality, and the belief involved in the Capgras Delusion - also known as Capgras Syndrome - is a real doozy. It's simple really; people with this disorder are just completely convinced that someone close to them has been replaced with a physically identical imposter.

Pictured: Your life with Capgras Delusion. Enjoy.

Obviously, living through the plot of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers every day of your life is less than ideal, and people afflicted with the disorder have very different methods of coping with it. Some people just accept the imposter and continue to go about their lives, having apparently come to the realization that their loved one's good looks are their only important quality. Others employ equally reasonable measures like pulling guns on their loved one and having standoffs with the police. Regardless of how you cope with it, treatment is tricky - simply pointing out to the sufferer that they sound like a fruity History Channel program doesn't work. Instead, you've got to point out how reality works, and wait for the patient to discover their loose screw all on their own.

"Imposters"

A disorder like Capgras Syndrome is far too much fun to restrict to just one possible cause - it can result from brain injury, stroke, schizophrenia, dementia, migraines, diabetes, migraines, hypothyroidism, drug reactions, normal human aging and hitting your head really, really hard until aliens inhabit Grandma's body. There are three female cases of Capgras Syndrome to every two male cases, which means if you wake up in the middle of the night to find one of your parents trying to peel your face off to see who you really are under there, chances are, it'll be your mother.

It's worth noting that Capgras Delusion has already made a very successful literary debut - the 2006 novel The Echo Maker by Richard Power is about a man whose car accident causes him to believe his beloved sister has been replaced by an imposter. The novel won the National Book Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, elevating kooky brain disorders to literary gold.

2. Jerusalem Syndrome

The city of Jerusalem has dominated world headlines for the last, oh, five thousand years or so, and in that time it's become a very important place for every religion that traces itself back to Abraham.

Jerusalem is significant to everyone except Greenland, China and North Korea. Make of that what you will.

Needless to say, if you're a big fan of this "God" person and his bestselling adventure novels, visiting Jerusalem is a pretty big deal. Different tourists show appreciation for the holiness of the city in different ways. Some people join scheduled, guided tours, to make sure they don't miss any attractions. Some people photograph everything they see. Some people might even choose to wander the city by themselves, taking in the culture and history of the five-millennia-old city.

Oh, and some people like to tear off their clothes and preach to random passersby on street corners.

Jerusalem Syndrome refers to a phenomenon wherein tourists with no diagnosed mental health issues descend into shoelace-eating lunacy after arriving in the city of Jerusalem. Symptoms range from funny to hilarious: sufferers commonly wander away from whatever group they arrived in, fashion themselves togas out of stolen hotel linens, declare themselves to be Jesus 2.0, and preach garbled, lukewarm sermons about the merits of 2nd-century lifestyles at the increasingly jaded public. Other fun symptoms include compulsive bathing and nail-clipping, uncontrollable reciting of hymns and psalms, and spontaneous pilgrimages to Jerusalem's holiest sites.

Just think - debilitating lunacy is only a plane ride away.

While the syndrome is known for appearing in people who are otherwise healthy and stable, closer examination has revealed that many of the 100 people who are diagnosed ever year have 'unusual thoughts' prior to the onset of the disorder. 'Unusual thoughts' is such a delightfully vague term that it could encompass everything from an insistence on always eating pizza on Wednesdays, to a deep-seated belief that moon-dwelling space leopards planned the 9/11 attacks. Just to be on the safe side, you should assume that if you have any personal quirks or irrational beliefs whatsoever, a trip to Jerusalem would see you standing on a sidewalk, hollering at strangers to forsake the modern evils of cell phones and elastic waistband underwear.

Repent, sinners!

The good news about Jerusalem Syndrome is that it's relatively easy to treat. The city has a designated hospital - the Kfar Shaul psychiatric hospital - that authorities drag all sufferers to, and the staff there find that only 40% of patients need to be tranquilized and pumped full of anti-psychotics. Usually, the most effective treatment is also the simplest - just leave the city. When sufferers return to their country of origin, they return to normal, with no lingering signs of psychosis. The entire process of onset and recovery takes as little as five days, making this psychotic syndrome actually preferable to the common cold.

Though Jerusalem syndrome has not yet had its moment in the literary spotlight, it was the focus of an episode of The Simpsons, and that's just as good.

3. Boanthropy

Those of you who paid enough attention in school to recognize the meanings of the Latin derivative "bo" and the Greek root "anthropy" probably don't need to be told what this is all about. For the rest of you, I'll spell it out: boanthropy is a condition in which a human being firmly believes him- or herself to be a cow.

Timmy was determined not to let his condition prevent him from leading a normal life.

Though this sounds like a made-up disorder invented by the pharmaceutical industry to give them an excuse to shovel pills down the throats of any four-year-old who declares he wants to be a farm animal when he grows up, boanthropy has been around for quite some time. It's been happening for so long, in fact, that the most famous case of the disorder appears in the Bible - in the Book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar II abandons all of his responsibilities to live as a cow for seven years. After nearly a decade of grazing in random pastures, the king snaps out of it and resumes his reign, since no one apparently objects to being ruled by a man who spent a significant portion of his life as livestock. At the time, people attributed his insanity to the whims of a petulant, Old Testament God. Today, psychologists are slightly more inclined to treat it with pills than with the sacrifice of a firstborn son.

Boanthropy typically comes on suddenly, with no major head injuries or hallucinatory drug mishaps to mark its onset. The only thing sufferers seem to have in common is that they're extremely suggestible - in some cases, hypnosis may be all it takes to set the disorder in motion. Some people are also capable of developing full-fledged boanthropy by just telling themselves over and over again that they are a large, grazing bovine. It's also one of the only disorders that has been linked to dreams; many cases have been found to begin after sufferers have a dream of being turned into a cow, proving that not quite everything Freud said was sex-crazed, cocaine-fueled nonsense.

"Hooray." - Sigmund Freud

Because of its rarity and bizarre qualities, boanthropy is one of those disorders still waiting to make its literary debut. Well, unless you count the Bible.

4. Cotard Syndrome

This disorder is also commonly known as the Cotard Delusion, which should instantly alert readers that this is going to be a good one. Like individuals with Capgras Delusion, people with the Cotard delusion have irrational beliefs and a diagnosis that starts with the letter "C". However, these people don't believe that their loved ones have been replaced with impostors. That would be crazy. No, people with Cotard Syndrome simply believe that they themselves are dead.

If you start dressing like this every day, other people will wish they were dead too.

The syndrome was first discovered in Paris in the late 19th century, by neurologist James Cotard, for whom, you may have noticed, the disorder was named. Cotard first encountered the syndrome in a patient named Mademoiselle X, who believed that she had been damned to hell, and become incapable of dying a natural death; this belief was severely tested when she died of self-inflicted starvation. Since then, cases of Cotard delusion have followed roughly the same path. Patients initially suffer with bouts of depression, which somehow progress into a thinly-rationalized belief that they are somehow no longer alive. If a patient happens to live alone, or with a family who doesn't consider any of the preceding symptoms to be sufficient reason to see a doctor, the patient's delusions progress until he or she completely stops meeting all physical needs and winds up as dead as they think they are.

You may recognize the disorder from AMC's hit documentary series.

Luckily, Cotard delusion can't sneak up on just anyone out of the blue. It only appears in people who suffer from schizophrenia, incredibly severe epilepsy, or other variations of crossed wires and psychosis. And for such a complex and potentially-fatal disorder, treatment is incredibly simple; the only thing needed to resurrect patients is an anti-psychotic prescription, sparing therapists from having to have long, frustrating, one-sided talks with patients who firmly believe themselves to be disembodied corpses.

To my knowledge, you can't yet pick up a novel and read about Cotard Syndrome. But you can always just purchase a copy of Richard Matheson's I am Legend and pretend.

5. Foreign Accent Syndrome

Some medical conditions have confusing or misleading names, but this one is exactly what it says on the tin: Foreign Accent Syndrome causes sufferers to develop, well, a foreign accent. Keep in mind, "foreign accent" could be any foreign accent; there's no telling if you'll get a posh English accent, a throaty German accent, or an accent found only amongst the indigenous Maori people of New Zealand. Some accents associated with this disorder are so convincing that people with genuine accents commonly mistake sufferers for being one of their own - one English-speaking patient who wound up with a Russian accent made the exact same grammatical errors common to Russian ESL speakers, leading the patient to be babbled at in rapid-fire Russian whenever he encountered a native speaker.

Changing your name to Boris is optional, but recommended.

Of course, not everyone afflicted with this disorder is lucky enough to get a recognizable accent; many patients end up pronouncing their words in a way that "just kinda sounds foreign" to native speakers of their language. Hilariously enough, people with Foreign Accent Syndrome can end up passing their altered pronunciation on to their young children or siblings, forcing an entire family to explain their unique medical history to every single person who asks them where they're from.

Now, Foreign Accent Syndrome doesn't just show up unannounced one day; it's usually the result of some kind of head injury, which means that the only thing standing between you and a potentially sexy accent is a heinous motorcycle accident. If getting a motorcycle licence sounds like too much of a hassle, you can also develop the disorder as the result of a stroke, developmental abnormality, or as a consequence of severe, pervasive migraines. Even if you've gone to the effort of brain-damaging yourself to a new accent, your efforts might all be for naught; the brain is an incredibly resilient thing, and - especially amount younger patients - the accent may disappear on its own after just a few weeks or months.

Sticking a bandage on it is known to really speed recovery.

Unfortunately for my aspiring writer audience, Foreign Accent Syndrome just doesn't seem like the sort of that that would be interesting to write about. There's no way that it could ever lead to an interesting story. Oh, unless you count the story of that Norwegian woman in WWII whose life went to pieces after a shrapnel wound gave her a German accent. She's kind of interesting.

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Which other fascinating disorders did I miss? Let me know in the comments.

This week's blog post starts with a confession: this isn't my first blog. Before I had built up enough of an ego to title a blog after myself, I ran an anonymous site that chronicled my adventures in undergraduate education. Because that very education and all its associated midterms is what prevented me from writing a new post this week, I thought it might be fitting to resurrect one of my favourite posts from my old blog:

There comes a time in every person's life when it's better to flee than to fight.

For some people, this moment might entail an uncomfortable family dinner with at least two of their drunkest embarrassing uncles. For others, that moment might come when they find themselves confronted with a large, hairy bear chewing on the femur of one or more family members. And for people who lead much scarier lives, that moment might come when they arrive home and discover their old substitute high school gym teacher playing strip poker with the cat.

I hand-drew the pictures this week. You're welcome.

For me, my moment to flee came in the form of a university transfer.

I should explain, partially to add context to this post and mostly to fill up space. Those of you who have hacked into my undergraduate transcripts will know that I spent my first two years as a doughy little undergraduate majoring in computer science. Now, life as a computer science major had its perks - no one says anything if you choose to replace most of your meals with canned green caffeine-sugar sludge, you can go about your day-to-day life fairly confident that you won't have to transition to a diet of dog food after graduation, and a sizable portion of your friends and family begin treating you like you're some sort of pasty wizard. For me, there was only one real downside: the fact that I would have rather launched a career in the lucrative "making money on a pole" industry than spend the rest of my life programming.

Cleaning telephone poles is a last resort for many desperate young women.

So what was a young undergraduate in crisis to do? In all my infinite wisdom, I landed on the simplest possible solution - I would pack my bags and transfer from my gigantic undergraduate babysitting facility in Western Canada, trekking 3,500 km East to attend the smallest, liberal artsiest university I could find.

Brilliant.

Needless to say, I was absolutely stunned when I discovered that a person couldn't just hop on a plane and stroll out onto her new campus, announcing her arrival as the university administration viciously fought each other for the privilege of kissing her feet. No, like everything else in academia, the process of transferring had to be needlessly complicated, hopelessly bureaucratic, and absolutely chock-full of lemurs.

Just an average day in Canadian academia.

I would say that this article is devoted to helping any of the future school-betraying cowards in my readership avoid the logistical nightmare that is transferring schools, but that's an impossible dream. Transferring is a nightmare that exceeds even that one sex dream you had about that hefty Tim Horton's employee that one time. Instead, let me simply brace you for the inevitable onslaught of academic shit that's about to hit the proverbial fan.

How to Transfer Universities:

Step One: Sheepishly Order a Transcript.

You already got into a university once. You've proved that you're a prodigal genius on the road to curing mousetraps and building a better cancer. Why should you have to apply again?

It's because your new university wants to check and see if the old one made a horrible, horrible mistake when they admitted you. Sure, you slept through enough high school classes and presented an acceptably hearty pulse to clear that 73% hurtle, but then what? Maybe you spent the first year or two of your degree pioneering the respectable new field of Ke$haology and solving one of the 21st century's most puzzling mysteries. Or maybe your spent that time challenging Ke$ha to a venereal disease arms race. Your new refuge from the real world has only one way to find out - they'll need to see your mortal soul reduced to a series of numbers and letters on a page.

Looks just like this.

Yes, the almighty transcript. If you're not entirely sure what that is, I wish you good luck with that transfer, Skippy. For the rest of you who didn't major in paste-eating, you're probably vaguely aware that you'll need to get that document from your current university into the hands of your new one. Easy enough, right? Just print that sucker off your online student account and shove it into the nearest mailbox! Good to go, right?

Wrong. If you think that's all there is to it, the only form you should be printing off is the application to change your major to Eating Paste. Infants these days know how to Photoshop bigger breasts onto their baby pictures before they can walk; the new university doesn't trust you now, and they won't even begin to trust you until they've finished sucking back the contents of your bank account through a straw. No, you need to get an official copy of your transcript signed, stamped, sealed and flossed through the butt cheeks of the Registrar himself before being mailed out by your school.

At this point in your journey, it's time to get yourself down to the Office of the Registrar. Remember that building/desk/plexiglass bank window you mistakenly referred to as the 'Office of the Register' for the first semester of your undergraduate career? Go there. It couldn't be easier; you'll just need to fill out a form specifying which university will be getting your traitorous self as a student. If you're standing in a province whose primary exports are things like food and oil, you probably won't even need to pay a fee. If your province mainly exports the bottled tears of laid-off pulp mill workers and automotive factory staff, you might want to bring your wallet.

Simple, right? Now hand your form to the lady behind the desk. She'll skim it over for a second, no doubt noticing that you're planning to jump the institutional ship and set sail for clearer waters. That's right, you and the tens of thousands of dollars of tuition money that pay her salary and feed her children and sick grandmother and quadriplegic ferret are about to turn your backs on the institution that guided you from a young naive freshman into a drunker, naiver sophomore. This place offered you a home, dammit; we were a family! We sold you the clothes on your back, we drove you to your first therapy appointment, and this is how you repay us?

She's very disappointed in you.

Or, y'know, you could put in your transfer request online and avoid the judgement-filled gaze of the Registrar lady. Your choice.

Step Two: Wait.

Universities move at speeds approximate to those of glacial drift. Now that your transcript has arrived at your new school, you can expect weeks and weeks of fun-filled waiting. To fill the time, you could try taking up an exciting new narcotics addition, making daily measurements of continental drift, or actually studying for those finals exams that you still have to write. Don't think leaving makes you special.

Moves faster than the average university.

But waiting is the hard part, right? When that's over, you can pack your bags, flip your old school the bird and head off on an adventure! Not so fast, I'm afraid...

Step Three: Bemoan Your Transfer Credits.

You probably already realize that universities are not all the same (if they were, you wouldn't be transferring) and that applies to their course catalogs as well. They teach different subjects with different teachers and textbooks. Some schools offer Engineering and Nursing programs; others don't. Some schools teach courses like 14th Century Tibetan Beading; others recognize that as a colossal waste of time. Maybe the U of [Initial] has a lab component to their first year Biology course, and the U of [Other Initial] prefers to round up the students for a weekly 3-hour Hunger Games-style death match.

What part of this isn't educational?

After you get accepted to your new home-away-from-entering-the-workforce (assuming, of course, that your application didn't send the Registrar into fits of hysterical convulsions) you'll need to be evaluated for transfer credits. This is a list of the courses that your new school has deemed not total horseshit, allowing you to count them towards your exciting new degree in Interpretive Dance. Now, if you're fortunate, the transfer credit process will simply be more waiting. Return to Step Two and start another brand new dependency on narcotics, you lucky bastard. And if you're unlucky? Hope you held on to every assignment you ever did, because a team of trained university administrators need to verify that your school isn't handing out calculus credit for crayon drawings of dinosaurs.

