This makes my job infinitely more difficult.

I am a writer. I’ve yet to be paid for anything that I’ve written, and I’ve only been published in a few small journals whose back issues are more likely than not in storage somewhere awaiting their reincarnation as an industrial size roll of recycled ass-wipes. Single-ply. Despite these two facts, I am still a writer. It is what I do, and it will be what I continue to do until I am A) successful, or B) an alcoholic. I am a writer. And that, is all.

What is a writer? Well… Let’s see. When people actually ask me what I’m doing in school, rather than saying that I should study law even though it’s very hard and not my cup of tea, I am forced to tell them, “I am a English/Prose honours double major.” I say “prose” because “creative writing major” sounds like I get a free padded hat when I graduate. These people who ask invariably say, “Oh, Journalism! How exciting!” I used to disagree and tell them, “no, no. Journalism is the opposite of what I want to do!” I would then go into an explanation of what a writer does, and what a journalist does. This would usually confuse them and would conclude with them, after more lengthy explanation, saying, “So, you’re going to write stories?” Which, with their tone, usually sounds more like, “Oh, you’re going to finger-paint and make hearts out of pipe cleaners!”

I assume you guys know what a writer does so we can skip that and move into what makes my job hard, namely, news stories like this:

“It’s as incredible as it is unthinkable. In an area where hundreds of thousands are feared dead, a new unwanted phenomenon is showing up – tourists.

Hard as is it to believe, travellers who held tickets for the popular Thailand resort of Phuket showed up there on Friday to begin their scheduled vacations.

Bizarre scenes of people lying on the beach getting a tan were intermingled with shots of dead bodies being tended to nearby, in an amalgam of tragedy turned into something approaching lunacy.

“My time has come around, that's it,” explains Juergen Kroh, who just jetted in from Germany. “So don't be scared, and of course all the pictures there you can see in the television around the world, they are horrible. It's a disaster. But what can we do?”

Survivors are bewildered that people would even think about coming to the place where more than a thousand died.

Some corpses are actually washing up on the beach, in the same places where the tourists sit. And in addition to all the chaos, there’s a lack of supplies to feed the sudden crowd.

Local business owners are struggling to restore order to their destroyed shops and restaurants to meet the unexpected demand.”

It’s sort of like Weekend at Bernie’s, except everyone else is dead.

Seriously though, I’m supposed to make up weird and wacky things for people to read and be entertained by, but how am I supposed to compete with stuff like Jerk-off-jet-setter Juergen Korh vacationing in a place called Phuket (come on, that’s funny) after a massive natural disaster? How am I supposed to top punch lines like, “It’s a disaster. But what can we do?” How am I then supposed to get that *Uph* into my stories? I’m not going to say that people are getting desensitized by television because I don’t like in vogue polysyllabic words, but I’ll say this: People are getting used to an elevated level of assholary.