I read productivity blogs much in the same way a gay man reads Hustler. Usually with lots of squinting and repetition of that’s not even fucking practical until someone’s all, “You’re not welcome at this Gymboree anymore.” But mostly, not at all.

I started adding them to my Google Reader about two months ago. I said to myself, “Aubrey, this whole cake for breakfast thing isn’t really working out. Okay maybe it is. But you need something to blame your problems on this week and you already used Time Warner Cable last week, so it’ll have to be this.” With each RSS feed I added, I got more and more excited about my new life as someone who gets up early, ditches television and does yoga on the beach where I would live because I learned how to organize my workspace. How to manage my online reputation and 31 ways to get more comments on my blog? How could this go wrong?

This is what my reader looks like now:

There's not enough 'Mark all as read' in the world to fix this

I soon realized that the only thing being produced from these blogs was a thick, white ribbon of self-persuasion that these tips on how do things like “get up in the morning” and “put yogurt in the freezer to make frozen yogurt” were worth more than an indignant duh. But I did learn a few things. Chiefly that people who write productivity blogs are huge fans of bolding things and

1. Numbering

2. Stuff

It’s all they do. Because productive people don’t have time for paragraphs. Oh, and to make things even more productive, they’ll post a photo that is tangentially related to the subject matter. For instance, if I were writing an article (they’re largely referred to as articles because this is real Tony Kushner-grade work), about How To Quickly Switch To A Very Serious Looking Entrepreneurial Document To Hide That Photo Gallery Of Celebrity Feet Because Some Asshole Is Over Your Shoulder Taking A Picture Of You For His Productivity Blog, I’d use this:

Perfect. Then I’d quote Ralph Waldo Emerson or something.

There are also lots of questions involved in writing productivity blogs. See, it makes the auteur seem totally relatable. I also suspect that it motivates the reader to think which is essentially the limbic system of productivity. Don’t you agree? Craig Harper, in an article about “The Inspiration Tap,” writes:

Then there are times when I have no (immediate) plan to write anything but something happens and I have to stop what I’m doing and literally run to my computer. Sometimes, I feel like I’m sprinting with a glass full of milk trying desperately not to lose any of my milk (inspiration) as I run. Have you ever had an amazing idea or revelation and then lost it two minutes later? How frustrating is that?

Thankfully, even those of you who are less productive than you could be (non-humans) can understand this extended metaphor because good ole’ Craig writes in such a way that the scene just unfolds itself. Here we see the milk, which is actually the inspiration in disguise, and the protagonist (Craig) who is desperately trying not to spill it because how frustrating is that? This is some real Mulholland Dr. shit. And he’s sprinting which means that his home is large enough to afford such a glut of kinetic energy because he’s so fucking productive and inspirational.

Other bloggers take a different approach in that they give away free things that no one really wants anyway in order to boost their subscriber numbers and in turn, be “personally excellent.”

#1. Yell at the beach

And I’ll admit – I want to be personally excellent too. So I’m aping this method and giving away this cat I drew so people will be tricked into thinking that what I have to say is valuable. Because trickery is excellent.

SUBSCRIBE AND GET THIS PURPLE CAT

Now I just sit and wait. Like any prudent productive person would do.

Oh, fuck:

Govs. Pawlenty And McDonnell Apply For Abstinence-Only Funding From Health Law They Opposed:

On Monday, both Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) said they would not be applying for funds from the Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP), which provides states with $55 million for comprehensive sex education programs. Instead, they applied for Title V funding, which has $50 million a year for states to implement abstinence-only education programs. The catch is that in order to get the federal dollars, states must provide a 75 percent match.

I hardly remember what sex education was like at my high school. However, there was a day care for all of the mothers who also happened to be sophomores, so my best guess is that it was a Hell-House-esque journey through photos of herpes sores and shades of avocado discharge.

Sadly, the curriculum even planned for the fact that in order to prove that sex always leads to infectious and in many cases incurable diseases, they’d have to show actual genitals. Their loophole depended upon showing outbreaks worse than the writing on Lopez Tonight, so that most of the sores actually eclipsed their penile residence in size. Or at least, what I think was a penis. So not only did I leave my nine weeks of, ‘This is what happens to you if you have sex, but don’t think that means we’re telling you that sex is real” with no mention of contraception, but I also began to question my own jittery grasp of how sex worked. Like, if this so-called ‘herpes’ was so bad, why did it look like a sea of pleasure nodes not unlike my own lousy uni-clitoral mud-flap? And why would I want to protect myself from it by promising Jesus that I would only take on multiple sexual partners after marriage?

