I cannot accept the fact that my boyfriend looks at porn and it’s a specific kind (hentai and very tall women). For some reason, for it to be a certain type for some reason hurts me more. I grew up looking at porn and still do off and on, so I guess I am hypocritical about this whole situation. My therapist thinks I am madder at myself than him. He feels ashamed about it and said he will discontinue, but unfortunately, if he stops or not, I will still feel the same way which is not good enough for him. Am I a terrible person for having such double standards? I want to achieve self-worthiness, take things less seriously, and confront jealousy in a productive, less destructive manner, but my compulsive thoughts get the best of me. Your advice would be of great value to me.

I’m not sure which is likely to cause you more trouble: the impact of your boyfriend’s porn-watching on your feelings and the chemistry that holds your relationship together, or what his attachment to porn says about his character and ability to be a good partner.

In other words, he could be an asshole, or he could just like to look at animated ass. Figuring this out maybe be a very tall order (pun definitely intended).

You can’t help the way you feel about his hentai/height fascination and, if it’s a total turnoff, the party’s over. Often, however, turnoffs in a long-term relationship are relative and manageable, as well as unavoidable; you look away, focus on his more attractive qualities, and make it work.

There are few partnerships that don’t require a certain amount of accepting unlikeable qualities and habits. That’s why mutual acceptance is such an important requirement in any long-term relationship (and why the divorce rate is so high).

Don’t feel guilty, because this is what the getting-to-know-you phase of a relationship is all about: discovering whether there’s something about a person’s living habits that you really can’t stand. Respect your instincts, because no matter how much you love someone and would like to accept him, there’s only so much tolerance you can force on yourself before it becomes intolerable. At some point, you have to accept the verdict of your inner snob, even if your beloved is guilty of no crime worse than making you want to leave the room (because he’s aroused by dirty Japanese cartoons, but still).

As for the amount of time he spends a’porning, it may be a good indicator of how he manages all his impulses, including drinking, drugging, spending, etc., and tell you how much you can trust him when the chips are down. Don’t let guilt or wishful thinking prevent you from determining objectively whether you can accept him and whether he can manage himself.

If you want to know if porn rules his soul, pay more attention to his bank account, work habits, and contribution to household chores than to his hard-drive. If he can’t keep himself away from the computer but can keep his life together, that’s a good sign, and should make his bad habits easier to ignore.

If he can’t keep anything together, then you probably can’t be together, either, nor should you ignore this advice.

STATEMENT:
“I hate being disgusted by my boyfriend’s porn-watching but I have a right to my feelings and to worry that addiction is often a flag for weakness and unreliability. I don’t need a shrink or a detective to get my answers. I have the strength to accept them if they’re not what I want.”

I wish I could figure out what to do with my boss. He’s not a bad guy, but he drives me crazy by playing favorites and just not understanding my suggestions. I sense he tries, and he’s not malicious, but he doesn’t get what I have to say, so he always turns to someone else. When I talked with him about the problem, I think he sincerely wished we could communicate better, but then nothing changed. I’d speak up, his eyes would glaze over, and the discussion would move past me. I know my ideas aren’t bad, because I’ve been doing my job a long time and my previous bosses respected my work, but it’s tough being politely disregarded. My goal is to get through to him so we can all work together as a team.

Two good things in your approach towards your stupid-but-not-an-asshole boss: you’re not taking his rejection of your ideas personally, and you’re not acting badly. That’s an accomplishment when, every day that you show up for work, you have to watch from the sidelines, particularly when you’re used to being a position player.

Badgering your boss is probably not a good idea; he’s not an asshole yet, but you never know what will happen if you push him harder to be someone he’s already shown you he can’t be. That’s usually the best way to bring out the worst in someone and maybe lose your job altogether.

Anchor yourself by weighing the advantages of the job versus the pain of doing it. I assume you’ve got the usual good reasons for sticking around, at least for now, i.e., the money, the money, the money, and a lack of alternatives.

Don’t think of it as a trap just because you’re suffocating and there’s no way out. Life is hard, survival is tough, and it almost always involves swimming upstream in shit. Bad luck has brought you a strong current, but you can be proud that you haven’t drowned.

