How to Be a Person

by Lindy West

  This is a collection of the best advice The Stranger can muster (it’s pretty good!). Rest assured, any errors or omissions are no one’s fault except Dan Savage’s. The three other co-authors of this book, who did not show this page to Dan before sending it off to the printer, apologize on his behalf.

  INTRODUCTION

  Just Calm Down, Don’t Freak Out, All Kinds of Things Are About to Happen to You

  Unless you grew up with assholes (in which case, congratulations! You escaped!), you’ve spent your life thus far happily sheltering under Mom and Dad’s warm, clucky wings. Now, for the first time ever, you are alone. All alone. You are excited because you get to drink and bang people, but—fess up!—secretly, you are also terrified. You probably don’t know how to do things like pay an electric bill, or do your taxes, or get an abortion, or stop crying. But stop! Stop crying. Don’t freak out. You’re definitely going to fuck some stuff up. At some point, you’re going to get a red envelope that’s like “YOU DIDN’T PAY YOUR ELECTRIC BILL SO WE WILL MURDER YOU NOW.” If that happens, you know what? You’ll figure out how to pay the bill. If they shut your electricity off, you know what? The food in your refrigerator will spoil. If that happens, you know what? You can get new food. If you overdraw your bank account paying the bill so they’ll turn your refrigerator back on and you can refrigerate your new food, you know what? You’ll get a part-time job to make some more money. If you get fired from your job? Get another one. Flunk a class because you were working too much at your part-time job? Take it again. Yeah, it’s annoying. Problems are shitty, and you don’t know how to deal with problems yet. But problems have solutions. Almost nothing is as big a deal as it seems. Stop crying.

  1. WHAT NO ONE ELSE WILL TELL YOU ABOUT COLLEGE

  BY BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT, JONATHAN GOLOB, JEN GRAVES, ANTHONY HECHT, BRENDAN KILEY, CHARLES MUDEDE, AND LINDY WEST

  How to Get Along With People Who Are Different from You

  It’s inevitable: At some point in your life, you’re going to have to hang out with/work with/live in a tiny dorm room with/have sex with someone you just can’t relate to. At all. Maybe they’re a Republican. Or from Germany or something. Maybe their custom license-plate holder says “BEING A PRINCESS IS A FULLTIME JOB” (1. no, it isn’t; 2. you’re not one; and 3. we don’t live in a monarchy anyway—or maybe you think that the president is the “head princess” of America?). People are terrible, and people are everywhere (for more information on people, see The Different Kinds of People That There Are).

  So what do you do? Well, once you get started, it’s surprisingly easy to pretend to like people. Think of it as a science experiment. In conversation, helpful phrases include “Ha-ha! Cool!” and “Bummer, dude.” Better yet, try to find some common ground, like old Professor McGillicuddy’s cra-a-a-zy mustache, or how much you both like Jurassic Park (because of the dinos!). The point is to get this person to think that you are awesome. It is way easier to like people who like you. After that, it’s just equal parts tuning-out-boring-shit and laughing-at-ridiculous-shit. And if you can locate an ally with whom to make clandestine, hilarious eye contact, you’re golden. Or, if you find yourself confined to close quarters with a person who is really and truly unbearable, here are three words for you: Head. Pho. Nes. Wait, that’s one word. HEADPHONES. But seriously, headphones.

  And if you’re considering just following your natural instincts and being a dick to these people because they deserve it, DON’T. This behavior does nobody any good. You will get so much more done in life by being a slightly disingenuous nice person than an unremittingly honest asshole. More flies with honey, and all that. It’s gross, but it’s true.

  How to Get Along With Roommates Who Are Different from You

  Say that your college or university is located in Los Angeles, which means that it is full of orange guys with muscles and hard hair, and girls wearing those tiny shorts that say “LOOK AT MY ASSHOLE” across the buns. And also Ugg boots, and Malibu rum, and people who think a good career would be “shock jock,” and business majors who wear suits every Friday and can’t wait to go buy companies from nice old men and split them up and sell them for parts like Richard Gere in Pretty Woman before he learns the meaning of feelings. Say that you’re not like these people, so you don’t fit in.

