I was like you once — a woman struggling to climb her way up the corporate ladder, longing to break through that glass ceiling. But after years of slaving away, I finally answered mother nature’s sacred call echoing in the chambers of my womb to focus on what I really wanted to do: steal a baby.

There comes a time in every woman’s life when her biological clock begins to tick and she can’t stop thinking about what it would be like to steal a precious child of her very own. Ever since I quit and devoted my life to kidnapping, I’ve never felt more fulfilled.

Once I finally gave my two weeks notice, I began making space for a new life. Nesting is a very important part of process of motherhood, so I dedicated many hours to decorating the secret, sound-proof room where I would keep my stolen baby until the heat died down.

I once would have spent my time shopping for power suits and sensible heels, but I was now searching for that perfect black balaclava to ensure I would get away with my infant theft undetected. I always thought my focused, organized, motivated personality lent itself to the corporate world, but now I see that I actually have all of the skills necessary to abduct a human child.

Sure, my life is different now. Instead of trying to grab the brass ring, I’m now trying to grab the key ring that the hospital custodian uses to lock the door to the nursery at night. My old work friends are always asking prying questions like “why are your walls covered in blueprints of the local daycare center?” and “what do you mean, you’re going to get your fingerprints burned off?” But they just don’t understand that motherhood is a beautiful, natural thing that every woman should get to experience, even if you, have to steal someone else’s baby.

Stealing a baby of my own was the best decision I ever made. I have no regrets leaving my high paying, high powered career behind. No job is more precious than the hours I spend with my little one, evading the police, the FBI and dodging calls from concerned loved ones. If you’re thinking about making the same change, don’t let the social stigma of stealing babies deter you: it’s time to have a family, no matter who your baby’s family technically is.

Every once in a while, I come across some creative project that sets my brain absolutely on fire. Jon Bois published 17776 today and it immediately ignited every last cortex I’ve got.

I’ve been a fan of Bois for years. It started when my brother-in-law introduced me to Breaking Madden, which is ostensibly about football and maybe also video games but ends up being a bizarre hilarious experiment that is as much a piece of comedy or storytelling as it is anything else. He kept doing stuff that was funnier and weirder, but 17776 is a whole new ballgame.

I won’t say anything about its actual content, partially because I don’t want to spoil anyone, but mostly because what’s so incredibly brilliant about it to me goes beyond the content. It’s about how the story is told, and where it’s being told.

SBNation is a sports website. Most of the things on SBNation are very straightforward blog posts and articles about sports. Some of the stuff is quite creative and funny, but nothing I’ve seen matches 17776 for sheer boldness. It left me gobsmacked, not just because of Bois’s talent as a writer but because it was published in such an unlikely place, not in the sense that SBNation is a bad publication, but in the sense that this is not the kind of content one expects to find on a sports website.

Because, on its surface, 17776 is bad content. It’s weird, it’s long, it demands attention. It’s not skimmable. In the age of virality, this is the kind of that would probably get laughed out of most pitch meetings, if anyone even had the courage to bring it up in a pitch meeting. Going purely off of the established rules of Good Internet Content, this should not even exist.

But it does, and the reason for that — at least in my mind — is that our ideas of what constitutes Bad Content are stupid and short-sighted.

When I was in college, I took a class about the history of the technology of writing. We covered everything from the days before written language was invented up through the present day. One of the major topics of conversation was how the proliferation of literacy affected human thought. Our brains changed as we became able to write. The way we interacted with information changed. And our storytelling changed. Epic poems that were once recited from memory by bards were written down and studied. On the last day of class, we had a discussion about how modern technology could influence our brains in the future.

I’ve always been profoundly annoyed by people who bemoan the omnipresence of computers and phones. People who think that no one is reading just because they aren’t reading physical books. People who think that physical books are the pinnacle of storytelling, and that anything else in any other medium is, by nature, inferior. Don’t get me wrong, I love books. I adore them wholeheartedly. What bothers me is not that I think books suck, it’s that I think people are being incredibly narrow-minded when they dismiss ‘technology’ and assume that its increasing presence will lead to the death of intellectualism and culture. For one thing, written language is itself a technology, as are books. Cuneiform tablets are as much a technology as the Amazon Kindle. But when we behave as though we’re living through the dying gasp of intellectualism and culture and storytelling and writing, we’re not giving the human mind enough credit. We’re not giving the human imagination enough credit.

