Schultz the Realist

In juxtaposition with the passive-aggressive approach is the alacrity of a mind resolute in its convictions that obstinately refuses any superfluously mellifluous words to ease the impact of the matter's reality. Ms. Schultz makes all feelings of ennui known; it's written all over your papers in red ink and all over her face when your work is anachronistic (as well as half-peached) in its completion; one assignment totally non-germane to the current matter in progress being openly judged in that entertainingly mocking style of one not afraid to tell you the reality of it all. Schultz's wisdom touches a lot on how to tastefully own up to your douchiness. 
-First rule: don't be officious; no one cares that you know the Latin alphabet or that technically being blind means that you are in fact color blind because you can't see at all, which includes color of course. Didn't ask for your input, if you cared you wouldn't share. 

-Secondly, be mendacious if it serves your purpose, no one cares if you actually had a Great Aunt Tanya, it's a vocab card: use the words right and get it done. Even Tim O'Brien contends that a True War Story rarely ever maintains validity; it's about the ultimate purpose; the meaning you aim to convey, that's the truth, everything else is just details. 

-Thirdly, you don't need to be an iconoclast, just because they aren't your beliefs doesn't mean they're not relevant.  If you attack these upheld notions and institutions, be prepared to face the wrath of the victimized, especially Schultz because in Waukegan lingo she'll put you on blast!

Sometimes you're going to find you're riddled with an unfathomable sense of ennui in which you feel disconnected from your friends and your life and you begin to believe that what you want will forever remain out of your grasp, but that's when you need to find within yourself the adroit capabilities of the feminine wiles to keep holding on until you get that fishy sticker and that proposal on a mountain as your peripatetic summer takes you all over the country with your best friend. 

             

Felicity lies in you owning your life and releasing all fears and hesitancy; the key to happiness is not to chase it, but rather to allow it to come and find you, at total bucolic peace, whether it's metaphorical or literal relation to the pleasantries of the calming countryside. 

Be willing to try new experiences, don't let a move across town or from your friends incite a xenophobic characteristic within you; make new ones...

 The greatest life lesson of all comes from you realizing the only way to obtain the truths of these lessons and the many more to come is take responsibility of your life and actions and realize that the truest life lessons come from the onus of living your own life; whichever way you choose...

So wear lame soccer jerseys with the Brooder

Don't be afraid to hold up the number of friends you have, including yourself (haha just kidding.)

Make bunnies adorably unexploited again

Enjoy your accomplishments, you worked hard for them.

Put on your PJ's and try to relax when you realize there's still seven days left.

Be a Bears fan, or be better than that....

Make cool t-shirts with your friends that remind you as Hannah Montana always said "Nobody's Perfect."

Be Great! Like Gatsby...until the person who borrowed your greatness loses it at the dry cleaner's.

                                              Don't be afraid to give people the "I know you're full of malarky" look like dude. 

Remember if all else fails, violence is an option...unless you're taking one from Mr. Bill's lesson-book...then stick to sarcastic remarks you say you didn't mean to sound like that but you totally did.

Smirk like you know your life lessons are the bomb.com...

.....even if they were taken from Game of Thrones

Raise the roof!

And let life itself teach you the lessons, because actually living them out is transcendent to even the wisest words. :)

Oh No Mr. Bill

If you're not one for moody confrontation, there's always the passive aggressive approach to life in which those least susceptible to satire will not grasp the illusion of your seemingly impervious reactions. It's true they'll mistake your dissembling indifference for legitimate neutrality, but then those aren't the people you really want to be engaging regardless. So take some tips from the wallflower lifestyle and:

-Play diffident; Public displays of humility put you beyond the invasive scrutiny of higher-ups and lower people's expectations from you, thus allowing you to generally exceed set standards. 

-Small talk is overrated and easiest to avoid given a feckless approach to lower the garrulous offender's ramblings as they then regard you as being an insufficient participant in their maundering. 

-As someone who values the entire basis of skepticism, you want people to arrive at their own conclusions and so in order to refrain from any possible influential remarks prevaricate answers provide your audience with no substantial sense of an inherently correct answer and so forces them to evaluate the issue through true analytical processes. 

  - Another important piece of wisdom is to be realistic in life; even to be to some degree pessimistic. If you never get your hopes up they can never be brought down; so realize there is no solution to all of your problems, no magical answer that appeases every party involved in a dispute. But even if there's no panacea to life's troubles, not allowing your hopes to reach ineffable heights of optimism makes pleasant surprises, even in paucity, something to be celebrated, regardless of their scarcity. 

 -You have a right to your opinions and perceptions of the world, whether people view you as a dilettante or not, just because you exercised certain notions regarding fields of work you may not possess a doctorate in. No one is as omniscient as they'd elect to believe anyway, so you have just as much a right to impugn the dinosaur enterprise as anyone; last time you checked those "prehistoric" bones were far too irascible to have endured what the cupidity of dinosaur industry tries to sell you for a much higher price than that of a t-shirt. So question everything. Be observant and don't accept anything less than cogent evidence in your acquiescence. 

-Technology is the degradation of academia. It pulls from traditional education and hands-on learning in its baleful predation on the callow minds of easily distracted teenagers. Its presence invective in its prioritizing of fatuous social media and promotion of countless canards that only serve to ruin reputations of unaccountable victims. It is because of Facebook and Twitter that people are quick to trust the apocryphal statements of mindless propaganda ever-present in this new-aged corrosion of face-to-face humane interaction. You can choose your role in this "advancing" society; the Luddite who is someone that firmly perpetuates the ideas listed above and refuses to accept the age of technology in all its unwitting pander which promotes morally unsound abuse of the technologies advantages for inane motives, or the puerile oblivion that chooses to ignore all of the detrimental effects a so-called progressing world faces as it deviates from the natural order of human condition. If anything, you can pose your moral objection to technology's poisonous trend and keep your flip phone only on hand for absolute emergencies. 

When it comes down to the wallflower approach, you find it fits best to those gauche individuals whose coping mechanism for crying girls is a ghetto Nemo sticker. 

The MANecke

Mennecke's Life Lessons (Learned through observation considering any spoken lessons are copyrighted Game of Thrones quotes. )
-Forget a sanguine approach to difficult situations, happiness is for those lacking the maudlin dichotomy of a bi-polar emo...I mean brooding intellectual.....

So act as the prescient fortune-teller and when the truth of life throws its many imbroglios your way, take the humility with a supposedly insouciant air while you not-so-secretly harbor those bitter feelings behind the epitome of stoicism. No one can blame your lack of discretion though, you're just owning up to the OG life as a hardcore rockstar.

-The apotheosis of rockertude of course being a "rebellious" piercing (Mennecke was born in a mid-life crisis)

-It's not a fete until somebody's reppin' Waukegan style (So at your next party be a dawg like Mennecke)

-When people don't empathize to your perspective, proselytize the opposition out of them until they too think that the river is indeed a symbolic womb of fertility rather than merely a geographical fact.
While Mennecke's life is a lesson to the casual observer on how to rock both pensively and stylishly, one aspect of Mennecke's existence not to be mimicked is his jejune security in the total extinction of hobbits, which are, much to his naive denial, still existing in the forests of Indonesia.
Follow these lessons, and if you so choose the displaced skepticism of the melodramatic brooder paradigm you'll be one step closer to understanding why those curtains are in fact blue; because it goes beyond a simple-minded description.