A friend texted Joseph in the middle of recording to say that getting old is a bitch. Not the knees. Not the back. The lecturing. Her kids are in their thirties. She is not old — she has just been reclassified.

Two villains tonight. The tech-support warden, the adult child who has decided one forgotten password is a diagnosis, and who does the voice — the slow one, with the little pause in the middle. And the concerned committee, the relatives who caucus about you without you and turn up having already decided.

Joseph gets into the coup nobody announces: thirty years of being the family's operating system, quietly deleted in one afternoon because your kid knows one thing about a phone that you don't. Why "I'm just trying to help" and "give me that, let me do it" are not the same sentence. And the two things you are allowed to say at the same time — I understand you're scared, and give me back my phone.

She kept multiple humans alive through fevers, heartbreak and one truly regrettable haircut. She is not confused. She's just not in a hurry, and you've mistaken that for decline.

Got a mess of your own? Send it to [email protected].

More at betweenthecoversmag.com — or read the magazine free in the BTC Magazine app, iOS and Android.

Bitch Fest is a Between the Covers production.

Two performers, one family. The guilt-trip artist, who never asks for anything directly because a sigh does the work of a sentence. And the family martyr, who does everything for everyone and makes absolutely certain everyone knows the cost.

Joseph gets into the sentences that sound like love and function like a bill — "after everything I've done for you," "no, no, go, I'll be fine," "I just thought family mattered to you." Why guilt works on the people who care most and bounces off the ones who don't. And what happens the first time you don't take the bait.

Nobody is asking you to be cruel. Just to stop paying for a ticket to a show you never bought.

Got a mess of your own? Send it to [email protected].

More at betweenthecoversmag.com — or read the magazine free in the BTC Magazine app, iOS and Android.

Bitch Fest is a Between the Covers production.

Kelsey from Cleveland writes in because her seven-year-old daughter was the only child in her entire class not invited to a birthday party. The only one. When she asked the other mother what happened, the answer was: "oh, I just thought your daughter wouldn't enjoy it."

Sweetheart. She wouldn't enjoy it because you made damn sure of it.

Joseph gets into grade-school social politics, where seven-year-olds are vetted for guest lists harder than intelligence recruits and the mothers running it have less self-awareness than a reality star three martinis deep. Plus a tribute to Terry the crossing guard, who sees more drama before 8:45am than the entire cast of any Housewives franchise and does it in a reflective vest.

Got a mess of your own? Send it to [email protected].

More at betweenthecoversmag.com — or read the magazine free in the BTC Magazine app, iOS and Android.

Bitch Fest is a Between the Covers production.

A bonus one, because this could not wait until December. Or October. Or whenever we have all agreed the year is allowed to start.

It is September. Joseph is in Costco on Highway 7 buying sunscreen, in shorts, in twenty-eight degrees, and there is a fourteen-foot pre-lit Christmas tree in the middle of the aisle next to an inflatable snowman. Nobody says anything. Everybody just pushes their cart around it.

So he says something. Out loud. To a stranger.

This one is about the people who stole the calendar. The conference room that decided December should start in September. Gina, in a puffer vest and Uggs in August, posting an iced pumpkin spice latte captioned "fall vibes" while the trees behind her are bright green. Spirit Halloween moving into whatever died this year. And the one thing in this country that still happens exactly when it is supposed to: tomato season in Woodbridge, with the uncle guarding the pot and two aunts fighting about the basil.

Also a confession involving a fourteen-foot Christmas tree currently sitting in a garage in King City.

You are not getting ahead of December. You are deleting September.

Got a mess of your own? Send it to [email protected].

More at betweenthecoversmag.com — or read the magazine free in the BTC Magazine app, iOS and Android.

Bitch Fest is a Between the Covers production.

A bride writes in about a guest who arrived at her wedding in a floor-length white dress and then said, out loud, to her face: "oh, is this white?"

Girl. You bought it. You tried it on. You zipped it up. You looked in a mirror and you got in a car. At no point in that sequence did the colour come up?

