Here's how "Scared Journalist" described their wretched life:

I spent the last four and a half years studying print journalism in college and watching vacantly as the newspaper/magazine industry crumbled before my eyes...I always figured I had what it takes to get a job even in an extremely competitive market: Before I ever graduated, I had completed four internships at newspapers, magazines and a Web site, published almost a hundred clips (including longer, high-quality pieces), and left a good impression with everyone I worked with. I knew I wanted to be a journalist, and I knew that I wanted to write for a living.

Now, six months after graduating, my parents still pay my cellphone bill and I am working full-time making ice cream. I make a couple hundred bucks here and there freelancing for a magazine I interned at, but otherwise my "freelance" career, as well as my journalism career, is dead in the water. I find myself despondent and unable to send out any more cover letters, and I can't find the time or motivation to research a story idea enough to send it to an editor because I assume he or she will simply reject my half-baked idea. I'm panicking, but I fear failure so much that I can't even get started. Freelancing seems to be my best option career-wise, but I can't summon the willpower and enthusiasm to do it. Plus, I lost my license to a DUI conviction (that got me fired from one of those newspaper internships), which has immobilized me and left me unable to relocate to a new job until October. The DUI also contributes to my job-hunting anxiety.

What I see is that my passion for journalism and writing is waning. Working full-time has taught me that work is work and play is play, and that I need to maximize the efficiency of my hours I spend at work in order to maximize how much I can play outside of work. I am looking into jobs in other fields that pay better. Is it healthier to stick it out working at an ice cream store and desperately try to make it as a writer, or should I pursue a career where financial security is more realistic?

This person's letter launched Tennis into an almost incomprehensible treatise on the virtues of the writing life in which he cited Sartre and Boswell and "Samuel Pepys on London Bridge getting blown by whores." What he should have said is this:

Enough with the whining, Sally! From here on out for the remainder of your existence I want you to stop each time you start to feel sorry for yourself and remember that some poor sap on the other side of the world is going to be beheaded today because he trimmed his freaking beard. Got that?

So your parents are paying your cell phone bill. And? What's the problem? Why aren't they paying more of your bills? Why aren't they paying your damn rent as well? Probably because you're too much of a coward to ask them to pay it! Listen kid, you're never going to get anything in life without asking for it, so never be afraid to ask for anything, no matter how ridiculous it may seem. Milk this whole parental support crap for as long as you can. Hell, lie if you have to—Tell them you have cancer and that you need $5000 for some alternative treatment not covered by their insurance that's only available in Bulgaria. Then go to Bulgaria for a couple of weeks, where you'll be fawned over by some of the world's most beautiful people for simply being an American, and you'll still come back with enough money to pay rent for a couple of months because everything's so ridiculously cheap over there. Then tell your parents that the treatment worked and you're cured! Say it with conviction and they'll believe you, because no parent wants to believe that their child would lie about having cancer for rent money. And consider yourself lucky for simply having parents with the means to help you. I wish mine would have. I had to work from the day I left home at 18 and that sucked!

Finally, and I don't really know how to break this to you gently, but you got screwed kid. You just wasted 4 1/2 years of your life and thousands of dollars that would have been better spent traveling the world doing drugs and having sex with beautiful strangers. Then you could have come back and just started a blog making fun of a certain gay British new media overlord and he would've hired you and—Voila!—A media job! But hey, free ice cream can't be all that bad.

And about that DUI—Move to New York where you don't need a car to get around and you can take cabs home when you're bombed out of your mind. Why else do you think this city is the media capital of the world?

I Studied Print Journalism: Now What? [Salon]

Dear Cary,

I am a week shy of my 25th birthday, and I am back living in my parents' home. I have a degree from Harvard and a year of grad school under my belt, but lifelong depression and social phobia have crippled me such that I can't capitalize on my achievements. There's never been a problem getting good grades, but I've never been good at setting my own goals and following through with them. Only too late have I realized that one has to get good at something (besides passing tests) to be able to make a living. Everybody just assumed that because I was book-smart, I would be life-smart, and nobody pressured me to plan out what I wanted to do with my life.

I've also been so sheltered that I can't give directions to my own home, nor do I keep track of how much money there is in my bank account. Basically, I haven't had to learn the ins and outs of daily independent living and it's driving me insane, because I am 25 AND I HAVE A HARVARD DEGREE!

Since I've dropped out of graduate school I've made some attempts to get a job, but not wholeheartedly. I was fired from a fast-food job a couple of months ago, which has shot my confidence for getting a higher-paying, higher-status job. I'm scared to death of getting one, because I don't think I'll put in the effort to do well. I don't have to worry about paying the bills (my parents take care of it all) so there's no external motivation to get serious.

Besides my lack of ambition, I have trouble maintaining relationships. Never dated. Friends come in and out of my life, and I either get bored with them or I get so annoyed that they have ambitions and passions that I feel uncomfortable sticking it out. I have no loyalty to anyone and even my family says that I am duplicitous and hard to read.

I spend most of my days sleeping or surfing the Net, away from people, tuned out from the world. Whenever I try to tune back in, I feel self-conscious due to all that I've missed out on. This again makes it hard to connect with others — what the hell can I talk about?

