What makes you qualified to give people advice?

By Circe -
I'm qualified to give people advice because they keep asking me for it.

I have a reputation for being able to figure people out, so I get a lot of friends and acquaintances asking me for my opinion of someone they're starting to date, or whether some coworker is really being unreasonable or they're just too irritated to see straight. Other times people recognize that there's some sort of recurring problem in their lives and they can't unpack it by themselves. I make it a point to say the things that most people just think, and sometimes I'll make an observation about someone that shines a light on something totally unrelated. It happens pretty constantly. Some weeks I am just the goddamn Epiphany Fairy.

Very rarely, I'll pop up on Omegle and just give advice to completely random people. Last time I did that, I apparently brought enlightenment to a bisexual girl who wanted to be told to go for her crush, some guy who was having issues with having to see the girl who just dumped him in school every day, a Pakistani fellow whose parents wanted him to quit a relationship that was affecting his grades, and a dude somewhere in France who was on the fence about whether to buy a Citroën. About 99 times out of 100, the other person disconnects when I'm not interested in watching them type while they wank, but nobody who's accepted the offer of advice has ever complained.

So far as I know, none of my advice has ever gotten anyone pregnant, arrested, or killed, and a lot of people come back more than once. Like Dan Savage, however, my official position is that nobody should take my advice, ever, and if you do, I disavow any responsibility for anything that happens, good or bad. I am some random blogger on the internet, and for all you know I am a small Boston terrier who painstakingly types all this out with the eraser of a pencil clenched between her little dog teeth.

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