From scorching satire to gut wrenching monologues; from passive aggressive emails to heartfelt wedding toasts; from confessing your love on bended knee to confessing infidelity on your deathbed: if you have something you want or need to say, I can make it sound so much more beautiful than it actually is.

People like to look at nice things, which is why it’s important that the things that people look at are in fact nice. If you find yourself irritated or confused by that self-answering logic, may I humbly redirect your attention to the elegant typographic choices, restrained colour palette, and overall sense of harmony and balance that characterises the webpage on which you are reading these confounding, infuriating, meaningless words.

One of the main benefits of being a painfully awkward child is that instead of playing with other children, you can instead excuse yourself to the kitchen to talk with their profoundly sad mothers about their lifetimes of pointless sacrifice all for the sake of children who don’t appreciate them and a man who doesn’t even notice them at all, and in the process become a preternaturally keen student of human nature.

“Nice” is the thing you reach for when you don’t really have a definitive opinion of something or someone but still somehow feel obliged to say, well, something. Nevertheless, I pride myself on being nice because…what’s the alternative? Being a character? I’ll happily recede into the margins of most people’s consciousness while furtively compiling all of the deranged shit the characters of the world say for a tour-de-force cri-de-couer in my future Best Adapted Screenplay. You’ll all know my name soon enough, and when you do, guess what you’ll say? “What a nice guy.”

Closely related to being nice, but distinct in a few crucial ways. People often confuse and conflate “niceness” and “Canadian-ness” but in fact Canadians are not, as a whole, particularly nice at all. What we are is unobtrusive. We will go out of our way to stay out of your way, and frankly, the world needs a little more of that energy.

Yours. Mine. Ours. Theirs. Per diem. Per capita. Expense report. Expensive taste. If there’s a way to spend it, I’ll find it — and do it with great aplomb. “But how could this possibly be a good thing, Tristan?” You might be asking yourself. Here’s the thing: it’s all imaginary. So if you allow yourself to be constrained by the arbitrary dictates of this collectively agreed upon delusion, you’re never going to get anywhere in this life. Do what you need to do to stay out of jail and in people’s good graces, but beyond that? Spend, baby, spend.

If you can’t convincingly bitch about the Australian Trustfundinistas who swirl and twirl around Dimes Square, or make lazy jokes about the price of, well, everything, at Erewhon, or pretend to hate Annabelle’s even though you’ve never even been, you’re simply not going to make it in this industry. I’m miles ahead of the pack, babes.