Don’t burden yourself with the expectation that you should like your boss because he’s a nice guy, or that you should be able to work things out because he’s not an asshole. If life were fair, those things would be true. Since it isn’t, don’t hold yourself responsible.

In the future, when you’re sizing up a possible boss (or prospective friend or partner), add one more thing to your list of essential, no-deal-if-you-don’t-have-‘em qualities, and that’s an ability to appreciate your point of view and speak your language. Obviously, you’re willing to bridge the gap and learn his language, but you now know there are some gaps that are too big and languages that you can’t learn unless you grew up with them. And since you’re got big reasons to stay at this job, despite the bad chemistry with your boss, take pride in how well you sit the bench.

STATEMENT:
“I feel as if what I say and do at work has no value because my boss disregards me, but I’ve proven my ability long ago, including reasonable communication skills, and am sure that I would have more to offer if he weren’t tone-deaf. I’m sure I’ll be stronger for having survived this experience. “

Is infidelity a sign of some problem in a relationship or just a natural and inevitable part of relationships? I feel it as a betrayal and my partner feels it has nothing to do with us and has no effect on our relationship. Is it possible to have a relationship between two people who feel differently about this issue?

There’s not much point in having a partner if you can’t count on him (and we’ll assume it’s a him); what doesn’t work for cops doesn’t work for civilians, either. First, however, you gotta figure out what you want to count on him for.

There are partners—admittedly, they’re rare—who have compulsively wandering weenuses but are reliable when it comes to covering the kids, the bank account, and your back. They won’t keep secrets from you, other than the tales of their penis’s travels.

It may be humiliating to be married to a guy like that, but the lifestyle and dinner table conversation may be worth it, particularly if he’s rich and famous. It’s fun to be king, and fun to hang out with him (at least until the press catches on to his shenanigans).

At least you know, from what they do, that it’s not personal. Your partner, for instance, is telling you that he is who he is, not that you’re not lovable. For you, relationships include monogamy, and for him, they don’t, no matter whom he’s partnering with.

So, as usual, the person you really need to consult is yourself. You want to know whether your heart can stand the strain, not to mention the ability of the rest of your body to fend off STDs.

The trouble is, the more vulnerable your heart, the more likely you are to fall for the guy because you love him, regardless of the fact that you probably knew, right from the start, that he is a wanderer. Your heart is also more likely to talk you into the false hope that that he’ll change, or you’ll change, and it will be OK. If that happens, the betrayer isn’t him or his parts, but your own little heart persuading yourself that you can get him to change.

The other risk of partnering with a wandering guy is that they often forget the facts of life—their penises have about the same brain-power as your heart—with the result that there’s another unexpected kid out there with a legitimate (or illegitimate) claim to your family resources. That’s a surprise that can send the wanderer on the lam for good.

If you’re honest in presenting yourself with the risks and benefits of your decision, you’ll never be a victim. Know your heart, however, and remember that he’s not going to change, and neither are the facts of life. Trust your ability to decide.

STATEMENT:
“I’m angry and hurt by my partner’s infidelity, but it’s a waste of time to argue, with him or myself, about whether he should change or be ashamed, because the real question is whether I can stand him the way he is, accepting that he’s not going to change and that there’s a price to be paid for loving him.”

I was pleased at first when the middle school principal took an interest in my 12-year-old daughter—he ran into her every day at the crosswalk in front of the school, and he liked her for all the right reasons—but now it’s 7 years later, she’s in college, he’s 45 and divorced with 2 kids, and their relationship has become serious. As a father, I can’t tell her to drop him because he has a reputation for being a good guy and makes no secret of the fact that he loves her. In any case, she won’t listen and will just pull back from me, which will reduce my influence even more. My goal is to get her to drop him before she gets trapped in something that really won’t be good for her.

As always, if you want to have an impact on your kid, don’t blurt out your fears. You’ll go from being a knowing authority to the scared party that needs convincing, instead of the other way around.

