Learning Day: How to Be Weird 🌭

Every WikiHow page is actually a great guide for something other than the lesson they’re actually talking about. For example, How to Reupholster a Chair is actually a great guide for stapling yourself to yourself. And How to Be Random was actually a killer guide on how to forget the sensation of human contact. 

What I didn’t impress upon you at the time was that How to be Random was merely a seminal work in the genre of ‘becoming hated.’ For some reason, How to be a Fucking Dickhead is a very popular subject on WikiHow. There are people out there who desperately want to be disliked, but every time they open their mouth it’s like pulling up to the prom in a camaro with a tiger in the passenger seat. If that’s you, if you hate being liked, if you can’t deal with all the love in your life and need every ounce of it destroyed, check out How to be Weird. 

How to be Weird promises that it will draw the fine line between kooky and crazy, which I always thought was ‘biting hard enough to break skin,’ but I guess it’s more complicated than that. I’m not sure what the ‘loose cannon’ line is about. I guess even Wandoms have a threshold. Like you can run around licking people’s elbows and screeching that you’re the Spork King, and that’s fine – stompable, but fine – but god forgive you if you hand somebody an unprovoked banana. Then you’re off the force! Turn in your squirtgun and candy badge and never quote Rick and Morty again.

Here’s something WikiHow loves to do: start off with pretty reasonable advice, then realize it only takes up a paragraph, and fill the second one with barely related words chosen in a blind panic. 

“Try to develop your own sense of style using different patterns and vintage pieces!” Then, after checking the word count: “Uhh…. also wear vampire teeth like Nicolas Cage in Vampire’s Kiss! It worked out great for him! I presume! I didn’t see the end, no spoilers!”

How to Be Weird makes this clear early: The guide is not about finding your true personality and expressing it. You might actually hate being weird. You won’t like the clothes you wear, or the person you become. That’s not what this guide promised. This guide only promised that other human beings would avert their eyes and find things that suddenly needed to be in the seats next to them whenever you got on the bus.

If you accidentally have friends, don’t worry! Try fucking up their names intentionally. Or better yet: Give them diminishing nicknames, like they’re not human at all! Everybody loves that, especially minorities! Call Teshawn “Big Snickerdoodles.” Call him it in front of other people! Let’s see how punched you can get in one day. Sanjay becomes Sorbet! Those noises he’s making are how his people say “I find this endearing!” They also spit at your feet when they think you’re being especially hilarious. It’s a weird culture — hey, take some notes!

Hey, remember when How To Be Weird expressly promised us we would not look like a psychopath? 

Because “frequently talking to inanimate objects” is definitely a diagnosis point in the DSM-5. 

“Don’t do it all the time, you’ll look crazy!” WikiHow warns us, as though anybody ever said, “No, Marlene’s just kooky – she only talks to the toaster every third silence.”

Do me a favor: Really try to look at that piece of shit through the cracked monitor that you just reflexively punched.

That’s art. That’s what art looks like.

Listen, you’re not supposed to like art. You’re supposed to feel something. Burning, non-directional rage is a viable emotion. Really look at his puffy painted vest. The tinted glasses. Really take in the smugness of that smile. 

I’m NFT’ing this right now. I looked up “how to do that stupid NFT shit” just for this one and only thing. When the artist dies, the value of this piece will skyrocket. 

Wait, this is WikiHow. I should say “when somebody reports the smell and the authorities finally find the body, the value of this piece will skyrocket.”

Every WikiHow creator is just an unclaimed corpse that hasn’t stopped moving yet.

About half of this guide consists of dire warnings about turning back. There are less severe warnings in How to Fuck a Shark (No Condom), I checked, purely for work reasons.

And I’ll never say this again: WikiHow is right. 

If you teach yourself to be a dickhead, you might not remember how not to be a dickhead. You could be stuck in Dharma and Greg vests and Burger King crowns forever, lamenting the beatings you no longer even get erect for, totally willing but physically unable to stop screeching Invader Zim quotes. 

Basically, pretend to be mentally disabled. 

Take a notebook down to the Helmetless Motorcycle Injury ward and watch what the husks do when something with too many colors comes on the TV. Then, try it on your friends! 

This is such misery. You can’t dress how you like, you’ve carefully trained obnoxious affectations into every part of your daily life, and now you can no longer eat the foods you enjoy. You must give up every inch of yourself to the Weird. 

