The illustrious, talented, and totally badass (also my personal hero)  Dorothy Parker once said:

    This is very much true, though also not an invitation to shoot me because I already own two copies of The Elements of Style so you've already missed your chance, assuming that the favors must be delivered in order. I will be so bold as to expand the ever wonderful Miss Parker's list with my addition of the third greatest favor you can present an aspiring writer with: a high-quality printer.
    My printer and I have a history of battles that I always have lost because, while I may have gotten my documents in the end, it was always ten minutes after I was supposed to be in the class they were being printed for, no matter how early I started printing them. So many times, I have said something along the lines of, "Okay, this is due tomorrow at 11:30am. It's 11:30pm right now, so I'll have this printed before I go to sleep and not have to worry about it in the morning." Then the sun rises, and I find myself having the same struggle as always: "HOLY FUCKPARADES PRINTER IT HAS BEEN HOURS, HOW ARE YOU SO BAD AT THIS?! SO FAR YOU'VE ONLY MANAGED TO REPRINT THE SAME TWO PAGES OVER AND OVER BEFORE CRUNCHING UP THE THIRD ONE AND THEN STARTING OVER! MY CLASS STARTED A HALF HOUR AGO, THIS IS A SIMPLE FOUR PAGE DOCUMENT! WHAT GYPSY DID YOU ENRAGE TO MAKE YOU THIS TERRIBLE?!"
    Today I was attempting to print a 93 page document, a large portion of a work that I am in the process of writing, so when the printer failed around page 73, I was understatedly a bit peeved. You know those scenes in movies where the protagonist is talking to him/herself, and you're like, "Who are you talking to, protagonist? You sound like a crazy person, expositioning nobody like that. You're a crazy person, you crazy person."
    Well, count me among the crazy people, because I legitimately started cursing at the printer in my house with such a hatred that I didn't realize that it had turned into a full-fledged speech until...well, too late to be a not-crazy person. I've taken bits of my rage-speech and constructed it into an open letter to not just my printer, but any printer who thinks that he's just too fucking cool for the document replicating game. So while you're reading this, imagine a wild-eyed, frizzy haired, rage-sweaty young woman violently screaming the words at an inanimate object with no one else around her. No one was there to judge me but myself, and that just isn't right.
    That's where you come in.

    Dear Printer, (aka Supreme Dickmuncher, All-Star Leader of the Dickparade)
    You piece of shit asshole sunnuva--page 73. The first 72 were fine, but 73 is your cut-off. We're already going two pages per piece of paper, yet this is where you draw the line, you worthless pile of bullshit.
    I have a lot of hopes and dreams, you know. I have dreams of success, dreams of happiness. I have selfish dreams and selfless dreams. I have dreams that nothing can stop me because I'm a comet on its celestial path to greatness. I have dreams that anything can stop me, because it means that I can place love over success, and that's what it means to live beautifully.
    But do you know what you've done, Printer? You've made me forget all of those dreams. My only wish now is for this entire house to burn down. That's right. I would gladly give up all of my possessions and all of the love that has been soaked into these walls for the twenty-four years my family has lived here if it meant that you would be melted like the Nazi faces in Indiana Jones.
    I hope that this whole mother burns down, and I hope you look around at the memories my family has created here, and that love touches your hard drive and grants it a soul. I want you to have a soul so you can feel the pain of your own demise. I want you to grapple with the existential terror of death, like the Terminator at the end of Terminator 2. You'll be all, "I know now why you cry--because the world is full of anguish and horrors, and yet you still manage to find peace and love among the people that a fortunate bloodline have blessed you with as your family. This home has been the center for that love, and I have done nothing but add violently frustrating inconvenience to it. I'm a fucking monster!"
    Then right as you're deciding that, on the scale of human horrors, a misfiring printer is pretty low, right as you're about to pick yourself up by your paper catcher and find peace with your life, your soul-bearing hard drive explodes and you melt into a glob of plastic and metal coils. And in your final moments of sentience, as you're wondering at the cruel nature of death and feeling your pieces and buttons fuse into one purposeless hunk of waste, you'll just see my face, smiling, laughing at your mortality, mocking your pain, happy to see that your only moments of humanity were spent in moral torture. Because I hate you.
    I know what you'd be thinking, Printer, if you had the capacity for personal agency. Am I being dramatic? Probably, but I'd like to think not. Because humans have many jobs to juggle during the day; besides our actual employments that pay our bills and student loans, we also have to practice social interactions, familial responsibilities, maintaining physical and mental health, searching for spiritual peace, and the like. You, Printer, have one fucking job: print my shit. Two jobs, maybe, if we need to scan a photo, which is rare because iPhones are a thing.
    Honestly, Printer, do you know how lucky you are? I went to five colleges and had six different majors, anxiously trying to discover what I was put here to do. You are physically designed to perform one simple task, something that humans could do without you--and have, in the past. It used to be someone's job to reprint documents by hand, but you came along and showed them the wonderful world of unemployment. And what do you do with that opportunity? You suck ass. You could potentially be obsolete, and yet you pretend that you're king of the fucking mountain and act like there are bigger and better things out there for you. Well, there aren't. You're a printer, Printer. Be glad that you know what you're here to do, and that you don't have a soul that allows you to feel the uniquely human fear that we may all just be purposeless pieces of meat wandering around yelling at each other until we eventually die and rot.
    To make a long story short, print my fucking documents, because I do not want to go all Office Space on your ass. I don't like to litter, and that shit looks like a whole lot of post-clean-up.
    Too Sincerely to be Considered Sane,
    Johanna

