Five Easy Steps

How to Stay Awake on a Long Drive

1. Choose a destination. Ensure that it is far enough to be considered a “long drive”; consider something over ten hours as a starting point.

2. Buckle yourself into your automobile.

3. Using roadways that have been laid by public employees, depart on your journey.

4. As the hours continue to add up, and the sun drops down beyond the horizon, imagine yourself in a warm, soft bed. Turn the heat up in the car to accentuate the illusion. Let your eyelids grow heavy, and your blinks to extend into seconds, then into tens of seconds, then into…

5. As the ambulance continues to carry you on your journey, allow the frantic activity of the emergency workers, coupled with the ridiculous amounts of pain your body is in  to keep your mind alert.

How to Get a Haircut

1. As a lonely egg, meet a friendly sperm.

2. As your magical encounter with the sperm finishes, begin to multiply your cells.

3. After about nine weeks, prove to yourself that you are becoming a mammal by growing body hair.

4. Be born into a world that has deemed it to be socially unacceptable to allow your hair to grow wild and free, a world that dictates how one should look by glossy photographs of well-known strangers in disposable reading materials, a world that forces you to feel less than “the other” if you refuse to stay “on trend”.

5. Book an appointment at a local hairdressers, sit in the chair, and let the scissors work. Don’t forget to leave a tip!

How to Write a Limerick

1. Grab paper and pen to compose.

2. Scribe words for the poem, not prose.

3. Write shorter “B” lines.

4. Make sure of the rhymes.

5. Then add in a twist in order to make the limerick funny, otherwise people will find it formulaic and boring.

How to Burp

1. In the hot desert sun, enjoy the lovely meal that you have been digesting slowly for the past one-hundred years.

2. Hear the sound of an oncoming sailing barge floating over the hot sand.

3. Ignore the silly bipeds and the threats that they shout at one another.

4. Feel excitement grow as you sense a battle happening above. As the blaster shots ricochet off of the laser swords, get ready for the fray to surely deliver another tasty meal to you.

5. Wrap your tentacle-like tongue around the ankle of a fallen bounty hunter and pull him, along with a mouth-full of air, down into your stomach. Feel the air rise back up as the bounty hunter descends, releasing the gas into the atmosphere in a belching sound.

How to Make Friends

1. Compare the size of your birthday cake to the number of people, beside yourself, who showed up to the party, and realize that you cannot divide by zero.

2. Grab a shovel and head to the graveyard.

3. Dig up enough body parts that, when combined, create one whole person.

4. Utilize what many of your peers call “mad science” to reanimate the corpse.

5. Repeat steps two through four until your social circle is complete.

How to Chew Your Food

1. Standing alone in your cavernous kitchen, a room which stands both as a monument to your substantial material success and a reminder of the loneliness that plagues you, prepare a meal.

2. Although you will be dining alone, just as you have for as long as you can remember, take note of the presentation of your meal. After all, the more time you spend dressing your meal up, the less time you spend gazing across the table at an empty chair.

3. On your entertainment system, play some music to lift your spirits; without a lift of some sort you most likely won’t make it as far as the dinner table, no less through the meal.

4. With a fork and knife, stab, rend and tear at your meal until it is reduced to bite-sized portions that you must force yourself to consume, simultaneously extending your life and prolonging your suffering.

5. Place the cut piece of food into your mouth and grind it between your opening and closing teeth, ignoring the way your deep sadness has turned its flavour ashen.

How to Build a House

1. Gaze at the starry night sky and realize that while the view is good, your current exposure to the elements is less than ideal.

2. Pick yourself up out of the muck and mire with a sense of determination completely alien to what you know of your normally sedate and indolent character. Sit back down to contemplate this change in yourself. Remain there until your meditation has allowed you to self-actualize.

3. Once again on your feet, examine your surroundings. Note the structures that have been erected on parcels of land nearby. 

4. Decide to forego the construction of less orthodox homes such as tents, bunkers and sky-scrapers. Instead, focus your attention on mimicking the behaviour of your neighbours by choosing a house for your future domain. 

5. Assemble wood, concrete, metal and drywall in the shape of a house, allow time for the paint to dry, then move in!

How to Plant a Tree

1. Gaze across at a beautiful virgin forest and marvel at the majesty of nature.

2. Order your employees to use chainsaws to cut all the trees down.

3. Ship the fallen wood by truck to a factory.

4. Sell the lumber in retail stores for a profit.

5. Hire unshowered university students to fill the government assigned quota and place saplings in the ground that you have handily cleared for them to work in.

How to Write a “Five Easy Steps”

1. Come up with the idea. This is the most difficult step. Do field research (i.e. browse facebook) to see what people are talking about. Piggy-back on their conversations.

2. Position yourself as an authority in the matter. Since you are going to be the person to tell your readers how to “do it better”, you need to let them know how much better you are at it that they are. Sometimes this is as simple as changing your first name to “Doctor” (see Doctor Oz, Doctor Phil), sometimes it’s as easy as not giving room for people to question your abilities. 

3. Communicate your idea in a simple, easy to understand manner. Remember, your readers are less than novices at any practice that you present, so you need to be as clear as you possibly can. Use of big words will only exacerbate and discommode your audience. 

4. Examine the “how-to” that you have produced and break it down into five easy steps. This should be very simple, since nothing takes more than five steps to do.

5. After posting your idea to the internet, sit back and rest assured that the world is a better place due to your hard work and wisdom.

How to Clean the Toilet

1. After your third nap of the day, make your way, at a relaxed pace, into the room where your toilet is found.

2. Inspect the condition of your facilities, find yourself disgusted.

3. Yowl at the top of your lungs, with the hope that your annoying calls will result in action.

4. Escalate the situation. Find your human and disturb whatever it is that is distracting them from your needs. If they are reading, stand on the book and stick your tail in their face. If they are on the computer, place your paws on the keyboard, striking random letters.

5. Return to your toilet and watch your human work.