Pocahontas
Pocahontas was famous for her romantic relationship with John Smith. They met when he settled in Jamestown and she invoked magic to learn English, resulting in the famous couple. Well, except maybe not. As she was actually 10 years old at the time, any stories of sexual relations between her and John Smith are mostly apocryphal. However, she was notable for maintaining a lengthy stretch of peacetime between the tribe, headed by her enormous father Powhatan, and the settlers. She served a role that would today be considered ambassadorial — she frequently visited both settlements and kept communications strong, so few violent misunderstandings were had. This peacetime was named after her: the brilliantly original “Pocahantas’ Peace”. The story had a happy ending when she married John Rolfe, moved to England, and died immediately. Rabies, you know how it is.

The Puritans
The puritans were a sour bunch. Puritanism, once defined as “the haunting fear that somebody, somewhere, might be happy” sprang up in the wake of King Charles I, a Catholic who was quite displeased with this ‘Protestant’ hooliganism. He began persecuting the shit out of them, so they left for the New World (the “Great Migration”). They greatly valued “religious freedom” — their own, anyway. Once there, they established churches as the centre of everything and tolerated no religious dissent whatsoever. If people didn’t want to go to church, they were exiled or executed. This solved all their problems and their colony was ultimately very successful (in the sense that they didn’t all die) because they all worked together and actually made an effort to feed themselves.

Robert Carter III
Robert Carter III was a wealthy statesman and proprietor of the revolutionary age, and a member of the New Swedish Church. He suffered from a sort of mid-life crisis when he realized his god probably wouldn’t be okay with his ownership and abuse of some 500 slaves. So he freed them and felt better. In today’s dollars, the move cost him millions upon millions and nearly all of his estate. It was the largest single emancipation of slaves (until the civil war) as well as a huge “fuck you” to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who still hadn’t freed any of theirs. He was forgotten by history, probably because he made the Founding Fathers look like chumps.

John Malcolm
John Malcolm was an English sea captain and taxman, sent to the New World to keep the colonies under control. He enjoyed his work far more than any tax collector should, and everybody hated him — they gave him a ‘nice’ tarring and feathering (i.e. he got to keep his clothes on). One day, when he was just casually yelling at a child in the street, George Hewes had the nerve to interfere. When told not to interfere with gentlemen’s work, Hewes made a fowl joke about his past. So he smacked that bitch-ass commoner with his cane. Later that day, Bostonians from all over (Boston) came to get him and gave him the Rebel Special: tarring and feathering, for reals this time. The humiliated and greatly annoyed Malcolm went back to England, but it turned out nobody liked him there either — he spent the rest of his life trying to get elected into Parliament so he could crack down on those traitorous Americans.

George R. T. Hewes
George Robert Twelves Hewes was an ordinary shoemaker, too short to join the army (his dream job). He personally delivered a pair of shoes to John Hancock, governor of Massachusetts, the highest honour a shoemaker could achieve at the time. Fifteen years later, John Hancock was his bitch. Hewes  was present at the Boston Massacre as well as a participant in the Boston Tea Party. He famously told John Malcolm to suck a dick and got his face bashed in as a result. He probably would have been forgotten, except that for the longest time, he just refused to die. He lived to be nearly 100 years old and easily outlived any of the other revolutionaries. In the 1830s, people became interested in his story and started work on his biographies. And in all that time, all Hancock managed to do was write his name really, really big, like a first-grader.

Okay, so that story had almost nothing to do with cunnilingus, but it’s relevant. See, it’s the experiences like that at a young age that made me such an eavesdropper as a kid. I was an only child and I liked attention, but no one gave a rat’s scrotum about my creative output back then, so I went for the other thing I liked: knowing stuff, which at the time meant getting good grades in school. And even if I got myself in trouble over it occasionally, I always learnt stuff faster than my peers because of it, and that made me feel smart.

Guess who ran around his Catholic school playground telling all the first-graders about sex. Me! I was a badass kid. I had to switch to public school in grade three, and thankfully they tolerated my crap a lot better.

Anyway, I liked being smart. I learnt a lot as a kid by spying on the adults. My mom would lie to me (as all parents do with young children) and I’d eavesdrop on her to learn the whole truth. Through eavesdropping and ignoring warnings that I wasn’t “old enough to understand”, I learnt how to tell when people were lying to me, why they were doing it, and how. I became an exceptionally good liar myself. By the time I was in middle school I could basically lie my way out of any trouble I got into at school. It was cool.

Now I obviously don’t eavesdrop on people anymore, nor encourage others over the age of 10 to do so. It’s a pretty rude breach of people’s privacy, and once you get older most of the things you’d hear from it would serve no purpose other than gossip or blackmail. But I still engage in what some call people watching.