Shockingly difficult to transfer.

Before you know it, you'll be emailing course descriptions of everything you've ever taken, the ISBN number of every textbook you were supposed to buy, scanned copies of the few assignments you didn't immediately burn, course readings, an exact transcription of your first dentist appointment, at least two recent letters to Santa and a screenshot of your Netflix viewing history.

Once you've managed to send them all that and resumed the waiting process yet again, you'll eventually get an official copy of your transfer credits mailed to you. Hooray! But once you come down from the cocktail of illicit substances you've been shooting into your extremities to kill time, you might want to take a second look at that page.

The first thing you'll probably notice is that you've been awarded fewer credits than you actually have. That's to be expected; not every school regards bagpipe lessons with the same academic reverence as your home institution. It's when you start to look at what specific courses transfer that you find yourself halfway down the bureaucratic rabbithole. If it was a simple matter of 'can we get away with refusing this course and bleeding another $500 from this student?", things would be simple. Every course would get either a 'yes' or 'no', you could have a proportionately long session of weeping, and you'd be set to register for classes. Oh, but what's this? They're combining two of your previous classes to give you a single course credit? How can that be? Does this university really believe that you spend exactly half of each of those classes watching Youtube videos while the professor drank herself into a coma? And look at this - they're crediting you two courses for just one of your old courses! Huh? Do they have firm evidence that you spent double the required time for that course reading ahead in other textbooks? What sort of scattered education do they think students are receiving at your old school? A school that dropped random reading materials and final exam papers on a crowd of undergraduate students from a crane could put together a more coherent education than what's represented in your transfer credits.

They wouldn't transfer Introductory English, but they did transfer...this.

Step Four: Brace Yourself, First Year is Coming (Again)

Starting first year is universally awful. It's awkward and lonely and difficult. You're forced to learn a series of chants that you will literally never recite again (unless you're lucky enough to be attending wizard school) and do humiliating team-building exercises with people you will literally never speak to again for the rest of your academic career. You don't know where any of the buildings are. You don't know which professors are supervillains in their spare time. You don't know which of the campus eateries serve burgers made mostly from seahorse meat.

Although you can probably make an educated guess.

But you did it! You survived! While your friends all abandoned their dreams of piloting space shuttles to Neptune and performing open-heart surgery on basilisks, you prevailed! You left the horrors of first year behind you, never to be repeated or spoken of again.

Only now you'll have to endure all of that again, plus much, much worse.

Unless you're fond of chest-length beards and body lice, you're going to need a place to live while you earn that almighty Bachelor's degree. Easy enough, you'll just stay in residence. You know who else will be staying in residence? First years. By second and third year people are already moving out into apartments, but since you don't know anybody to room with, you'd have to take a chance on Craigslist and risk living with a perma-stoned trust fund baby whose sexual behavior violates at least four municipal bylaws.

I am not drawing that.

Nope, it's easier to just live in residence among the wide-eyed newbies who won't share any of your classes and still think that being cool matters in university. To them, you'll be the mysterious creature holed up in your room doing - horror of horrors - actual studying at all hours of the day and night. To your same-year peers, you'll be that mysterious man- or woman-child still living in one of the university's 24-hour daycare centers where things like noise rules and alcohol restrictions are a thing. There's clearly no way to win, short of learning to stick your feet to the underside of the roof overhang and curl up like a bat every night.

So good luck with that transfer, champ. You're gonna need it.

Every story needs an antagonist. There has to be some kind of force that works against the protagonist, preventing her from reaching her noble and lofty goal until the story's epic climax. An antagonist can be a person, a circumstance, a force of nature, an oppressive society, a hungry bear, a glittering vampire, a tornado full of sharks, or any other unpleasant thing you can think of to throw at a character, but without an antagonist present, all you have is a plotless mess of aimless wandering and banal, asinine navel-gazing from a self-absorbed protagonist.

And really, who would publish such a thing?

The best kind of antagonist, in my not-so-humble opinion, is a villain. It's all well and fine to have your hero struggle with poverty, or morality, or a crotch rot disease previously unknown to science, but there's just something indescribably delightful about packing all the world's evils into one kick-able, punch-able, flammable human being. Every great franchise has a great villain. Harry Potter has Voldemort. The Lion King has Scar. The Avengers has Loki. Star Wars has Darth Vader.

Game of Thrones has an inbred, mouthbreathing sociopath with a face that screams "please bludgeon me to death with my own foot and feed my remains to the dragons".

But with so many great villains running around, stealing from orphans and kicking puppies, who should claim the title as 'greatest villain ever'? I'd cast my vote (assuming such a title was awarded democratically) for Princess Mononoke's Lady Eboshi.

Seen here using her ponytail as bangs, for some reason.

For those of you who aren't familiar with late-90s feature-length anime movies, Princess Mononoke is the guilt-tastic story of a forest in danger, a greedy mining corporation putting said forest in danger, and an exiled prince who would very much like not to die from his arm-rotting curse.

Specifically, the story is about Askitaka, a young prince whose reign is cut short when he attempts to save his village from a demon/giant angry thing made of worms, and gets himself infected with a curse for his troubles. Closer examination of the dead demon reveals that it was actually a boar god driven to infectious insanity by corruption from an iron ball lodged in his side. Unfortunately for Ashitaka, the boar's curse is fatal, and will take over his entire body at some indeterminate point in the future. On the upside, while he waits to die a horrible, writhing death, Ashitaka also gets to enjoy some nifty, demon-strength fighting powers.

It made sense in the movie.

What happens when you shoot a boar with an iron pellet, apparently.

Naturally, Askitaka's villagers are extremely grateful to him for saving their lives, and they all vow to ensure that his final days are as comfortable as they can possibly be.

Oh, no, just kidding. That doesn't happen at all. They just cast him out of the village to wander around until he dies. At some point on his aimless quest for death, Ashitaka learns that the Great Forest Spirit has the ability to cure him, and he takes off into the woods to search for him. In the process, he stumbles across Irontown, an oh-so-subtly named settlement devoted to the extraction and processing of iron. Since they aren't living in 'Treetown', or 'Happy Organic Crunchy Quinoa Earth-Hugging Commune', the residents of Irontown spend their days clear-cutting forests so they get at more of that sweet, sweet iron. Naturally, the forest gods aren't exactly thrilled about this; as a cunning, last-ditch effort to save their homes and their lives, they send a random feral teenage girl into Irontown to assassinate the town's leader, Lady Eboshi.

Nature's last hope, seen here marveling over a shiny object.

Since the movie is more than ten minutes long, San the Wolf-Girl's efforts to assassinate Lady Eboshi fail miserably. In retaliation, Lady Eboshi just continues the clear-cutting and profiteering that she's known and loved for, recklessly murdering enormous swaths of forest in the name of the almighty dollar. If you've ever paid attention to world news, or if you've ever noticed that most able-bodied adults are not frequently at home between the hours of nine A.M. and five P.M., you might recognize this system as 'capitalism'.

This cartoon will explain everything.

So why, exactly, is Lady Eboshi so concerned with aggressively expanding her profits? Was her entire family murdered by trees? What does she plan to do with the money? Is she building herself a fortress? Hiring an evil army? Saving up to purchase herself a set of fancy clip-on bangs? Of course not! She's up to something far more sinister. You see, Lady Eboshi uses the money she earns from raping Mother Earth to care for the lepers and former prostitutes that she takes in and provides for. In fact, the lepers she cares for are so grateful for being treated like human beings, that they engineer super-weapons to help her shoot forest gods right in their tree-hugging faces. Everywhere Ashitaka goes in Irontown, residents sing her praises and hint at the unimaginable horrors they faced before Lady Eboshi saved the day.

The villainous Lady Eboshi, seen here with the disadvantaged women she single-handedly rescued from a life of sex slavery.

And that's what makes Lady Eboshi such a great antagonist. Don't mistake her for a cuddly humanitarian - it was Lady Eboshi herself who lodged a bullet in that boar demon, and she's not particularly remorseful about what it did to Ashitaka. She's blunt, she abrasive, and she commits environmental crimes that would make the Lorax hang himself, but there's no way to beat her. If Ashitaka and Wolf-Girl choose to obliterate her, the hundreds of lepers and disadvantaged women she's rescued will starve to death, turning Ashitaka himself into the great villain of the story. If, however, Ashitaka chooses to stand by the Iron Lady's Leper-and-Whore Resort, he'll guarantee himself an early death when Lady Eboshi slaughters his only chance for survival.

Oh, did I mention that Lady Eboshi is planning to behead the Great Forest Spirit? Because she's planning to behead the Great Forest Spirit.

In fairness, if you ran into this thing in the deep woods, you'd probably behead it too.

Everything Lady Eboshi does, right down to lopping off the head of the Almighty Red-Faced Deer himself, is done to directly benefit the people she cares about. Yes, all villains have to have some sort of motive, but in that regard, an awful lot of other antagonists are on pretty shaky ground. The Joker is evil because he's, uh, a disenchanted lunatic, I guess. King Joffrey is evil because... inbreeding, maybe? Even the struggle between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, the good-and-evil struggle by which all other good-and-evil struggles are compared, can be summed up as "something, something, Dark Side".

Apparently the Death Star's employee benefits package doesn't cover visits to a dermatologist.

This isn't a case of a well-meaning, but incompetent, ruler accidentally causing mayhem, either. Lady Eboshi knows what she's doing, and she's damn good at it too. If someone needs to be thrown under the bus so that her goals can be met, she'll drive the bus over them herself, and save three dozen lives by doing so. As a character, she's a rich soup of villainous intent, heroic outcomes, and enough realistic utilitarianism to make everyone watching feel uncomfortable and ashamed. You want her to die, but you don't. You want her to stop her assault on the planet, but she can't. You want there to be some hero out there, ready to step in and save the day, but she's the best they've got.

If you're so bad at governing that you make the rains dry up and the sun burn out, you may want to consider an alternative career path.

As much as I hate to spoil the ending of a sixteen-year-old children's movie, as it turns out, there really is no way to defeat Lady Eboshi. She gets the happiest ending that we can ever expect to get out of our own forest-pillaging industries - she recognizes that she's perhaps doing a bit more environmental damage than is strictly necessary, gives the Great Forest Spirit his severed head back, and promises to do better in the future. Does she completely cease her mindless capitalism and replace iron mining with tree-planting and flute-playing? Of course not. She still has leprosy-riddled mouths to feed. On his part, Prince Ashitaka chooses to stay in Irontown and help rebuild a better, more sustainable city, making Lady Eboshi the only antagonist whose "the villain stays in power" outcome is considered a "happily ever after" ending.

Who is your favourite antagonist of all time? Leave it in the comments.

Quick, who's the villain of Beauty and the Beast? It's Gaston, right? Of course it is - he's arrogant, he's pushy, he's mean-spirited, and, most importantly of all, Wikipedia lists him as one. Sure enough, Gaston devotes every second of his screen time to being vapid and controlling as he relentlessly tries to force Belle to marry him and push out a basketball team's worth of copies of himself. There's no way anyone could argue that Disney's youngest villain isn't a hairy pile of pure evil with a ponytail, right?

Despite having the hairline of a 47-year-old man, Disney alleges that he's actually around 25.

Wrong! In keeping with last week's post about villains and children's cartoons from the 1990s, I decided to use this week's post to meticulously comb through a 22-year-old Disney movie to examine whether or not Gaston, narcissistic huntsman and antler aficionado, is really such a bad guy after all.

For now, we're not going to count his gratuitous chest hair as a crime.

When you're deciding whether Gaston is malicious or just misunderstood, keep in mind that:

He's illiterate.

People who don't like books are awful, knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing embarrassments to human evolution, and they deserve to be thrown into tar pits so that their preserved bones might at least have some educational value to people living tens of thousands of years from now. Any child or librarian could tell you that. And so when Gaston casually tosses Belle's precious book into the mud, that's really all we need to see to know that he deserves to be thrown off the top of an improbably high tower.

Here, Disney plays a clever game of "spot the pornography joke".*

This is where a wonderful thing called 'historical context' comes in. The movie never actually specifies what year they're supposed to be living in, but the coexistence of bookstores and chamber pots points to sometime in the mid-18th century. For those of you who spent every single history class of your life snorting cocaine instead of paying attention, the 18th century was not a particularly great time for book-learnin'. Unless you a) had a penis and a royal title, or b) had a family whose livelihood depended on knowing their ABCs, chances are, no one would ever bother to teach you to read. Gaston is a huntsman. His entire job is to shoot things. Of course he tosses Belle's book aside; her passion for reading is the 18th-century equivalent of spending all day tinkering with an obscure programming language. Belle herself shouldn't be so high and mighty about it - her own ability to read is just sheer dumb luck. If she'd been born to almost any other villager besides the inventor, her perky, illiterate ass would be parked right next to Gaston's blonde admirers on that bench.

They're waiting.

The fact that they live in the 'pooping in pottery' era of human history aside, Gaston isn't the brightest human being to ever grace the Earth. And that's not his fault. His full name, Gaston LeGume, literally translates to "The Vegetable of Gascony", with "Gascony" referring to the real-life French province where they live. He's a few croissants shy of a dozen, is what I'm saying. His world is comprised of muscles, guns, and holding metaphorical dick-measuring contests in the town bar; books aren't even on his radar. That might make him a poor match for Belle, but can we really claim that that makes him a bad person? I posit that we cannot.

Brains are not his strong suit.

Belle should want to marry him.

The definition of an ideal marriage is a multi-billion dollar question that could be the sole subject of entire blogs by itself. No matter how you feel about couples with matching genitals, however, most people in the Western world do agree on one thing: couples should at least be able to stand each other before they get married. In fact, they should ideally be quite fond of each other. If they really want to go the extra mile, they might even find some things that they have in common with each other before tying the knot. That's what makes Gaston's proposal to Belle so ridiculous - they have nothing in common, while Belle and her true love, Prince "The Beast" Adam, bonded instantly over their mutual love of, uh... eating porridge with their faces?

Ladies, control your trembling loins.

Except, once again, the fact that Belle was born in the year "17-something-something" is an issue. In her time, marriage wasn't about finding someone to have deep conversations with through the night. It was about finding someone who was capable of preventing your ass from starving. Remember, as a Renaissance-period woman, Belle doesn't have any career options open to her that involve keeping her knickers on. If she doesn't want to end up in the world's oldest profession when her father dies, she needs a husband, and a girl could do a lot worse than Gaston.

People who read to sheep in public fountains don't usually have great marriage prospects.

He may not be her soulmate or intellectual equal, but Gaston is more than capable of providing for her. He's popular. He's successful. In an age where the average man spends his entire life coughing up blood and chunks of lung until he drops dead from yellow fever at the ripe old age of 35, Gaston is almost unnecessarily healthy. He's not looking to love her and leave her penniless; Gaston makes it uncomfortably clear that he intends to have a life with Belle and raise a family together. If she wants her essential needs covered, with a little extra money left over for books, she shouldn't be so quick to turn her nose up at the town's most eligible bachelor.

And just think of all the antlers she'll have.

His beliefs are justified.

Imagine, for just a moment, that you wandered out of your house one day and saw the object of your unrequited affection in the arms of a four-headed green alien. Would you wait patiently for your crush to explain that the alien is actually a lovely individual and a generous lover? Of course not. You'd run screaming into the house to find the biggest projectile your little noodle arms can lift, so you can hurl it at the monster and rescue your beloved. So when Gaston's first reaction to seeing the Beast is to rally the villagers and head off on a late-night murdering adventure, is that really so hard to understand? He hunts animals for a living, he wants to marry Belle, and his IQ is room-temperature at best. How else is he supposed to react? He's the village's entire supply of testosterone; they're hardly going to be receptive to him suggesting that they embrace the beast as a source of diversity in their currently-monsterless town.

He just wants a hug.

