Bitch Fest with Joseph Tito

You've said it. Don't lie to me. You've looked at someone who loves you and said, "It'll take five minutes."

I said it to my husband. Frank has a very serious corporate job. I put him in a wizard costume for a Party City shoot. Then, when the shoot was over and nobody needed a wizard anymore, I walked him porch to porch through the neighbourhood in hair to his waist and a beard to his knees. For free. I had my husband working an unpaid shift for Party City.

This one is about the...

I would like to begin by being gracious about the election result. Unfortunately, you've downloaded the wrong podcast.

Angela Saggese lost the Ward 1 council race in Vaughan. The record: on May 29, 2023, as a York Catholic school trustee, she voted against flying the Progress Pride flag at the board office for June. The motion lost six to four, students walked out, and at that same meeting the board appointed her to its Gender, Sexuality and Catholic Education Committee. It's in the minutes.

Then the endorsements. Stephen Lecce, our MPP and the Education Minister when that vote...

There's a four-month-old pumpkin on my porch. No teeth. Her mother is holding out a pillowcase. Ma'am, that baby can't eat a Coffee Crisp. That's your candy. Take two.

No letter this week. It's Halloween, and I've been standing at that door for years taking notes. The mother forty feet back on her phone yelling "WHAT DO YOU SAY?" at a shark. The mom who answers for her kid like a publicist. The handmade traffic light who can't get up my steps. Every princess in a parka, because it's Ontario. The teenager in a hoodie who says...

The sign says pay by app. There's a machine right there. It's got a garbage bag over its head like it's being kidnapped.

No letter this week. This one's mine. I want somebody to tell me when leaving my car in a rectangle became a relationship. The dentist has a portal. Your kid's school has four apps. The menu is a sticker on the table and it wants to send you notifications.

The password that can't be one you've used before, and I've used them all. Pressing "I agree" to God knows what. Typing sixteen...

Nine years on social media. Two hundred thousand followers, mostly women, mostly moms, almost no gay men. Joseph has thoughts about that, and about the other seventy percent of what all of us do online.

The nail tapping. The "everyone's been asking" when nobody asked. The fit check nobody requested. The seven-part series about a brunch invitation. The grocery montage that takes more editors than a feature film. The motivational speech filmed in a parked Hyundai.

And the confession: he has walked into his own house more than once...

There's one at every school. She parks in the fire lane like it was built for her. Her daughter is an angel. Just ask her. In the office. At full volume.

Last week I asked you which moms you wanted roasted, and my DMs have never filled up that fast. So this week it's Brenda. Not one woman. A franchise. There's one in every plaza, like a Tim Hortons.

The four-minute voice notes that start with "I'm not trying to start anything." The second group chat, the real one. The birthday party that invited one...

A guest who brings her own dish, eats only that, and pulls a face at yours. So the host sends her home with a doggy bag of the food she wouldn't eat. A mother-in-law who has claimed the good holiday for ten years running. Two letters from Vaughan, both about the same thing: who gets to decide.

Plus the holiday group chat. The longest message you've ever seen, a reply to a question from nine messages ago, and one uncle who sends a thumbs-up. To what, Frank? What have you agreed to?

<...

I opened a bag of chips on Saturday and it exhaled. Half air. And on the front, in a little yellow starburst, it said NEW LOOK. Girl, the look is the same. There's just less of you.

This week we're going to the grocery store. Not to yell at the people who work there. Leave them alone. The kid on cash did not decide what butter costs. We're going after the people who decide what things cost, how much of it you actually get, and what the store knows about you when you walk in.

...

What your kid's teacher legally can't tell you about the classroom.

A five-year-old told his teacher he was going to rip her face off and eat it. She said, "Do you want salt with that?" That's the episode.

A teacher wrote in anonymously, because legally she can't tell you what happens in your kid's classroom. The daily meltdowns. The kicking, the biting, the scissors. The twenty-four other kids told to ignore it. The ten minutes of paperwork for a two-second incident. And the code teachers speak because it's all...

What actually happens when a school loses funding: one secretary, two schools, and the parent who yelled at the wrong person.

Three weeks into the school year I got an email saying my daughter was being switched to another class. So I went into that school like I was about to personally replace the Ministry of Education. No training. No experience. Just a daughter and a fucking opinion.

Then they told me why. Funding cuts. A class being cut. The secretary now splitting her time between two schools. The vice principal, same...

A woman writes in about a husband who has appointed himself Head of Loss Prevention for their marriage. He supervises her at the self-checkout. He audits the grocery bill. He announces to an entire restaurant that he is not tipping.

None of these places employ him.

Joseph calls him Dave, because this is Dave behaviour, and because Dave has been radicalized by a debit terminal. The trouble is that Dave isn't wrong. Tipping screens are out of control, the cereal box is a pamphlet, and they made the toilet...

Priya has a best friend who has cancelled on her eleven times this year. Eleven. Not in a lifetime — since January. The text lands about ninety minutes before, and it always says the same thing: ugh, I'm so sorry, today got away from me. Red heart emoji. Let's for sure do it soon. Soon never comes.

Joseph gets into why she started counting in March, and what it means that she did — nobody builds a case file on a relationship that's working. Why "I thought you of all people would understand" isn't an apology, it's...

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.

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 yo...

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...

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...

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...

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 on...

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 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.

...

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 ve...

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...

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...

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...

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 yo...

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.

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 ti...

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.

...