When I’m in stores and other public places, I overhear snippets of strangers’ conversations. I’m not eavesdropping or spying on them, I just think hearing statements out of context from people I don’t know is fun, and by utilizing my aforementioned ability to piece together contextual clues, I can use it as a way to find creative inspiration.

• Nice date with a cool attractive person who holds a good conversation: good.
• Eye-opening discussion with life-long best friend: fantastic.
• Trying to piece together why that gangbanger and elderly Chinese woman are talking about the Spanish Inquisition: priceless.

Do this for a while and take some notes. I’m not saying you should sit in the coffee shop with binoculars and an ear trumpet, but just listen to the people around you during your everyday life. You’ll have a cache of different characters in your writing repertoire to draw from later, when you’re feeling lazy. Write a couple of weird strangers into a room with a normal person and they might tell you what you should write.

Then there’s, “I learnt how to perform cunnilingus while on holiday with my boyfriend.” The weirdest thing I’ve ever heard a gay man say. I mean, he had a pink v-neck, badly-dyed blond hair, and a lisp like Louis CK’s worst impression of a rollerblader. My brain’s just going to assume he loves men until I get proof to the contrary… and even then…

To this day I haven’t got a single clue what he was talking about. I like to imagine he had a Pulitzer-worthy heartwarming romance story to share with his friends in the food court. For all I know he could’ve been part of a “say something ridiculous and shocking” contest. Either way, he’s stuck out in my mind ever since, and I’m writing about him. Thanks for telling me what to write, Random Gay Dude. I couldn’t do it without you.

I feel like this class has improved my writing dramatically – I have moved from sporadically writing about anything to frequently writing about nothing, which is obviously a great leap forward. I look forward to this time next year when I will hopefully be writing constantly but seeing no ink appear on the page at all.

Possibly the most important thing I’ll take away from this class is the way words are spelled – especially big words, like “irony” and “refutation”. Orthography is surely one of the most important fields of study of our time, second only to religion and possibly archaeology. I now realize that there can only be one way to spell “refutation”, that it must include at least two ‘t’s and an ‘f’. Any other way is just wrong. Back in my dark days, I might have drawn a surfboarding shark by mistake.

I have accepted how important it is to use commas in the prescribed way, and only the prescribed way. Smooth phrasing and logical sentence structure should always come second to tradition and conformity. It has also come to my attention that when using quotation marks, a comma needs to be placed at the end, but before the last quotation. Regardless of whether it makes any sense whatsoever, and even though it mutilates an otherwise perfectly good string of characters, that’s just how it’s done. Best not to question it.

The students in this class are of a very educated folk, and I know I am very lucky to have had this opportunity to teach them and to learn from them. The experience shared will surely last a lifetime or two. In particular, the ones who think war censorship is nifty are the ones who will forever plague my memory. I do hope though that that one girl will come to accept that Swedes are people too, even if they do talk funny. It is a very good thing the prof took attendance every day (and deducted points for absences) or I might not have gone at all, and such wonderful fortune may have passed me by.

There have been untold times when I’ve walked into class practically blind and left feeling as though I had had my eyes opened for the very first time, with some new fantastic revelation. Have you ever seen The Matrix? It was like that, only with more poetry. Well, more Spoon River Anthology, anyway.

I currently own $10, 946 worth in gold from Goldline, as you recommended. When the economy collapses again, I will not be left behind. Sadly, when my attic collapses again, I will have to move the coins somewhere else. The last time they fell on me, I was nearly crushed.

I remember that day on your radio show when you were talking about the Marxist invasion of our homes. I was probably paying twice as much attention to you as I was to the road! Coincidentally, I went plowing into a ditch and dislocated both of my shoulders, but when the Marxists showed up at my door, I was ready for them.

I have also become a devout Mormon, although I do not know exactly what that is. If you lose your home as a result of this, I want you to know that you can store your chalkboards in my garage.

I used to have a friend who had a brown, ugly dog. His name was Woofers. I don’t understand why anyone would want an ugly pet. It used to run out to the road and bark at anyone who walked by. That is, until the day when it was suddenly hit by a car. Incidentally, Coke is great for getting bloodstains off your bumper before the cops show up. Anyway, after that Woofers didn’t want to be friends with me any more. Some people need to learn to forgive and forget.

The neat thing about pets is that they look cute but they can also be used to exact vengeance on your enemies or total strangers. My parents used to have a cat that would immediately scratch anybody who entered the house. Whenever Jehovah’s Witnesses showed up at the door, we would act all interested and invite them in for tea. They had to tolerate the scratching – we told them we couldn’t put the cat in another room because we were too afraid of it.

Another benefit of having a pet is that, unlike people, pets don’t talk. This is good in two ways: firstly, you don’t have to worry about your pets yelling out the answers when you’re trying to watch Jeopardy. Secondly, no matter what you do to them, they can’t tell anyone.

