Life Advice: The Ultimate Guide™ to Succeeding during Upper Year

As I’m sure you all know, I, Emily Green, am thriving. Upper year can be a very difficult time, so  here are my top 50 tips to surviving and thriving throughout your 11th grade year.

So here it is: The Ultimate Guide™.

1. Pretend you don’t speak English. If you can’t speak, they can’t expect you to write.

2. To save time, put a coffee IV straight into your veins instead of drinking it.

3. Write your 333 about the Puritans. Everyone loves the Puritans; they’re so zealous.

4. Go soul searching.

5. Sacrifice a lamb to the gods of chemistry.

6. Drink milk, get STRONG bones.

7. Sleep a minimum of 8 minutes every night.

8. Open your heart to love.

9. Just kidding, you don’t have time for love.

10. Open your heart to lust.

11. Listen to Simon and Garfunkel and cry, just a little bit.

12. Take up the banjo and write sad folk music about your experiences.

13. Swim in the river and become one with the lampreys. Lampreys don’t have to do work.

14. Be exclusively nude. Nobody can say your dress isn’t fingertip length if there is no dress. This will save time and societal pressure to be “trendy.”

15. Become an emo. Hamlet was an emo and it worked out for him. Right? I haven’t gotten to the end of Hamlet yet.

16. Sometimes, you gotta just take the L.

17. Lock yourself in your room and don’t come out until senior spring.

18. Hiss at preps when you see them laughing. If you can’t have fun, nobody else is allowed to either.

19. Shave your head so you don’t have to waste time brushing your hair.

20. Join a cult centered around Tagg Romney, Mitt Romney’s eldest son.

21. Start a cult centered around Tagg Romney, Mitt Romney’s eldest son.

22. Consider dropping out and joining the Coast Guard. Someone’s gotta guard those coasts.

23. Learn guitar and join a roaming hippie street band to play away the pain on those gentle, twangy strings.

24. Pay a prep to bring D-Hall food to your dorm room so you don’t have to leave.

25. Join a sport. It isn’t too late to row your way to Harvard yet!

26. Stare longingly out the window at people frolicking in the nice weather while you’re inside writing your 333.

27. Hop a freight train straight out of town. The nice assembly poets said to do it, so it’s gotta be a good idea.

28. Do yoga. Find your center.

29. Think about how much you miss your cats and cry a little bit.

30. Wear shades and block out the UV rays (and h8ers.)

31. Go to the beach. Join the dolphins. Swim away.

32. Apply for a position in the Trump administration. You don’t need any qualifications.

33. Join a punk band and write angsty music about your chem grades.

34. Succumb to capitalism.

35. Learn to do interpretive dance. Use interpretive dance to express your feelings. Cry on stage while “Drops of Jupiter” by Train plays.

36. Become Tagg Romney.

37. Drink a tall glass of chocolate milk. To take the edge off.

38. Write snarky humor articles to distract you from your intense suffering.

39. Sleep for literally three days straight, then ask to combine the dickeys.

40. Transfer to Andover.

41. Don’t fight your inner demons. Just let them win.

42. Cry into a bowl of whole wheat, mildly soggy d-hall pasta.

43. Make up an excuse to use the hot tub in the Athletic Trainer’s Room. “It’s good for my restless leg syndrome.”

44. Go to the library. Never leave.

45. Do your best. Just kidding, that isn’t enough.

46. Become nocturnal, except also don’t sleep during the day.

47. Claim your puffy eyes are due to a pinkeye outbreak.

48. Punch a canvas and call it modern art. Ask to be paid $20,000 for it.

49. Buy a sled and make lowerclassmen drag you to class, like a dogsled team. This way, you can read on the way to class.

50. Hide in a cardboard box.