It’s like taking a class on candy making that revolves solely around photos of cavities. And then telling everyone that if you make caramel, you will get burned. I mean, yeah, you probably will but that’s not the point. Because just like sex, candy is fucking awesome and if enjoyed responsibly, it can be more than an invitation to pass out in the bathroom of a 7-11.

But, really, $50 million is a great deal for a time machine. Just not one that is unable to actually go forward in time.

Sometimes I get questions about how I come up with material. Do I carry a notebook? Does it just come to me? Do you think you could stop emailing and asking me to send you the overalls I wore in the ‘Forever’ video? And, aside from John Stamos being a total dick, I’m flattered because it never even occurred to me that I have material, just a few zingers that could be printed on the inside of Laffy Taffy wrappers.

The short answer is that I kind of come up with it as I go. The slightly longer, might-be-considered-a-mental-disorder answer is that I use a hand puppet. Sometimes I get stuck and sit at the screen long enough for me to eat an entire sleeve of Oreos and since that only takes about two minutes, I usually spend an additional hour biting my nails. It’s a habit I’ve had nearly my whole life and one that I’m not particularly proud of. To remedy this, I started using a hand puppet that goes by the name of, “Klappar Vild” which apparently just means “glove puppet.” Way to try, IKEA. I’m pretty sure it’s some sort of crocodile or dinosaur but either way, it’s not at all effective at being bad-ass since it not only has felt teeth but rounded felt teeth. That’s why I’m comfortable sharing my feelings with it.

Or rather, ideas. I never intended for it to be this way, but I found that if “streams of aluminum robot tears” sounds stupid coming from a glove puppet, then it will likely be even worse once written down. By now, Klappar and I have forged quite a bond. Check out these bedroom eyes we’re exchanging:

Targeting Nich Lachey's solo music career is too obvious. Next.

Klappar even lets me know how dumb it looks to show just one of my eyes and since the “I’m growing it out” excuse never works, my inferior non-puppet hand fixes it for me.

I really should just get a notebook.

I bought a space ant farm. Don’t bother re-reading that sentence because it’ll probably sound just as stupid as it did the first time. See, spending money on things that no one needs ever is what unemployed people like myself refer to as, “responsibility.” Other things that qualify include watering plants that are only kind of dying, creating a to-do list entirely dedicated to renewing library books and making smoothies without ice cream.

The thing about responsibility is that I don’t have it. I mean, I do my own laundry and am able to feed myself, but when it comes to getting things done, I’m about as successful as Andy Dick is sober. And it’s incredibly hard for me to admit that. It’s hard to admit that feeding myself is for me, somewhat of a small victory. Because I could make an entire scrapbook out of all of the times I would sit in bed and think, “I need to eat something” but refuse on the basis that it just wasn’t worth the effort. And instead of colorful photos with labels like, “Graduation!” and “Pool Party!” there would be a photo of me looking like a ham in an old Oksana Baiul shirt accompanied by, “Made It to the Couch!” and “Got a Glass of Water!”

I can laugh about it all now and in truth, I laughed about it as it was happening. But it was really just a placeholder for the real laughter that I hoped to have after I was done living my life as a hamster devoid of an exercise wheel. But now I’m faced with a set of atrophied doin’ stuff muscles. Even now, I’m struggling to push through writing about my life as a feather desperately searching for something more than intermittent gusts of wind. The “ugh” part of my brain wants to simply end this with, “Yeah so it’s basically just hard to do shit sometimes because I was like, depressed and shit.”

But there’s more to it than that. Tasks come into my life innocuously and leave as unattainable desires. Want becomes a byproduct of my own avoidance. And I let it happen. I allow something as simple as sending an email go from, “This will only take a minute” to “Well I should probably check Twitter” to “Gotta pee” to “Holy shit Teen Mom is on” to “Okay well I will put ‘write email’ on my to-do list for tomorrow.’” Eventually, tomorrow turns into a week or more and with each passing day, it gets exponentially more embarrassing to complete the task. It’s like talking about this awesome movie you saw called Sixth Sense and it was so wild because holy shit Bruce Willis was dead the whole time sorry that’s kind of a spoiler but seriously you have to see this movie.