If you imply she’s too easily influenced by a guy old enough to be her father (it will be hard for you to avoid that phrase, but avoid that phrase), she’ll show you you’re wrong, by defying her actual father. If you talk about his baggage—age, ex-wife, child support—she’ll see a man in need of love and a family that she can heal.

Instead, put your protective emotions aside, treat her like an adult, and ask her how she sees the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of partnership. Respect the obvious advantages, i.e., he’s a guy who seems solid (although you want to know more about what happened to his marriage), probably makes her feel safe and secure, and has a lot to teach her (no snideness intended).

Then make sure she considers the obvious drawbacks, as if you were discussing a business deal. If the attraction is fueled by the normal admiration a young person, uncertain about her gifts and independence, feels for an accomplished person who knows the ropes, or by the pleasure it gives the old guy so admired, there’s a risk. After all, things will change as she grows older, acquires more confidence (partly thanks to him), feels more like a peer, and wonders whether they really have that much in common any more. Both of them have a lot to lose.

Unless she makes a good living and saves up some money, there’s also a risk she’ll help take care of his kids without there being enough left over for the two of them or for starting a family, so advise her to watch how he manages his competing obligations. He should do right by his kids without being overly responsive to his first family with time, money, or emotional reactivity.

If he has credit card debt, or doesn’t manage his money carefully, her admiration will disappear the moment they have to pay for something big together, whether it’s upsized digs or a hospital bill. She’s thinking love, but you need to channel Jane Austen and think money.

Don’t expect to change her mind. All you can do is alert her to possible roadblocks and disappointments while making it clear that your main interest is her best interest and that you accept her, regardless. Then you’ll make it clear that if she’s interested in a man who really is like her father, he’d want her to do what’s right for her and not bind her to premature or crippling commitments.

STATEMENT:
“I’m sad and worried about my daughter’s relationship with an older guy, but I’ll make clear that the risks I see are not due to her being foolish or her boyfriend’s not being a nice guy, but to the fact that life is hard and that their age difference puts horrible stresses on relationships as time goes by.”

My daughter is turning into a petty criminal. She’s getting kicked out of school again, she won’t stop messing around with drinking and drugs, she has unprotected sex, and her boyfriend is probably the guy who broke into our house and stole our TV, though she refuses to believe it. My husband and I have tried so many times to get her to see what she’s doing wrong and steer her in a better direction—we’re our own private “scared straight” program at this point—but every time we confront her about where she’s headed, she says she feels terrible, that she’s sorry, that she never wants it to happen again…and then she gets wasted and everything repeats itself. If only we could get her to understand the harm she’s doing, maybe we could get through to her and turn her around. Meanwhile, it’s killing us. We try to forgive her, but it’s hard. My goal is to forgive her and get her to see what she’s doing to herself and everyone who loves her.

There’s no point in getting your daughter to see what she’s doing wrong if she can’t really stop herself from doing it, and she really, really can’t. You can’t scare straightness into a boomerang.

Regret and remorse will make her feel bad, and you might think that will stop her from fucking up next time. Well, au contraire, my dear unHarvard-educated sap. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it works. You should know that since you’re the one missing a TV.

According to Christmas movies and sentimental parts of the Bible, repentance leads to redemption, but I say, goddammit, that’s just wishful bullshit.

Repentance leads your daughter to hating herself more for the shit she does when she loses control, and self-hate makes it that much easier to lose control again. Your goal isn’t to get her to repent. It’s to get her to accept that she’s fucked and should nevertheless try for better self-control.

Fuck forgiveness, too, while you’re at it. You wouldn’t forgive a snake for doing its thing with your foot and its fangs, because it does what it does, and your daughter’s lack of self-control is probably the same kind of thing. If you weren’t around, she’d still be having the same problems. She’s just steal someone else’s TV.

No one knows why some kids have so little self-control over anger and neediness, or sometimes we know but knowing does no good. Acceptance means you aren’t entitled to judge or forgive; just to make the best of things.

Making the best of things means trying all the standard tricks for keeping a kid of any age away from over-stimulation and temptation. Keep her busy, move her away from the bad kids if you can, and find good activities you can schedule regularly. Above all, stay calm and positive, and don’t show how scared and upset you are about her fuck-ups.