Another one of Gaston's more questionable beliefs is his belief that Belle is the absolute ideal wife, just because she's just so gosh darn pretty. Isn't he a horrible person for choosing a spouse based on looks alone? Well, actually, he's got one imporant thing on his side. It's just basic human instinct - even without a formal education, the dark recesses of our brain have a loose understanding of how genes work. If you don't want to have potato-shaped children, you don't choose a potato-shaped mate. Your body doesn't steer you towards attractive, symmetrical people for no reason; even if you don't consciously want strong, plentiful children, you can bet that your loins do. Gaston has doubtlessly been raised to believe that wives are supposed to be decorative offspring factories, not best friends or companions. Besides, beauty is a famously subjective trait - Gaston is coveted by a set of gorgeous blonde triplets who would murder a flock of ducklings just for the chance to comb his chest hair for him, yet in his eyes, no one is more beautiful to him than the arguably-less-conventionally-attractive-Belle. Doesn't everyone think the object of their affection is the most attractive human being around?

And just look how symmetrical she is.

Besides, if you're going to throw stones at Gaston for over-valuing Belle's beauty, you'd better bring enough for the entire village. Why? Belle has no friends in the village, claims over and over that she doesn't fit in, and runs around singing about how they're all boring peasant cogs in the French provincial system. And yet, the entire village trips over themselves to talk to her and about her. They can't seem to shut up about her, even though she's done exactly nothing remarkable. And through it all, the villagers make it perfectly clear that the only reason they're putting up with her anti-social, book-reading bullshit is because she gives them something pretty to look at.

Something seriously lacking in this town.

While we're on the topic of Belle, Gaston makes his opinion of her hobbies known right from the start of the movie. Women shouldn't read or think, he says. How could he possibly justify something so outrageously misogynistic? Again, it comes down to sweet, sweet, wife-beating history. Up until the women's suffrage movement of the early 20th century, real, actual medical doctors with real, actual credentials believed that women didn't have enough blood to power their brains and their reproductive systems at the same time. If a woman was foolish enough to go to university or hold public office, it was believed that woman's womb would be so terribly deprived of blood that she would actually become sterile. So when Gaston tells her she shouldn't be doing any pesky thinking, he's not inflicting his own personal brand of sexism on her; he's concerned about her actual physical health.

Get down from there before you sprain your uterus.

He's just like the Beast.

When my small, mushy, 5-year-old brain first took in this movie, I thought that Gaston and the Beast couldn't be more different. Gaston was a bully with a mean streak; the Beast was eccentric and misunderstood. But after re-watching the film with my 21-year-old mature brain that still very much enjoys Disney movies, I gradually realized one very important thing that should complete exonerate Gaston from 'villain' status. Are you ready for it?

Gaston and the Beast are almost exactly the same person.

Let's start from the beginning. Gaston chooses Belle to be his own personal baby factory because she looks nice and she won't produce children with weird eyes and crooked teeth. Yes, by today's standards, that makes him kind of an asshole. But what about the Beast? He doesn't set his sights on her for her vivacious personality and delightful conversation. He just needs a girl to break the curse. Any girl will do. His requirements begin and end with a functional vagina. She could be three hundred pounds and covered in a delightful smattering of multicoloured pustules, but so long as he can force himself to fall in love with her, it's all good. Lumiere and Cogsworth literally refer to her as "the girl" right up to the end of the movie. The Beast can't claim moral superiority over Gaston here - she's little more than a trophy to either of these men. Who knows - if Gaston had saved her from those wolves and had his own subsequent bonding moment montage, maybe Belle would have grown to love him instead.

As if she could ever compete with the love he has for himself.

Of course, Gaston has a much darker side than his normal bravado might lead you to believe. In his most heinous act in the entire movie, he blackmails Belle into marriage by having her father, Maurice, committed to the insane asylum. If you keep in mind that this is a hellish, 18th-century approximation of an insane asylum, Gaston's actions are downright chilling. It's hard to believe that anyone other than a villain would employ such tactics. Oh, but hang on, imprisoning Maurice to gain leverage over Belle sounds awfully familiar. Where else have I seen that used?

Hint: This scene does not take place at Gaston's house.

Oh, yes. The Beast does literally the exact same thing. She trades her father's freedom in exchange for a promise to never, ever leave the Beast, which is essentially the Cliff's Notes of any wedding vow. When she's permitted to leave the castle to save her father from freezing to death in the snow, that's supposed to be a huge allowance on the Beast's part. But it's not all bad for Belle. I mean, the Beast has a sprawling, impractically gigantic library! How could a person who owns so many books not be a perfect match for Belle? There's just one little problem - those books clearly came with the castle, because the Beast is every bit as illiterate as Gaston.

Some of you might recognize this as the scene where Belle quite literally teaches him to sound out the word "two".

In fact, throughout the entire movie, Gaston is perpetually just one little script edit away from actually becoming the hero of the story. If he had been put under an ugly spell as a child instead of Prince Adam, this would be a heartwarming story about Belle falling in love with a simple villager instead of an arrogant prince, and no one's character would have to be any different in the slightest. If Gaston had believed Maurice's claim that Belle had been captured by a horrible beast, he could have easily realized that he truly loved her and rescued her from the Beast's clutches before she was neck-deep in Stockholm Syndrome - Disney has sold us on far less believable changes of heart before.

And we know Disney has no problem with the 'pretty girl chooses handsome guy after all' ending.

Even the final scenes didn't have to turn out as they did. Again, any quasi-talented, mostly-sober scriptwriter could find a dozen different ways to turn handsome, confident Gaston into a Disney prince instead of Prince Adam. If the timing of the final battle was off by even five minutes, remember, the Beast would have remained a Beast forever. Perhaps Gaston could have had a change of heart upon seeing that the beast wasn't such a monster after all, and the Beast could have stepped aside, refusing to let Belle spend her entire life with a twelve-foot-tall lion/buffalo hybrid. Even if the original "Belle ends up with Disney's first redheaded prince" ending is preserved, there's no real reason for Gaston's story to end the way it does. The Beast proved he was a better man by sparing Gaston's life. Any reasonable fictional character would take that as a sign that it's time to quietly slink away and re-think every terrible choice he's ever made. Having Gaston subsequently stab the Beast and get flung off the roof for his efforts only works because Disney wanted a more dramatic ending, and Disney fans demand that every little transgression is punished by death.

The children demand blood.

Gaston may be an uneducated, selfish, egotistical buffoon, but he's a far cry from the cold-blooded sociopathy of his fellow Disney villains Queen Grimhilde, Maleficent and Jafar. You want to know who the real evil is in Beauty and the Beast? How about the Enchantress, who sentences dozens of innocent people to live as sentient housewares for no other reason than they were unfortunate enough to work for a prince who's kind of an ass.

That was not a nice thing to do.

How do you feel about Gaston? Are you convinced that he's just an idiot in the wrong place at the wrong time, or do you still think he's earned a spot among Disney's most dastardly villains? Sound off in the comments.

* In case you somehow missed it during your childhood viewings of 'Beauty and the Beast', Gaston's confusion about the lack of pictures and insistence on holding the book vertically are meant to imply that he's used to looking at old-fashioned pornographic magazines. Take that, childhood innocence.

Post-secondary education is supposed to be a time for personal growth and exploration, and there's no greater way to express your individuality than with the clothes you wear. For the first time in your life, you're not constrained by teachers, family expectations, or fairly reasonable dress codes, and if your parents love you enough, you're not constrained by budget. University students can express their creativity as much as they want, and find a totally unique way of presenting themselves to the world.

So, naturally, everyone wears the exact same thing.

If you're a university student yourself, or if you just enjoy crying into your Bachelor of Arts degree at your old Alma Mater on the weekends, you're almost guaranteed to spot girls sporting one of these six possible outfits. Each has been painstakingly illustrated here by yours truly, to help you properly identify:

The White Girl Uniform

If you live in an area that boasts a large population of the common 20-something white girl, you've seen this outfit before. It comes in many forms, but some elements are always present. For instance, no white girl is complete without a pair of Uggs boots, the only boots that combine the durability of craft foam with the ruggedness of bedroom slippers. Legend has it, they get their name from the sound you make when you inevitably slip on the ice and greet the concrete butt-first. Tights are an equally indispensable part of this ensemble; at some point, these leg coverings evolved from being mere shields to protect the world from the sight of your splotchy, veiny legs, to being full-fledged pant replacements. Of course, a lady does not venture out into the world with crotch on display, so a comically oversized sweater is a must-have for the modern modest girl.

And, of course, what's a white girl uniform without accessories? The most crucial of those is a scarf, but not just any scarf will do. No, this has to be a special, oversized scarf. Beach-towel-sized is acceptable. A scarf large enough to cover a picture window is even better. And if you can find a canvas circus tent cover with an 'authentic, vintage' print, you can wrap it around your neck and get the white girl high score. An iPhone filled with Taylor Swift songs and a pumpkin spice-flavoured coffee beverage are optional, but recommended. Having an unkempt owl's nest pinned to the very top of your head as a bizarre attempt at a hairstyle, however, is mandatory.

The Edgy: Abridged Edition

Remember high school? When your only real responsibilities were to present a pulse, make half-hearted attempts at your homework, and avoid getting pregnant? If you had the right combination of a rebellious spirit and a shockingly permissive set of parents, high school was the ideal time to let your freak flag fly. It was easy - all you had to do was get up three hours early each day to get all of your face paint, hairpsray, studs, gloves, zippers, piercings and prosthetic horns in place, and make biweekly hair appointments to have your tri-coloured mohawk touched up. Going off to college meant you'd have more freedom - you'd finally be able to have your earlobes stretched until you can train the family dog to jump through them.

But then reality struck. When you've got three quizzes to take, four essays to write, seven midterms to study for, two group projects to lament, one professor to seduce, and three and a half bowls of ramen to devour, there's just no time to maintain that carefully cultivated 'corpse' look you had going on. Before you know it, you're throwing on two coats of eyeliner and running out the door with dishwater-coloured hair each morning, a mere ghost of the ghostly presence you used to be .

The Protector of the Earth

This girl is so organic, her body wilts every time she walks past a McDonald's. Her biodegradable outfit has more nutritional value than your lunch, and you'd get more dietary fibre from chewing on her dryer lint than you do from your specially-formulated breakfast cereal. Her clothing has all been imbued with the blessings of the ancestors of the fair-trade workers who made it; the only thing that's seeped into your clothing is the dried tears of the eight-year-old Malaysian child slave who made it.

If you want to dress like a Protector of the Earth, the first thing you'll need are pants so large that MC Hammer would ask to have them taken in (how's that for a dated reference?). If the local bourgeoisie shops don't stock such a thing, try to make do with overpriced yoga gear - they're sure to have that. A rolled-up tablecloth worn as a floor-length skirt is just as good. The rest is really up to you. Just make sure that everything you're wearing looks like something that a concert-goer would have worn to a certain infamous music festival your parents are too young to have attended, while simultaneously inducing massive amounts of guilt in everyone who lays eyes on you. Showing a little skin is encouraged; demonstrate to the masses what a quinoa- and organic-chickpea-fed body is supposed to look like.

The Northern Neophyte

As I previously mentioned, I go to school in Edmonton, Alberta. For those of you who haven't visited Edmonton, the intensity of its winters is rivaled only by that of the hypothetical nuclear ice age that would follow a worldwide atomic apocalypse. Those of you who have visited Edmonton are acutely aware of this, because you're probably still frozen to the ground.

Students who come from parts of Canada that can actually sustain life don't always think to check historical temperature trends before they make the big move to Alberta's capital. We're Canadians! Cold is supposed to be universal up here. What we don't realize is that for some of us, 5 degrees below freezing is enough to draw alarm, while others don't bat an eyelash until the mercury drops below -40C. Newcomers to Edmonton are always easy to spot - they're the ones bundled in every item of clothing they own, peering at the world through the gap between their fourth and fifth scarf and wondering just how in the hell everyone else is getting by with just a hoodie.

The Anatomy Major

This girl may or may not actually be a biology student, but she's certainly giving everyone a refresher course in anatomy every time she saunters down the hall. The only dress code this girl obeys is the legal parameters for indecent exposure. One good look at her will tell you exactly how many tattoos, bruises and chicken pox scars she has. If this young lady's overexposure to sunlight ever results in the formation of a cancerous mole, random passersby will let her know about it long before she gets around to seeing a dermatologist.

Despite basic instinct and general common sense, this look is frequently worn in all seasons. Even if you live in an Arctic hell-hole that all the world's deities forgot, the only modifications you'll ever see to this outfit are the addition of mittens and a scarf. It's also worth nothing that a Jillian Micheals level of fitness is in no way required to pull this off; so long as you have the core strength and the commitment to suck in your rolling foothills of stomach flesh all day, you're all set to venture out in public. Overall, this is the perfect look for women with especially hardy torsos.

The Complete, Total Despair

When your weekly homework can comfortably fill a standard-sized dumpster, there's no time to be wasted on appearance. This girl has more important things to do than bathe. You probably don't want to know when the last time she did a load of laundry was, either, and you're almost certainly better off not knowing how long its been since she's changed her underwear. Instead of spending endless hours fussing over her makeup and curling her hair, all this girl has to do is shake most of the obvious body lice out of her sweatshirt and get back to studying.

This look isn't something that a subset of the female student body consciously aspires to; rather, this is something that every student will eventually be reduced to, regardless of how pretty she was in high school. Students rocking this outfit are practically non-existent in the first days of school, but by the time midterms are in full swing, every other girl will be proudly displaying some variation of this. At the end of the term, when finals are fast approaching, the student body will be virtually indistinguishable from a homelessness convention. Don't fight it, female students - total despair is as inevitable as it is repulsive.

Do you recognize your own personal style here? What other kinds of outfits have you seen on college campuses? Let me know in the comments!

If you are in any way connected to any form of social media whatsoever, you might have heard that long-standing sitcom and Simpsons clone, Family Guy, recently decided to ratchet up the laughs by having the family's dog killed by a car, right in front of their youngest child.

Oh, yeah, spoiler alert.

The public reaction to Brian's death has been less than favorable, to say the least. Angry blog posts and petitions have gone up across the internet from the moment the episode aired, with hundreds of thousands of people weighing in. There may be thousands of people around the world suffering from war, famine and preventable disease every day, but there's nothing like a cartoon character's death to get people fired up to rally for change.

Watch it if you dare.

Since I'm among those aforementioned bloggers responding to the death, and because I've titled this article "Reasons I Need Brian Back", you might have already guessed that I'm not exactly in favour of Brian shuffling off this mortal coil. Because I insist on substantiating everything I say with a detailed, multimedia blog post, enjoy reading these incredibly convincing arguments for why the Griffin's atheist dog deserves a Biblical resurrection.

Now who am I supposed to relate to?

Like the millions of other people who watch bad TV for sweet, sweet escapism, I like to psychologically latch onto a character in every story. It gives me someone to root for, and it lets me know how I would fare if I were to be somehow transported into that fictional universe. In Family Guy, Brian is the obvious choice for me. He's a struggling writer. I'm a struggling writer. He's sarcastic. I'm sarcastic. He holds extreme, ideologically questionable left-wing views. I hold extreme, ideologically questionable left-wing views. He's kind of obnoxious. I'm kind of obnoxious. The list goes on and on.

Brian, suffering the plight of all writers who aren't James Patterson.

But now that Brian's only role is to feed the worms of Quahog, who am I supposed to cling to each time I finally give in to the unique combination of boredom and procrastination that drives me to watch Family Guy? Let's see. I'm an overweight, myopic girl with a very large brother and an affinity for knitted wool caps. Who does that leave me with?

Oh, no.

That's right. Brian's demise has left me with no choice but to internalize the horrific psychological abuse endured by the unloved, unattractive, and almost-definitely-adopted Meg Griffin. Not only will my frail psyche have to cope with my own traumatic adolescent memories, but now it'll need to make room for those of a sniveling, two-dimensional punching bag. You see what you've done to me, producers of Family Guy? I just hope you're happy, Seth MacFarlane. I hope you're happy.

We don't need endless months of bad Italian stereotypes.

Viewers who made it all the way to the end of the knee-slapping 'Life of Brian' episode without throwing their remotes through their TV screens were treated to the introduction of the Griffin family's new dog, Vinny. After moping around for a month after Brian's death, the family decides to head down to the pet store, hoping a new dog will ease their grief; there, they meet Vinny the Pussyhound (he's 1/16th cat), proving that no amount of gut-wrenching tragedy will ever overshadow the need for a good vagina joke. Vinny is voiced by Italian actor/saggy leather wallet Tony Sirico of The Sopranos fame, which tells you all you need to know about his character.