That is not a question. That is an alibi. Nobody asks "is this white" unless they have already had the conversation with themselves and lost. Joseph gets into cousin Vanessa, the lace, and the moment she walked into the family photo like she had been invited into it.

Next week: the houseguest who stayed eleven days.

Got a mess of your own? Send it to [email protected].

More at betweenthecoversmag.com — or read the magazine free in the BTC Magazine app, iOS and Android.

Bitch Fest is a Between the Covers production.

You share a promotion. Haha. You share a diagnosis. Haha. You share funeral details. Haha.

A listener signing off as Left On Haha writes in about Nadia, who has one response to everything that happens in the group chat, and it is four letters long. Joseph gets into what "haha" actually is — not a laugh, but an exit. A way to be present in a conversation without ever being in it.

Also: the specific violence of being left on read by someone who is clearly typing, the friend who only surfaces when they need something, and why the group chat is where modern friendships go to be quietly downgraded.

Next week: the woman who wore white to a wedding.

Got a mess of your own? Send it to [email protected].

More at betweenthecoversmag.com — or read the magazine free in the BTC Magazine app, iOS and Android.

Bitch Fest is a Between the Covers production.

Eleven years. Eleven years of dinners, brunches and group trips, and Christine has never once had her wallet on her. Not lost it. Just never had it.

A listener signing off as Still Waiting On That Etransfer writes in about the friend who is always three taps away from paying you back and somehow never arrives. Joseph gets into why the person who forgets is never the one keeping score, why "I'll get you next time" is a sentence with no next time in it, and what it actually costs to keep quiet for a decade to avoid one awkward conversation.

Next week: the friend who replies "haha" to actual news.

Got a mess of your own? Send it to [email protected].

More at betweenthecoversmag.com — or read the magazine free in the BTC Magazine app, iOS and Android.

Bitch Fest is a Between the Covers production.

A woman writes in about her neighbour Lorraine, who came out with string and stakes to measure the property line. Four inches. Four.

Joseph gets into the particular madness of people who treat a shared fence like a contested border, the ones who know exactly where your recycling bin sat on Tuesday, and why the person with the most free time on the street is always the one policing it.

Plus a confession about what he has personally let happen on a neighbour’s lawn.

Next week: the friend who has forgotten her wallet for eleven consecutive years.

Got a mess of your own? Send it to [email protected].

More at betweenthecoversmag.com — or read the magazine free in the BTC Magazine app, iOS and Android.

Bitch Fest is a Between the Covers production.

A listener signing herself Death By Calendar Invite writes in with eleven hours of meetings a week and no time left to do the job those meetings are about. When she raises it with her manager, he books a call to discuss her bandwidth.

Joseph takes apart the whole performance: meetings to prepare for meetings, follow-up meetings to review them, and grown adults reading slides aloud to people who can read. The work does not vanish — it migrates into her evenings, unpaid and unacknowledged.

He also confesses his own version of it. He accepts nearly every invite he resents, nodding along while mentally somewhere else entirely — a man-shaped screensaver.

Three ways out: trade attendance for a written deliverable and a deadline, propose a short odd time slot, or ask for an agenda. That last one makes a surprising number of meetings quietly disappear.

Got a mess of your own? Send it to [email protected].

More at betweenthecoversmag.com — or read the magazine free in the BTC Magazine app, iOS and Android.

Bitch Fest is a Between the Covers production.

A bride two months out writes in, worn down by relatives who have quietly promoted themselves to unpaid wedding planners. The dress, the decor, the honeymoon — everyone has notes, nobody was asked.

Joseph’s diagnosis is not the advice. It is her habit of answering it. Treating every relative’s opinion like a customer complaint that requires a justification is what turns a wedding into a deposition. And most advice-givers are not thinking about her wedding at all — they are relitigating their own.

Includes a three-line script for shutting it down: past tense, no reasoning, no debate. Plus the relative who swapped out his centrepieces mid-reception without asking.

Some hurt feelings are the price of a boundary. Pay it.

Got a mess of your own? Send it to [email protected].

More at betweenthecoversmag.com — or read the magazine free in the BTC Magazine app, iOS and Android.

Bitch Fest is a Between the Covers production.