Unsolicited Advice

I am of course not going to tell you to try all the drugs and booze you can get your hands on in college. I am obliged by the tradition of covering my ass to mention that you can hurt yourself with them if you're not careful, that you can get into a great deal of legal trouble over them, and that at least in most parts of the US, having a drug charge on your record automatically renders you ineligible for some kinds of financial aid, and might get you kicked out of school. The above has never in the entire course of history actually prevented any sufficiently-determined human being from getting wasted. Running for a moment with the fiction that you are all squeaky clean little boys and girls who would never think of touching the locoweed or the demon rum, I am going to pretend that you have a "friend" who is thinking of getting into these sorts of things, and I am therefore going to give you some advice to pass on to them. First off: If you're going to do drugs, d...

Pot noodle has the nutritional value of cardboard, and the sodium content of those salt licks you used to give your gerbil. Man cannot live on coffee and Taco Bell alone. If you're going to go off to college on your own, you are going to have to devise some way of feeding yourself that doesn't result in a trip to the student health center for scurvy. There are a number of different ways you can handle this, but the one I recommend is learning to cook. You don't necessarily have to learn how to cook well , you just have to learn how to follow a recipe without courting disaster. Food is a kind of currency, in the dorms. If you're even a halfway-decent cook, people will spontaneously come up to you and offer to pay for all the ingredients if you just stand there and show them how to convert a miscellaneous pile of groceries into a meal. One can only eat so much microwave popcorn before one starts craving things like casseroles. And if that doesn't convince you, you...

You should always assume that at some point in your college career, you're going to break your fancy toys. College students live an annoyingly nomadic existence. You have to haul all manner of things around on your back from class to class every day, and then they chuck you out of your dorm at the end of the year. So one of your priorities, when buying electronics for school, is to either get something that will survive  anything short of thermonuclear war, or something that can be repaired  easily and cheaply. Survival largely depends on brand; some brands are good at making things rugged, some brands produce dainty fragile devices that quit working if you unexpectedly turn them sideways. Macbooks are notoriously hardy, especially if you spring for a Macbook Air with almost no moving parts. IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads are heavy as hell and not for moving around, but are constructed like tanks. Dell also has some Inspiron models that are intended to be "desktop replacements", ...

The only way to move painlessly is to own absolutely nothing. The next best way is to pay someone a lot of money to do it for you. Since you are about to be a college student, neither one of these options is tenable, so you're going to be stuck doing it yourself. First: Buy real luggage. You will thank me later. It can be cheap clearance luggage, but the idea here is to get a set of nesting suitcases which can be disengaged and filled with things for transport, and then reassembled into a matryoshka that takes up no more space than the largest piece in the set when they're all empty again. The wheels and towing handles will make your life much easier when you inevitably end up filling one of them with heavy things like books or shoes or your collection of lead scrap. The smallest one, usually overhead-bin size, will also come in handy on those rare occasions when some class project requires you to haul a lot of presentation materials across campus in the rain. Most sets also ...

Every so often when I go about chasing down stuff interesting actors do, I run across something I think would be useful to a totally different discussion. I mentioned a couple of entries ago that I've been watching A Very Peculiar Practice , and that Captain Awkward would be proud of the talking involved in the central romance, but the good Captain would probably also be proud of the talking in a lot of the other relationships as well. The character of Rose Marie, for example, is an intentional parody of the stereotypical view of militant feminists. She goes by just "Dr. Rose Marie" because she doesn't believe in surnames as "patronymics", and she espouses the view that sickness is something men do to women. She likes to talk about the evils of the "phallarchy". I don't mind this, actually -- this thing is part comedy, after all, and most of these people are supposed to be untenably insane. It's quite clear that she's not normal, and ...

I have, of course, been helping Moggie with her paper. I research things like I breathe, and I am desperately  amused that she's finally writing something on "Sidekick Studies", which I have been telling her she should be minoring in for years. There's a strangely small amount written on the role of the sidekick in literature, at least that I can find; the main source that most things cite seems to have been written up about a decade ago as someone's thesis and published in the popular press much more recently. I have also been trawling through YouTube looking for useful things, because that is what I do. It affords me an excuse to look through countless hours of footage of people I find highly entertaining. One of these people is Peter Davison. Moggie and I are firmly in favor of his entire career -- he does Doctor Who  things, some of the few sitcoms and drama-comedies that I've actually found amusing, and police procedural/detective series like Campion  a...

