Score!

As Borat would say: "Great success!" One of the cosmetics PR firms I approached this week took the bait, promising to send me several hundred dollars worth of a "revolutionary" product that's been a mainstay in Oscar schwag bags for the past couple of years. Surely this one score will lead to more Oscar-worthy items. (Whatever gets me through the day, okay?)

I'll admit, my post-heist high did fade to reveal a touch of lapsed Catholic guilt. After all, I killed two commandments with one stone: I lied in order to steal. Then I had lunch with a couple of friends from the website where I was most recently employed as an editor/reporter. Weary and exasperated, they told me all about the latest employees to be unceremoniously fired, what sort of financial trouble the company was rumored to be in, and the tantrum thrown by my ex-CEO the previous day (I swear, when that man gets on a rant his eyes go black like the characters in True Blood when they were possessed by Mary Ann). Following that uplifting conversation, I returned home to wage email war with the accounts payable department of a widely read, highly regarded newspaper. Never mind how many years I've freelanced for said publication, they still can't remember to process my invoices. I haven't received a check for over two months, and I write a weekly column.

That's when I started to feel a little less guilty. Desperate times call for desperate measures, right? It's clear that no one plays by the rules, which makes it all but impossible to play fair and still stay in the game.

I think...