Vinny, casually undoing whatever progress the Italian-American community has made since Jersey Shore went off the air.

The problem with characters based on racial stereotypes is that there are only so many jokes you can make with them. Brian may have been based on his own set of stereotypes, but there's a lot more you can do with the common Eastern Yuppie archetype. Everyone knows at least one. You can head to a Starbucks, an Apple store and a university philosophy course, and find enough source material to power you through an entire season. Best of all, Eastern Yuppies are always changing; Brian evolved from a novel-writing prat, to an obscure-reference-dropping prat, to a social-hypocrisy prat, always keeping up with the times. Vinny's character amounts to a threatening accent and a Mafia allusion. Unless you live on the set of a Godfather sequel, you'll never meet anyone who fits his role. There aren't a lot of new directions you can go with these stereotypes; by the 4,831st time I hear Vinny threaten that someone will be "sleepin' with the fishes" or reminisce about how "Mama use-a to make-a da best pasta", I'll start cheering for Stewie to push him out in front of the next car he sees.

Remember what happened last time we let Seth MacFarlane run amok with racial stereotypes?

Really, we get it. Italians talk funny, and their #1 source of employment is organized crime syndicates. They bathe in Doritos cheese and their blood is 14% alcohol. They universally suffer from a bizarre, localized form of Tourette's syndrome that forces them to randomly intersperse all of their speech with the letter 'a'. They place 100% of a woman's value on her ability to prepare carbohydrates, and every moment of their education is devoted to teaching them to talk louder. Television has already taught us everything we need to know about the Italian race. How about we pick on someone more interesting, for a change?

Brain was the least awful character on the show.

Let's get one thing straight - absolutely every character who appears on Family Guy is a horrible person in some way or another. The Griffins spend much of their time doing everything from making offensive comments to straight-up trying to murder each other, and their neighbors range from a sex maniac to an actual pedophile.

Almost no part of this highlight real is not morally reprehensible.

That's not to say that Brian isn't without his flaws. In fact, he's got quite a lot of them; he's pretentious, stuck-up, alcoholic and condescending, and that's just the beginning. Though Brian was originally intended to be the voice of reason in the Griffin family, his smug self-satisfaction has rubbed more than one character the wrong way.

Brian's flaws, lovingly detailed in this rant by Quagmire.

Arguably, Brian's biggest personal flaw is his failure as a parent. Brian didn't even know of his son Dylan's existence until he was into his teens, and when the two do meet, Dylan is an aggressive, ambition-less delinquent, with no real future ahead of him. The only way the Brian manages to bond with him at all is to smoke pot with him, and once they'd developed some semblance of a relationship, Dylan went back home to his mother and never appeared on the show again.

How a seven-year-old dog fathers a human teenager is one of TV's little secrets.

But even Brian's shortcomings as a parent pale in comparison to those of Peter and Lois. Throughout the show, Peter takes neglect and child endangerment to Olympic heights - it's a wonder that any of his children are even alive, nevermind still in his custody. Lois is supposed to be the sane, competent parent, but she's no better. Stewie - despite being almost fifteen years old - is still just a baby with a serious congenital skull defect. Infants can't be left alone for more than five minutes, lest they exercise their innate talents for choking on small parts and swallowing household poisons, yet Lois leaves Stewie alone so often that he's being raised by the family dog, and he's even managed to build a nuclear cache in his bedroom.

This is not part of the average baby's room.

Brian was one of the show's only sources of jokes that weren't based on bodily excretions, bodily noises, bodily functions or sex. He had plenty of slapstick humour to go around - part of the reason his death by car was so shocking was that he'd endured far, far worse injuries and survived unscathed, and his father-son/occasionally mildly homosexual relationship with Stewie was one of the highlights of the show. Without Brian, the combined IQ of Family Guy drops from "kindergartner chugging paste" to "decomposing vegetable".

And not a bestiality or genitalia joke in sight.

The good news is, Brian's name reportedly appears in the titles of upcoming episodes in season 12, and Tony Sirico is only signed on to the show for six episodes, which means that Brian may not be gone for good. How do you feel about the dog's demise? Leave it in the comments.

If you're of a Westernized, semi-Christian persuasion, the entire month of December revolves around one thing: university final exams. Oh, and also Christmas. Regardless of how rarely you show your sinning, heathen face in some sort of church, you probably recognize and look forward to this re-purposed Anglo-Saxon midwinter feast day/celebration of the birth of a religious figure who was born in the summer.

What's better than giving birth in a random barn? Giving birth in a random barn in sweltering heat, of course!

Of course, in the modern Western world, no amount of Jesus is enough to supersede the boundless joys of commercialism, and one of the biggest dilemmas any Christmas-observing individual goes through each year is the question of which presents to bequeath to family and friends. Between Groupon, Amazon and Steam sales, everyone already has everything they could ever possibly want; what are you supposed to buy for gifts? Chocolates aren't on the prehistoric raw-and-slimy vegan diets that everyone will start on New Year's Day. Clothing is impossible to buy for someone unless you know exactly how many gut-sucking, space-age girdles they need to squeeze into their current wardrobes. Herpes is the gift that keeps on giving, but it's notoriously hard to gift-wrap.

Or is it?

If you're having a tough time shopping for that picky, spoiled someone in your life, take a look at these appealing options. You'll have to Google links to retailers for yourself, because I have no idea where you live and dammit, no one is paying me any advertising dollars for this.

Novelty Ice Cube Trays

If there's one thing that all of the rich, poor, middle-class, male, female, elderly, young, paraplegic, ambidextrous, savant and psychic people on your Christmas list have in common, it's that they all use frozen chunks of water to cool down their beverages and numb their various bar brawl wounds. Now, any idiot can fill up a normal ice cube tray, but why make your loved ones suffer through life with regular, cubed ice? This Christmas, baffle your friends and all of their future party guests with the literally endless possibilities of novelty ice shapes.

For the former White Star Line employee in your life.

These aren't just a gag gift for holiday office parties, either - producers of these fine ice molds are more than happy to cater to that certain special someone in your life.

Ice engagement rings: as cheap, cold and temporary as your eventual marriage.

If silly gifts aren't your forte, don't worry - there are plenty of practical alternatives to standard ice cubes. You can find ice trays for frozen stir sticks, ice rods for water bottles, and even icy corks for chilled wine.

Waiting on an inheritance from an alcoholic relative? Novelty ice trays are there to speed the process along.

The only thing your giftee will need to make these work is a freezer, access to semi-potable water and the patience to painstakingly pop these things out without shattering them. Alternatively, those of us in Canada can just fill them up and stick them outside for a minute or two.

Beard Oil

Ladies, are you tired of running your fingers through the clump of steel wool your man sheepishly calls his beard? Gentlemen, do you look on with pity at the puny scrabbles of scruff sported by male friends and family? Is anyone out there shopping for a female bearded circus freak who's struggling to make it in an image-conscious world? Never fear - I know just the gift for you! Behold:

Made from a combination of mysterious tree oils and the essence of pure manliness, Beard Oil hydrates flaky, shampoo-ravaged under-beard skin and conditions beard hair until it no longer looks like your loved one has pubic hair glued to their face. It can be purchased from homemade vendors jockeying in the wilds of Etsy, or from forward-thinking retailers and mustache allies in your area. Best of all, each application only takes a few drops, which means that the aspiring Gandalf on your Christmas list can make your gift last all the way until next year, when you can surprise them with a new and exciting variety of facial grease.

Obscenely Gigantic Candy

"The gift that keeps on giving" was originally coined to refer to the phonograph - because apparently that made sense in 1924 - but I think it much more accurately describes these gifts that will absolutely give you Type II Diabetes. In the ultimate testament to Western excess, candy manufacturers have begun pumping out confections that are actually larger than the children who were originally meant to enjoy them.

Give your friends and family the gift of not being able to make eye contact with you while you eat this.

Remember those palm-sized swirl lollipops that every candy store has in the window? Those are, pardon the pun, child's play. No candy is off-limits; if it's made of sugar, someone has made a donkey-sized version with more calories than the combined contents of your pantry. Send your favourite sweet-tooth into hyperglycemic shock when you surprise them with a Fuzzy Peach the size of their soon-to-be-enlarged heart.

Some rare honesty in advertising.

Plus, if you've got any mythological ogres on your shopping list, you're basically all set.

Wine Bottle Outfits

Christmas family gatherings are not the time to be naked (especially with my family), so why should your wine have to go without clothes? That might sound like the thought process of an unmedicated schizophrenic, but apparently it rings true for enough people that it's led to the blossoming of a new industry. A very sad and sort of creepy industry.

For the friend who's pretentious enough to dress up his wine, but down-to-earth enough to appreciate practical, working-class clothes.

And don't worry if gimmicky costumes are too tacky for you. Thanks to the drunken shoemaker elves who apparently churn these out while the sane people in the world are asleep, your wine can don any sort of style you please, including the scrubs you'll be wearing when someone finally gets around to institutionalizing you, you fucking wine-dressing lunatic. And yes, we as a society have finally reached a point where we're ready and willing to sexualize glass beverage containers.

"Hey. My neck is up here."

Do wine clothes have any real effect on temperature or oxidization? Probably not. But if you swish it in your mouth just right, you can really taste that added self-esteem. And heaven forbid you be a social pariah with naked wine.

Yodeling Pickle

It's a plastic pickle that yodels when you push a button. Need I say more?

Exactly what it says on the tin.

What's the most creative thing you've ever given or received? Leave it in the comments!

This blog post is coming to you in mid-December, which means that most of you have been enduring non-stop Christmas carols for roughly six weeks now, at the hands of your local retailers' PA systems.

A moment of silence for our brothers and sisters in retail.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love Christmas music. Love it. I have "All I Want for Christmas is You" on my Apple-issued listening device, and I rock out to that fucker all year round; December is the only month of the year that I don't have to feel weird about that.

All I want for Christmas is more 1994 Mariah.

Most popular Christmas songs are all about the good times that they holiday brings; they tell us stories of decking the halls, awaiting Santa Claus' arrival, and celebrating the ability of a congenitally defective reindeer to secure gainful employment as a headlight. Some songs, however, choose to use Christmas as a chance to remind us that life is a meaningless, painful struggle that ends only with the cold oblivion of death. If you're looking for an excuse to douse yourself in kerosene and set yourself ablaze this holiday season, take a moment to listen to four of the most depressing Christmas songs in existence:

The Christmas Shoes (Newsong) - 2000

The Christmas Shoes starts with a man standing in line in a store, waiting to pay for a few last-minutes gifts and generally feeling a little bit grumpy. It's a classic holiday scene; maybe the man is just waiting for a Christmas miracle to come along and boost his holiday spirits until he sweats egg nog and shits tinsel. Or maybe this is a comedy song about the commercial hassle that Christmas has become, with all the shopping and standing in line and airplane food, what's up with that?

Turns out that no, this is not a comedy song.

The man finally pulls his head out of his well-fed, middle-class ass long enough to notice that the customer ahead of him in line is an antsy and thoroughly filthy little boy, clutching a pair of shoes. The boy gets up to the cashier, and because children have no idea how to protect themselves from child molesters by withholding personal information, he proceeds to blurt out his life story with no prompting whatsoever. It turns out that he needs the shoes because they're his sick mother's size and he wants her to look nice when she goes off to "meet Jesus" that night.

Hint: "meeting Jesus" means she's either dying or she's got an appointment with a burly Mexican biker.

The boy tries to pay for the shoes with a fistful of pennies but comes up short, because he belongs to a special kind of poor family that values fancy new shoes over things like 'food', 'running water' and 'spending the last moments of your mother's life at her side, instead of haggling with a cashier over footwear'. The singer then heroically steps up to pay for the shoes and basks in his new-found Christmas spirit; he even muses that God probably murdered that child's mother just so he could reclaim the holiday joy of standing in line to buy his wife some mustache bleach for Christmas. This song isn't the only one to lean on the crutch of "kill off the maternal figure", however. After all, there's...

Mama Liked the Roses (Elvis Presley) - 1969

Until my mother pointed out to me that this song actually appears on Elvis' Christmas Album, I'd assumed this it was written for the sole purpose of being played at the funerals of dead mothers. The words "Christmas", "holiday", and "sweet, sweet baby Jesus" never actually appear in this song, but since it's wedged between "Blue Christmas" and "Silent Night", radio DJs force themselves to play it on the air every December.

This might not be the best choice for your Christmas caroling group.

Elvis recounts how Mama enjoyed tending a rose garden in her yard each year, but, tragically, she found it difficult to keep her roses growing properly in mid-winter. Plants don't grow well in the winter, you see. Whenever rose-growing got too hard, Mama would comfort her family by, uh, decorating the living room for them. And also, she liked to sing every Sunday until her son cried. And she always made sure that everyone prayed a lot. Wait, what is this song even about?

Apparently he was raised by a religious, interior-decorating rose fanatic. Huh. Explains a lot.

Some time later, Elvis comes across a dried rose tucked in the pages of the old family Bible. This really cements just how gosh darn much his mother loved roses, which is convenient, because that's what they put on her grave every Mother's Day. Wait, Mother's Day? Isn't this a Christmas song? If I knew you were going to throw dead parents at me without even having the courtesy to sing about the proper holiday, Elvis, I'd have declared Burning Love to be a Christmas song and saved myself a lot of misery. But as it turns out, not every Christmas song needs a dead mother to be depressing - just take a listen to...

Fairytale of New York (The Pogues) - 1987

Don't get me wrong here - I love Fairytale of New York. It's one of my favourite songs of all time, Christmas be damned. But take a listen to the lryics. This modern classic opens with a man rotting in a New York City drunk tank on Christmas Eve, listening to a wasted old man singing about how he plans to be dead by next Christmas, and bemoaning his unsalvageable, needy farce of a relationship. Gosh, I just feel so warm and fuzzy already, don't you?

I embedded the version with lyrics. You're gonna need 'em.

As the song progresses, we learn that the man's wife/girlfriend/personal harpy came to New York because the man promised her that she was destined for a successful Broadway career. When this didn't pan out - presumably because she has a voice like an eighty-year-old Irish horse - she spiraled into a hopeless and debilitating cycle of drug abuse. Her inability to sing, dance and act with New York's finest, and her inability to handle disappointment without re-enacting the plot of Requiem for a Dream are apparently completely the man's fault, because of course they are.

Maybe she's just getting ready to audition for RENT?

When the woman finishes her tirade, the man reveals that he has shaped his whole life around his lover, placing his entire chance at happiness and self-worth in her basket of Broadway dreams. Since it's too late for her to achieve any of those dreams, both of them are doomed to suffer together in obscurity, struggling with their unhealthily interdependent relationship. The woman mentions that she hopes this is their last Christmas together, but the man makes it clear that they're both so entrenched in this relationship that it's come to define both of them, as they endlessly replay the memory of the Christmas Eve when they met. Have I mentioned that in Ireland, this is considered the greatest Christmas song of all time?

Ireland? Are you okay? Do you need to talk to someone?

The song does a few redeeming qualities, though. If you make it past the first one minute and twenty-three seconds without hanging yourself in your closet, it takes on a delightfully jaunty Irish tune. Plus, it's the only Christmas song in which you'll find the lyrics "Old slut on junk" and "Cheap, lousy faggot". In any case, it's certainly less gloomy than...

The Cat Carol (Bruce Evans and Meryn Cadell) - 1993

This is it, folks. Put away the razor blades and hide the ammunition, because if you aren't feeling manically suicidal by the end of this song, you need to see a cardiologist to re-start your cold, blackened heart. Emotionally charged, touching Christmas songs have been popular for years, but songwriter Bruce Evans decided to get behind the wheel of that bandwagon and steer it right over the embankment of animal abuse and dead pets.

Behold.

The Cat Carol, which boasts the lyrical complexity of a six-year-old's garbled rendition of Jingle Bells, tells the story of a cat who gets shut outside in a blizzard on Christmas eve. Despite her anguished cries of pain and misery, the house's occupants refuse to let her inside, presumably because they're far too busy eating cold gruel and denying health insurance to orphans. This cat isn't bright enough to find any form of shelter whatsoever, as she apparently lives in a neighborhood completely devoid of decks, porches, cars, sheds and oversized lawn ornaments, so she hunkers down in the yard and prepares to die of exposure. Just then, a tiny, frozen mouse who's also too dumb to find shelter wanders by, and the cat proposes that they set their differences aside so they can cuddle up together and keep each other company through the storm.

