Enter Week 62 of The Invitational: How to stress yourself out

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In this week’s Invitational contest, Week 62:

Tell us a funny strategy for increasing anxiety, like examples paraphrased from the 1966 book "How to Make Yourself Miserable" that begin the March 7, 2024, Invitational at GeneWeingarten.substack.com or directly here. Don’t make them any longer than those unless they’re immensely readable; much shorter entries would be perfectly fine as well. (As in many Invite contests, they might be “signed” by some famous person, fictional character, etc.)

How to format your entries: As usual, please submit each individual entry as one single paragraph; i.e., don’t push Enter until you’re starting the next entry, or else your joke may fly into multiple pieces when the Empress sorts them all into one big anonymous list.

Include as many as 25 entries in the area below where it says "Your answer." It's best to copy them in from another document so you'll have them if your computer suddenly dies or something, or if you click to submit the form and something goes wonky.

Note: Your auto-reply confirmation might be missing formatting, with everything squished into one big blob of text, but it seems that it's nothing to worry about; the entries have been coming out fine on this end.

If you don't get a confirmation within a few minutes that you've sent your entry -- you've searched your email filters (e.g., Updates or Promotions in Gmail; and good ol' Spam) and there's nothing -- don't just send it over and over! Feel free to contact the Empress at myerspat@gmail.com and she can check if it got through (put something in the subject line that refers to The Invitational). She might not get back to you immediately but promises that you won't miss the deadline.

Entry deadline is 9 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday, March 16. Results will be posted in The Gene Pool on Thursday, March 21. Entries will sometimes be edited by the Empress and/or Czar for space, taste and just better wording of the joke. Unfortunately, time doesn’t permit full consultations about every editing tweak.

Every entry will be personally read and ruminated on (ewwww!) every week by either the Czar or the Empress or, when there's time, by both of us.

Tell us the name you want to be credited as, along with the town you live in; e.g., Joe Blow, Bendover, Miss. (this is the format we strongly prefer).
In the event you win and you would like the Unfabulous Prize mailed to you, please enclose a mailing address. U.S. addresses only; if you're from out of the country, you'll have to settle for Glory. *

If you have ideas for the headline for the contest results and/or the subhead above the list of honorable mentions, submit them here (no more than 10 each). Feel free to search through the All Invitational Text file at NRARS.org to see whether we've used that headline already. (If you don't have anything for this category, just skip it.)

This is also the place to let us know if the email address linked to your paid subscription is different from the one you gave above, and we wouldn't recognize it. (If your name is part of your email address, we can find it that way. We're still doing things with actual human fingers!)

Your answer

We used to ask you to leave them here, but we're not seeing them ... So: don't! Instead, feel free to send any questions, comments, complaints, general chat, arrangements for bribes, etc., directly to the Empress at myerspat@gmail.com. To submit questions, etc., in advance to The Gene Pool, please go to bit.ly/genepool-question . Gene would like to get lots and lots of questions! You can also submit public questions for Pat, either Invite-related ones for the Empress or grammar-type ones for Pat the Perfect.

A copy of your responses will be emailed to the address you provided.

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