The beginning of a new month is just another opportunity to learn the wrong lessons from the previous month's personal disasters, to clumsily redress past failures in such a way that everything is made worse and even more convoluted, and to embark on new and even more ill-advised and poorly-conceived adventures in unsuccess so that one has something substantial to regret thirty days down the line. How hard it is to keep up, every month presents a new challenge. How do you keep failure fresh over and over, how do you keep from simply repeating stale catastrophes? Besides, if you keep making the same mistakes you might learn from them and then where would failure be? I look at other people who somehow regularly come up with novel ways to sabotage their own happiness and it makes me ashamed, to the point where if someone genially asks me what I've failed at lately I won't even want to respond, I just look away with a pained expression. I mean why bother. I'm an amateur. To fail at failing, unfortunately, is not the same as success, at least not in this nation of bland achievers. "It could be worse" is more of a weary European motto.