Enjoy the heartwarming feeling, because this is the last time you will ever feel joy.

Up until this point, the song sounds like PETA's new winter jingle, but we're reminded that this is a Christmas song when Santa shows up! Hooray! They're saved! Santa discovers the little ball of fur nestled in the snow and quickly realizes that it's... the frozen corpse of the cat. He lifts her carcass into the sleigh and the mouse pops out, still alive and healthy. The little mouse is overjoyed to learn that the two of them have been rescued, until his cat friend fails to wake up and Santa is forced to explain that she froze to death in an attempt to save him.

Ho ho holy shit, that's dark.

But not to worry, the song has a happy ending! It's too late for Santa to save the cat's life, but he lifts her into the sky and turns her into a constellation that will appear only on Christmas eve, so that the mouse and the cat can be reunited once a year. It's a beautiful ending, until you realize that the average life expectancy of a mouse in the wild is less than one year; he'll be dead by next Christmas, and the cat constellation will live on as a meaningless clump of stars, symbolizing a sacrifice that no one will be around to recognize.

Merry Christmas, kids.

One more Christmas-themed post, people, and then we return to regular programming until next year. I promise.

No more Christmas posts until you and this anonymous thin woman have shed this year's extra holiday pounds.

Two weeks ago, I tried to be a kind blog writer and give all of you a wonderful head start on your holiday shopping by providing you with a list of wonderfully bizarre and impractical gifts to startle your loved ones with on the big day.

Just look how happy she is.

Of course, I have no doubt that the vast majority of my readers didn't take my advice, and now three days before Christmas you're scrambling to find last-minute gifts that won't leave your entire family disappointed in you. Sure, you could go to the mall and stab a random stranger to get your hands on that last trendy handbag or hot holiday toy, but, once again, I've got your back with a much more practical solution.

Just looking at this makes me salivate.

That's right, books are the answer to all your problems. They're affordable, yet classy. They're popular, and yet you're much less likely to get punched in the face at a bookstore than a department store. They provide hours of entertainment, and yet you don't have to have the newest operating system or console to view them. They are, in essence, the perfect gift.

Of course, picking out the right book can be tricky. Unless everyone on your list has an active Goodreads account, you can't always tell what they've already read, and someone's taste in novels might not always match their taste in movies. But don't let fear of buying the wrong book scare you off. Even if you hand someone a book they'd rather use to prop up a wobbly table with than read, books still make the best presents because:

They make excellent bludgeoning weapons.

I live on the edge of Alberta's capital region, which means that at any given time, I'm within a reasonable driving distance of a range of deadly predators, including bears, wolverines, bobcats, coyotes, wolves and mountain lions. If sharp-toothed meat-eaters aren't your thing, locals here also have the option of being peacefully trampled to death by herbivorous moose, cattle, big-horned sheep, buffalo, elk or caribou.

This is not a random stock image; this was taken just outside my high school.

It's foolhardy to go up against these animals empty-handed, but defensive weaponry poses a serious problem in the great white north. Running around with a shotgun sticking out of your snowpants will get you a strongly-worded letter from the local RCMP, and harpoon depots are notoriously hard to find in the prairies. Chasing them off with snowballs won't do you any good either. They were born in the snow, molded by it. They didn't see spring until they were already adults. You merely adopted it.

Canada's cultural necessity, the mighty Timbit, unfortunately cannot save you from bears either.

And that's where books come in. They're heavy, they're compact, and they're easy to store. They've got sharp corners for gouging and a full pad of pages for delivering small but deadly papercuts. Bigger is better - fend off Mother Nature's pointiest children with that copy of War and Peace that you'll never get through, or with those copies of the Twilight Saga that your misguided grandmother got you. It doesn't matter what the book is about; so long as you can grab it and start swinging, it's an excellent Christmas gift.

You can make artful sculptures out of them and put pictures on Pinterest.

It's not always easy to pick out the perfect book for someone, even if you do know that person's hobbies. What if your painter friend has that book of brush techniques already? Is it condescending to buy a children's 'how to draw' book for the struggling artist in your life? And is it really appropriate to buy the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy for your harem of sex slaves?

I'm not doing a Google Image search for that last one.

Luckily for you, there's Pinterest. Pinterest, as you may know, is an online hive of middle-aged supermoms whose sole purpose is to made you feel bad about giving your three-year-old a batch of 'just add water' grocery store cupcakes to smear on himself for his birthday, instead of whipping up a gluten-free masterpiece of fondant, buttercream and surgically precise decorating.

I dare you to make this without ending up divorced in a psychiatric ward.

Cakes aren't the only thing the denizens of Pinterest invest their copious spare time in; book-based art has quickly become a huge trend. Using just an old book and the contents of an entire art studio, you can produce a trendy, uncycled piece that will finally earn you the coveted re-pins of the Pinterest elite. Unwanted books will mostly likely sit on your shelf forever - why not have them sit there in style?

There

seemingly

endless

supply

this

stuff.

You can even suggest this approach yourself. If your friend unwraps your literary gift and makes a face like you've just handed them a pickled human colon, you can instantly pretend that you've merely gifted them with the raw materials for a beloved Pinterest masterpiece. After all, who doesn't love a gift that you have to make for yourself?

They make superior car fresheners.

People like their cars to smell nice, for some reason. If you've ever spent any length of time driving around with a sweaty teenage boy or not-so-fresh corpse, you probably understand. Now, for some reason, the gold standard of car freshening comes in the form of a flimsy cardboard tree hung from the rearview mirror. Car freshner manufacturers have begun to make their products available in everything from "fresh mint" to "bacon", but nothing seems to have usurped the popularity of the original 'inside of a wood chipper' scent.

Nothing unnatural about a wood-scented chunk of bleached lumber pulp.

As long as we're perfuming our cars with tree byproducts, we might as well take advantage of the ultimate paper-based scent: book smell. You know that wonderful musty smell inside a book that makes you light-headed with joy and binding glue fumes? There's no reason you can't take it with you everywhere.

This exists, but I'm told that open flames are frowned upon in moving vehicles.

If you or a loved one receives a pile of unreadable tripe this Christmas, there's nothing to worry about. Just crack that puppy open to a random page, prop it up against the heat vent, take a deep breath, and enjoy. Seriously, though, drive carefully, because paperback glue apparently spews toxic fumes when it's heated. No need to worry about hardcovers, though - that glue is made from harmless leftover chunks of horses.

You can add some fibre to your diet.

You're not getting enough fibre in your diet. You're not getting enough calcium, Vitamins A-D, iron, zinc or potassium either. In fact, your entire diet probably consists of nothing but sodium and saturated fat. What did you have for breakfast, fried whale blubber?

Dinner is served.

Until it becomes legal to kidnap and gift-wrap dietitians, there is no one gift you can give that will sort out your loved ones' hopeless, greasy mess of a diet. A good book, however, is a start. Sure, you can load them up with cookbooks, diet books, health books, and carefully bound photographic essays on morbid obesity, but if you think their pudding-based meal schedule has brought their fibre to critically low levels, buy them the worst book you can find and let nature take its course.

Eat up, kids.

Books are chock-full of fibre, and they come pre-sliced into easy-to-eat, easy-to-tear slices for your munching convenience. Their low calorie count won't force you to move up into a larger pair of industrial-strength stretchpants, and their water solubility means that even Grandpa can mush 'em up with his gums. And if someone on your shopping list really takes to eating books, you've potentially got a great episode of My Strange Addiction on your hands.

That concludes this year's Christmas blog posts! Leave your thoughts in the comment section, and have yourself a Merry Christmas and some Happy Holidays.

5ZZF6HT6HGS3

Writing for pleasure doesn't exactly pay the bills.

As most of my regular readers already know, I'm a fourth-year university student with tuition and books to pay for, and unfortunately for me, no one is throwing wads of cash at me for my devastatingly witty blog posts each week.

Pictured: not the average writer's experience.

In order to keep myself in textbooks and wine coolers that my student self so desperately needs, I work as a freelance writer. It's a simple enough way to make money - someone asks me to write something, I write it, they pay me - but every time I mention what I do for a "living", I end up bombarded with disbelieving stares and ceaseless questions. Since most of my friends are at least somewhat literate, those questions are often to the tune of "how do I get started"? Freelance writing may be simple, but the process of starting out is anything but.

So if you're interested in embarking on your own freelance writing adventures, or if you're merely interested in reading about the inconveniences and hardships of the career path in order to bolster your already-immense admiration for me, keep in mind that:

You don't get to write what you want.

Before I embarked on a freelance writing career, I specialized in writing exactly two things: fiction and snarky blog posts. That's about it. Now, how much of a paying, for-hire market do you suppose there is for either of those things?

If you answered with hysterical laughter followed by gentle sobbing, you're right!

"I'm sorry, ma'am, there's just no market for your creepy Twilight fanfiction."

The problem is that entertainment writing just happens on its own; no one needs to shell out any money to make sure that stories keep getting written. Even if the entire publishing industry were to go up in flames tomorrow, intrepid writers would continue to churn out novels and blogs for the meager reward of page hit counts and a little recognition.

"But wait!" you shout, because you're obviously very passionate about this topic, "what about ghostwriting?" Sure, fiction ghostwriting exists, but it's not what you expect - there's no "write an awesome fantasy novel and reap the sweet, sweet benefits when your wealthy patron gets it published". Almost every listing you'll ever see for a freelance fiction writing job goes something like this:

"I've got what I think is the coolest, most original idea for a novel in the history of mankind, but I don't have the time/patience/skill to actually write it. I need someone who writes like a combination of Stephen King, Douglas Adams and J. K. Rowling - I will accept nothing less. The book should be about 25,000 words, because I have no idea what the industry standards for word count are, and I'm going to make you sign a series of questionable legal documents I made from Word templates to ensure you can't so much as hint at the fact that you had anything to do with its creation. Also, I'm going to need your help getting it published. Pays $200."

Even those jobs are few and far between; should you actually accept one, you'll become the poster's personal writer on a string. You'll be expected to take the half-baked "Japanese teenagers trapped in a love dodecahedron" idea you were handed and hammer out a coherent plot, while simultaneously fielding all the suggestions, ideas, changes, character descriptions, edits and embellishments that are emailed to you around the clock. Even if you pull it off and create a literary masterpiece, you may find yourself the target of the poster's wrath when they realize that publishers won't touch ghostwritten fiction with a generously long pole.

Fiction ghostwriting sucks, is what I'm saying.

Articles are the bread and butter of freelance writing. Unlike fiction, articles don't just spring forth unbidden from the Internet - no one wakes up in the morning and goes "Gosh, I think I'll write up a detailed guide to troubleshooting my favourite blender and give the rights to the manufacturer so they can post it on their website". Companies need to pay for that to happen, and there are some weird companies out there looking for writers. Every freelance job board out there is a smorgasbord of bizarre jobs that need doing. If you want steady work and you're planning to write in only one or two fields, like parenting articles or makeup tutorials, you're out of luck. Almost every freelance writer eventually has to suck it up and take on whatever work they can find.

I've written about places I've never been, schools I've never attended, and products I can't even buy in this country. My job history includes topics I know nothing about, like lipstick, childcare, one night stand etiquette, pet names, VPN server configuration, educational toys, iPhones, and boot sector errors, and topics I'm in no way qualified to write about, like architectural standards, building codes, child rearing, stimulant-based medications and fasting diets. Even if you head into a freelance writing career with the intention of specializing, you'll quickly find that your topic selection process consists of little more than seeing a posting for twelve articles about denture adhesive and thinking "I guess I could do that."

You'll start out making less than minimum wage.

Let's say you're getting $8.00 to write a 400-word article, and you can type 60 words per minute. Even if you take five minutes to plan the article and two minutes to sit around and fantasize about the day that Alan Rickman will burst through your door to take you away from this provincial life, you should be able to crank out articles quickly enough to earn yourself a decent living... right?

Someday my prince will come.

Of course not - at least, not right away. Did you read the previous section? Most of the time you'll be writing about things that you know absolutely nothing about. When that happened in high school, you could fill two pages with "therefore"s, "as such"s, and "Oh please, Mr. Cooper, I'd do just anything - and I do mean anything - to pass this class"s, but that trick won't work on an employer who does know the material you're writing about. Almost everything you write will require some research. If it's a topic you're familiar with, that might mean browsing Wikipedia for a few minutes to make sure that you're on the right track. If you signed up to write a technical computer manual despite the fact that you treat your laptop as little more than a Facebook machine, you might need to pore over guides and tutorials for hours before you're even ready to make the outline. Just remember, you're not getting paid for any of that research. It doesn't matter if it takes you five minutes or five days - you're still only making $8.00.

And don't even get me started on employers who make you conduct original medical research.

Once you've got your feet under you and start taking on bigger jobs, price estimation becomes an issue. What's a reasonable price for a 15,000 word eBook? $200? $300? $500? $1000 or more? Remember, you're probably competing against a dozen or more writers for every single job - bid too high and you risk losing the job to someone who's asking for less money. But bid too low, and you might find yourself earning less per hour than the person who served up your much-needed morning coffee.

This person makes more money than most freelance writers.

Compounding the problem is the tidal wave of English-speaking writers from faraway lands like India, Pakistan and Egypt, and beginner writers desperate to get a foot in the door, who flood freelancing job boards with bids to do jobs for a fraction of the cost of other writers. Whenever you stumble across a job that you'd consider to be worth around $100, you can be sure that other writers are offering to do it for $15 or less. If you want your freelancing job to be more profitable than picking up cans off the side of the highway, you need to prove to each employer that you're worth every penny you charge.

You are stuck in a catch-22 before you even start.

If you've ever searched for any kind of gainful employment at any point in your life, you already know this one - to get a job, you need experience, and to get experience, you need a job. That's especially true of writers. As a freelance writer, your entire career hinges on your reputation - when you're competing with dozens of other writers, it's tough to convince an employer to hire you if they've never heard of you and don't know anything about you.

On the internet, nobody knows you're a monkey.

Having a writing sample helps, but not as much as you might think. Sure, if you turn in a garbled heap of half-translated Chinese as a writing sample, employers will know not to hire you. But even if you do present them with Pulitzer-quality samples, there's no way to guarantee that it was actually you who wrote that - you could have easily swiped it from someone else. Most importantly, no writing sample you can provide will show someone what you'll actually be like as an employee. Maybe you don't answer emails. Maybe you need constant reassurance that your writing is good. Maybe you handle all requests for edits by mailing parcels filled with a variety of animal feces to your employer. Probably none of those things are true, but until you've gathered reviews, ratings and testimonials that say otherwise, prospective clients look at you as little more than a scruffy urchin clutching a pen.

This is you.

So how do you get ahead? The options aren't pretty. The easiest way to break into freelance writing is to offer to work for next to nothing. When you've got no work history and no one to vouch for you, the allure of saving a few dollars might be enough to convince a client to take a chance on you. Yes, it sucks, and it means that you'll have to put off having your J.D. Salinger-shaped swimming pool installed while you eat ramen in a cardboard box for a while. A better option is to take on projects that are so unappealing, you're one of the only writers who bids on them. I'm not talking about taking on requests for erotica, either - writers will line up around the block for a shot at writing that for pay. I mean bidding on postings for comprehensive, 20 000 word technical reports about the performance benchmarks of an obscure graphics chip. If you're a brand new freelance writer and you spot a listing filled with technical jargon that required at least twelve Google searches to understand, then congratulations - she's all yours, champ.

How did I land my first freelance writing job? I, uh, did neither of those things. A client read the older, equally snarky blog I used to run and offered me a job based entirely on my unusual writing style. So that's an option too, I guess.

The steadiest work isn't always morally upstanding.

Freelance writing careers can be fickle; sometimes, you'll finish off all of your existing jobs and just won't be able to find another right away. Freelance work has a very high turnover rate; your joblessness may last a few hours, a few days, or longer. Unfortunately, you've got cat food and internet porn bills to pay, and you might not be able to afford to just sit at your computer in your underwear for a few days, waiting for work to come along. Well, there is steady work out there, but you're not going to like it.

If you've flipped on a news broadcast on any slow news day, you might have learned that the only thing bigger than mommy and daddy's dream of seeing junior go off to Harvard is mommy and daddy's bank account.

