Advice for Someone

Montezuma is former Emperor of the Aztecs. He holds the World’s Record in AutoCAD Design.

Dear Montezuma,
My whole family is giving me hell because I don’t want to go to my sister’s wedding. They continually accuse me of being selfish. They don’t realize that I think weddings, marriage, and the very ideas thereof are stupid. They don’t realize that to me weddings are actually something I find disgraceful and defeatist. How can I make them understand that I think weddings are horrid without alienating them?
Scott
Queens, NY

Dear Scott,
You must, at once, realize that a marriage is not about you. Specifically, you are not what the marriage is about. Furthermore, your being is irrelevant to the connubial joining of a related person and an unrelated person. Additionally, the center of this public ceremony does not reside within coördinates approximating your location in spacetime. (Montezuma’s note: remind word processing manufacturers to include spacetime in their spellcheck tools. They are geeks, after all. (Montezuma’s further note: spellcheck is a common neologistic endocentric compound noun which should also be included in such word processing dictionaries automatically.)) Marriages are entirely about caloric intake at the afterfollowing secular receptionary service. As an evolutionary adaptation, the lifetime bonding of male and female organisms created an opportunity for the community of individuals to come together and share nutritional intake in an effort to increase the wellbeing of the whole. More food meant stronger individuals better able to protect progeny and possessions which in turn lead to greater gain for everyone. With the recent demise of evolution, such pressures are irrelevant. The aftereffects of such conditioning still exist and can be taken advantage of easily. This is the literal free lunch. Also, it is likely that your personal procreative pressures are still present. The same pressures exist in the other males and females present at the receptional activities. One may increase one’s happiness through conjugal variation following the consumption of calories and alcohol-based beverages. Being in situ during such activities gives one the standing to later speak out authoritatively and reasonably on the results of such bonding. As, traditionally, such bonding takes place not only between the individuals being joined, but the community, you will have entered into the contract fully yourself and will have lost no standing in the eyes of the community to speak on any developments which may arise. While one may certainly not care about the opinion of others, leaving them no room to complain makes it selfishly easier to complain one’s self in the long run.

Montezuma,
You Must Help Me! Recently, I put a pitcher of tea in the fridge for a few hours. When I tasted it again, I swear it tasted of apricots. Literally, it tasted of apricots. That makes no sense. Why would old tea taste like dried apricots? Please help me.
Lucy Sawyer
Utica Flats, Ponderada

Finally, a correspondent in Ponderada again! Lucy, you are the fifteenth person to communicate such an occurrence to me in as many months. It took quite a lot of fact checking and the staff here (recently lowered in number by the current outbreak of vegetarian flu) have worked very hard collating all the relevant materials. We took a scientific approach and so went out immediately to destroy a common freezing unit. No one smelled any apricots and so we decided to try another common freezing unit. After over a dozen tries, the local authorities became concerned and we were forced to leave the SvenCo home appliance department. Alfredo Ramon, head researcher, stumbled over the brilliant idea of a side-by-side comparison blindfold test. We set up the test in a nearby strip mall. 45 pitchers made from various materials were paired with 45 dried apricots. A canopy was placed over the whole assemblage to disguise the constituent parts of the test. Each pitcher and each apricot were provided with a tube connected to a funnel with a strap to be attached to the test subjects’ faces. A second table/canopy combination was set up nearby with nothing on the table as a control group. Subjects were then tested. 98% of the subjects detected a difference between the smell of empty pitchers and the smell of dried apricots. Only 75% of respondents at the empty table detected a difference between nothing and nothing. The test was repeated with full pitchers of tea. 99% of the subjects detected a difference in smell, while 75% of the control group detected such differences. Finally we requested purchase receipts for the last year from each letter writer claiming this dried apricot smell. It was discovered that you, along with everyone else who detected this smell had purchased a Celestial Seasonings’ brand of apricot flavoured tea. We have, however, discovered something of the smell of empty space.