We’ve never been good at predicting what the seismic shifts in our culture will be. When written language was first invented, it was used mostly for clerical purposes. People wrote down laws, ship manifestos, medical documentation, and what basically amounted to receipts. No one thought it would be used to write The Grapes of Wrath. When SBNation first started, I’m sure no one thought it would be used to write 17776. The point is that technology is developing too fast for anyone to be able to predict what the next dominant form or medium will be. Everyone’s pivoting to video and debating about long-form or short-form. Everyone’s mad about listicles and Twitter.

But we’re missing the forest for the trees. The internet, phones, sports blogs, these are all just vessels. They’re neutral. As long as there are good storytellers, there will be good stories. What matters is embracing whatever story breaks the mold and letting it be told however it should be told. We aren’t going to be able to predict what that will look like. (Don’t trust people who say they can. They’ll be wrong in a year.) What we can do is pay attention to things that come along that are brilliant and weird and could only exist in this medium. Stories that can only be told in the ways that they’re told.

What sets my brain so absolutely on fire about 17776 is exactly that. It looks at the medium and the tools available and it takes perfect advantage of all of them to tell a story that’s just plain good. It’s bold and risky. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It made me laugh out of sheer surprise (and then later with good and funny jokes). Bois is an incredible storyteller, and his editors and SBNation as a whole should be lauded for letting him make what he made. More platforms should be given to things like this, regardless of whether or not a CMO thinks they could go viral.

Virality isn’t the point. Storytelling is.

I’d like you all to review and adhere to the following notes and rules for Season 5 of my talk show.

There will be no meetings in my dressing room. No stopping by or popping in. NO ONE. I am tired of people asking about why I have a coffin in there.

Do not come to my dressing room unless invited. I can’t come into your house without being invited, so it’s ONLY FAIR.

Do not open my dressing room door. IF YOU OPEN MY DOOR, EXPECT TO BE SWARMED BY BATS.

My security team will stop everyone from standing at my door who have the intent to see or speak to me or wave a crucifix in my face.

I want all the ambushing to stop now. That includes TV staff, priests, and Van Helsings.

You must schedule an appointment or summon me using the appropriate rites, rituals, and/or blood sacrifices.

I have been taken advantage of by my lenient policy in the past. This ends now. NO MORE.

Do not approach me while I’m in the makeup chair having blood cleaned off of my extra-long canines and covering my pale, dead, sallow skin with various powders and rouges to restore a lifelike appearance unless I ask to speak with you directly. Either knock or use the doorbell.

I am seeking more free time for me throughout the day to lie in my coffin, avoid sunlight, and gather my strength to hunt my prey and satiate my gruesome hunger, with which I have been cursed for countless centuries, as soon as darkness falls.

Do not wait in any hallway to speak to me in the ancient tongues and brandish strands of garlic at my face as you attempt to banish me to hell once and for all. I hate being ambushed. Please make an appointment.

I promise you I will bite you in the hallway, and do not attempt to walk with me.

If you’re reading this, yes, I mean you.

Everyone, do not take offense to the new way of doing business. It is for the good of my personal life and enjoyment. Also, I am a vampire.

Thank you all,

Vampire Steve Harvey

Yesterday, a very controversial piece was posted on Noisey, Vice’s music blog, alleging that popular musician Drake does not know how to smoke weed. The piece, written by Kyle Kramer and Dan Ozzi as part of “Weed Week,” is potentially very damaging to Drake’s career, not to mention that it’s just plain mean-spirited.