Don’t expect treatment to change her. Sometimes a 24 hour control-your-every-activity residential school will break bad habits and build new ones, but it’s expensive and often doesn’t work.

As for the oft-derided “Good Will Hunting” one-on-one psychotherapy, it’s less expensive and similarly unlikely to lead to a basic transformation. More realistically, therapy can do the same thing as you’re doing: positive coaching towards better behavior. As for achieving that better behavior by getting her to take responsibility, own her actions, and feel bad…you’d have better luck with a snake charmer.

STATEMENT:
Compose a statement of purpose that will keep you positive. “I think you want to be a good kid and that you regret at least some of the things that happen when you mess up. But it’s hard for you not to mess up because your brain pushes you so hard to act before you think, that’s just the way you are. So we’ll keep on trying to keep you away from risky situations and slow you down, so you have more time to think about what you really want to do. There are some troubles we can’t protect you from. You may get HIV or go to jail. But nothing will change our determination to help you get the control that you need, sooner or later.”

My sister and I have had issues over the years, but we’ve always managed to stay cordial despite our differences, at least until she got married. Just after she got married five or so years ago, she did something to my parents that really pissed me off—she was basically stealing from them, as far as I can tell—and while, in the past, she and I would have eventually gotten over it, her husband got into the crossfire (I chewed both of them out, not just her), and now he won’t let me anywhere near my sister to even try to move past this. I still think what she did was awful, and I still think her husband is an asshole, but she’s my sister, and she’s family, and I need her in my life. My goal is to figure out how and whether I should make amends to my brother-in-law, even though I’m not really sorry, so I can put my family back together.

You’re right to start thinking about what’s best for your family relationships and forget about who’s a conniving criminal, because you’re never going to stamp out family crime or protect its willing victims. You’re not God, or even Judge Judy.

On the other hand, you may benefit in the long run by avoiding unnecessary conflict, retaining your family membership card, and participating in events that allow you to make the best of the family you have, crooks, liars et al.

If forgiveness is important to you, you’re fucked, because whatever you forgive your sister for, she’s likely to do again, which will destroy your faith and make you nasty. Fuck forgiveness. Again.

If she’s a criminal, she is, so your goal is to accept her the way she is and decide what you want to do with her and the family relationships that you will always unavoidably share.

Figure out if the fight with her is worth it, and if it’s not, and you decide that peace will give you a better chance of enjoying family events, then mend fences, declare the war over, and let all hostilities from this point on be for her and her husband to sustain, or not.

You can’t stop her and her husband from continuing to hate you or freeze you out, but by refusing to hate them back, you just may lull them into giving it up, shutting up, and making nice.

STATEMENT:
Prepare a statement that stays positive, doesn’t lie, and lays out the advantages of peace. It may sound like an apology, but it’s not. An apology would be dishonest. “I know we’ve had our differences, but there were tensions in the past that no longer seem important, at least not to me. I believe you and your husband are an important part of my family and I think we’ll all be happier if we can share some friendly time together. I think it’s better to put the past behind us and remember that we share lots of good childhood memories, a love for our parents, and responsibility for their welfare as they grow older. I think we’ll all gain from resuming a positive relationship.”

I just started at college, and I like my roommate, but she’s bulimic and hard to be around. Not just because she’s sick (and everybody on the floor knows about her problem, it’s hard not to), but because when she binges, it’s on my food because that’s what’s closest, and she always feels really bad about it and cries that she wishes she could stop, but then she doesn’t offer to pay for it and it’s costing me a lot of money. Part of me just feels bad for her, because she’s clearly really messed up, but another part of me is pissed because I’ve lost a lot of money this year on food that she’s eaten and thrown up, and that just makes me feel guilty like I’m a bad person for putting my lost money above her health. I want to move after the break, but I don’t want her to feel abandoned. My goal is to help her and myself.

Welcome to that other part of college, Hard Knocks University, where the class Helplessness 101—what to do when you can’t help both someone and yourself, and sometimes you can’t help at all—is a frosh requirement.