I know I'm smart, but I'm lazy, and am nowhere near to approaching my potential. The separation between my ability and my actions is driving me crazy and has brought on suicidal thoughts.

I wouldn't mind being isolated or having a low-status job if I were independent (not relying on parents). But "settling" for a "McJob" while under their roof seems to be the very example of slacking off because there's no pressure to do better, and I feel embarrassed doing that.

I know there's a way out of this — maybe finding a different set of friends; a mentor; making a plan and not caring what other people think of it — but getting out of bed to do it is the trick. I've even thought of running away to California (I studied film) but I don't know how the hell I'd survive.

Thanks for reading.

Stalled

Ha ha ha ha. First, yes. Definitely run away to California. That will work out really well for you. Second, ha ha ha again. Third, learn where your fucking house is, Jesus Christ. Fouth, as a lazy, unambitious, clearly kind of dumb person, thank you for basically confirming most of our negative stereotypes of Harvard and Harvard grads.

No, seriously, you are just a lazy rich kid. Deal with it, maybe? Or maybe you just can't, because your parents, who are clearly still enabling you, have fucked you up beyond repair. In that case, whatever, keep mooching until they die. While you're mooching, try starting a literary journal or writing a novel about a young man who graduated from Harvard but still can't figure out "women" and "not being a tool"!

And for godssake learn where the hell your house is.

Like, it's only the mystery of existence, and don't worry, I have devices. (But I do have to get up in the morning and go to the guillotine. Just warning you. Sorry.)

Eh?

This is written just upon arising. That may be another reason. The stress, you know, of large sums of money. Yesterday was Many Forms Day, like going into the Army. We made tea with tea bags and tried not to laugh.

And?

And finally, the words I long to hear spoken to him, given his predilection: You feel me, Cuz? You feel me?
Yes, I feel you, Cuz, she'll say. I feel you loud and clear.

A lady had asked him if she should dye her hair for her boyfriend.
[Salon]

This helpless, recent college grad hates his job and wants to go travel. But isn't it a bit gauche to live off the $30,000 you didn't earn when people are jobless and starving, right here in our own country? Um, no it's not. Spend the money, fool. But alas no one was around to bonk him on the head, so he wrote in to two of our most salient thinkers, Prudence from Slate and batshit hat-wearer Cary Tennis over at Salon. And they both responded! Their answers? Typical.

Prudence fawns all over the youngster's work in poverty aid and wishes him "Bon Voyage!" and reminds him that he'll be stimulating the economy by spending dead gramma's blood money.

Cary Tennis, on the other hand, does a deep dive into the meaning of colonialism and travel and service and the effect of gamma rays on man in the moon marigolds and comes up with this:

It is in part an attitudinal problem: How do you orient yourself to cast a modest shadow? Can you be humble and love the people and the lands that you travel through? Can you level yourself? Can you cleanse yourself of the savior impulse, not look down on others, not presume that they need your help, not pity them nor mistrust them nor assume that when they look at you you have any idea what they are really seeing? When they look at you they may well see the man who ran them off their farms. Or they may see the man who saved them from tyranny. There is no knowing what others see when they look at us. That is the point: You must allow yourself to be regarded. You must be the object of their gaze. You must uncouple your ego from the adventure of being observed. You must be nothing, or less than nothing, go about invisibly with no mission. That is my sense of it: That even a laudable mission is a presumption, and thus an outrage on the culture that it presumes to serve.

If you lost the thread about three words in, that makes two of us.

So again, our advice: Grams is dead as door nails, so just go. See the world. Your shitty job and this shitty country and this shitty economy will be waiting for you when you get back.

Cary's answer: 462 words.
His Nut Graf (HA): "Be cool. Relax. Try to be wrong. Yep, just be wrong. Be wrong a lot — but silently! Be wrong but in the secret aura of your own thoughts! Allow yourself the luxury of extravagant error in the vast field of silence you have cleared for yourself!"
Summary: STFU.

[Salon]

C! C! C! Because you have been made unstable, by the internet. Also because then you can seek out advice from equally unstable Salon advice columnist Cary Tennis! So, friend these people or not? Or to put it another way:

I have what appears to be a simple problem: A childhood friend found me on Facebook and wants to be my Friend, and I am faced with a monumental decision.

By George, that does sound like a simple problem.

This "friend" was never a good friend of mine anyway, but was friends with my friends. All these "friends" I no longer consider to be friends. They are all lovely, good people, but they are also small-minded and rather boring ... like most people in my hometown. I left for a reason, and I'm not going back. When I visit, they'll try to hunt me down and hang out. All very fine, but I can't stand being around them or even thinking of them. All they seem to represent is a fear, a fear of a life I could have chosen had I not wanted to flee it. A life of boredom, a life of satisfaction with whatever you've been handed. These people live within a mile or two of where they grew up, are active volunteers (good people, right? salt of the earth) at the schools we went to. They've never gone far and they don't seem to want to. It scares and infuriates me. Deep down I think it gets to some problem of mine that I'm sort of curious about.

We've deduced this problem of yours: you're crazy. What's the mental illness where somebody is convinced the entire world is a movie about them? That one.