    PS Fuck you.

Dear Dresses-With-Pockets,

Let’s get this out of the way: I love dresses. Anything that lets me look like I give a flying turd about looking nice while in reality being just another excuse to not wear pants is a perfect fit to my increasingly I-don’t-give-a-flying-turd existence. But we all know the problem with women’s purses: they’re either impractically small, or unbearably huge. That middle ground for a purse is hard to find, and it means that carrying around my wallet or lighter or Reuben sandwich has always been a battle with me.

Then you, dresses-with-pockets, then you show up.

I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to go home with a cute dress, put it on in front of my mirror to discover that it has pockets. Or even better is when I don’t realize it until I’m already wearing it out for the first time. I’ll smooth out my dress or touch my body in an attempt to seem objectifyable to men and lo! where has my hand disappeared to? Suddenly it is not seen by anyone, and for a fleeting moment I believe myself to be an  amputee. Or a magician. Or that my hand has taken a spontaneous trip to Narnia that for some reason lies in the seam of my dress.

But no! Even better! I have POCKETS. Suddenly my big bulky purse is no longer needed, or whatever lucky guy friend I’ve dragged along can stop keeping my money and ID in his pockets because now I have my own! I am an independent woman!

Therein lies the beauty of what your existence means. While women have made giant leaps in today’s world, society is still generally sexist and trying to keep us down in many ways–one by making our belongings easier to steal. Don’t believe me? Try to steal a man’s wallet from his pocket. Now try to steal a woman’s wallet from her purse. Odds are you’ll just grab for the whole purse, am  I right? That means you’re not just getting her money, but her phone, her iPod, her make-up, her birth-control pills, her Midol—you’ve just sentenced her to a very expensive shopping trip. And all because she had to carry a purse, something men never have to understand.***

(***And I don’t include those shitty men’s messenger bags, and neither should you. Because while their wallet, sunglasses, and douchey Macbook are probably in them, no one is going to bring that fashion atrocity out to a bar at night because it's both stupid behavior and an anti-poon force field. Blech.)

But you. You, my pet, my turtledove, my darling…you set me free. You give me a place to put my cell phone so I don’t have to bring a purse. I don’t have to set my bag on the disgusting sink covered in some uncomfortably off-color film while I pee in the single-stall bathroom at the bar by the train tracks. You give me a practical place to sneak my tampons when I don’t want all the people, who I for some reason think are paying attention to me in class or at a restaurant, wonder what the hell I would need my entire bag for if I’m just going to the bathroom; with you around, I don’t have to put on a sweater just to hide it in my sleeve or pretend to drop my pen so I can slip it in my cleavage. You give me years of my life back that I will no longer be spent digging through my purse for endless minutes to find a lighter or my phone or my headphones or my debit card or that condom I found in my roommates desk that I stole to make it seem like I’m getting some.

You make me a woman. You set me free. And you give me life.

God created man in his image. Then created you, because you are better than all of us.