The tough part is not the decision, but accepting the shitty nature of your options. Bulimia, like any chronic condition (depression, addiction, etc.) is not completely curable, not by you or certainly the patient herself.

If you buy into the psychobabble about body image and low self-esteem, you might think you could help her by praising her strengths, noticing her attractive qualities, or getting her to think about the superficiality and limitations of attractiveness. Ha!

Whether it’s coming from you or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir of Therapists, your therapeutic support is not going to change those mysterious urges to binge and puke. Buying into that notion will waste you even more time and money than all the cash you’ve already flushed away at the supermarket.

Bulimia, like all addictions, can turn people into assholes. Don’t get me wrong, they don’t choose to be assholes, but when you’re more interested in binging and purging than in anything else, including other people’s feelings and squaring your debts, you’re an asshole. Or really, you’re a normal, possibly good person suffering from a bad case of asshole-itis.

It’s a humiliating thing to say about ourselves, but what helps most in controlling dangerous behavior, when all else fails, is to be treated like a soldier or dog-in-training in a program where our every movement is controlled. That’s the kind of treatment that saves lives when bulimia gets dangerous.

Obviously, it doesn’t cure it, but it stops us from going over the cliff until we can get enough control back to keep it down to a barf or two a day.

So the most you can do is let her and others know if you think her life’s in danger. Otherwise, you’ve got little influence over her for good or ill, and you’re living with an asshole you can’t cure who’s costing you a bundle.

You may wish you could help her, ease her pain, and not make yourself feel guilty by locking the refrigerator if you don’t get a check. Well, I hate to say this, but fuck you. That’s a goal of feeling good, which is much like her goal.

If, however, your goal is to make the best of this situation, it’s not to feel good but to do what’s right by helping her if you can and otherwise preserving your resources for worthwhile causes.

That means bearing the pain of watching her in pain, feeling helpless, and ignoring the guilt of receiving a look that accuses you of adding to her misery. It also means letting her know you’re there if she wants to get real help, establishing your refrigerator perimeter, and getting to eat your own damned ice cream.

STATEMENT:
Prepare a mission statement that protects yourself from false guilt. “I can’t help my roommate feel better or control her eating behavior, but I can watch out for her if her life is in danger and I can encourage her to be a stronger obsession manager by requiring her to pay for what she eats. In doing so, I may temporarily make us both feel unhappy; but that’s an unavoidable part of her recovery and my self-protection. It’s the work we both must do to pass this course in making the best of a bad situation.”

Since there’s no easy way to say it, I’ll just put it out there that I have a problem with my anal sphincter (a botched surgery when I was a kid that left me with very little control). Like everyone since then, my co-workers notice that I sometimes smell bad and like to joke about it, usually but not always behind my back. I do my best to control it, and I’ve seen specialists about it, but what it comes down to is that everyone is happier when I keep my distance and I just wish I could find a job I could do from home. I even avoid attending family events and leave early when I go because I don’t want to embarrass my parents (and I obviously avoid women and people in general). I just transfered to another branch, and now I’m terrified about the reaction of my new co-workers. I know this sounds like a joke, but it isn’t. My goal is to find a treatment that can control this problem or a lifestyle that is less full of humiliation.

By now you should know that you can’t have what you want, either a sweet-smelling body or a solitary, well-stocked bat cave to retreat to. Forgive the pun, but tough shit.

You’re fucked, and if you keep trying to eliminate the problem you’ll never live your life and your parents will die and you’ll regret the things you didn’t do with them or the other things you want to do with yourself like make more money.

Now that that’s cleared up, ask yourself what your goal is when the goals you’ve been chasing are unattainable and there’s no way to avoid a shit-load of pain (last sly double-entendre, I swear).

The obvious answer is to try to reduce your sensitivity to humiliation so that you can live life as fully as possible. It would be nice if you were a natural-born comedian who could deflect nasty jokes, or an insensitive clod who never understood them in the first place; but you’re not. Now that you’re an adult, however, and no longer a school-kid, there are lots of other things you can do.