The typical modern mother. Apparently.

Unfortunately for them, Ivy League universities don't auction off their seats to the highest bidder. So what are wealthy parents to do? They could do the responsible thing and hire tutors, of course, but private lessons would take away from their precious darling's video game time, and besides, tutors can't guarantee that he'll stop throwing rocks at peasants long enough to actually write a decent essay. No, if it's a guarantee they want, the only thing to do is to hire a professional writer to crap out a prizewinning high school essay. And that's where you come in.

This is your boss now.

The 'essay writer for hire' business is booming, as students from middle school to the late years of PhD programs discover the joys of cheating to get ahead. And since teachers don't seem to find it at all suspicious that students who have to sound out the tricky words in class can suddenly write like James Joyce, the trend shows no signs of slowing down. For a freelance writer, it's tempting. The work is easy and decent-paying; all you really need is a copy of The Catcher in the Rye and you can make yourself a comfortable living by joining an essay mill or going it alone. All you need is a feeble conscience and a little disclaimer saying that students really shouldn't hand in your products to their teachers, because gosh, that's not very honest, and you can pretend that your work isn't morally questionable.

Now the big question is, have I ever done a student's homework for money? I don't think I have, but I can't be sure. Remember, freelance job boards are filled with everything from tech start-ups looking for someone to write their blog posts, to wealthy old perverts looking for custom Blues Clues erotic fanfiction. You can't always be certain who you're really writing for. Sure, that article on obsessive compulsive disorder might be for a mental health website, or it might get handed in as homework to a college professor. It's not always easy to tell.

You might work for terrible people.

I need to put a preface on this section: I've been very lucky in my freelance writing career, and thus far, all of my clients have been professional, courteous, and upstanding. I don't have any personal horror stories to tell. My freelancing friends, however, have not been so lucky.

The worst kind of client is one who straight up rips you off. You slave over a project for hours or days, making sure that every phrase is worded properly and every bit of punctuation is in the right place. You turn that sucker in and wait for your payment, but it never arrives. Weeks pass, your emails to the client go unanswered, and all the other contact information you were given turns out to be fake. You've been duped. These clients are awful, but fortunately, they're easy to avoid. Scam artists prey on the 'Golly gee, mister, you want to pay little ol' me to write? This is a dream come true!' mentality that makes beginners too timid to make demands of their clients. Here's a demand you should always be making: use an Escrow service. Escrow services - which are built in features of most freelancing job boards like Elance - act as an impartial third party to your transaction. The client gives your pay to the service before the job starts, and when you show the service that the job is finished, they release the money to you. Yes, they take a small percentage for themselves, but it's not a lot to pay for peace of mind.

When possible, avoid taking jobs from cartoon villains.

Other kinds of terrible clients are more subtle. For instance, during one of your slower weeks, you might take on a job that pays a little less than you're accustomed to. No big deal - you hand it in, collect your pay, and start searching for the next scrap of work. Then, sometime later, when things are slow again and you're that special kind of bored, you Google a few quotes from the low-paying piece to see where it ended up. You do find it, but to your surprise, it's accredited to a freelance writing company you have no affiliation with. Since you don't remember accidentally gaining employment as a staff writer, you do a little digging and learn that this particular company not only sold your article to another client, but they got more money for it than you did. What's going on?

You've fallen victim to a middleman. There are a surprising number of groups and individuals out there who seem to sustain themselves solely by taking on high-paying jobs from clients and then outsourcing them to other, lower-paid writers and keeping the difference. It's despicable, and the real client has no idea that only half of their money is going to the person who really wrote their articles, while the rest gets pocketed by some random jackass who may or may not actually know how to write.

How I envision people who do this.

Then there are blackmailing clients. Since freelancers who work for larger boards like Odesk and Elance rely on client reviews in order to secure work, sometimes clients take advantage of this system and threaten to leave poor, scathing reviews if the hapless writer doesn't do a metric shitload of free work for them. For writers who only have a handful of reviews to their name, this sort of thing could really cripple their chances at finding future work. Luckily, the review system is a two-way street; some sites let writers leave poor reviews of bad clients, and most sites allow writers report abuse. As long as you refuse to back down to an abusive client, you shouldn't have anything to worry about.

Got any questions or comments about freelance writing? Leave them in the comments!

Ladies and gentlemen, if you direct your eyes to the sidebar on the right of the page, you'll see a bright green button clashing with the rest of the page. If you're functionally literate in the English language, you might even notice that it says "Follow on feedly" on it.

So what is feedly?

It's the name of the unicorn you can follow me around on.

feedly is a news aggregator, which in real-people terms means it's an application that will gather up all the new blog posts and news stories from your favourite sites and put them in one place for you, so that you don't have to strain your delicate finger muscles by typing in all the URLs each day.

To get feedly up and running, all you need to do is download it for free on your Android or Apple device and set up an account. If you have a pathological fear of smartphones, you can just go to the website and use the browser version. And if you've got rich parents and a pathological fear of sunlight, you can dig out every electronic you own and have a blog party. Just make sure you follow janelcomeau.ca, so you can get my new blog posts sent to you no matter where you are.

There is no escape.

So in other words, it's now 237% easier to read my blog posts on the toilet.

Enjoy.

Buckle up, readers, because I'm about to take on the most beloved books the world has ever seen.

If you grew up in a literate, first-world family that didn't engage in ritual witch burnings, you've read Harry Potter. At the very least, you've seen the movies. If you were alive in the 1990s and you've made it this long without being exposed to the famous boy wizard, you are a statistical anomaly on par with the existence of an albino humpback whale.

This is you.

For all the albino whales and forgetful readers in my audience, here's a quick synopsis: Harry Potter is a seven-book series that tells the story of a bespectacled, cupboard-dwelling orphan with an AC/DC logo on his face who teams up with a redheaded welfare case and an encyclopedia with tits in order to defeat an immortal, snake-faced racist. The final book culminates in the deaths of approximately everyone, including Remus Lupin, Nymphadora Tonks, Lavender Brown, Fred Weasley, George Weasley's ear, Rufus Scrimgeour, Alastor Moody, Dobby the House Elf, Hedwig, Charity Burbage and a host of other characters whose names you don't recognize, Bathilda Bagshot, Vincent Crabbe, Nymphadora Tonks' father, a substantial number of Death Eaters who had it coming, Nagini, Colin Creevy, Severus Snape, Lord Voldemort, and your childhood. What the book fails to mention, however, is that every single one of those deaths could have been easily prevented by a single character: Harry's Aunt Petunia.

This woman killed Dobby.

This might be a good time to mention that this post is absolutely lousy with spoilers, but c'mon guys, the last book came out in 2007. It's been seven years. Snape kills Dumbledore, and Harry is a Horcrux. You should know this by now.

Also, they had bitchin' lightsaber battles, like, all the time.

Let's get right to it. At the start of the fifth book - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - Harry and his chunky cousin are strolling through suburban England when they're accosted by spooky, soul-sucking magical prison guards called Dementors. This is Dudley Dursley's first direct encounter with the magical world, and he reacts by running home to his mommy and throwing a spectacular hissy fit. That scene prompts the following exchange:

"De - men - tors," said Harry slowly and clearly. "Two of them."
"And what the ruddy hell are Dementors?"
"They guard the wizard prison, Azkaban," said Aunt Petunia.
Two seconds of ringing silence followed these words before Aunt Petunia clapped her hand over her mouth as though she had let slip a disgusting swear word. Uncle Vernon was goggling at her. Harry's brain reeled. Mrs. Figg was one thing - but Aunt Petunia?
"How d'you know that?" he asked her, astonished.
Aunt Petunia looked quite appalled with herself. She glanced at Uncle Vernon in fearful apology, then lowered her hand slightly to reveal her horsy teeth.
"I heard - that awful boy - telling her about them - years ago," she said jerkily.
"If you mean my mum and dad, why don't you use their names?" said Harry loudly, but Aunt Petunia ignored him. She seemed horribly flustered.

Gee, it seems awfully strange that Harry's aunt can't bring herself to name his parents. Rowling makes it clear throughout the series that the woman is going through life with a stick of generous circumference firmly lodged up her hindquarters, but surely even Petunia isn't too uptight to use her dead sister and brother-in-law's names. So why doesn't she just say Lily and James Potter?

Because she's not talking about James Potter.

I just wrote this post as an excuse to look up pictures of Alan Rickman.

When Harry takes a leisurely swim through the silvery goop of Snape's memories in the seventh book, the second memory he sees is a young Severus telling Lily all about Azkaban and Dementors while Petunia eavesdrops. In comparison to all the other life-changing memories Harry witnesses in the Pensieve, that one is relatively minor. The only reason that it's included is because J. K. Rowling has a lady-boner for keeping tiny details in her universe consistent. That 'awful boy' referenced in the fifth book wasn't Harry's father at all - it was Petunia's creepy neighbour, Severus Snape.

I wonder what other sorts of things Petunia caught them doing...

So let's go back to Petunia and Harry's little chat about Dementors. We know that Aunt Petunia is hyper-sensitive to criticism, and that there are approximately no circumstances in which she's willing to shut her big, horsey mouth for even a moment and stop talking. And yet, her hatred of magic is so strong, she's not even willing to continue the conversation long enough to let herown nephew know that she's not insulting his dead father. Its not as if Petunia has any reason to conceal Snape's identity. He started at Hogwart's after Lily's death, and Harry's education isn't exactly discussed at the Dursley dinner table; she has no way of knowing that the 'awful boy' from her childhood grew up to be Harry's least favourite teacher. So in that one little phrase - "Aunt Petunia ignored him" - Mrs. Dursley damages her relationship with Harry, disrespects her dead sister's memory, alarms her son and husband, conceals the identity of a man she has no reason to protect, and sentences dozens of innocent people to die in the battle of Hogwarts. How?

If she had corrected Harry's assumption, he would have learned about the connection between his mother and Snape more than two years early.

"Connection".

Remember, Harry is desperate for any link to his deceased parents, to the point that his 'deepest heart's desire', shown in the mirror of Erised, is just to be with them. There's no way that he would have overlooked Petunia mentioning "the Snape boy" - he's hungry for knowledge of his parents, and finding out that any teacher knew his mother as a child is something he'd be sure to follow up on. By this point in the fifth book, he already has plenty of information about his father; he's seen his awards, learned about his Quidditch career, met his friends, discovered his shape-shifting and acquired his map and cloak. Keep in mind, James Potter was only twenty-one years old when he died; Harry essentially knows his entire life story, and if there's anything he needs to know, he can ask Lupin and Sirius for more stories about that time they smuggled a ravenous werewolf under a homicidal tree. Everywhere Harry goes, adults blurt out "You're just like your father", as if it's a Tourettic tic.

For Lily, however, Harry has nothing. The only person in Harry's life who spent substantial time with her when she was alive - her own sister - has no interest in talking about her, and Harry won't meet Professor Slughorn until book six. He knows nothing about her hobbies, achievements, classes or friends, and he doesn't have any of her old possessions. She might as well have been a pair of sentient eyeballs, because the only information Harry ever hears about her is that she was good at school and had the same remarkably noteworthy green eyes as him.

Either it was really dark in Hogwarts, or all wizards suffer from blue-green colourblindness.

Finding out that Severus Snape was the only living connection to Lily's childhood and school days would have profoundly changed the nature of their relationship. Harry's desire for information constantly overthrows his common sense - he threw himself at a murderous tree in the middle of the night and snuck out to an abandoned shack to single-handedly confront a man he believed to be a dangerous mass murderer, just because he knew the man had a connection to his father. Harry changing his mind about Snape is not just idle speculation on my part, either; when Harry learns about it in book seven, it prompts him to name his freaking son Severus. Imagine the connection the two of them could have had if Snape had been alive to discuss Lily after the revelation, instead of being a dead husk of snake chow.

You monster.

Having a trusting relationship between Harry and Snape isn't all about Harry finding closure and emotional well-being, however. That wouldn't be worth writing about. What is writing about is that nearly every single bad thing that happens from book five onward could have been prevented if Harry had trusted Snape. Don't believe it? Let's start with Sirius Black. Specifically, with the death of Sirius Black.

The only man ever killed by a mysterious archway.

Sometime during the fifth book, Voldemort figures out that he can do a Vulcan mind-meld with Harry, allowing the two of them to sense each other's thoughts and feelings. After Harry uses it to witness an attack and save Arthur Weasley's life, Voldemort realizes that the connection goes both ways. He then starts filling Harry's head with visions of a hallway filled with glass balls. Dumbledore doesn't feel comfortable having Wizard-Hitler rooting around in Harry's brain, and he orders Harry to start taking private Occlumency lessons with none other than Severus Snape.

"Private lessons".

The lessons go nowhere. Lack of trust and a bad memory viewed out of context lead to a complete breakdown, and Harry's mind remains completely vulnerable. Since Harry can't protect himself, Voldemort takes advantage of the mind-link and feeds Harry a fake memory of Sirius being tortured at the Department of Mysteries, luring Harry into an obvious trap that results in the death of his godfather. If Harry had had a chance to confront Snape about his childhood relationship with Lily and clear the air prior to starting Occlumency lessons, he might actually have been able to stick with them long enough to block the fake vision from getting in.

Even if Harry's angsty teenage brain never did get the hang of Occlumency, he still could have prevented Sirius's death by trusting Snape. When Harry first has the vision, Hermione is clever enough to realize that they should verify that Sirius is in danger before they go skipping off to the ministry. Problem is, there isn't a member of the Order of the Phoenix handy. Dumbledore has been chased off, and McGonagall is in the hospital after being stunned to the tits by Umbridge's lackeys. That leaves Harry with absolutely no one to go to, except for maybe Severus Snape, a full-fledged member of the Order and a Death Eater double-agent, who could have easily told Harry that the vision was fake and ordered him back to his room to sip pumpkin juice and read page 394, because everything was fine. No one would have died. The only reason that Harry himself doesn't die in the fifth book is because Snape correctly interprets Harry's cryptic, half-garbled warning, based on this three-second conversation with an evil house elf.

As it turns out, this was not a reliable source of information.

Things only get worse from there. Having proven himself to be an impulsive and irresponsible shithead, and having completely alienated himself from Snape, Harry is not informed of Dumbledore's inevitable death or of the 'Snape kills Dumbledore so Voldemort doesn't get suspicious" plan. When the moment of Dumbledore's death actually arrives, Harry's blind hatred for his teacher leads him to completely misinterpret Dumbledore's "c'mon, seriously, you promised you'd do this" begging and Snape's "I would really rather not murder the only person who ever gave me a second chance" glare.

"Thanks, bro, I owe you one." - Dumbledore

Harry's completely avoidable distrust of Snape culminates in the seventh book. Harry and friends spend most of the book camping out in the wilderness, gathering Horcruxes and destroying them with a sword that conveniently turns up in a nearby pond. Of course, the trio isn't nearly competent enough to be managing this all by their lonesome; though they don't know it, Snape is is babysitting them from afar the entire time, sneaking them help and sending his Patronus to lead them to things they need, like convenient pond-swords. Really, Snape has everything locked down; as Headmaster, he's exercising his power to keep Voldemort and the Death Eaters out of Hogwarts, preserving his students' safety while keeping them just miserable enough to be convincing. With Harry well on his way to destroying all of Voldemort's Horcruxes, all Snape really needs to do is keep sending help and bide his time until his master is left defenseless.

Then Harry comes along and fucks it all up.

Goddammit, Harry.

Things come to a head when Harry figures out that one of the last Horcruxes is probably Ravenclaw's diadem, but since Hogwarts isn't real big on vocabulary tests, he doesn't know what a diadem looks like. He decides that the only way to find out is to break into Hogwarts and stand around, undisguised, in the Ravenclaw common room. A passing Death-Eater-turned-teacher walks by and sounds the alarm, summoning Voldemort and crew to the castle and prompting the battle that brings out the truth about Lily and Snape, and results in the death of just about everybody. All because Harry and Snape didn't trust each other enough to realize that they were on the same side.

Come on, guys, even Voldemort knew how to hug it out.

So, in summary: your favourite character died because Petunia Dursley was too stuck-up to admit that she'd heard a greasy poor boy talking to her sister once. She had a perfect opportunity to overcome Harry's pride and Snape's shame to bring them together just in time to take down the world's most evil wizard together without all their friends and colleagues dying in the process, but instead, she chose to say nothing. At least Tom Riddle had a motive for all of the terrible things he caused, and paid the price for his actions. Petunia Dursley was just uptight and petty, and went about her life not knowing what she could have prevented.

