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.

Priya from Oakville writes in about the school pickup line, and honestly, she is not describing a traffic pattern. She is describing a hostage situation with minivans.

Joseph breaks down the five parents who turn twenty minutes into full institutional collapse: the early-arrival spot hoarder who shows up before lunch, the wrong-way driver who has decided arrows are a suggestion, the dramatic goodbye parent staging a wartime farewell, the phone-call parker, and the chronically late one holding up forty cars without a flicker of shame.

Grown adults. In cars. Behaving like this. Daily.

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.

When did a kid's birthday party turn into a production? Cake and pizza became balloon installations, live mermaids, and goody bags that cost more than groceries.

Two parents write in exhausted, broke, and quietly judged for not keeping up. Joseph gets honest about his own years of Instagram-perfect sponsored birthdays — and why he finally walked away from all of it.

Kids do not need spectacle. They need presence. And no parent needs to go into debt to prove they are doing it right.

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.

Modern parenting, where mothers get audited for everything and fathers get a standing ovation for showing up once a season.

First, the mom being emotionally tackled by a Pinterest-obsessed PTA queen who treats store-bought cookies like a federal offence. Then the mother whose ex is crowned Dad of the Year for attending one soccer game, while she has been doing the actual work for years.

If you have ever felt invisible, undervalued, or ready to scream into a steering wheel in a school parking lot — this one is for you. The double standards get dragged, the Disney Dads get named, and the myth of the perfect parent gets dismantled. You are not crazy. The system is.

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.

One-sided friendships — the kind that drain you faster than your phone at one percent.

Two letters. A twenty-two-year friendship that quietly turned into unpaid emotional labour, and a best friend lost to an MLM spiral where every conversation is now a sales pitch with a ground-floor opportunity attached. If you have ever been guilt-tripped into being someone's 24/7 support line, or watched a friend you love start talking like a pyramid scheme, this is your permission slip.

Real friendship needs reciprocity. Not extraction, and not a downline.

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 workplace tyrants, one episode. The manager who thinks "after hours" is a suggestion and texts you like an emotional support employee. And the supervisor who runs staff meetings like a firing squad with a slide deck.

If you have ever been guilt-tripped for having boundaries, dragged in front of your coworkers for a mistake that was not yours, or told you can cover the weekend because you do not have kids — this one is your gospel. Joseph breaks down why these people thrive, how to shut them down, and how to get your time and your dignity back without setting your career on fire. Unless you want to. He supports that too.

Petty. Cathartic. Painfully accurate.

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

Read the magazine free in the BTC Magazine app — iOS and Android.

Bitch Fest is a Between the Covers production.

Two letters, one theme: the people who are supposed to have your back and somehow keep standing on your neck.

Rachel from Thornhill is drowning in a household where she is the only adult doing adult things. Sarah from Vancouver has a mother-in-law with opinions about her family — the kind that arrive dressed up as concern. Joseph takes both apart: why doing everything yourself teaches everyone that you always will, why anger is information and not a character flaw, and why the standard you accept is the standard you get.

No coloring-book advice. Just the thing your friends are too polite to say.

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

Read the magazine free in the BTC Magazine app — iOS and Android.

Bitch Fest is a Between the Covers production.