However, ants are industrious and, unlike myself, aren’t burdened with credit cards that are all like, “Those 6-inch pink glitter heels aren’t so cute now, are they?” Ants build and forage and create very distinct, pheromone-driven societies. The other cool thing about ants? All of the workers are female. Males in any given colony are used solely for reproduction and die soon after, while queens can live up to 30 years. I get horny just looking at this ant farm.

Here you will see no fucking ants

The only problem is that I can’t find any. I’ve been trying for the past two months and all I’ve got to show for it is a search history that could probably implicate me in a couple of cold cases. Things like, “How to buy an ant queen,” “How to start an ant colony” and “I want ants because they really inspire me and maybe I could even feed them sugar from my mouth like that time on King of the Hill when Bobby was controlled by an ant queen.”

Predictably, most ant-related results usually involve methods for getting rid of them instead of how to cradle them in your nutrient-rich space gel and mimic their habits. But I’m not giving up. In the process of learning how to go all Donald Trump on my life (but in a good way), I’m also getting comfortable with the reality that I’m going to have to turn over a lot of rocks to find what I’m looking for.

But, hopefully not as many as I’ve had to turn over in my quest for ants.

Sometimes I get kind of down. But in this context, sometimes is closer to Denny’s hours of operation rather than an afternoon of sulking over not knowing what to have for lunch.

Usually I deal with it by opening up a lot of very serious documents with the intention to bust a productivity nut all over their little square faces. Then, I shuffle through iTunes for six hours. And that’s how I keep this little tugboat of depression in motion.

There are times, however, when I stage an intervention. On myself. See, the thing about staging your own intervention is that it’s the worst idea ever. For me it involves a lot of bargain bin compliments like, “You’re really good at fishing things out of the garbage disposal” and telling myself that, while Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” is a good song, I should probably distance myself from it for a while. At least until I can get through it without feeling envious.

After I’m done listening to “Everybody Hurts” (loopholes, people), I buy myself something. I don’t necessarily subscribe to the Sex and the City endorsed philosophy that buying shoes will inevitably attract men who will buy you even more shoes, but I do subscribe to candy. Which is why I bought 84 ounces of peanut M&M’s. And a giant jar to put them in.

The other side of my face isn't visible because that's where I hide my cleft palate and club foot

At first I was like, “Target, you losers, I can’t believe you just let me walk out of here with the makings of the best plan ever crafted.”

Then I got home. I washed the jar. I laid out the contents of my rehabilitation in front of me. The high began to wear off and I found myself transitioning into a paranoia-induced panic attack. I worried that I might eat all of them, kind of like Saturn did with his children but way less mythological because this was real.

I poured them into the jar thinking that, since I sometimes find chip clips to be too burdensome, they’d be safe there. Of course, I double-fisted the jar a few times before fastening the lid, but after that something weird happened. I didn’t go back for more. It just sat there next to the television, completely unmolested.

The M&M’s outnumbered me in a big way and my refusal to rectify that was a refusal to create superficial problems for myself in order to avoid my actual problems. M&M nausea is easy. Self-acceptance is hard.

I still haven’t figured anything out, but at the very least, I have four pounds of sub-standard chocolate reminding me that I need to.

I lived in Alaska as a kid and while that alone borders on child abuse, I did get out eventually. Before leaving on what ended up being hours of precarious mountain driving in a Cadillac Caprice with a transmission on the verge of signing its Dear John letter, I rifled through my mom’s cassette collection. Since I was nine-years-old and really only familiar with The Lion King soundtrack, much of it was lost on me. With an uncommitted gaze, I dismissed Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and The Rolling Stones as if they were hanging on a sales rack at Old Navy.

But I was able to recognize one  – Michael Jackson’s Dangerous. Its contents tore through the foam of my headphones throughout the entire trip. The only exception being “In the Closet,” when I would lower the volume because even though I didn’t know what it meant to “give it,” I figured that whatever it was would result in a conversation that I was too young to understand but old enough to feel embarrassed about.

Luckily, I’ve since grasped the concept. Which is why I’m able to appreciate Majela’s position on bearded men tickling her vagina:

After spending my afternoon perfecting the casual way in which she strums her vagina, I noticed the impressive cassette collection in her living room, or rather, shrine to the day that someone graduated from something. I can only hope that Dangerous is buried there somewhere and that, if given the opportunity, I’d have enough sense to swipe the cassettes that inspired her to sing about her “wet, wet, wet juicy vagina.”