Yes, that makes Petunia worse than Voldemort.

I recently finished reading J.K. Rowling's 'A Casual Vacancy'.

Those of you who stalk me on Goodreads already know this.

I had had the book for some time, but never managed to psyche myself up to reading it. The only thing I'd heard about the book - over and over again - was that it wasn't Harry Potter. Eventually, though, I caught sight of it on my bookshelf and, despite it not being Harry Potter, my curiosity got the better of me. And after I'd finished it, one thing really stood out to me.

If this cover were one shade brighter, you could actually land planes with it.

Harry Potter and The Casual Vacancy are practically the same book.

Sure, on the surface, one is about an orphan conquering the twin demons of blood purists and puberty, and the other is about a small town realizing that people die sometimes. But when you really delve into it, there are some oddly specific things that the two worlds share. Things like:

(It's worth noting that I'm not including The Cuckoo's Calling in this analysis, because technically, that was a Robert Galbraith novel, and seriously, people, I'm a student. I don't have the time or money to read things that aren't textbooks right now.)

Twins

Twins account for somewhere between 9 and 16 births for every thousand episodes of pushing out a live baby. In other words, if you're pregnant, your odds of getting an extra bonus baby are between 0.9 - 1.6%. That's not a lot of twins. Statistically speaking, you are more likely to believe that lizard people run the government than you are to bear dual versions of yourself in one go.

Of the 149 important characters who show up in the Harry Potter series, six of them (Fred & George Weasley, Padma & Parvati Patil, Hestia & Flora Carrow) are twins, which leaves the Harry Potter cast clocking in at 4.0% twin - roughly quadruple the actual rate. Apparently twins are magical beings, because even Loony Luna Lovegood goes on to have her own set of twin boys. But as twin-filled as Harry Potter is, The Casual Vacancy is even worse. Two (Niamh & Siobhan Fairbrother) of the 34 characters are twins, which puts this book at a whopping 5.9% twin rate.

No good can come of so many twins.

So what does this mean for any future books? Readers should expect to see more and more incidents of multiple births, until Rowling finally gets her hands on a copy of Brave New World and writes a novel starring eighty-three identical teenage clones.

Shitty, Shitty Fathers

Look, it's not exactly a secret that J.K. Rowling has some daddy issues. She and her own father have what Wikipedia calls a "difficult relationship"; in other words, he auctioned off a collection of the autographed first-edition books she gave him for Christmas in order to save his failing burger truck business. Rowling's animosity towards her burger-peddling paternal figure shows up in more than just her adolescent diaries, however; it's splashed all over her writing.

Peter and Joanne Rowling, in a rare moment of not despising one another.

Virtually every character in both the Harry Potter series and The Casual Vacancy has a catastrophically shitty father figure. Look at Harry Potter. Voldemort's father abandoned him, and his mother's father was an abusive, shack-dwelling hobo. Snape's father may or may not have liked to 'argue' with his fists. Sirius Black's father disowned his teenage son for not being enough of a wizard Nazi. Dumbledore's father got a life sentence in prison for torturing three Muggle children. Malfoy's father indoctrinates his only son to a life of serving an immortal lord of racial purity and death, and makes his 17-year-old child promise to murder the most powerful wizard who ever lived. Even Remus Lupin, who is portrayed as kind-hearted, responsible and trustworthy, instantly turns into a child-abandoning shithead the moment he's entrusted with offspring. In fact, the character who is arguably the purest of heart - Mr. Neville Longbottom - is one of the only characters who grew up without any father figure whatsoever.

Father-son bonding just interferes with snake slaying.

But the Harry Potter books aren't the last stop on the 'horrendously irresponsible father' train. Oh, no. The Casual Vacancy is so chocked full of heinous fathers that it's actually the driving theme of the book. Andrew Price's father steals things he can easily afford and beats his entire family whenever they dare to breathe too loud. Stuart 'Fats' Wall's father loudly and openly expresses that he can't stand his child and he never wanted a son in the first place. Sukhvinder Jawanda's father is too busy performing open heart surgery and making middle-aged panties drop to notice that his own daughter is carving herself up like salami every time someone calls her stupid.

In other words, if you live in a J.K. Rowling novel and a person came out of your balls, you are probably a horrible human being.

Good Fathers Coming Perilously Close to Death

Even J.K. Rowling seems to have realized that filling up her novels with nothing but child molesters and offspring-abandoners is a quicker ticket to therapy than to a book deal. In order to keep the psychiatrist's prescription pad at bay, she sprinkles in the occasional father figure who truly loves and cares for the tiny humans he humped into existence. Harry Potter has James Potter, Arthur Weasley, and Sirius Black, whom I'm counting as a father because I seriously don't have a lot to go on here, Rowling. The Casual Vacancy has Barry Fairbrother and Howard Mollison.

Anyone noticing a pattern here?

Here's a hint.

Every single one of those men either dies, or comes incredibly close to being offed before his time. In Harry Potter, James Potter's death is one of the events that sparks the entire plot. Arthur Weasley picks the wrong night to take guard duty and inadvertently ends up as a snake's midnight snack; interestingly enough, that run-in with Nagini in book five was supposed to be Arthur Weasley's ultimate demise, but J.K. Rowling realized that his death would leave her series completely devoid of decent fathers, and changed the outcome of the scene. Sirius Black stepped out of the blue to prove that good parents don't have to be your birth parents, and that even people from cartoonishly evil Nazi families can overcome their past, but all of that amounts to nothing when he suffers a tragic death by haunted curtain.

Bed, Bath & Beyond just got deadlier.

In The Casual Vacancy, Barry Fairbrother's death is the entire point of the book, and (There be spoilers up ahead, mateys), Howard Mollison suffers not one, but two attempts on his life... at the same time. This goes way beyond coincidence. If you're a father in the London area, try to avoid holding hands with your children in public, lest J.K. Rowling spot you and bludgeon you to death with her typewriter.

Teenagers Meddling in Things They Do Not Understand

And now we come to the real underlying theme of J.K. Rowling's books. Harry Potter is essentially a seven-volume instruction manual for how to screw up absolutely everything and then stumble ass-first into success. It starts from the very first book. In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Sorcerer's Stone, if you're south of the 49th), Harry is told, over and over again, to kindly stay the fuck away from the third floor corridor, because it's not entirely unreasonable for adults to want to keep an 11-year-old child away from a giant, feral 3-headed dog.

Puppy! Er... puppies?

Of course, Harry the Wonder Boy doesn't listen, and promptly charges through Dumbledore's Seven Circles of Hell to retrieve the Philosopher's stone, defeat Voldemort and save the day. He's the hero here! Except... had Harry not intervened, Quirrel would have stared hopelessly at the mirror until Voldemort got bored and mind-crushed him. He had no way of getting it out. Harry is literally the only human capable of getting the stone, so if he never shows up, Voldemort's plot is still just as foiled. The outcome of the story is exactly the same if Harry isn't in it at all.

Reminds me of someone else I know...

Harry's further exploits including playing with evil diaries when he's told not to, playing mind-footsie with Voldemort when he's told not to, and fighting the world's most evil snake lord behind Dumbledore's back when he's told not to, only to have other people swoop in at the last minute and help him save the day. But he and his friends aren't the only teens to stick their noses where they don't belong. The Casual Vacancy is the adultiest adult book ever, about adults doing adult things like holding elections and dying of brain aneurysms, and it's still chock-full of curious teenage meddlers.

Growing up sucks, kids.

The entire plot of the novel is driven by shitty, shitty kids doing shitty, shitty things with consequences they can't even begin to comprehend. The book blurb may tell you that it's about a small town trying to throw an election to find a replacement for a dead town counselor, but don't be fooled; it's really about chronically unsupervised teens trying to find out what happens when they post their parents' secrets on the internet and make out with their friends' parents.

So if you're anxiously awaiting the release of Miss Rowling's next masterpiece, you're welcome; I've already given you a sneak preview.

What other patterns have you noticed in your favourite books? Leave 'em in the comments.

Hey, you. You in the body.

You might think of yourself as a complete human being, with arms, legs, fingers, toes and butt cheeks, but it really comes down to it, everything that makes you 'you' - your hopes, dreams, quirks, personality traits, memories, goals, haunting recollections of that body you buried in the woods - are all contained within a 3lb chunk of flesh inside your skull.

This is you.

But as important as our brains are, most people don't seem to know a heck of a lot about them. Most of my regular readers probably know that I'm an undergraduate psychology student, and that I am all about brains. Love 'em. Big fan. The only problem is, now and then someone finds out what I study, and they hit me with some piece of brain-related trivia to see if I knew it. Most of the time, I did not. But it has nothing to do with holes in my education - an overwhelming amout of psychology 'fun facts' floating around are just straight-up wrong.

So before I push someone in front of a train for bombarding me with tidbits of bad information, let me shed some light on common email-forward facts like:

We only use 10% of our brains.

Here's a quick question: how much of your brainpower do you suppose it takes to coordinate every single muscle in your body, maintain spacial awareness, interpret visual information, process audio information, deal with touch signals from every inch of your skin, hold on to the definitions, pronunciations and spellings of the roughly 20,000-35,000 words in your vocabulary, assemble your nebulous thoughts into sentences, comprehend human speech, recognize the tens of thousands of items in your environment, keep track of time, experience and cope with emotions in response to environmental and internal stimuli, recognize human faces, store memories of lifetime events and facts you've memorized so that they can be recalled at a moment's notice, hang on to handy skills like the ability to tie your own shoes and drive your car without moving down the neighbour kids, identify smells, and keep all of your internal organs functioning properly?

How about all of it?

You need this.

Your brain has a strict 'use it or lose it' policy; if your neurons stop firing, they die. After all, why should your body work so hard converting all those Cheetos and Kit-Kats you eat into energy, just so you can fuel lazy, freeloading brain cells? It would much rather let the useless cells die and use that excess energy to construct a third chin for you. If you really allowed 90% of your brain to die off, you'd be little more than a vegetable with a functioning brain stem. I mean, think about it - if you only used 10% of your brain, having a stoke would be no big deal. Yeah, a chunk of your brain dies, but so long as you've still got the 10% you needed, you'd feel no effects.

Look at that, he's got way more than 1/10th of his brain left. Bet he won't even notice.

I'm completely baffled as to where this little 'fun fact' even came from, because it has two horrible possible implications:

a) No matter how hard you strive and strain and push yourself, you're still way too lazy to even begin to access your full potential. Everyone on earth is harboring Mensa-caliber intellect that they could use to cure all known diseases, make great contributions to the arts and increase the efficiency of all the systems we rely on, but ensh, that takes work and Duck Dynasty is on.

b) Mother Nature chose to endow us with immense brain capacity that we're somehow capable of detecting, but entirely incapable of accessing. All of humanity is essentially carrying around a 50 exobyte external hard drive, but no one has the mini-USB cable needed to actually connect it.

Either way, it's total crap.

Left-brained people are logical, and right-brained people are creative.

Chances are, if you ever managed to draw a straight line on a graph without getting confused and falling down a flight of stairs, someone quickly labelled you 'left-brained' - you favor the left side of your brain, and in exchange, it grants you the power to compile lists, do calculations, and bore the ever-loving crap out of everyone you encounter. Likewise, if you took a magic marker to your own face as a child, someone might have popped up to call you 'right-brained' - you favor the right side of your brain, which enables you to paint masterpieces, compose symphonies, and see the merits of wearing maxi dresses and skinny jeans. If you're curious to find out which side your talents lie on, don't worry! There are hundreds upon hundreds of online quizzes that will tell you. There's just one little problem.

This. This is the problem.

Remember that thing we were just talking about? About how you rely on your entire brain to do things? That still applies here. It's true that your left hemisphere and right hemisphere do have slightly different functions; in most people, language and verbal abilities lie on the left, while music and non-verbal abilities fall on the right. That said, there is considerable overlap. Consider this - young children with catastrophic epilepsy will occasionally, as an absolute last-ditch effort, have an entire hemisphere of their brain removed. After an initial period of recovery, during which their squishy, adaptable little brains do some rewiring to adjust for the missing hemisphere, these children retain their full range of cognitive abilities. Kids who have had the left side of the brain hauled out have gone on to get graduate degrees in language, and kids whose right hemispheres were removed can still sculpt, sketch and figure out that Nicki Minaj is just awful.

If you're really desperate to figure out where the functions in your brain are located, all you need to do is pick up a pen.

One of those hands is about to drag itself through wet ink. Poor lefties.

Handedness has a bigger impact on the orientation of your brain than personality or hobbies ever will. If you're right-handed, as most people are, there is a 95% chance that you have the left-language, right-non-verbal orientation. The other 5% of you have this either reversed, or your functions are shared between the two sides. But if you're a lefty, there's only a 70% chance, that your language is originating from your left; for 15% of you, it's on the right, and for the other 15%, it's split. The proportions aren't always exact - but they're a hell of a lot more scientific than the left-brain, right-brain personality divide.

Learning styles are a thing.

Little Tommy likes to read, so he must be a visual learner. Suzie remembers what her teacher said in class, so she must be an audio learner. Timmy likes to chew on keys and gargle paint, so, uh, he must be a tactile learner.

Dammit, Timmy.

Teachers swear by learning styles, and if you went to school in a year that starts with a 2 (assuming you're not a time traveler from the 200's), you were probably evaluated for learning style at some point during your school days. The results likely had absolutely no impact on your education, but at least you knew. And if you were tested multiple times, you might have found that you had a different learning style each time. Did your learning style change? Why is that?

Samantha was shocked to discover that she learned best by taste.

A large part of it is that no one can find a model that holds up to scientific testing. 71 different models of learning style have been proposed, and not a single one has actually been shown to have any validity in psychological experiments. Fundamentally, all humans learn in similar ways - the reason that Jack might prefer to read while Jill would rather listen to a lecture is far too complicated to attribute to an abstract, stable trait like a 'learning style'. Maybe Jill's entire family was bludgeoned to death by books, you don't know. When it comes down to it, we all learn best by doing, and putting our skills to work. So all you apprentices in the trades, you're in luck! To those of you studying theoretical mathematics... good luck with that.

People with concussions need to be kept awake.

First, some clarification: if your loved one has just miraculously survived a head-first tumble down an elevator shaft and is incapable of seeing, thinking, walking, talking or refraining from vomiting, do not let him or her go to sleep. It's notoriously difficult to evaluate brain damage when someone is asleep, since you have no way to tell if their symptoms are getting better. Worst case scenario, they'll slip into an irreversible coma. Best case scenario, they'll choke on their own vomit and go out like a rock star. Either way, it's not good.

This is not necessarily a man you want to emulate.

But if your friend just got a little bump on the head as they were walking through low doorframes or scoring a touchdown during the 9th inning of their hockey game, and they're coherent enough to stomp over to you and declare that they're going to bed, you should let them sleep. Contrary to popular belief, your brain doesn't make you sleep so that it can put its feet up and have a little 'me' time until it's ready to entertain you again. Sleep is the only time you stop using your neurons long enough for them to be tuned up and repaired.

She's about two hours away from restoring her brain to its pre-college state.

You might recognize 'brain repair' as something that's pretty important for a person who's just bounced their brain off the inside of their skull. So unless you have a vested interest in seeing the concussed patient's IQ drop, so long as they're coherent and not vomiting, you are safe to let them sleep. In fact, you should command it.

The Myers-Briggs Personality Test will tell you exactly what you should do for a living.

If you've ever been on a dating site, or worked at an overzealous workplace, you might have seen people identifying themselves by a four-letter string that looks something like 'INFP', or 'ESTJ'. These are the shorthand codes for the Myers-Briggs personality types, which measures personalities on four dmensions: Introversion vs. Extroversion; Intuition vs. Sensing; Feeling vs. Thinking; and Perception vs. Judgement. And once you know which side of each dimension you fall on, you should be able to use that personality score to determine your dream job. It's that easy! Hold crap, why isn't this test mandatory?

This man. This man is why.