First, confront the Madison Avenue notion that your self-esteem depends on attractiveness. Your goal isn’t to be attractive, but to make people feel as comfortable as possible with your ugly side while you pursue your other goals.

So pretend you’ve got a colostomy and that’s the way it is and learn how to be shameless. Wear a diaper if it will help, just learn how to not take shit personally and put together a list of what you want to do with yourself and do it. That’s your goal.

Make people more comfortable by telling them, frankly, that you have a GI problem that sometimes causes bad smells and you can’t stop it but that you’re pretty good at managing it. That’s why you, for instance, use incense and deodorizers, and sometimes have to leave meetings unexpectedly. If your smell is a problem and you don’t notice it, you don’t mind having it pointed out to you.

Keep a candle burning on your desk. Be the first to let them know when you’re having a bad day. Read a book of bathroom jokes beginning with “What died in here?”

Your goal isn’t to control your colleagues; that’s impossible with heaps of cash or hypnosis, so accept that they’ll be nice or nasty, as they are. Instead, create a wall between you and your problem and invite them to see your problem as something apart from you. Lots won’t, but a few will.

After all, you’re not a bad smell, just a guy who’s trying to do a good job despite a tough, humiliating handicap. That’s something to be proud of, a much bigger accomplishment than being sweet-smelling and attractive. Fuck advertising.

Give your parents similar directions, letting them know that you’re happy to attend family events, but you’ll let them know if you’re having a bad day and you won’t take it personally if they’re planning a big event in a poorly ventilated space and don’t want you to come.

You can’t control your problem or how people react to it, but you can’t let those factors take over your life completely. After all, even for those of us with cooperative anuses, life often stinks. You just arm yourself with Fabreze and carry onward.

STATEMENT:
Prepare a manifesto that keeps you focused on your own priorities rather than the reactions of idiots. “My job is to lead my life and try to make a living and find friends, and I’m not responsible for my bad smell. I manage it well by protecting others and making it easy for them to protect themselves. My bad smell may humiliate me; but it can never outweigh my pride in not letting it stop me.”

OK, I’m having an issue with a guy at work, and it’s pretty gross, but it’s also driving me crazy and nobody will take me seriously. I can’t say exactly where I work, but it’s the kind of bureaucratic place where nobody ever gets fired. Like you’d have to murder someone in the office, and even then, vacation without pay. This guy recently got kicked down to my office, which is pretty small and windowless (it’s a filing sort of thing), and I’m not sure what landed him here—he’s nice enough, although he’s a little creepy around girls—but all I do know is that he farts. All the time. And I know, it’s funny, ha ha, but it’s not funny when you have to spend all day with him and he occasionally bends over to file something and lets one rip in your fucking face. Normally, I’d just bust his balls about it, but he has zero sense of humor, and I think he’d just stare at his feet and say nothing and avoid me in the future. Which would be great, except our desks are right next to one another. My boss thinks it’s a joke and told me to deal with it. But it’s not a joke, it’s fucking gross, and working with him makes my sick, literally. So my goal is to get someone to take me seriously and help me deal with this guy.

Congratulations! You’ve come to the right doctor because, while I rarely care about your feelings, I always take farts seriously. After all, is it possible to feel happy without happy bowels? Of course not.

I’ve often theorized, (if not in scientific meetings, at least at family get-togethers), that farts were the first form of pheromonic communication, before people learned to lie by making sounds with their vocal cords. After all, while assholes often lie, farts do not.

Then the brain routes their message directly to the amygdala, (I’m sure that’s what brain imagists will discover, when they do the necessary experiments), which is, on the higher level, very similar to what happens when you touch a hot skillet and jump back before you realize what’s happened.

Here, of course, the danger isn’t that you’ll leap from your desk, but that you’ll haul off and slug him or, just as likely, point directly at him and break out laughing. So we have here an ultimate challenge that requires you to rein in the deepest reflexive responses of your brain and body, while your rational mind tries to solve this problem constructively. This should be an Olympic event.