Now, let me give you a bit of background here. I myself am a big-time weed smoker and lover. I love weed, and I love to smoke it, and I love to talk about all the different ways I know how to smoke it. I am definitely what you would call an expert. I know all of the different methods, and I have a vast collection of tools and equipment that I use to smoke. I don’t have any here with me right now, so I can’t show them to you, but trust me! It’s quite a collection.

But I’d like to call on my fellow “smoke-aholics” (this is not a real scientific term: I just invented it to refer to all the people who, much like me, are very enthusiastic about their weed practices) to stop being mean to Drake. It’s not his fault that he, unlike us, doesn’t know about all of the great ways to take the smoke from weed and put it into different places in your body! To be fair to him, smoking weed is an extremely complicated and elaborate process. Not everyone has the time or the energy to learn the many thousands of different ways that are best for doing it. I definitely do, but Drake does not! And I think that’s okay.

In this country, there is a lot of division right now. I think it’s important that we, as trailblazers in the field of getting high on that excellent smoke, not create more division by alienating the people who do not subscribe to our lifestyle or its many instructive publications, which describe all of the good ways to get high on weed, almost all of which I have certainly mastered (although Drake has not).

Now, my fellow “weedies” (again, this is a term that I have coined just now using my expertise in this field — newcomers may not be able to comprehend it) out there might wonder why this issue struck such a chord with me. The truth is, there are a lot of nasty rumors out there alleging that I have never smoked weed and do not know how to do it. This could not be further from the truth. I have. Probably too much! The police are very cross with me about it!

But I’m not going to stop. In fact, I’m getting ready to do some smoking later today. I’m going to go home, turn off my phone, enter my subterranean chamber, close the airlock, and get all of my instruments well-greased and ready for action. So don’t go telling everyone that I’m not an expert about smoking!! I am. But I’m also a victim of a really nasty conspiracy theory. So I can sympathize with how Drake must feel right now, except that he doesn’t know how to smoke, and I absolutely do, so much so that I am thinking about starting my own YouTube channel where I will instruct the people on the internet about how to do it well.

Let me be clear: I’m not scared at all that my secret, which is that I’ve never smoked weed and I don’t know how and I’m very frightened and confused about it, will get out. That’s because no such secret exists. I have nothing to hide! If I did, would I talk so much all the time about all of the different kinds of weed that I’ve seen, and smelled, and probably burned with some sort of flame until the smoke from it goes into my body through some hole or other and then goes into my brain I think and makes me feel different in some way? I don’t think I would.

I am just trying to look out for Drake and the other poor folks who don’t know what we know. Which is that weed is very good and fun and not at all mystifying or frightening. We “plant puffers” (I really feel like I need to make it clear that this term is not from science, and that I made it up, especially since to the best of my knowledge science has not yet been able to prove that weed is a plant) should make our community one that is not prone to bullying and is very accepting and tolerant of outsiders, because I bet it must be very embarrassing and scary for Drake to have this terrible shameful truth come to light. I do not know for sure how he feels, because his experience is so very different from mine, as I’ve said, but I bet he feels very bad! And, as we all know, when you’re a fan of being high on drugs from the smoke of weed, everything should be about feeling good.

This particular problem, which has long loomed over femme relationships and permeates pretty much every level of our culture, is a tough one. So tough, in fact, that I called in backup: one of my very best friends and femme libra soulmates, Nikki Padula. Never having been in a relationship with another femme, I didn’t feel comfortable being your sole advisor on this, so Nikki was kind enough to offer her thoughts in between killing the fat fashion game over on her Instagram and being the angelic face of yet another Smartglamour campaign.

First of all, I assume you and your girlfriend are both femme. I assume that because, usually, our heteronormative programming makes it so that we look at queer relationships with the goal of figuring out who is the man and who is the woman. I don’t need to waste anyone’s time by delving into how bogus that is (it’s extraordinarily bogus), but it means that lots of people — including people who are themselves in the queer community — seem unable to reach the logical conclusion that the two femmes they always see holding hands, kissing, shopping for engagement rings, and co-parenting children are actually dating each other.

