Dear Aliens: Vacations Are Fun!

Except when they're depressing or frustrating or sad or excruciating.

Dear Aliens,

I hope everything is going well on your planet, whatever “going well” entails. (More Bristle-Headed Snarfs running around than usual, and their faces are more delicious than usual? Just a guess.)

Since you’re my brand new pen pal, I wanted to update you on some of the happenings here on Planet Earth.   

This is the beach. It’s a highly coveted location where Earthling land meets Earthling water. I am going to this location soon with my Earthling family, which is the name we give to the Earthling humans we grew up with. Because we spent so much time with our Earthling relatives when we were small, they can make us feel happy and nostalgic about our glorious childhoods, and they can also make us feel sad and anxious and enraged about the shitty times during our otherwise-pretty-fun childhoods, and they also sometimes make us feel deeply depressed about how abjectly miserable our childhoods were.

Earthling families often make us feel all of these ways within the course of a few hours. We can feel elated and loved and close one minute and then feel harshly judged and gaslit and undermined a few minutes later. Because we Earthlings just adore suffering (What’s better than suffering? I can’t think of anything!), we often like to drag our girlfriends and partners and spouses and children with us to the location where the dirt meets water, so they can enter similar portals to the happy and unhappy memories of our pasts and get sucked into our daily cycles of denial, projection, bickering, defensive overreaction, unprovoked attack, etc, etc.

This is called “going on a vacation” and it’s “super fun”!

This is a bathing suit. We drape skimpy pieces of cloth like this one across our predatory frames before entering the water. Often when Earthling humans put on a bathing suit, they are hoping to look like they were born a little bit more recently than the date on which they were actually born. Many Earthling humans also prefer to appear as if they’re smaller than they usually are when they wear these skimpy pieces of cloth, because they’ve been tricked into believing that bony, diminutive Earthling bodies are more exciting to rest your eyeballs on than those bodies that are less tiny and angular. What’s strange is that these skimpy pieces of cloth almost always make Earthling bodies look much less diminutive than they do when fully clothed!

But making your Earthling body smaller is just one impossible goal that Earthling capitalists give us so we stay fixated on difficult but pointless fake achievements instead of noticing that they’re overheating our planet and destroying its natural resources while they plan an escape route to another planet that they’ll use once they’ve fucked this one into the ground. Makes sense, right?

Thinking about this or putting on a bathing suit at all can make many Earthling humans want to eat a dozen glazed donuts very quickly in one sitting. Donuts are delicious fried gluten lumps and eating a dozen of them all at once is what we call a “life hack.”

Luckily, Earthling vacation time is often evenly divided between lying around doing nothing in a skimpy piece of cloth, and shoving more and more glazed donuts and other fried Earthling foods into our food holes. When we aren’t napping while half naked and eating while half naked, we’re generally having “fun” with our families, either by bickering with them openly or by criticizing their bad choices behind their backs with our other family members.

This is a cocktail. When the napping and donuts and bickering get to be too much, we like to pour this beverage into our food holes, because it changes the alcoholic content of our bloodstreams in ways that make us even stupider. As it turns out, being very stupid and insensitive is much more relaxing than being very smart and neurotic and oversensitive. This is why families full of “smart” (relative to other Earthlings, still absurdly stupid to you aliens), neurotic, oversensitive humans like to mix up cocktails and pour them into their food holes in each other’s company. Stupid insensitive Earthlings like to do this, too, actually. Some Earthling humans think it’s “unhealthy” and “dangerous” and “self-destructive” to do this, and they’re probably right about that, but we feel sorry for them anyway.

After inserting cocktails into our faces, the whole family chuckles merrily and watches the sunset and it’s all very jolly and meandering and dipshitty, which is great. The gaslighting won’t begin again until the morning, and that’s nice to know. It’s nice to look around through the haze of strong booze and think, “I luff these muverfuggers, I rilly do.”

Just don’t say that out loud. That’s not how Earthling families do it.

Anyway, I hope you’ll get a chance to go on the alien equivalent of a vacation very soon. But then, maybe you’re on vacation right now. Maybe you’re hovering in the skies over our heads, waiting for the right moment to pulverize all of our cells and seize control of our overheated planet so you can replace juicy Bristle-Headed Snarf meat with delicious glazed donuts, which are far less full of bristles.

That would be incredibly suspenseful and cinematic! Great optics, too. (Here on Planet Earth, we love thrills and drama and great optics even more than we love stuff like “preventing our cells from being pulverized by a foreign power.”)

Look, just enjoy yourselves, OK? Make that your top priority, no matter what. If what you enjoy the very most is pulverizing human cells, well then, you do you.

Have a great summer!

Molly