The brands with which we surround ourselves prop us up, make us feel sexy and beautiful, when in reality we're pretty dumpy creatures.

We just watch anything speed by. To stop and really ponder what a product label says, or the tagline on a TV commercial, might be inherently silly. Those are things that are almost designed to be thrown away.

Surprise keeps the reader awake. The only alternative is to continue saying what the reader is expecting. What fun is that?

Negative space is important. When I teach students to read critically I advise them to look for what the author isn't saying just as carefully as for what he or she is.

I want to leave my readers with a sequence of ideas/phrases that makes them question something they'd taken for granted. Or that confuses them to the point that they laugh, but contains one or two phrases/lines that stick in their minds.

Humor and absurdism are inevitable. If you look at our current massive flow of consumer products and digital communication and related media from a sort of astute perspective and carefully state what you see you can't help but sounding like you're joking.

The brand is lying about something, or at least misrepresenting it. When I read a bottle of shampoo or moisturizer or other beauty product, I always perceive a dark subtext. The words haunt me. It comes across as humorous to the reader/audience, but in fact the words really do make me a little bit queasy. Nothing is as easy or natural as consumer brands want us to think - no problem is as resolvable. Your hair will fall out, eventually. Yet we do have these brands, and we line our shelves with them. There's an inherent irony.