Nikki knocks it out of the park on her first at-bat. “My first thought is that it’s society that needs to change, not them.” Femmephobia, which constitutes a perfect storm of misogyny, queer phobias, and plenty of other toxic waste, is deeply woven into the fabric of our culture. We can all work to change that, but for now, the hard truth is that you’re going to face the challenge of erasure in a lot of spaces.

What’s the solution to that? “Go to gay stuff. Find events and queer pockets in your area and go inhabit those spaces. Go to the queer art, go to the “support groups” if that’s your thing, go to the clubs and the mixers and the dance parties. People there will see you. You’ll see people there. You will see yourself reflected, hopefully.” This will be easiest if you’re in a big city where there are plenty of events, but these communities exist everywhere, and tend to be tighter knit in smaller towns. “It will take time, but other queers will literally start to know you.”

Being seen is a big deal. Unfortunately, we can’t always count on others to do the work to see us. But surrounding yourself with other queer people — people who know exactly what you’re dealing with, have been through it before, or have friends who have been through it before — will start to make a dent in the feeling that no one sees you for who you are and your relationship for what it is.

Nikki sums it up perfectly: “If you can create or join a community in which your queerness is known and celebrated, random strangers on the street not realizing you’re gay will start to matter a lot less.”

If you have a question for Phipps Tips, submit it anonymously here.

The fact that you put quotation marks around the word “better” makes me think you don’t necessarily believe that there are better jobs out there for you. It sounds like a somewhat frustrating place to work, but it also sounds like you have a lot more freedom there than you would at other places. You say you feel pressure — where is the pressure coming from?

I think a lot of people feel external pressure from the world at large to have a job that consumes their lives and defines their identities. But the truth is, not all of us are interested in that kind of life. We have other things that consume our lives and define our identities, and we’re just trying to make rent in the meantime.

You don’t like your job, but you also don’t feel particularly motivated to leave. I’m not sure why that is, but as long as you’re not being complacent or letting your decisions be governed by your fear, then I think you’re fine. You have my blessing to stay at this job, but only as long as you’re getting enrichment in your life from other sources.

If the pressure gets worse, or if you feel like it’s coming from you rather than others, keep thinking about it. Send out some feelers. Finding a new job can take a while, so you don’t have to make a decision anytime soon.

If you have a question for Phipps Tips, submit it anonymously here.

Whoa whoa whoa, slow down there, tiger. There are a lot of other steps you can take before you Gone Girl yourself and devastate the lives of those around you by making what is — and I’m sorry for being so blunt — a very selfish choice.

Let’s take these problems on one at a time.

Your friends don’t seem to care about you anymore? That’s happened to me a few times in the course of my life. It’s a terrible feeling to suspect that all of your friends have decided that you’re no longer worth their time, but sometimes that feeling isn’t grounded in reality. Sometimes we’re so wrapped up in our own personal issues that we don’t realize that our friends have their own personal issues, too — issues that might prevent them from texting back or making plans or being 100% available to us for emotional support. You might be right that your friends don’t care, but you also might be wrong. You might be so swept up in your own feelings tornado that you don’t know what’s actually going on with the people in your life. The solution isn’t to bail on everything completely.

You can’t stop drinking? Stop drinking. Yes, it’s much easier said than done. Yes, there are a lot of ups and downs on the road to recovery, and temptation is everywhere, and biology is a motherfucker. But if you think you need to get sober, you can get sober, and you should get sober. Even if you’re not an alcoholic, cutting booze out of your life right now will probably help a lot, and it will certainly make it easier for you to look at your problems with a clear head and figure out where to actually go from here. Cutting and running on everything won’t help you stop drinking. If anything, it might make you more likely to drink, since you’ve bailed on all of the people who might have been able to hold you accountable and support you.

You regret getting married? That’s a tough one. I’ve never been married and never want to be married. But the reason you give for your regret — your potential bisexuality — isn’t a good enough reason to end your marriage yet. A better step would be to come out to your wife and actually talk to her about what’s going on with you. From what I understand about marriage — and, again, never been married — your spouse is supposed to be your greatest source of support. You two made the decision to live your lives together, and it sounds to me like you haven’t been following through on that. Your wife at least deserves to know the reason why you’re feeling this way. You owe her the chance to talk about these things with you before you make any decisions about what to do next, and the two of you should try to make those decisions together.