This reads like a ritual handbook for people who want to host a demon. If you want to be a proper vessel for Leonard you have to be pure. There can be no happiness or joy left in your body. You must destroy everything you like and replace it with the hate of others. Only when your very cells have forgotten the memory of love will Ol’ Goose-Legs give you the erasure you so desperately crave. 

“Always wear hats” seems a little out of place. 

How to be Weird is about commitment. It’s about the total destruction of a life. Imagine reteaching yourself human language with extra syllables and exclusively clothing yourself in the reeking cardigans and cigarette-burned Cosby sweaters of the Goodwill discount bins only to meet a guy who thinks he’s on the same level as you because of “always hat.”

Again we see one good piece of advice — “try exploring lesser known hobbies like pinata-making!” — followed by several lines of advice specifically designed to get you a Priest-only funeral and a murder nobody is petitioning the sheriff’s office to investigate.

Here’s your Shark-Fucking warning: “Make sure you have loyal friends who won’t ditch you for being weird.”

If you reforge yourself as ‘the pet rock guy’ and your friend actually sticks by you, you need to cancel your life insurance immediately. Nobody loves anybody that much. You are going to be found in a lake.

Yeah, here you go: Give up language. Words are only meant to help you connect to and communicate with other humans which, again, is something we’re trying to burn out of ourselves. You’ll never be properly Leonard-lubed until you replace all of the meaningful conversations in your life with Jar Jar Binks impressions. 

Feign moderate dementia! 

See, all your time in the Helmetless Motorcycle Injuries ward paid off. If you wanna get rEaLlY weird you better practice faking brain damage. For bonus points, try soiling yourself without noticing. You know who gets a lot of attention down at the ol’ HMI? 

Half-head Herbert! 

Half-head Herbert NEVER has a dry diaper, and all of the nurses think he is just the most! Even his wife agrees! “He’s so much,” she whispers, when she thinks nobody is listening. “He’s just so much now.”

Again, remember that we’re supposed to be pulling up just shy of crazy in this guide. But pretending to be the President or Napoleon are the joke examples the DSM-5 uses in their word problems. 

“President Tic-Tac and Big Black Napoleon are 50 feet apart, they have their genitals out and are approaching one another at a rate of 1.5 feet per second. If this rate stays constant, how long will you have to rapidly flip the lightswitch before they touch tips and their families file a gross negligence lawsuit? These are joke examples, of course. Nobody is Hollywood crazy like that. It’s mostly compulsive masturbating. Show your work.”

The artwork in this guide promises that, at best, one person will laugh at your antics, almost certainly out of nervous pity, while everybody else in the crowd will visibly wrestle with their barely constrained hatred. 

At best. That’s your best-case scenario: That one person out of twenty will feel bad for pushing you in a river.

Hey, muscular giants with distended pulsating necks and crazy Zooey Deschanel eyes, by all means accost women on the street with unhinged questions and wild accusations. They love it! Grin while you do it – wide, so wide it splits the human face you keep on the phallic shaft even now unspooling from your torso like Wilford Brimley in The Thing. Paw at your unraveling human crotch, ask them “what is… banana?” from your warping voice box. They’ll find it charming! Look at those women! Look at their faces! They clearly find this very charming!

Go to work and for the whole day just do your worst Chinese accent. I mean the whole time. All fucking day. Everybody loves that. Everybody will love that. They will not punch you straight in those novelty teeth that have taken on a whole new connotation now. They will not kick you until their ankles break, destroying their own bodies just to harm yours. Do it. Also wildly screech at maximum volume while you do it. Just go ahead and do that. That kind of pure hatred is like a bathrobe straight out of the dryer for Leonard. 

I’m going to show you something, and you’re not going to believe it. You’re going to think I wrote it, and deserve some kind of award for channeling pure unlikeability so well. A little trophy shaped like Ben Shapiro, or the kid from The Babadook. Every sentence is worse than the one before it. It’s such distilled despicability you might be able to drink it. Pure Hateahol. Mix it with sweet vermouth and bitters and have yourself a Manhatean. 

Anyway, do all of this awful shit and make the world a worse place just because you think any attention is good attention, but do try to refrain from drooling, as SoCiEtY perceives it as “creepy.”

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