Six Bad Pieces of Advice You Should Never Follow – what kind of a title is that? An honest one, that’s what it is. Honesty is a rare commodity OTI, as anyone who’s ever clicked a link called ‘One Weird Trick…’ will attest.
True story: Internet ads won’t make you thinner, younger or stronger, nor will they furnish you with a new iPad.
This article makes no such claims: all you’re getting is all you’re promised in the title – and not a jot more. If you’re genuinely looking to get thinner or stronger, here’s one weird trick you can follow: get off the internet and do some goddamn exercise. It works wonders for the corpulent frame.
Bad advice is bad
Treasure this brutally frank article, for it may be lacking in good advice, but at least it is honest about its failings: these tips are baaaaaad – so read them, but whatever you do, don’t follow them.
The web is awash with people trying to dispense well-meaning advice. People who think they know better than you because they got an HNC in Sociology from some shitty polytechnic – or worse still, started a weblog and decided this made them a relationship guru, qualified to dispense tropes about life, the universe and erectile dysfunction.
Thankfully, I’m not like those guys. You see, every piece of advice in this article is unashamedly bad – I know because I tried it. I tried it so that you don’t have to. That’s right: years ago, I deliberately made a series of wrong decisions so that in the future I could write a reflective article about them for your benefit. Selfless or what?
If at first you don’t succeed, start a weblog
My life isn’t one catastrophic series of failures, incidentally: there’s been good bits in there as well, but I’m saving them for another article, as soon as I’ve achieved six things that warrant boasting about. Only last week I successfully managed to pee without splashing a drop on the seat, taking my notable life achievements to three. At this rate, my article on epic wins will be published before I’m 60.
1. Always put off till tomorrow what you should do today.
Anyone who lives their life by a single mantra is a jerk. I’m a jerk, and this is the mantra that guides me. Don’t follow it – it’s fiendishly bad advice. Sure, at first life seems easier when you can defer all responsibilities, but one day you’re gonna wake up to find over 9,000 debt collectors at your door, six dead hookers festering under your bed and a woman claiming back-dated child support for a brat you supposedly fathered – and although you can’t remember slipping her a length, her claim that you shirked wearing a condom, reasoning ‘I can wear one tomorrow’ seems highly credible.
2. Love thy neighbour as thyself
Some famous dude coined this adage (his name eludes me), and I can tell you now: it’s bull crap.
I dunno about you, but when I love myself, there’s a tube sock on my dick and 32 browser tabs open. If you really wanna show some affection for your neighbour, bake him some cupcakes or something, but whatever you do, don’t love him as thyself. Love is supposed to be an intangible concept; not a touchy-feely sticky one.
3. Don’t do drugs
This is possibly the worst piece of advice I’ve ever heard (and disregarded). Do drugs. Seriously: do them. Many of the greatest nights of my life have occurred while on drugs. The stories I could tell you about times I was epically mashed off my tits. Like, um…yo, it’ll come to me in a sec… Actually, can I get back to you on that one? My mind seems to have gone blank all of a sudden.
Drugs aren’t bad – people are bad. If you’re a dickhead straight, you’ll be even more of a dickhead chinged off your nut; that’s about all you need to know about drugs. Taking them won’t make you a better person, but neither will shunning them altogether.
The solution? Drink responsibly and do drugs – in moderation. Smoke weed, snort gak and bosh swedgers – but avoid heroin unless you’ve got the willpower to avoid turning into a gouching zombie that will suck a big bag of dicks for a small bag of brown.
When I’m in charge of the curriculum, drugs awareness classes are going to be so much more educational.
4. Love the body you’re in
Seriously – don’t. You may think that 16 stone and three chins is acceptable, but the rest of us don’t. Do not – under any circumstances – love the body you’re in, even if it’s damn sexy. In the immortal words of Patrick Bateman, ‘You can always be thinner’.
That said, don’t take self-improvement to the point of hating the body you’re in. Ask a man what he’d rather piece – a BBW who’ll let him motorboat her with the lights on, or a size six cutie who’s too shy to remove her top – and he’s gonna plump for the plumper every time.
Sadly, the maxim holds true that the less weight a girl has, the more inhibitions she has. Get it sorted womankind – for your sake as much as ours.
5. When you hear a knock at the door as you’re bagging two kilos of weed and a shout of ‘Police!’, be sure to panic and lob the grass out the window before discovering that it’s only a mate playing a prank, by which time you’ve been busted by the real police while trying to recover your stash.
Er…this one’s kinda personal. Can we just move on?
6. If you screw up your Highers, you’re screwed.
Good news kids: this over-preached axiom is officially a load of cobblers. (What the hell are cobblers anyway?) When you’re 16, getting good grades seems like a pretty big deal because your rentals and teachers drum it into you that it’s A Pretty Big Deal. Turns out they were lying: employers really couldn’t give a damn whether you got an A or a D- for Modern Studies because in the real world, Highers ain’t worth jack.
That’s not to say you should spend your teens skipping school and doing drugs (in moderation): you’re still gonna have to do some work, cos that’s just life, innit? The good news, however, is that if you do screw up your Highers, your life isn’t over. Unless you an hero of course, in which case it really is over.
So what have we learned today?
Six bad pieces of advice, six good lessons to take away with you:
1. Deal with shit when it happens.
2. Ignore Jesus.
3. Do recreational drugs – recreationally.
4. Get fit – not fat.
5. Getting high doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive to getting Highers.
6. Ignore any advice you read on the internet – including this advice.
Confused? Don’t be – everything will be clarified in next week’s blog: Six Good Pieces of Advice You Should Sometimes Follow.
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Cobblers: Shoe makers. Cobblers Awls – stitching tool – Cockney rhyming slang for “Balls” (as in… yer baws). so… Cobblers = “Balls”.