  In this case, not fitting in is far superior to the alternative, but that’s cold comfort when you can’t make a single friend and have to spend a couple years living in 100-square-foot rooms with randomly assigned strangers. Maybe the first stranger is a shaky Texan model who eats nothing but canned tuna mixed with ketchup, shares a twin bed with her shaky Texan mother whenever she comes to visit, and pulverizes large sections of the asbestos ceiling trying to hang up her totally psychedelic black-light posters, a transgression for which you are both fined $100. (Perhaps she affixes the black light itself to the wall with Scotch tape. Betcha didn’t know: The sound of a black light crashing to the linoleum floor in the dead of night sounds strikingly similar to a madman crashing through the window in order to skin some freshmen.) Maybe this roommate breaks up with her faraway Texan boyfriend and listens to “Bitter Sweet Symphony” on repeat for three days. Maybe sometimes you find her hair in your bed. You live with this person for AN ENTIRE YEAR.

  Maybe the second stranger is from Bangladesh (“It’s pronounced BONG-gladesh”), and she smokes two packs of Newports a day (TWO, like as in the number two), she wallpapers the entire room with Absolut vodka ads, and she only owns two videocassettes: A League of Their Own and Erin Brockovich. Over and over, she watches them. Any time of the day or night, you come home and there she is—shades shut tight against the LA sun, tucked up in bed beneath a halo of wackily revamped vodka bottles, stinking of menthol and laughing, yet again, because there’s no crying in baseball (there is, as it turns out, crying in cohabitation-ball).

  OH MY GOD move out! YOU CAN DO THAT! All through life, if you don’t like your situation, there is ALWAYS a way to change it. Find. The. Way.

  On Making Friends

  It’s totally stupid, but it’s true: In order to make friends, you have to do stuff—stuff that you’re into, with other people, like join the University Anti-Ugg Club. (Or start that club. You can be the president!)

  A Few Majors That You Should Not Major In

  Sociology is bogus. It’s a discipline that sloppily combines bastardized versions of a number of worthy, in-depth fields of study. Unless you want to read about coal mine disasters (hard on communities, who’d have guessed?) and listen to your professor bloviate about the significance of vanity license plates, this is not for you. Political science is nowhere near as asinine, but still, just major in history and get a minor in philosophy. Speaking of philosophy, while it is not an absolute no-no (no one likes an absolutist), you should know that unless philosophy majors are very, very careful, they are pompous, annoying, and repellent to those they wish to sexually attract. Journalism: Seriously? Furthermore, hardly anyone at any still-extant newspaper has a journalism degree—they all studied things that might, like, help them write better, such as English literature, or know more things about the world, such as environmental science or microbiology or history, or they skipped college altogether and attended the School of Hard Knocks. If you would like to dismantle the patriarchy, put that lady-brain to work inside the traditional phallocentric academic structure; women’s studies is great, but it’s a minor, not a major. And finally, communications: This is not a real thing. Actual smart people don’t even know what it means. If you want a job writing press releases, though, you’re probably barking up exactly the right tree.

  Everything There Is to Know About Whatever Major You Choose (Or, Who Needs Classes?)

  EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT PHYSICS

  If stuff is still, it doesn’t like to move; if stuff is moving, it doesn’t like to stop. The more stuff you’re trying to move, the more you need to push it to speed it up. When you push on stuff, stuff pushes back on you. Stuff likes other stuff, fro
m a distance at least. Stuff likes becoming more chaotic, but cannot be created or destroyed; stuff can be rearranged. (All that is Isaac Newton.) Energy, like stuff, cannot be created or destroyed, only changed from one kind to another. Energy can be stored in movement, bonds between stuff, and many other places. Changes in how energy is stored allow us do things—like bake, drive, get up tall buildings, and kill each other. (That’s Sadi Carnot.) Also, stuff is energy. Stuff is a lot of energy. (That’s Albert Einstein.) Compress plutonium with explosives and the atoms fission, releasing the energy stored in stuff. When the energy is released in downtown Nagasaki, you kill about 40,000 people right away and another 40,000 over time. (Thanks, Enrico Fermi!)

  EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT ART

  For cave painters, what you need to know is bison. That’s the subject. Next came angels with big foreheads: the Middle Ages. Then Italian Renaissance, which means that objects in the distance are painted smaller—exactly as much smaller as your eye sees them. (This fetish for verisimilitude was the real birth of photography, even though photography wouldn’t be invented for another 400 years.) Things begin to fuzz out with impressionism (the greatest glorification of poor eyesight in history), speed up with futurism (don’t side with them, the fascists did) and Dada (avoid this word, because its meaning is complicated and contradictory, and it will only embarrass you). Salvador Dalí was a surrealist. Surrealists are Freudians. This means a bunch of guys with perverse fixations on women’s parts. Whatever you do, never say “modern art” when you mean new art. Modern art ended in 1959. Andy Warhol: still cool.

  EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT PSYCHOLOGY

  In 1856, two Europeans cursed their newly born child with the name Sigismund Schlomo Freud, a nomenclatural brutality that would have condemned the young lad to a life of psychotherapy had psychotherapy existed. Little Schlomo went on to invent it, discovering his affinity for cocaine and young Viennese women in the process. A couple of decades later, some guy made a bunch of dogs slobber when they heard a bell, which proved something important. Since then, psychology has offered self-obsessed losers new reasons to whine about how miserable they are and spawned a bad pair of Robert De Niro movies, as well as Woody Allen’s entire glorious oeuvre.

  EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT COMPUTER SCIENCE

  In the olden days (the 1980s), computers were for green-on-black word processing and Zork. Then someone plugged some computers into each other, and there was the internet and Zork Online. Now we have fast internet, but very little Zork at all. Things change. This is known as Moore’s law—the internet is twice as fast and has half as much Zork every 18 months. At some point, you will have to decide if you want to be a computer geek or just a regular computer user. There is no third option. It’s not acceptable to not know how to use computers. This is like bragging that you can’t read, walk, or see. You don’t have to know anything about how computers work, but you do have to know about the internet. Learn some basic HTML. Get a Mac. If you can’t or won’t get a Mac, for the love of god, don’t use Internet Explorer. If you’re paying to look at porn, you’re doing it wrong.

  EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THEATER

  Oedipus accidentally fucked his mom and Sophocles got famous writing about it. Aeschylus was killed by a large bird that mistook his bald head for a stone and dropped a turtle on him from a great height. William Shakespeare was the passionate, poetic one; Ben Jonson was the cerebral, cranky one. Samuel Beckett is their poetic, cerebral, cranky heir. Bertolt Brecht was a Marxist and the exception to the following rule: Political theater is bad. Everyone talks about Antonin Artaud but nobody reads him. (Read Susan Sontag’s essay on him instead.) Constantin Stanislavsky thought actors had to “live the part,” so Dustin Hoffman stayed up for two nights so he could look exhausted for Marathon Man. (Laurence Olivier, his costar, suggested: “Try acting—it’s much easier.”) David Mamet wrote about men, Caryl Churchill wrote about women, and Sarah Kane wrote about herself—in a poetic, cerebral, cranky way. (She is Beckett’s heir.) Then she committed suicide. Don’t ever, ever disparage new work by saying it’s “derivative.” Fucking everything is derivative. That’s a cowardly criticism for people who don’t have anything intelligent to say.

  EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT BIOLOGY

  Evolution is everything. Don’t worry about RNA, DNA, cells, phylogenies, and the rest; Mendelian genetics and evolution, combined together, are the essence of biology. Briefly: New ways of doing things (Mendel’s alleles) are constantly being invented by accident—when mistakes are made during the copying of the instructions. Living things with better versions of these instructions tend to overwhelm those with poorer versions. Mendel figured out anything with more than one cell working together gets two copies of instructions for any given task. One copy can be a total loss—a scratch pad where crappy instructions can reside and not harm chances of success. Sex is about sharing alleles; if two organisms can have sex and have kids that can have sex and have kids of their own, they’re a species. Species evolve, not individuals. Combine these ideas together and you have the beauty of the living world in your hands.

  EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT CHEMISTRY

  Stuff is made up of different arrangements of atoms; atoms are made up of a nucleus surrounded by buzzing electrons. The outer shell always wants to be filled with eight electrons. So, any arrangement that gets you there—sodium with chloride, oxygen with two hydrogens, carbon with four chlorides—will work. This is why the periodic table has eight columns and helium (with eight outer electrons of its own) doesn’t explode. Some arrangements adding up to eight shared electrons are happier than others. Chemical reactions rearrange from less stable to more stable arrangements on their own, giving off energy in the process. To make a less stable arrangement, you have to put in energy as payment. Chemistry is simply accounting: You must not gain or lose atoms at any point. Ignore the nuclear physicists on this point.

  EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT CLASSICAL MUSIC

  Think of it as one note that breaks into two, and then multiplies into a universe of sound and possible instruments. Start with the monks. Their chants. Very monotone. Bach is the baroque: He turns music into an argument, lines fighting with lines. Mozart is next, using a strict form that has roots in world exploration—introduce a theme in one key, wander it around and develop it in other keys for a while, and then return home with the musical spoils of all that wandering. Then comes Beethoven and Wagner: everything bigger, louder, and longer. In the 20th and 21st centuries, starting with Stravinsky, all rules are suspended. Even the do-re-mi scale that’s the basis of Western music is broken into microtones, and the system of keys gives way to other equations and algorithms (even though 12-tone music sounds impossible, it’s simple: All 12 tones of an octave must be used before any can be repeated). Mozart’s period is the classical period, and thus the correct meaning of the term “classical music” is music made from about 1750 to 1820 (Mozart lived from 1756 to 1791). Therefore, saying “classical music” when you simply mean nonpopular music is the equivalent of saying “modern art” when you mean new art.

  EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT LITERATURE

  English literature as it is taught in college is the story of power and class struggle. Keep that in mind and your grades will never sink below a B+. The oldest known poem in English is Caedmon’s “Hymn.” It’s about the rise of Christianity (power) and its domination/extermination of pagan beliefs (the poor). Moving on. William Shakespeare’s best play is The Tempest because it’s about the birth of the colonial era and of great importance to postcolonial theory. (Who is Caliban? The colonial subject. Who is Prospero? The colonial master. Memorize that.) The metaphysical poets—what were their poems about? An obsession with Platonic beauty? No. The birth of existentialism in an increasingly skeptical world? No. The decline of the court as the center of political and economic power and the transition to bourgeois cosmopolitanism? That’s it. See how this works? We’re already at
John Milton. Good guy or bad guy? Good guy—opposed censorship and absolutism. Charles Dickens wrote about the oppression of the emerging industrial proletariat. And fog. Lots of fog. The boat in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a symbol for the madness of colonial greed. Then we’re in the 20th century, when realism falls out of vogue because Virginia Woolf wanted to write about her feelings. High modernism has two camps: one led by Gertrude Stein (progressive) and the other led by T. S. Eliot (reactionary). There was also Ezra Pound—but Pound leads to fascism. Postmodernism is good because it marks the death of master narratives.

  EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT ECONOMICS

  Economics is a social science based on the way humans behave given limited resources. There are some simple rules: A recession is fairly bad but a depression is very bad; inflation is like cholesterol—there’s normal and there’s bad. Economics is a very soft science. Nobody, for instance, is sure when a recession becomes a depression. It may have happened while you were reading this sentence. Also, economists issue strong statements, but those strong statements are often followed shortly by statements of surprise. There is one thing you must know: If you want to be an economist, you must be able to read and draw graphs. You should, in fact, be graphilic. Any shortcomings having to do with graphs will disqualify you from the profession, which is based entirely on graphs.