Unsolicited advice for the week: If you assume that people talk to you for any reason other than they want to talk to you, you will drive yourself insane. One of the other desk attendants at the dance studio spent the last half hour of her shift telling me an extensive tale of her interactions with this guy, which were a classic example of overthinking absolutely everything. She likes him, they spend a lot of time together, she once accidentally went on a five-hour date with him, and apparently they've hooked up. She is uncertain whether he wants anything to happen. I spent the entire conversation wanting to take her by the shoulders and shout, HE LIKES YOU HE LIKES YOU HE LIKES YOU, GO BANG HIM UNTIL YOU RUN OUT OF CONDOMS, STOP TO BUY MORE, AND THEN CONTINUE. She spent the entire conversation spinning reasons why he might be answering her text messages for hours on end even though he didn't want to. I don't know, without the invention of alcoholic beverages and the ...

Yesterday I found a blog called " Does Every Woman Have An Eating Disorder? " This... disturbs me. Greatly. I know I've written before about how I can't relate to a lot of girl-pop (and even young feminist!) literature, because basically all of it is predicated on the assumption that every woman hates her body. They mean well, but that's about all you can say for them. A lot of the pop stuff gives diet and exercise advice, which is generally stupid and not helpful, but at least not intentionally malicious; most of the feminist stuff preaches size/body acceptance, which is better but often has problems remaining all-inclusive rather than slipping into 'real women have curves' (so boyishly-built women and transladies who haven't had surgery or horomones aren't 'real'?) territory. It all presumes that the default state for woman is thinking that her corpus is a hideous blob, courtesy the evil bloodthirsty media, and that everyone is struggl...

One of my readers wrote me the other day and mentioned an intention to embark on the grand adventure of owning rats. I don't know if she's already got them or not, but if anyone else is interested in acquiring rodents, here are a few pieces of advice. Assuming that you haven't inherited your rats by accident or necessity -- I know several people who have ended up with rescue rats -- there's an easy way to ensure you get friendly, sociable critters. First, you find a pet shop that sells rats. Note that I do not say 'find a shop that sells pet rats'. Unless you specifically want a particular breed of fancy rat, like a dumbo or a rex, rats is rats is rats. The ones in the pet terrarium are exactly the same as the ones in the bin marked "snake food (small)". Snake food is often cheaper. (We took some un-fancy rats to the veterinarian once. I had a hell of a time making the appointment. The receptionist kept asking me what kind of rats they were. I e...

The good Captain has posted yet another piece of excellent advice about compliments and why it's not a really great thing to always argue with them. She is pragmatic and insightful, as always, and if she keeps this up I'm going to have to resort to just writing mash notes when I don't have anything to add. Hope AwkwardPartner doesn't mind, Jenn. For those who feel much more socially adrift and panic at the thought of trying this out without some visual examples, this  is how you politely take a compliment:   (Snaffled from Rikki Sixx , who conveniently just posted them to tumblr. I can't actually reblog on Blogger, so this'll have to do.) Note that it is totally okay to be really bashful, if that's how you feel. You can look away, or duck your head, or fiddle with your fingernails, or close your eyes briefly, if nice things still overload your thinky parts. You do not need to be regally unruffled at all times. You are not Grace Kelly. Even peo...

In the past couple of weeks, I have had more than one person ask me for advice on a situation that boiled down to, "X person is a member of Y demographic group which is traditionally oppressed in Z fashion, and also is acting like a histrionic wanker. If I tell them to fuck off, is that equivalent to Z? How do I make them stop getting their drama all over me without coming off as a complete Y-ist?" Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, the proper response to this is 'mu'. 'Mu', written with the character [無], is the traditional solution to many Zen koans, including the infamous, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" The ideograph's literal meaning is 'void', 'nothingness', or when attached to some other thing, 'lack or nonexistence of (second thing)'. It is the equivalent of searching the Great Database of the Cosmos for something and getting back MALFORMED_QUERY: 0 records found . In short, it mean...

So a couple of days ago, io9 posted a book excerpt  on "how to think like Sherlock Holmes -- and have a better life". And it's great, as far as it goes. The bit they publish is all about "motivation and mindfulness", which is pretty much how you pick up the skill in the first place. You have to actually give a damn before you can learn anything. I've been known to tell people who ask how I do this stuff that I have "the magical power of paying some fucking attention ," because that's the bedrock foundation of everything else that trick involves. (I also sometimes tell them "spooky psychic powers". This is because some people are superstitious idiots and won't accept another explanation. People who sincerely believe that magic is real and that science is wrong and evil because it doesn't know everything yet are surprisingly easy to deal with, if you can figure out how to tell them things in the proper mysterious fashion, and --...