Upsetting Day: 101 Ways to Get Back At Your Ex (Patreon)

There's not a lot of set criteria for what makes a good 1900HOTDOG article. It can be a book, a building, a stack of puzzles, a historical incident, or an erotic cake. One rule I personally have is that if a piece of media has an intro like this, it's probably Hotdog material:

We're endangering animals? Hilarious. Is this a spiteful jokebook where most of the punchlines are psychological damage? Perfect.

In the fiction of this book, the author, Samantha Charles, is a licensed family therapist who works primarily with couples. In the intro to the book "Samantha" writes that revenge is a "healthy way of getting over a relationship gone sour." She also advises that you stay with the person you want to get revenge on so that you can maintain access to their home or office for vengeance reasons. Basically, Samantha Charles is a character from a thriller novel who's escaped into a joke book. A perfect setup for hilarity!

The About The Author section of the book also gently suggests she might be trying to get a cult off the ground. We love a Girlboss and who is more of a boss than a vengeance cult leader? I'm filled with a sense of grim foreboding, the perfect mood to start a jokebook!

Ok, what strategies does this "licensed family therapist" think we can use to enact vengeance on some guy who probably works at Applebee's? All of the advice/jokes-for-legal-reasons in this book sound best if you picture them being screamed at you from a moving vehicle. Let's start with number one. Usually, you have to go pretty deep into a book like this, past the normal stuff, to find the hotdog-worthy advice, but not this time. We're going to kick things off with:

First of all, why? If your ex Timothee Chalamet? Is this a Dune joke? Sand seems specific. If we were doing a bit, I could think of a funnier substance: Jell-O is a classic, maybe rubber ducks? Spiders? Many deadly, venomous joke spiders? I guess it depends on how much money you're willing to invest in your revenge. Sand is a fairly economical option for the vengeance-minded lady. Some of the suggestions in this book are way more expensive.

That's actually a pretty nice gift. Panties are expensive, and you have to pay that monthly; it's not a one-time payment deal. Are you willing to see a recurring charge on your credit card for, very heavy quotes, "vengeance?" With this one, you would need to decide how many pairs of vengeance panties you're willing to purchase. Are you looking for six months of vengeance? Nine months? If you buy a full year of panty vengeance you usually get a discount.

Sending things to your ex, usually of a sexual nature, is a recurring theme in the book. The evil therapist thinks that people hate gifts, I guess? She does get more specific later and says to send them to their office.

Again, vibrators can be expensive. This is just a gift. A gift that makes you cum! Enjoy your vengeance orgasms, bitch. I'm starting to wonder if the joke portion of this book is the author tricking people who read this book into buying presents for the ex. Where is the animal endangerment I was promised?

Ah, there we are. Maybe this is why so many shitty guys own snakes. That's pet shaving insurance. Shaving a dog sounds bad, but also, some people use animals like topiaries, and they don't really seem to mind. If I could give my dog a mohawk, I totally would, and I think it would look pretty cute. If you're planning to shave a cat, rest in peace. There aren't many ways this works out well as vengeance, and there's at least a thirty percent chance you accidentally make their pet more radical.

I see; they saved all of the animal trauma for the end of the book. How angry do you have to be to obtain a beehive? Any of these plans for vengeance are objectively hilarious if you break them down into each individual step it would take to achieve them.

Step 1- Get Angry

Step 2- Obtain little beekeeper outfit.

Step 3- Call a man who raises bees and ask to purchase bees from him. He's probably going to ask about your beekeeping setup, and if you say, "no no, they're to stuff in my ex's mailbox," he isn't likely to sell them to you. So you're going to have to lie to a beekeeper.

Step 3a- Learn how to lie to a beekeeper about the care and maintenance of bees OR

Step 3 (alt)- Hunt around public parks in your little beekeeper suit for free bees. And if you run into your ex while you're out bee hunting you'll have to pretend you're someone else or when they find the mailbox full of bees they may remember their interaction with you in the beekeeper suit. This could blow your cover.

This is far too complicated. Let's look at simpler vengeance.

Eloquent, simple, not a present, not expensive, doesn't involve bees. It probably doesn't work for vengeful men, though. You can try it! Who knows. It would probably haunt me if a man told me this, but mainly the logistics of how they achieved it.

So, I'm not a skier, but I Googled it, and I'm pretty sure this is homicide. It's rich people's homicide, so maybe you wouldn't go to jail for it. It could definitely break someone's leg, at least. There are a couple of vengeance ideas in this book that are just sort of low-calorie murder.

Does it count as a prank if it might cause a detective to show up at your door asking about your whereabouts on the night in question? Sure, it's not guaranteed to cause a car accident, but it's also definitely a pretty risky vengeance if you're someone who enjoys not being under investigation.

Wow, autopay has really ruined revenge. This is messed up, but also, unless your ex is abnormally stupid, they're probably not going to assume that the bills have simply stopped showing up because they don't have to pay them anymore. Again, there's a lot of commitment involved in this. You're hanging around your ex's mailbox a lot for someone who is no longer dating them, committing a whole bunch of federal mail fraud. I think you should ask yourself if this energy would be better spent finding someone new to terrorize, I mean love.

In the fiction of this book's universe, has the insane therapist who wrote it… done so as an act of vengeance against her own terrible ex? Not only that, but she hopes that the terror induced by her advising other people to stuff their ex's mailbox with bees will convince her partner not to break up with her for fear reasons? What a phenomenal twist. This is the best thriller I've ever read.

Someone saw the movie Fatal Attraction and thought, wow, this is so funny? Samantha Charles even sounds like the name of a sexy older therapist who seduces an eager young beekeeper into showering her nude body with bees even though he's MARRIED.

These jokes obviously suck. Any revenge advice that isn't legally actionable doesn't really work as revenge. The main thing I learned about getting back at my ex is that vengeance is expensive and time-consuming. I like to think of myself as a highly vengeful person, but this book has made me realize I might be too lazy for vengeance.

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