In my quest to not be an immobile vessel of butterfat and negative feelings,  I’ve been reading self-help books. Not the types that offer hollow solutions, but the kinds wise enough to recognize that people who seek out self-help books don’t really want help, just confirmation that they never needed help in the first place.

And if there’s something I can get behind, it’s undeserved validation. Which is why I’m halfway through Life Is a Verb – a book that encourages readers to live intentionally through reminders that death clutches to the collective undercarriage of our lives along with exercises that involve dancing kind of like Paula Abdul after too many Klonopin then writing about how it makes you feel. According to my answer to the prompt, my dance made me feel, “kicking legs maybe.”

Luckily, the book is a bit more articulate and while I don’t expect it to eliminate the days where I wish I could crawl inside my mattress, sometimes I’m reminded that there’s a whole world above it, waiting for me to tempt the frame beneath it.

And that’s how I, awkwardly, spent most of my Saturday night.

Today, I ‘liked’ Planned Parenthood on Facebook. As with most things, I didn’t really know what that meant. I figured that at best, it would stir up some suspicion that I just came home from an abortion, half drugged and thankful that I didn’t have to say goodbye to Peanut Butter Nipple Wednesdays.

Instead, I got this:

This is gonna be good

Alicia has either missed the point entirely or well…that’s about it. I thought about sharing my reaction so I could be part of a mob for once in my life, but I couldn’t put this into words:

Earlier today, I was on the hunt for a lunch box I had a few years ago. It carried my handcrafted and snack cake heavy lunches from grades 10 through 12. So yes, while I was one of those quirky assholes in high school who toted around a lunch box appropriate for a 6-year-old, I at least had the decency to eat alone and delude myself into thinking that my peers would probably consider me a friend if I just stopped using so much hairspray in my bangs. Then I’d rebut the imaginary argument by explaining to myself that since my face is chubby, I need to cut down on as much extra volume as I can and it’s not like you have a better idea. Stop crying.

It was a plastic yellow rectangle showcasing Sesame Street’s Snuffaluffagus and Big Bird, along with the claim that they were ‘Best Friends.’ Now, even though I had about 16 years of exposure, I never thought of those two to be best friends. I considered the claim to be dubious at best but, knowing that ‘tolerant neighbors with palpable sexual tension’ was too wordy, I reluctantly accepted it.

My search was fruitless. I did, however, find other Big Bird items ideal for alienating everyone you know.

Sexy Big Bird? Seriously? Sexy Mr. Hooper has a better chance at getting laid. But forget about the fact that Big Bird lives in a giant nest and has an unnatural attachment to a teddy bear, check out those fuck-me pumps.

Now, this doesn’t work very well for a costume since it’s technically a sweater, but it is the perfect way to say, “Hey, it’s not like I want to take a bath with your kid, I just kind of have to.”

Speaking of children:

Take away the giant beak and imagine, for a moment, that this child is masquerading as a giant yellow penis. It shouldn’t be too hard because that’s exactly what’s going on here. Whoever photographed this despite the I’m so excited/I’m so scared facial expression is one sick fuck.

My guess is that it was Mr. Jazz Hands up there.

Someone on Twitter expressed disappointment in me today. My initial thought was, “Mom?” But I quickly realized that this was coming from a guy who lives “near St. Louis” which really means, “the closest supermarket is 35 miles away and is actually a gas station.”

I’m thinking, “Oh, he’s probably disappointed because he, too, wanted to start a website dedicated to adult diapers and artificially sweetened snacks. I get that.” But to be sure, I ask him.

And bless his urban dictionary heart, because he promptly responds with:

So now Mr. Best Buy Credit Card wants to start doling out critiques just because I go to one of those asshole banks that don’t accept prolonged giggling as legal tender. But just before I begin the process of canceling my accounts, I see he has concluded with the decree that paying for things with people money does, however, “make sense.” What a relief. Although, this is the same guy who also thought a Best Buy credit card made sense so I’m still feeling pretty insecure at this point.

He must’ve detected my, “Why was I even born” themed pity party and followed up with this:

Wait a minute. Not that nice? Okay so he’s mistaking, “accurate” for “nice.” I don’t claim to be able to understand this brand of myopia, but I do feel the need to apologize for ruining his fantasy that my body maintains itself by recycling the same Aristocrats joke. It’s unfortunate, really, because I clearly don’t make any money from writing Vagina Drum.

Even so, I’m at least able to pay my bills on time. Which is more than I can say for my new friend.