With your feelings tightly “sphinctered,” your goal is to find a non-threatening way to invite him to discuss better management of his gaseous emissions. Tell him you’ve noticed that he has problems with gas and wonder whether it’s causing him distress. If he responds, you can offer suggestions (“activated charcoal worked for my dog”) while suggesting that he step out of the room before relieving himself; otherwise the smell might get (other) people angry.

Offer him this free bit of wisdom: “Bad smells cause bad feelings.” Pinch yourself hard, so that you retain your seriously earnest demeanor and assure him that he never need fear your laughter. And at least get to the bathroom before you release some feelings of your own.

STATEMENT:
Perhaps a statement might help you retain your sense of purpose and a straight face. “Intestinal gas is a basic form of human communication that probably predates words and, like everyone, I’ve got automatic ways of responding. But if I want to influence this guy’s gas management, I have to distance myself from any possible threat of humiliating him and be prepared to offer practical suggestions, no matter how much I sound like the weird commercials on TV.”

I graduated from college last year and just moved into a house with 5 friends from school. At first, everything was cool—kitchen was clean enough, trash made it’s way out the door, people left each other’s ramen alone, whatever—but now things are kind of falling apart, and, I swear, it’s because one roommate, and nobody will admit it’s them, refuses to flush the toilet. Just won’t do it. And hey, if it’s yellow, let it mellow, I’ve heard that before, but yellow this isn’t, and it’s not just disgusting, it’s rude. I left a note about the toilet that basically said “please flush,” but that didn’t help (actually just seemed to piss everyone off), and now the dishes are getting done less and food is disappearing because everyone’s annoyed and just passively sniping at each other. I don’t want to move (or can’t, really, with the lease) and I don’t want to lose my friends, but I do want the shitter sitter (his nickname) to jiggle the fucking handle already. No, this isn’t a joke.

Believe me, nobody is laughing at your dilemma; overcoming fecalphobia is a crucial part of anyone’s medical school education, right up there with basic anatomy and prolonged insomnia. I like to think of myself as a pioneer in the field of psychoscatology, as the use of shit as a method of communication covers the entire field of human psychology. Trust me, it’s science.

You see, according to the psychoscatological theory, words are unnecessary. Shit is the ur-form for semiotics, the sign of all signs that communicates almost everything you want to say. Flowers ain’t got nothing on it, a diamond ring is meaningless. Say it with shit, for shit is forever.

Of course, you can’t change your roommate’s behavior, and you’ve already learned what happens when you try: more shit. He probably doesn’t even know why he does it or really realize what he’s doing, because planting your shit prominently is an old reflex for asserting control over your territory. At least this is true for pets, but if you’re feeding your roommate and cleaning his mess…well, let’s just hope he doesn’t shed.

If you fight the floater with all your might (and passive-aggressive note-writing skills), you’re the chief cop, and become the target of everyone’s resentment, so being the arbiter of house law and order is a shitty, if not dangerous, goal. After all, the biggest problem, and this applies to most roommate issues, is that whoever is most bothered by the shit gets most covered by it.

Now that you’re ready to accept that your roommate situation has turned to shit, it’s time to invite your roommates to a sit down (on the couch) and ask them whether they feel cooperation on chores has become a problem. If they aren’t bothered by the current state of chaos, then you’ve just gotta flush your anger down and let it go. You’re in the shit, and this is not a battle you can win alone.

If they are bothered, ask them what they think are the most important chores to share and then draw up a schedule. Whatever your real feelings, stifle, because if you show any zeal beyond being just the facilitator, you’re the narc/parent and they’ll all hate you. Then you’re in the shit once more.

Finally, assume that, despite your best efforts, your shitter sitter will not likely be a quitter. Do put pen to paper for more note writing. Put your money in the bank so you can afford to live alone.

STATEMENT:
Compose a statement to help you keep your real shit out of the negotiations. “I have a right to be disappointed in the carelessness of my roommates, particularly the shit-meister, but there’s little I can do about it except choose better next time and wonder if there’s a warning sign that I missed because I liked these guys too much and didn’t take a close look at their hygiene habits. I’ll try to make things a little better if I can. For now, it’s the old choice of eating less shit now or more shit later.”