The Act

If you're anything like me, time-wasters, you've developed a very sophisticated and complex act to disguise the fact that, really, you're basically a basement shut-in hiding under a tarpaulin of fabricated social skills. You've learned these skills by watching people at restaurants and by listening closely to old men. You've been forced to the conclusion that you'll likely stay an outsider because you still don't understand the appeal of cell phone text-messaging.

So what do you do when your tarpaulin falls off or catches fire? Without the warm confines of your deceptive little facade, you're exposed to the world, and if you can't find some way of stitching the thing back together, you're going to have to take to lurking in the basment again.

You don't want that.

So here are some tips for those of us out there who lack instinctual social grace, and find ourselves suddenly robbed of our coping strategy:

• Obtain a cold or a flu of some description. This enables you to keep your mouth shut most of the time, and as a bonus, you get to spread germs. Serves all those smarmy "confident" people right, too. Eating candy you find on the floor of movie theaters or prancing in the rain are good ways to get started.
  
• Tell stories about your cats. If you don't have cats, make some up. It's not that hard, as most cats generally follow your standard "cat" mold pretty closely. "Yeah! Toasty got up on the counter today! Really! And then he just sat there and engaged in foot maintainance! Seriously! Holy crap!" Pretend to brush cat hair off your shirt and chuckle slyly at your crafty little bit of bamboozlement.
• Hide under the table and try to disappear.
• Bring your laptop with you wherever you go. Duck behind the screen and adopt an expression of strained concentration. "Constipated news anchor" is the look you're going for. If you're lucky, people will think that you're either a powerful businessman in the midst of making a lot of money and being powerful, or a deep and insightful writer who has been struck repeatedly about the face and head by inspiration. If you're unlucky, they'll think you need hospitalization. Half a game of "Battleship" can make a convincing laptop if painted properly.
• Hide under the table and make rocket noises with your mouth. This won't really help you much in social settings, but it's an awful lot of fun.
• Make up an impressive job title, and say it a lot. For example, I sort books for the library system. This is unimpressive. Add polish and lies, and you get: Multimedia Materials Relocation and Organization Specialist. Impressive. If you've got the time, you might consider making yourself a shiny nametag out of pop cans and bike parts.

I hope this has helped some of you out, time-wasters! These methods are FooDaddy Tested and Approved, I can guarantee you. In fact, I'm using the laptop method right now. I'm waiting for the fellas at the car dealership to change my oil, and in order to maintain an air of competence, I'm writing this post! So it's really a win-win coping strategy, folks. It's providing you out there in Not-FooDaddyLand with some entertainment, while over here in FooDaddyLand, I get to pretend to be useful.

I realize I may be sharing too much with you, and I'd apologize, except that I lack that kind of social grace.

Heh. This is good floor candy.