But the problem is, if I don't Friend this guy, that's just mean. I've never turned down a request. But the other option is worse. If I do Friend him, it will open up the floodgates of mediocrity. It will signal to the rest of them to come after me, to inspect my life, to comment on and judge it, to reduce me to a "Seinfeld" character (everything in life can be reduced thusly by them). I don't live a crazy life at all! I just happened to have moved on and eventually landed in San Francisco, where I'm very happy to be. I just don't want their snarky comments. I don't want to know that people can lead such sad lives.

Elitist. Elitist and crazy.

Cary Tennis says go ahead and friend them or whatever, wtf. Marking the first time that Cary Tennis has been less crazy than his advisee. [Salon]

See how it feels to write down, "I want to direct." Or write down, "I want to act." See how that feels. Make pictures of what you want to do. Make collages to stimulate the primary process thinking that is the creative mode.

Collages are fun.

Meditate for five minutes and notice how quickly the time goes. Narrow down. Narrow down and make a plan. Think about a year. Think about how so many corny things are true. Think about how you are not 22. Ready yourself for sacrifice.

I know I'm not 22. But Cary, do you know whereof you speak?

I am a child of Florida's warm, wet indolence, the intoxicating rot and the rough, beefy unculturedness. I am a child of that. I know how it is to hate Florida and feel better than Florida and want to live in places like California.

Final words of wisdom?

So be with the ones who know you well. Be with the ones who see your bullshit. Work it out where you're from. Work it out, whatever it is; work it out where you're from.

You have this thing you have to do. It has something to do with film. You don't know precisely what, yet. But figure it out and then if you have to go to L.A. to do it go to L.A. But figure it out first.

Thanks!

[Salon]

I picture that hotel room full of Marines and your friend, drunk, abandoned by her friend and hungry for something, seeking something, vaguely aware that once she starts drinking she often can't stop or control what she does next, vaguely aware that whatever has been happening to her lately is happening again, and every time it happens it seems to get a little more out of control. When I picture that hotel room and what went on there — maybe with just one Marine but maybe more than one, given that her shame may be overwhelming and her memory incomplete — when I picture her desperation and her hunger for whatever it is she was seeking at the end of the night, and then I hear the phrase "consensual, unprotected sex," I marvel at the gulf between the language and the event. Perhaps this language indicates the gulf between your world and hers as well, and between the full horror of what happened and our willingness to imagine the full horror of what happened.

Uh.

The more I imagine what went on in that room, the more I wonder if you and your good friends have come to terms with, or admitted to consciousness, the full terror of the event. No one probably knows for sure what really happened in that hotel room. Has anyone uttered the word "trauma" in relation to these events?

Uhh..

One out-of-control incident leads to shame and humiliation and fuck it all, who the fuck cares now, might as well get out of control again because my friends did not rescue me the first time, so fuck them too, they must not care about me, and since they don't care about me I must be pretty worthless, and if I'm worthless you're worthless too, you shit, we're all worthless, so what if I give my fucking boyfriend an STD, he should have been there to protect me from those Marines and protect me from myself, too. So fuck him. Fuck you. Fuck it all.

This is the way we end up dead.

Thanks!

Dear Living the American Dream ...

The kind of American dream you are living is the kind you wake up from in cold sweats.

There is another American dream.

It is a dream of wholesale revamping of cities, towns, transit and housing. In this dream, you get up in the morning and shower with solar-heated water and walk down a pleasantly crowded pedestrian way to catch some breakfast at a sunny outdoor cafe and then walk to a well-designed mass transit hub where you catch a fast, comfortable and efficient train to work. Or you work at home, using video hookups when necessary for meetings, transferring digital files at high speed, and when you start to feel isolated and restless you step out of your house to mingle on the street or jog or cycle on a nature path. And maybe you pick some wild watercress on the way and when you get back you make a salad for your wife, who is conducting a seminar on Chaucer in the living room.

The flight crew said we could stand in the aisles, which several people did. A 60-ish man across the aisle from me stood up, but he violated an unwritten rule of airplane-aisle etiquette: Always face fore or aft when standing and, if possible, stand alongside a seat back so you don't crowd the personal space of a still-seated person. No, this guy stood with his butt inches from my face. Within moments, I smelled something awful. Could it be?

Oh yes, it could.

I had my iPod headphones on, so I hadn't heard anything. I pulled them off, and within seconds heard a faint fart coming from the backside that was all but in my face. Then came the smell again. And then he farted again! I couldn't believe it. I turned my air nozzle on full and pointed it at his butt, but it did little good. He farted probably five times in the course of a minute and showed no inclination to apologize or even make his way to the lavatory.

Cary's response, boiled down to the relevant sentence, by the way: "Are we not sitting idly by every day as powerful people fart in our faces with impunity? "

Are we? Err, not? Are we not?

We encourage you to send stories to Cary along the lines of "I was stuck on a crowded downtown 6 train when an a cappella group took a shit on me." Make sure to toss in a question about what you should have done; it increases the likelihood of the thing getting printed for Cary's self-reflections.

A man farted in my face on the plane and I said nothing! [Salon]