The Myers-Briggs test is based on the work of Carl Jung, who in turn spent his academic career licking the hypothetical feet of Dr. Sigmund "Mom sure is lookin' good" Freud, a man who simultaneously founded the field of clinical psychology and made it difficult for anyone to take it seriously. The problem with Freud was that his work was scientifically flawed from the get-go; it's one thing to claim that males live their entire lives terrified of being castrated by their fathers and that all healthy three-year-olds are obsessed with their own buttholes, but if you can't actually come up with an experiment to test your ideas, they're worthless.

Also, he prescribed cocaine for, like, everything.

All of the problems with Freud's work show up in the Myers-Briggs test. How is anyone supposed to evaluate the test? 'Personality' is not something that shows up in a blood test or an MRI, and following so-called 'Feeling' types around to see if emotions really do run their lives is hardly feasible. This is the reason why the Meyers-Briggs test never pops up in psychologists' or psychiatrists' offices; they have far stronger, more reliable personality inventories that aren't available to the general public. In any case, official indexes of personality mostly look for major disruptions that indicate you have a whopping personality disorder going on; they don't tell you that you would be just the best oral hygienist that Western Canada has ever seen.

And that's why the Myers-Briggs has continued to thrive. It'd be so convenient to fill out a questionnaire and figure out exactly what you should do with your entire life. The alternative is to spend years getting to know yourself, making mistakes, and trying out things that might be new and scary to you.

And really, who wants to do that?

What other psychology myths have you heard floating around? Let me know!

Almost two months ago, I took a deep breath and entered my first writing contest.

It looked something like this.

But let's back up a bit.

Way, way back in the social and developmental dark age we call "high school", I spent most of my time as a directionless mess of bad choices and pink hair. I knew that I wanted to be a writer someday, but I didn't trust my freshly-minted frontal lobes to come up with an original idea that anyone would think was worth reading. Instead, I cut my literary teeth writing tomes upon tomes of contrived anime romantic fanfiction, because I was that special kind of nerdy. Then, one day, towards the end of my twelfth grade year, I started drifting off in calculus class and came up with a rough story idea about a plain, ordinary teenage girl who would defy all tropes by coming to the aid of a mysterious, super-powered boy. It wasn't exactly the groundbreaking literary twist of the century, but I sketched out a wildly careering plot and jotted down a few pages here and there.

Wasn't kidding about the pink hair, by the way. That really happened.

I then promptly got caught up in the whirlwind of graduation, heading off to the mysterious world of post-secondary education, and reaching the Alberta drinking age. Writing novels was something that old people did, and I'd get back to it someday. Then sometime in my second year of university, with a handful of writing and computer science classes under my belt and the novelty of sketchy nightclubs safely worn off, I stumbled across my old novel. And what I read made me chuckle. I dusted off the project, gave it a whole new plot, and had at it. As a student, I have roughly twenty-three hours of homework, courses, meetings, volunteering and sobbing scheduled per day, but when I found a spare moment, I wrote. I wrote before classes, between classes, after classes, during classes, on weekends, in the middle of the night, and around mouthfuls of ramen. Over two years, I wrote a 100,000 word novel in hurried, three-minute chunks, sometimes 50 words at a time. Even I'm not arrogant enough to assume that my first draft was perfect, so I went back over it time and time again, editing and nitpicking until the pages bled.

And that's when I came across Pitchwars.

It actually involved far fewer snowball fights than I'd been expecting.

For those of you who aren't aspiring authors with polished manuscripts in hand, Pitchwars is an annual writing contest hosted by tireless blogger and 2014 debut Young Adult author Brenda Drake. It works something like this: author hopefuls send in all-important query letters (the specifics of which I discussed in an earlier post), and then a group of author and publishing professional "mentors" dig through the slush pile to select their three favourites. Each mentor settles on a top pick and two alternates to make up their team, and provides six weeks of mentorship, feedback and guidance to help their mentees get their manuscripts and query letters polished. At the end of it all, the lucky writers chosen for a Pitchwars team get their work perused by literary agents looking to discover the next Harry Potter/Hunger Games/Shockingly Successful BDSM Porn Trilogy.

Google Images assures me that this is what a literary agent looks like.

This year, I was one of approximately forty gazillion aspiring authors who sent in a query letter and spent a week biting their nails down to the beds while decisions were made. Hopefuls were allowed to apply to a maximum of four mentors, and when the dust settled, all four of the ones I'd applied to reported that they'd received over 60 applications. Technically, that meant that my chances of landing a particular mentor were far, far worse than Katniss' odds of surviving the 74th Hunger Games.

Kind of expected to be the one getting the flower burial in this scenario.

During the long, agonizing week between submissions and results, mentors flooded Twitter with statistics about submissions, helpful advice, and tortuously vague hints about the manuscripts they were choosing. Now I use Twitter the way most people use dental floss - sporadically, and at the urging of professionals. But that entire week, I was glued to the Pitchwars twitter feed. Any time a mentor I'd applied to even mentioned that they were considering a manuscript that contained words and a plot, I'd descend into a rapid, schizophrenic tailspin of simultaneously assuming it was mine, and couldn't possible be mine.

And then it happened.

This. This is what happened.

Halfway through the week, my super-secret writing-only email lit up with a new message from a familiar name - it was one of the mentors I'd emailed, messaging me back! She liked my pitch! She wanted to read the first chunk of my manuscript! And I was at least 83% sure that my mother hadn't paid her to say so! I fully expected her to hate every word of it and express-mail me a bag of flaming horse turds as punishment for wasting her time - because I'm a self-defeating lunatic - but at least I could write a pitch that was decent enough to trick someone into reading more of my work.

I sent off the chapters and went back to waiting. Just as I was about to run out of fingernails to bite, forcing me to take off my socks and strain to see if I could reach my toenails, the big morning arrived. Pitchwars results were in. I arose from my bed, dashed off to my computer, scrolled through the big list of winners... and I wasn't on it. It wasn't much of a shock. My novel had only been read by a handful of people who weren't my immediate relatives, and the eyeballs that had scrutinized it thus far almost exclusively belonged to people who were 15-20 years older than me. I assumed the praise they'd given me was more of a "I'm going to put this right up here on the fridge, sweetie!" than an actual indication that I could write a decent book.

Above: me and my critique partners.

Just as I was about to get on Twitter and bombard the winners with congratulations, my super-sneaky secret email lit up again. It was the mentor who asked me for chapters. She thanked me for submitting my work, and gave me some incredibly helpful advice on why she'd had to pass on my manuscript. I was thrilled! Getting quality critique was my entire reason for entering Pitchwars, and I had received some without even being chosen as a winner. That was all it took - I was tinkering and editing my manuscript before I'd even read the bottom of the email.

I was so happy, I turned into an elderly Asian woman.

My mother, who became something of Pitchwars cheerleader during the contest, asked if she could read my rejection letter. So I brought it up and read it again. And this time, I read it all the way through, and I caught those sentences I'd missed before. She had ended the letter by congratulating me, and telling me that she was happy another mentor had chosen me as an alternate. Now I was confused. I went back to the winners list, and scanned it again for my obnoxiously French name. Nothing. But this time, I noticed that the contest had a little twist - six secret mentors had been scanning the entries and would announce their own picks the following day. That had to be what she was referring to. A second email from another one of my mentor picks confirmed it - I'd been scooped up by one of the secret mentors, and my name would be on the list the next day. My cheerleader and I were elated.

This is how I picture literary cheerleaders. Sorry, mom.

If you've read any of my numerous analysis posts, you'll know that my favourite thing to do is pick things apart until they're bleeding carcasses of organized lists and bare-bones information, and I did the same thing with my possible mentors. Of the six choices, only three represented my age range - young adult. One of the remaining mentors stated that she only handled manuscripts with main characters who were 18 and up - my book is about a very confused 15-year-old. Another mentor stated that she preferred to work with books with strong Christian themes - my book has murder, sentient computer programs and a transvestite, and the only instances of "Jesus" that come up are pure blasphemy. That one also seemed unlikely.

So then it came down to the last mentor. Renee Ahdieh.

I took one look at Renee's biography, noticed that her favourite form of exercise was "Ugh", and her favourite form of transportation was "Alpaca" (a species that, I might add, appears in my manuscript), and I knew she was the one who'd picked me. A quick creep through her Twitter feed revealed that she'd selected one manuscript about the "Ordinary Extraordinary"; since once of those words actually appears in the title of the book, I figured my hunch was correct. A few hours later, I woke up to a text from my boyfriend that confirmed it - I was on the list, and Renee Ahdieh was my mentor.

I was so happy, I tracked down a dandelion field in December and temporarily looked good in white pants.

After that, my life turned into a blur of final exams, edits, Christmas, a new term, and preventing my seven-month-old Newfoundland puppy from eating various household goods. Renee tweaked my query letter to make it snappier, and she transformed my lacklustre, one-sentence plot recitations into kickass, intriguing teasers that I could splatter across the Internet.

This dog is alive today because she's cute and because she will drop anything she's holding in exchange for cat food.

As an alternate, I took place in two agent showcases throughout the contest. The first, #PitMad, was entirely Twitter-based. I had 140 characters to sum up my novel, introduce the genre and include the #PitMad hashtag. Agents and editors perused the feed all day; if they saw something they liked, the favourited the tweet, signalling the writer to submit a query. My #PitMad was, on the whole, extremely successful. The second showcase - the Alternate Showcase - was hosted on a mentor's blog, and it featured a 35-ish word pitch and the first 250 words of my manuscript. Agents perused the showcase, and if they liked what they saw, they commented with instructions on how to submit the manuscript to them. That showcase was slightly less successful than I'd hoped - but still a rewarding day of Tweeting and poring through other writers' pitches while cursing the Old Gods that none of their incredible stories were in print yet.

Submissions and querying are things writers just don't talk about. No specifics for you.

And now, after all that - after all the nerves, the waiting, the hoping and the incessant Tweeting - Pitchwars 2013/2014 has come to an end. In a way, it feels like summer camp is over; I've gotten so used to creeping through the Twitter feed, seeing familiar faces, cheering on my favourite writers and swapping stories of edits with my fellow alternates and mentees that I'm not entirely sure what to do with my Twitter account anymore. My editing and submission process are far from over; I've still got feedback yet to come, and besides, nothing I've written is ever "finished" until I've run out of deadlines and someone is physically tearing the manuscript from my cramped, scribbling hands. Pitchwars was just the beginning. Maybe the feedback and exposure I got from it will help me land an agent for this novel. Maybe it won't. Maybe this experience will give me the boost I need to make my next novel even better. I have no idea where my writing career will end up. All I know is that I couldn't have asked for more from my first contest, and that if and when I finally snag the elusive Literary Agent, it will be due, in part, to having taken that deep breath and sent off those four little emails almost two months ago.

And I will be so happy that I will put on a sheer curtain, wrangle up a unicorn and ride it into the sun.

Any fellow Pitchwars alumni out there with stories to tell? Anyone polishing up a manuscript for next year? Tell me about it!

On November 27, 2013, Disney released their 53rd animated feature film: Frozen. Based incredibly loosely on Hans Christian Anderson's pants-shitting nightmare storyThe Snow Queen - minus all the kidnapping, pedophilia and Satan, of course - Frozen has been hailed as the greatest animated movie to come out of Disney studios since the Spice Girls broke up. Audiences seem to agree - the film has raked in $813 million dollars worldwide, making it the second-highest-grossing Disney film ever released.

Yeah, yeah, we get it Simba, you're #1.

If you haven't seen Frozen yet, you need to. Immediately. For two good reasons:

Until you've seen Frozen, you are an empty, joyless shell of the person you will be after viewing this film. Seriously. You are a skin-wrapped void where fond memories of an animated talking snowman, a self-aware reindeer and Disney's greatest song ever should be.
If you haven't watched Frozen, this blog post is going to be a gigantic festival of spoilers.

You know you wanted to see this again.

Even if you haven't seen the full movie, it only takes one glance at a poster to recognize that Frozen is animated in the exact same style as Disney's first successful foray into 3D animation - Tangled. Both films feature protagonist with wide doe eyes, impossibly long eyelashes, tiny chins and whole lot of sideburns. It's not exactly hard to understand why; right from the beginning, it's obvious that the two movies were created with the same artists, programmers and sentient pieces of software that Disney rely on. Know what else Frozen and Tangled have in common?

Their entire freaking plot.

Subtle, Disney. Subtle.

On the surface, the two films couldn't be more different: Tangled is a heartwarming re-telling of Rapunzel (without the blindness or unplanned childbirth), and Frozen is a heartwarming re-telling of The Ice Queen (without enslaved children with chunks of mirror lodged in their eyes). Rapunzel is smothered by her overbearing mother and wants a glimpse of a royal castle. Princesses Anna and Elsa grew up in isolation without parents, and Anna dreams of stepping foot outside the royal castle. Totally different. But when you put on your nitpicking hat and really dissect the stories, you'll find that Rapunzel's story is just a combination of Anna and Elsa's stories.

Don't believe it? Let's see if this sounds familiar:

The story starts with a young princess, who spends her entire childhood shut up in a castle/tower/stone structure of some sort. She was involved in a mysterious incident as a young child, and her parents desperately try to conceal her supernatural powers from the outside world. From a young age, she knows that there will be terrible - albeit non-specific - consequences if her magical abilities are ever revealed.

"Uncontrollable Ice Queen powers" might be slightly more difficult to hide than glowing hair.

And so the young princess grows up naive and restless, yearning for a chance to step outside her stone walls and take part in the world outside. She tries to while away the long hours with art (either painting it or conversing with it), but it's a poor substitute for human contact.

One of these girls is marginally crazier than the other one.

Everything changes, of course, when the princess reaches a milestone birthday and technically becomes an adult. For the first time, her world opens up, and she's allowed access to everything she's been missing out on is there for her to explore. Of course, her newfound freedom is only temporary - she only has one day (Princess Anna) or three days (Rapunzel) to fulfill all her hopes and dreams before returning to isolation. No sooner is she left alone, however, than she has an unorthodox chance meeting with a man with well-groomed facial hair.

If Flynn Rider and Prince Hans combined their facial hair, they'd almost have a full beard.

The princess sets off on a grand adventure to, er, find herself, or resolve her lifelong angst, or whatever it is she's doing. Shortly after setting out, she and her incredibly reluctant travel companion wind up at a dimly-lit establishment in the middle of nowhere, where the princess gets some unlikely help from a large, burly, potato-shaped man.

A large, burly, potato-shaped man who is definitely in touch with his feminine side.

The princess reaches the apex of her journey, and learns to lighten up and embrace the quirky teenager/palace-dwelling ice monarch that she truly is inside. In a weirdly specific shared plot point, she undergoes a personal transformation and becomes exponentially hotter with an elaborate braided hairdo.

Either the animating software came with a "screw it, let's slap a braid on her" button, or someone at Disney has a braid fetish.

With her inner Zooey Deschanel character unveiled, the braided princess takes a long, hard look at her travel companion and realizes that he makes her feel all tingly inside. He's a scruffy, orphaned commoner from the wrong side of the tracks, and he's locked in an unnatural, empathetic bromance with a sassy ungulate, so by modern Disney standards, he's obviously her soulmate.

Next time, Disney, I demand a movie about a scruffy Canadian lumberjack and his beloved moose.

Just as it looks like the princess is about to board the 'happy ending' train and ride off into the sunset, with true love and large hoofed animal in tow, she's tricked into leaving his side and returning home. Things take yet another weirdly specific turn when the princess bravely sacrifices herself to prevent a traitor from her past from stabbing her loved one to death.

Wow, that Flynn picture does not look so good out of context.

Disney isn't quite ready to actually have a princess suffer for her actions and spend the rest of her life as a dark-haired commoner with a dead boyfriend, or as a girl-shaped chunk of ice; naturally, everything works out for the better, and the princess re-claims her place as the most beloved member of the royal family. Most importantly, at long last, she's is finally in a place where she's happy and truly being herself. And how do we know that? Why, it's because her hair has finally returned to its natural colour, of course! And she even gets to kiss the guy!

Disney: masters of recycling.

Now, don't get me wrong. Disney can spruce up this same formula with cute characters and catchy songs from now until the heat death of the universe, and I will watch every family-friendly moment of it, assuming that I possess biological immortality I was otherwise unaware of.

Like a lobster. Technically, these little fuckers can live forever.

What do you think? Are Tangled and Frozen two fancy re-tellings of the same story? Or am I on a special kind of crazy pills this week? Please, do let me know.

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