Hey relax - we’ve all be there. By ‘there’ of course I mean hunched over a computer screen in a spasm of social anxiety, feverently scanning for evidence that we’re loved, liked, or even just invited. If checking your facebook and myspace accounts were like eating a piece of fruit, I’d nail my 5-a-day by lunchtime.

Since we’re the first generation to take for granted the presence of mass global communications in our life’s, some would have it that we are the internetgeneration. Fuck that. Every cardiac-courting company exec to every thick-rimmed twitching caretaker in adult-land can email bad jokes to their friends and source decent beastiality with just as much efficiency as us. No, it’s the social networking phenomenon that defines us. We are the facebookgeneration.

Ever had a ‘grand-slam’? That’s when you log in to myspace and find you have one of each – a ‘friend added’, ‘new message’ and ‘new comment’ all at once. It’s like hoping for a decent haircut and realising when you stand up they’ve given you a new set of threads, some cool designer stubble and three inches on your dick as well. Of course it could turn out that the new friend is some awful band, the new message from an automated cam-whore and the comment an advert for some night you can’t afford to go to. In other words, the threads could be too small, the stubble could be ginger and your cock could still be way below the male average (5.6 inches).

Still, one major achievement of the facebookgeneration is to have consolidated all those unique school-yard methods of letting someone know you fancy them - hair-pulling, name-calling, dead-arms – into a simple ‘poke button’. Hours otherwise wasted on posturing and goading reduced to a single mouse click, so we can all get on with the simple sex sum much quicker (proximity + alcohol).

Social networking websites also allow us to indulge our private fetish for post-break-up self-torture. The online equivalent to slashing your arm with a compass, checking your ex’s profile page for any shred of evidence that they have dared move on is surely a staple of modern young heart-break.

One positive thought is that it might just be the thing that keeps us all together. That in a vague, shopping-catalogue type of way at least, we will all be in touch forever, poking one another with our cyber-walking sticks and listing our health complaints under ‘interests’…

They say that anyone who claims not to masturbate is a liar. They also say that anyone who chooses to write a blog about masturbation is an idiot.

As with most physical acts, when women masturbates they conjure an erotic, sensual aesthetic in which human beings seems at one with a deeper spiritual self. When men masturbate they can only ever look like one thing, and that thing is a monkey.

For many of this current generation of men, masturbation began roughly at 11 o clock on a Friday night with ‘Eurotrash’ on Channel Four. This worked out fine as long as the programme focussed on bare-breasted Swedish models. It was when the action turned without warning to a naked German man pretending to be a dog that the enterprise collapsed a little. A deliberate prank on 13-year olds everywhere?

Like counting to a million, it is always easy to be put off masturbation and have to start again. Hearing your Mother hover the stairs is perhaps the most common cause of this problem.

It was once thought that masturbation would turn us mad or sexually deranged. We now know that, if anything, it ensures the opposite. The best time to masturbate is the same as the best time to have a cigarette: when you realise that you haven’t had one for a while, and no one is around to disapprove.

It could be argued that, in our cynical consumer age, newspapers are one of the few remaining items that represent ‘value for money’. The problem is that you only ever read about ten pence’s worth of the sixty-five you had to lay-out in the first place. If you’re clever and socially minded, you read your paper from front to back. If you’re a man it’s the other way round.

People with time and money can look at a Newspaper stand as a menu offering a three-course meal. The Times is the stodgy main, The Mirror the guilty pudding and The Daily Mail a tooth-pick to prise irritating minorities out from between your teeth.

Most people prefer the tabloids because there’s more about celebrities, less about Venezuela and the puns are funnier – although walking around campus, a copy of The Guardian does more to enhance your reputation for left-wing intellectualism then The Daily Sport.

There is a misconception in this country that Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun is the newspaper with the widest circulation. It is actually The Metro. The Metro can be found on the floor of every bus, train and tram left open at the ‘60 Second Interview’ feature with half a muddy foot-print stamped over it. It is essentially an feat of eclectic plagiarism that renders all non-free dailies impotent.

They say that the scope of human thought first expands, then gradually decreases. That is why we go from reading about Middle Earth as children, to Planet Earth as teenagers, to Britain as adults, to the ‘Pocklington Post’ as seniors.

Anxiety no. 4123 – Using Public Transport

Public transport falls into the following categories: planes, buses and taxis. Trains are public, but only occasionally used for transport. The rest of the time they are an excuse to eye-ball electronic notice boards and make irate phone calls to loved ones you suddenly feel you may never see again.

Airports are like book-ends on either side of your holiday that let you know when your allocated slot of fun is to begin and when it must come to an end. As everybody is operating in a different time zone, the rules of time do not apply in airports. That is why children sleep while adults scream and cry, and every single person’s bag is ‘always the last one out’.

Buses would be pleasant if it wasn’t for the fact you have to share them with other people. The earlier the bus you get, the weirder the other people are. As with all public transport, giving up your seat for an elderly passenger is correct etiquette. Unlike all other public transport, it is not etiquette for the driver to wait for the elderly to sit before they pull away. Despite this bad-mannered disposition, no one has ever left a bus without thanking the driver for all that they have done for them.

Taxis represent the pinnacle of public transport, because you public can dictate exactly where they go. They are also the only mode of public transport that will happily wait for you at a cash machine. Taxi drivers all seem like odd characters, because most of them are so tired of making small talk that they are willingly and expertly weird.

Some of the most interesting conversations with taxi drivers can be instigated by asking them whether of not they can ‘relate’ to the character of Travis Bickel.

Anxiety no. 4122 – Public Toilets

Public toilets are an arena in which you feel like a Man or a Mouse – depending on how much alcohol you’ve had to drink. The first decision that must be made is whether to use the urinal, or the cubicle. The former takes a Man, the latter, a Mouse.

The Man will invariably sigh, glance down to aim, then look straight ahead. A pale enamel square will be studied as intently as a rabid dog if another Man is standing by the same spot. The Mouse may feel a loss of pride for having opted for the cubicle, and will compensate for such with a token nose-blowing. This lets the Men outside know that he is there for the tissue, not the privacy.

First-class public toilets are generally reserved for the disabled and, luckily, are almost always free. You get cushioned seats, a full roll of toilet paper and an extra foot of leg space. There’s even a red chord to pull if you get stuck.

Public toilets are the only places outside of pornography where it is perfectly legal for large groups of men to handle their genitals in front of one another.

Anxiety no. 4121 – Text Messaging

Text messaging is useful for two things: arranging where to meet your friends, and keeping in touch with people that you can’t be bothered to actually talk to.

It is the worst possible method of having a serious argument with a friend or a loved one. Along with MSN Messenger, text message is the platform from which we conduct all of our most important heart-to-hearts. It is also where we have most of our arguments with friends and loved ones.

When you’re writing an angry text message, you tend to run over the 160 letter limit. This results in your recipient receiving half of it straight away and half of it two days later. Trying to shorten your message requires going back over it, removing the ‘g’s from ‘ing’s and changing all the ‘to’s and ‘too’s to ‘2’s. Twice.

After you’ve sent a text message, you immediately refer to your ‘sent’ box to re-read what you have said. After a moments lament, you read their text messages in chronological order from your ‘inbox’. You then re-read theirs and your own in the exact order that they were sent.

The winner of a text message argument is usually the one who first understands that the most offensive, cutting and poignant text message they can send is no text message at all.