Thank you,

Your biggest fan

P.S. Call me.

Dear Library,

Remember that time you asked me why kids these days are spending so much time playing video games instead of hanging out with you, and I told you it was just radiation from their Giga Pets messing with their priorities? Yeah, I lied to make you feel better. Firstly, nobody has bought a Giga Pet since Clinton’s first in-office blowjay, so that should have been your first clue. The truth is that you have a lot to offer the world; you’re like a year-round Santa Claus with a bag full of amazingly imaginative stories, facts that I can’t believe are about the world I live in, and timeless influential literature, providing us with a cumulative narrative about our global history and culture experienced in the personal abstract space of our ever-expanding minds.

But you as, like, a thing? I’m literally only sitting behind this desk because I’m being paid to. I’ve been breathing this quiet, stagnant air and organizing all your shit in your specific god damn order (seriously, if you’re that anal about it, do it yourself) and listening to awkwardly stifled coughs and sneezes for the past six hours for the soul purpose of living in a capitalist society which requires me to make money.

You’re boring as fuck. That’s all there is to it.

Smooches,
Johanna

Dear Snow,

I think you’ve been confusing December with April for the past few years. December is the one with snow, and April is not. I know, easy to mix up. One is at the very end of the year with songs about sleighs that require you to function and the holiday where everyone wants it to be white (that’s your cue) and the big fat guy with reindeer giving out presents to everyone but poor people–again, with the sleigh. The other is in the spring, with a rhyme about rain and the affect it has on the following months, and a bunny that comes around putting eggs in tiny places to rot throughout the year…actually, they both have pretty stupid holiday characters. But here are some things to consider:

1) the Easter Bunny will probably freeze to death hiding eggs if you come around in April again.

2) Jesus (apparently) rose from the dead for Easter, which is generally in April. You don’t want him to come back and have to brush snow off his car, do you? Bad form, Snow. Bad form.

3) You’re going to put Christmas hats off the market because you’re not around when the proper holiday calls for them. What, you think they’re tacky or something? Just because they don’t look good on you, you think you can just get rid of them? Selfish!

What I’m trying to say, and I think I speak for most people in this region of the country, is that everyone would really appreciate you more if you’d stick to your allotted months and not get all up in springtime’s business. I know you get a lot of shit, with people hating snowfall and pissing their names into you and turning you into balls and starting wars. So it’s understandable that you’d develop a complex and get confused when trying to please people. But really, Snow, think about this: would they stick around if they actually hated you? No, they would move. Probably to the equator. Because even in the south you still like to fall sometimes–which, by the way, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.

The point is that I feel much happier brushing snow off my car in December thinking about how the semester’s almost over and I get to go home and drink hot chocolate or go sledding, than doing the same thing in April when the semester’s almost over and I wind up homicidally pissed because I want to do is enjoy the warm spring weather and you’re just refusing to leave like the way-too-drunk guy at the bar. Only we can’t call the cops on you, and spelling inappropriate things on you actually does less than when we do it to him.

We all have flaws. I’m too pretty. You’re stubborn and self-conscious. Just do what you’ve always done–come around in December, leave sometime in March–and we’ll be cool.

Just think about it, Snow.

Sincerely,

Johanna

P.S. If you pull that whole snowing-in-May stunt again, I swear to Christ, I’m moving to the equator. And I’m going to spray aerosol cans into the air until winter is completely obliterated. I. Will. Destroy. You.

Dear Today,

Thank you for the lack of sleep.

Thank you for the stress.

Thank you for the nightly kitten

scratches, I’m just blessed.

Who needs a night of sleep

to recover from disease?

I’d rather have my best friends cat

pounce on my face, yes please!

Thank you for the lack of air in

the back tire of my car.

Squatting in gas station puddles–

That’s how every day should start!

Thank you for the old ass broad

driving slow in front of me.

I didn’t want to be on time.

Clearly, neither did she!

Thank you for the day at work,

for Thursdays are the greatest.

No Friday night distractions,

and tonight we’re open latest!

Thank you for the weather,

I just love the color gray.

The chilly rain, the icy roads;

they really make my day.

And if, Today, you love me

(and you very, clearly do)

I won’t get to Kwikfill in time,

and then I’ll get the flu!

Much love,

Johanna Rose