In each of these problems, and in the zany solution you propose, I see one common factor — you’re only thinking about yourself. Maybe it’s the way you phrased the question, but it doesn’t sound like you’ve considered other people very much. I get that. Problems like these can make a person selfish. Paranoia about friendships, indulging in self-destructive behavior, facing problems in your marriage, those are all things that force a person to internalize and self-obsess. But take a second to pull your head out of the sand and think about how selfish the impulse to abandon your life as it currently stands actually is.

Because the truth is, it’s not just your life. You made sure of that when you got married. And as much as you might want to back out of that contract now, there’s a whole other human being involved. She doesn’t deserve to have her life destroyed just because you don’t feel like you’ve been making the right choices in yours. Maybe divorce is the right path for the two of you, but straight-up abandoning her is a cowardly, selfish thing to do.

You’re assuming your friends don’t care about you, but how much have you shown them that you care about them? Have you considered that they might be going through their own issues right now, and that makes it harder for them to give you support? Have you put in the work of reaching out to them?

You absolutely have the power to change your life. There are concrete things you can do to make those changes happen. But they’re going to require you to be brave and careful and thoughtful, and they’re going to require a lot of hard work. I understand that that might not be appealing, but it’s how lots of people tackle these problems (and problems far worse than these). This isn’t Mad Men and you’re not Don Draper. You don’t get to cut and run when things get tough. That’s not what decent people do. Decent people own up to their mistakes and try to fix them. You’re a decent person, so can do that, and you should.

If you have a question for Phipps Tips, submit it anonymously here.

I’ve decided to write a think piece. Are you guys ready to do some thinking? Great, let’s jump in.

Think about your childhood bedroom. If you had more than one bedroom as a child, think about the one in which you spent the most time. Think about the way the room looked at night. Was there an overhead light? Did you have a lamp beside your bed? Think about what kind of bed you had. Think about how big your bed felt when you were a child, and how small that bed might feel now. Think about how weird it is that children sleep in beds that are as long as adult bodies. Think about what a weird waste of space that is. But then think about how stupid it would be to make beds for children that are as short as they are, because children grow up so fast, and you would need to replace the bed constantly to keep up with the growth of your child.

Think about what it was like to get growing pains in your legs, and think about how growing pains are caused by your bones growing faster than your muscles, and think about how weird it is that you have more or less stopped growing now, unless you are still growing, in which case, think about how weird it is that you have not stopped growing yet. Think about the space you take up in the physical world. Think about whether it feels like you take up too much space, or not enough space. Think about the spaces you want to take up space in. Think about the beds you want to take up space in. Think about the first time you slept in a bed that wasn’t your bed or the bed of someone in your family. Think about a childhood friend whose bedroom you were jealous of. Think about everyone you know who had to share a bedroom with a sibling.

Think about your siblings.

Think about the people you like talking to the most. Think about the best conversation you have ever had with one of those people. Think about the ways in which that conversation changed the way you think. Think about other people’s conversations you’ve listened to or overheard that changed the way you think.

Think about the way you think.

Think about the events that transpired in your childhood bedroom, with your siblings and/or your childhood friends and how those events shaped the way you think. Think about the toys you had that contained an entire universe because your imagination was so powerful that you could look at something and see a million different stories emerging from it the way someone capable of perceiving the fourth dimension can look at a person and see them at every age all at once. Think about how easy it was to spend hours sitting on a floor with a chunk of plastic or fabric creating stories that were vivid enough to be completely real to you. Think about when it stopped being easy, and soon you could only do it for an hour, and then only a half hour, and then only a few minutes, and then never again.

