Flipping through my copy of "You Are Worthless" (a self-help book by Scott Dikkers, creator of Jim's Journal and Editor-in-Chief of The Onion), I'm surprised to note how much of it is legitimately useful.

Some snippets:

You often say that you're not doing exactly what you want to be doing with your life. You will continue saying this until you die.

When you talk, people are only pretending to be interested. Trust me on this. Their head is somewhere else.

The law of averages would suggest that at some point in your life, someone has referred to you as "that idiot."

If you had never met your friends, and you had been born in Iraq or something, they would not care if you got bombed. In fact, they might support the idea.

If they were paid half a million dollars and guaranteed to get off scot-free, most people would have no problem killing you. They've done surveys on this.

When you're crossing the street, people in cars are making jokes about getting points for running you down.

Ninety-five percent of the people on this planet live in painful, abject poverty. And you don't care. Heck, none of us do.

There's nothing very special about your special someone. Anyone would have sufficed.

Look at that photo you have of you and your best friend - you know, the one where you have your arms around each other and are smiling and looking right at the camera. You may think back fondly to that moment, but, if you'll recall, you were both asked to fake that smile.

So, okay, maybe I'm just imagining the positive message in all of that. At 2am, you can't expect me to articulate it clearly. But, I'll try anyway.

I told someone recently that I don't mind being a hopeless romantic - it's the hope that'll kill me. That ties into it, I think. We just have to be able to let go of our expectations. Don't blow things out of proportion - try to see how common and trivial they are from someone else's eyes. Once you get the hang of that, it's all good.