Dear freshman,

You will be starting your journey through high school soon and there are a few misconceptions that I would like to clear up. First of all, as a general rule of thumb, remember that you have had as much experience to understand the world by now as everyone else. If anyone tells you how to live your life, they don’t respect you or understand the absolute urgency your situation when your mom makes you clean your room. This statement is the key to your self-satisfaction in the next four years and will continue to be a major guiding force in all of your decisions.

These four years will be the longest of your entire life, so remember that time away from school is yours. If anyone takes that away, they’re taking away a part of who you are. Homework is merely a way for the teachers to show administration that they are doing what they are told so that they can get money. Strippers make more money than teachers and they are angered by this fact and will express it often. Homework has little, if any, value to you as a student.

You have eight bathroom passes throughout the semester. Make them count. They don’t have a time limit, so make sure you take the whole period. Make sure everyone knows that you didn’t really take an hour and a half to pee, of course, but let their imaginations fly over the possibilities of all the adventures you may have had. And once you’ve used them all up, you can earn rebellion points for peeing in a bottle in the corner.

The meaning of life is to find love. You will need to practice “relationshiping” and be on the look-out at all times just in case you find your true love. If you don’t get enough practice, when you do meet your true love, she might be disinterested because you don’t know how to make-out and that’s just weird; your whole life will be ruined. You must establish yourself as the alpha male by being the first to grind on your love at dances. If others follow, you have been accepted.

You have to try hard to make friends. Other people are more secure about themselves than you are and don’t feel the need to make friends, so when they act interested, it’s because you are merely a tool for their amusement.

The more girls you flirt with, the less attainable you are and the less attainable you are, the more valuable you are. The purpose of relationships is to feel better about yourself. It’s really romantic to make-out in the hallways between classes.

Teachers will try to convince you that everything they say is absolute truth. The last statement was the only truthful one in this letter, even though everything teachers say is not. The irony of that last statement is that it is also true, but it says that the first sentence of this paragraph is the only true statement rendering it, like the cake, a lie. If you are incredibly masochistic, go ahead and follow these guidelines for a great surface life, but if you want these years to go by quickly, don’t trust your heart. And yes, the cake is a lie. And so is that last statement.

Love, Caitlin N :)