by Rojas Oliva, managing editor

HOW TO HAVE IDEALS AND ALSO FRIENDS: AN EDITORIAL IN THREE EASY STEPS!

STEP ONE: get some ideals. Ignore content and focus on easy to internalize talking points. Parents, the Internet or mail order brochures are all viable sources. Now that you’re properly equipped, it’s time to validate those ideals by PUSHING THEM ON OTHERS, the stronger the better. Remember: your values aren’t solidified until other people acknowledge them. You’re not really a Democrat until you’ve made a conservative cry. Keep in mind you’re just looking out for them. Ask yourself what’s worse — your friends thinking you’re elitist and awful when you try to peddle your religion, or their eternal damnation? You’re doing this for them. Sadly, the same ignorance that ideologically separates them from you will lead them to feel anger and frustration at your attempts TO SAVE THEIR CLOSE-MINDED AND PATHETIC LIVES and you’ll probably lose some friends. Maybe all of them. But that’s part of the plan.

STEP TWO: make friends with who (or what) you still can. If you’re a vegetarian, don’t compromise your views on the gruesome evils of factory farming with peacefully coexisting with your meat loving friends. If your friendship isn’t worth giving up meat, you don’t need them. The blood mouths. Pets can be wonderful sources of companionship, affection and the blind following of your word that you desire from those around you. If you don’t believe in domesticating animals, try furniture. The key is to find things that lack free will, but can still provide physical warmth. And even if your ideals are hyper-idiosyncratic there’s probably an online community out there just for you. Surrounded only by your precious values, you’ll never be alone.

STEP THREE: If you follow the first two steps and somehow still feel a gnawing emptiness, try changing up how you deal with the outside world. Realize that yeah some things are totally worth fiercely believing in, and sometimes people do need a good solid kick in the moral butt, but (ha) largely these types of differences aren’t too conducive to love, fellowship and everything else that’s a little less terrible about high school. I’ll end this with a rather long — but then, this was a rather short and easy and obvious ‘editorial’ — David Foster Wallace quote: “It atomizes, does not bind crowds, and, like everything timelessly dumb, leads to blind hatred, blind loyalty, blind supplication. Difference is no lover; it  lives and dies dancing on the skins of things, tracing bare outlines as it feels for avenues of entry into exactly what it’s made seamless.”