When I get my pet, it will be the happiest pet ever. We will play fetch and paintball and we will re-enact my favourite Western movies. I will be sure to feed it every day unless I forget or am angry at it.

Step 1: Choose the type of bread you want to use

Step 2: Put the bread in the toaster

Step 3: Butter the toast, then put 1-2 slices of cheese on the toast

Step 4: Put the sandwich in the microwave for 30 seconds

Step 5: Enjoy

Firstly, what do scientists have against God? Why is it that I never read any “scientific” papers that prove he does exist? Is it just me, or does every person claiming to be an “intellectual” deny the greatness of our Lord?

Secondly, why all the big words? Why can’t they speak English? They always use complicated terms like DNA and H₂O instead of just telling us what they’re talking about. H₂O is water, by the way — but a scientific paper won’t tell you that. I don’t even know what DNA is supposed to mean, probably alcohol or something.

Thirdly, if medicine doctors are so good at curing things, why are there so many diseases out there that have yet to be cured? They keep their patients in the hospitals for weeks (and charging them big money) instead of just fixing what’s broken and sending them on their way. I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it’s pretty clear that’s what’s happening.

Lastly, if, as they claim, they can’t cure these diseases, why do we keep funding medical research? If it’s done, it’s done. It’s not like they could have ever reversed God’s will anyway. We could be using that money for something useful, like a bigger army, or more bibles for starving kids in the Middle East.

I don’t know how we’re supposed to keep blindly trusting these so-called scientists. They lie, they make up facts, and worst of all, they appear to put absolute faith in their little “textbooks”.

There are some outrageous disgusting unforgivable acts going on in the world. Back then, we would have burned these people at the stake, but today, it is far too often overlooked, almost acceptable to commit these kinds of atrocities. And in these dark times, I can only cling to my bible for protection against the evils of the world.

I want my children to be able to grow up in an environment where they can feel safe. The last thing I want for them is for them to feel pressured by society, which is getting increasingly dangerous, not to mention sinful.

By this point, I’m sure you’ve all figured out what this great threat to our liberty is. This is a disease – a disease so powerful that when good young boys contract it, they instantly kill themselves. Yes, I am talking about the gay.

Over the past century, the gay has become one of the most deadly forces facing Americans. It has been known to turn ordinary, God-fearing people into murderers, criminals, and atheists. We need to come together and put a stop to it, right now. For the sake of our future. Because, damn it, I will not have my children marrying anyone of the same gender, whether they want to or not. I know what’s best for them, even when they’re forty years old.

So what can we do? The only way to stop the spread of the gay is to kill anyone showing symptoms on sight. Get out your gun – if you’re a true American, you have at least three of these – and shoot them before it’s too late. Kill them before they kill you! Or worse! YOU could catch the gay! Or your family! DO YOU WANT YOUR WIFE TO CONTRACT THE GAY???

That’s why I made this satirical newspaper last year.

Click the images to enlarge.

And to really succeed, you need to learn how to walk this line carefully.

Your bed is allowed to be made, unmade, or nonexistent. No one gives a shit about how you sleep as long as they can’t see anything crusty.

The desk is one of the key parts of your home, where you store all your important paperwork, your writing supplies, and maybe even a computer if you have room. When it comes to desks, you’re generally in the clear as long as the stacks of papers don’t dwarf that old CRT monitor.

Having a messy desk is acceptable within reason, especially if you’re in a dorm. Schoolwork piles up on all of us, right? It’s okay to have a bunch of I’ll-get-around-to-it-after-this-party homework on your desk. Watch out for valuables, though; a messy desk might look like an impenetrable fortress to you, but people in search of your loose change and weed will search the desk.

If you’re in a dorm, your table is probably also your desk. There are two main states that a table can be in:

But not all forms of binging are appropriate. For example:

There are three main states that your trash can be:

Totally empty is acceptable. This is the ideal state, though you have to watch the states of the rest of your room. If your entire room is messy, but your trash can is clean, people will just assume that someone puked in there and you wanted to get rid of it, which can quickly roll it over into unacceptable territory.

Unless the trash can is in the middle of the room (UNACCEPTABLE), no one really cares if it’s full of junk.

After clearing the old gravy off your desk, you have to empty the trash. If people are coming over later, crumple a bunch of papers up to make the trash can look more full. If they ask why your bin is full of crumpled papers, tell them you’re an art major.

Pretty much everyone appreciates a good clean floor. This goes double if you expect people to take their shoes off when entering your room.

It might look kind of cool if you have so much junk on the floor that you can’t even see the actual floor anymore, but unless you’re willing to commit to such an arrangement you’re better off just keeping the place clean. Besides, do you really want people to get papercuts from walking barefoot on your I’ll-get-around-to-it-after-this-party floor-homework?

And that’s all the advice I have for now.