I like to think of myself as a reasonably well-informed person, a newspaper-reader (back when that was how we got our news).

I’ll confess, though, that whenever I opened the pages of the local gazette, I skipped right past stories about looming taxes and lame basketball teams, the quicker to get to the good stuff:

The advice column(s).

If I can’t be a priest in a confessional booth, nor hear well enough to eavesdrop in restaurants, peering in on “Dear Advice-Giver” is the next best thing.

Which is what landed me in the pages of How To Be A Person in the World, a best-of compilation of Heather Havrilesky’s New York Magazine advice beat.

It’s the usual stuff; the human predicament doesn’t change much. My job is bad. My love life is worse. But new versions of the same problems pop up all the time.

In the voice of “Polly,” Havrilesky fields questions like:
— How can I go on after herpes?
— How can I break out of my long string of half-interested guys?
— My soulmate ditched me. And our baby. What next?
— Will I ever break out of boring jobs and be an artist?
— I love my husband, but how do I stop thinking about the mega-celebrity with whom I spent a few hours in a hotel room?

As advice goes, I’d give Havrilesky a B-. She dishes out some good stuff. Sometimes adversity wakes us up to a better life, she tells one sufferer. Make your plan as if no man, she tells another. Or how about: keep your job, be artsy on the side, and maybe the two will merge someday.

Even your mother could tell you this stuff. But it’s more palatable coming from somebody younger and hipper, somebody who admits her imperfections, which include turning men off with her mouthiness and many, many dermatologist appointments.

But there’s bad advice too: “This world wants nothing but happiness for . . . you.” No, it doesn’t. It couldn’t care less. But a few hints about how to get through your week in the face of that indifference can’t hurt.

Polly’s pages are thick with her mouthy wit. That’s part of the problem here. I love thick, especially in a milkshake. But if you can’t suck it up through the straw, it sure ruins the milkshake moment.

Sometimes Polly forgets her reader’s problem altogether and gallops off on a riff of her own choosing. I wonder how it would be to pour your heart out to her, only to open up New York Magazine, see your case right there in print, then watch Polly go completely off the subject, rapping like Kanye and generally showing off.

And Polly liberally seasons her advice with F-bombs.

Maybe this is a market niche I could fill. I should sell F-bomb replacement kits that magically change your reading material to “You need to the tell boyfriend to [shove] right off” and “An event like this can really [mangle] a person’s sense of . . .” And “We live crazy [no word needed; just leave it out] times.”

You’re welcome.

Photo credit: Sweetly Before shop on Visualhunt.com / CC BY