Think about your parents in the toy store, looking for something to get for you, not knowing what would offer the best and most exciting universe for your little mind and your little body, both of which were growing at an alarming rate. Think about how they must have felt when something they got you caused you to sit on the floor for hours creating stories that were vivid enough to be completely real to you. Think about when they sat on the floor with you, and how much it meant to you to have them inside of your little object universe for a while. Think about what it must have been like for your parents to sit on the floor with you and know that you were in a universe that they could only access superficially, but that they got you the thing that helped you create the universe that you were in, and that you were a little universe unto yourself, and that that little universe was expanding every day, and that it would need a new bed eventually because its legs would get too long and hang off the edge of the bed it was sleeping in now, in its childhood bedroom, with the little plastic lamp attached to the wall that it drew on with magic marker and the boxes full of magical chunks of plastic and fabric.

I’ve kept journals and diaries since age five. I started my first novel when I was eleven. In middle school, when chatting about dream jobs with my friends, they only semi-jokingly told me I would grow up to be “a writer who never gets out of her pajamas.”

This is both an accurate snapshot of me as a person and an eminently attainable job title. But for as long as I’ve wanted to be a writer, I’ve also felt like I’m destined to fall short — to only fulfill the second half of that middle school prophecy.

It’s not that I don’t write. In high school especially, I was unstoppable, often at the expense of my grades. I would walk into geometry with my notebook of choice (three-subject college-ruled spiral bound Five Star® in a muted grey or blue) and sit there scribbling away under the flimsy pretense of note-taking. I’ve recycled more personal writing in the last ten years than most people do in their entire lives.

The persistent problem is that my best writing is personal to the point of being utterly unsuitable for public consumption. I look back at these diaries and find the most lyrical and heartbreaking turns of phrase, always buried in a lengthy letter to an unrequited love who would never read it. The majority of these letters are painfully embarrassing to read, and are so specific to place, person, and time as to be totally irrelevant to anyone who hasn’t lived inside my brain for the past sixteen years. Who cares how I felt about the goofy, shy basketball star a grade above me now that it’s almost a decade later?

Aside from the unrelenting urge to document my feelings, I don’t have much in the way of inspiration. Every few months I have a good idea, and then I either pitch it or write it myself, and then it exists, and then I’m out of good ideas for a while. I’ve been told that the antidote to this is to just establish the practice of writing every day, on any topic, but every time I’ve set out to do it, I come up short.

Which is another piece of my fear that I’ll never be a writer who gets out of her pajamas and only someone who never gets out of her pajamas. Creative pursuits require enormous amounts of work ethic. As much as I like to think that hustle is a defining aspect of my personality, can I really keep claiming that when my creative output is negligible at best? A writer is someone who writes. Being good at it isn’t enough if you never do it.

Especially at this time of year, I run out of gas. I have less and less energy as the days get shorter and shorter. My productivity and positivity both essentially shut off once the sun goes down at 4:30, and I devote more and more time to activities like sleeping, eating, and reality television. It would be easier not to find fault with those pursuits if I felt like I had done enough during the daylight hours to justify my laziness.

When friends see me for the first time in months and ask how writing is going, lately I have no choice but to tell them I’m out of ideas. In all honesty, that’s only partially true. I have three or four monstrous ideas, perpetually too big to tackle, both for lack of energy and fear that I won’t do the idea justice. (This is a trait I inherited from my father: a brilliant man with an endless list of ideas too daunting to tackle.) Do the courage and motivation come with time, or is it up to me to fake it until I make it?

The worst part is that I have no idea how the rest of the world actually perceives my creative output. My latent imposter syndrome forces me to assume that, behind my back, everyone is talking about how I’m not working hard enough. I’m constantly taking stock of the success of my peers, wondering if I still have time to accomplish something of note, or if I’m past my prime at the ripe old age of twenty-six.

As I add minor achievements to my meager list, the feeling only gets worse, and I suspect it won’t go away anytime soon, no matter what kind of space I manage to carve out for myself as a writer or as anything else. The best I can do is keep putting my back into it, writing even when I don’t have ideas, and give myself a moment to celebrate when I cross something off my creative to-do list.

I’m still not gonna get out of my pajamas, though.