What do I do if a find a particular from The Survival Guide to Everyday Life to be lacking in quality?

This, my dear friend, is a question where you will find you had the answer all along. Leon Firestone and I are very important, busy people with countless obligations and dinner dates. Some of which are with attractive women, although most of them are with people so like us: bearded, intelligent, sub-par physical attractiveness, and black. However, dear reader, if you’ve ever been angry at a close friend only to find your anger disappear when you learn the whole story from a different perspective, you are equipped to answer your own inquiry.

Please consider the following:

Our Struggle
Leon and I share space frequently, but not so far as to say we live together because that implies we have chosen an alternative lifestyle, although the thirst for knowledge is certainly an alternative lifestyle. However, the cultural implication with the phrase “alternative lifestyle” implies homosexuality. Which is not the case. Nonetheless people still assume.

Do you have any idea how hard is it to work under these conditions? At least three times a day people will come and knock on our door and ask us if they can read a poem at our commitment ceremony. Not only that, but the phone is constantly ringing off the hook because attractive women are constantly trying to get us to go to Linens-n-Things with them because they really want to find that really good gay friend to shop with. And you know what? We’re not one to turn down someone in need (especially if they rate above a seven on our elaborate hotness scale), so a good part of our day is spent examining various 82-quart stainless steel coolers in a strip mall with gorgeous women. Sometimes if we have to make a return, we don’t get home till after midnight. Which, as you can imagine, gets in the way of producing quality guide entries.

Our Workspace
In order to produce a guide entry on a subject, we have to conduct conducive research. In fact, we actually ran out of room to conduct such research so we had to convert our bedroom into a room that is filled hundreds of mice running around with wires jammed into their synapses. We don’t know what that room will accomplish, but we do know we have to put our guide before our personal lives, which includes sleeping comfortably. For the last five months we’ve been sleeping on the roof of our four-level home. Which isn’t as bad as it seems, because we’ve constructed a machine that keeps the weather on our block a comfortable 78 degrees. That aside, Leon is terribly afraid of heights so he’s constantly on edge from night after night of constant paranoia that he’s going to plummet to his death. So yeah, you can see where the quality can suffer a bit.

Our Careers
As I stated before, I have a double minor in Jewish and Gay studies. What I have not stated was that I teach at a very private institution for students that specifically want to get only a double minor in Jewish and Gay studies out of their college career. When I’m not at the Linens-N-Things, I’m either grading papers or thinking of new ways to approach Jewish and gay people with a scholarly approach.

And then there’s Leon. When he’s not out in the valley trying to hunt boar so we can put food on the table (because God knows teaching can’t do it) he works at a factory that makes commemorative baseball plaques. His job is to forge famous baseball player’s signatures on the plaques so stupid twelve year olds think they actually own something of value.

So to answer your question, in short:

If you don’t like it, eat a bag of dicks. We’re trying.