20 things we didn’t learn in school

1) Bird shit doesn’t always fall on someone else.

Ever since I was a kid, I’d always laugh at friends who were the targets of a natural, possibly unintentional bombing run. It was amusing, looking at their faces twisted with disgust and the excreta dripping down their shirt or face. Then would come the cry of frustration, resounding with the inability to understand why it couldn’t just have missed them in the first place. It was amusing until I, myself, was hit by such a projectile, and it wasn’t pretty.

2) Wearing a full-body safety harness improperly can result in injury or death.

I went to a teen camp over the summer, and one of the activities was sliding down this contraption on the side of a hill. A few wires were attached to the top of the hill and to two pillars at the bottom. One attached his harness to these wires via some sort of trapeze, and then slid down to the bottom. A full-body harness has two straps that go in between both your legs. The problem with these straps is that if they’re not properly secured, they have a tendency to catch your balls in a vise grip. Quite a few of my fellow campers had their balls crushed, and I made sure to tighten mine as much as possible to avoid injury. As a result, I only experienced minimal discomfort.

3) Cheap liquor gets you drunk much faster.

A low alcohol-tolerance level is one of the things I inherited from my dad. While his eyes become yellow and puffy and his skin turns beet-red, I just get intoxicated fairly quickly. Which still is a bad thing. The day last school year ended, I went to a house party thrown by one of my classmates. Someone brought several bottles of Grand Matador, and I decided to have a go at it. It tasted kind of like Johnnie Walker Black Label, but a lot weaker. I had another glass. Bad move. I had two more. Pretty soon I was reeling around the place, jumping on tables and rolling on the floor. I threw the Quiksilver cap I bought in Paris out the window (it seemed the logical thing to do at the time), tricked someone into drinking beer mixed with my piss, and caught it on video. I said a lot of things I shouldn’t have said. In the end, I passed out, and had to be carried home. I kept puking all the way. When I woke up in the morning, I could hardly remember a thing, only flashes of a wildly spinning world and many faces looking down on me as I lay, face up, on the floor.

4) Feeding a person grass is not a good way to make friends.

I studied in Xavier when I was in the first grade, and whenever I was on break I’d head over to the football field and horse around. One day, I decided to try and make friends with a tough-looking guy, to help me ward off the bullies. His name I cannot remember, but he was a big lout of a boy with dark skin and an ape’s face. He wanted to play a game, so I told him we’d play at farming. He was the carabao, and I was the farmer. It got boring, so I uprooted a sizable clump of muddy grass and hid it behind my back. I asked him if he was hungry, and he nodded in the affirmative. I yelled, "CARABAOS EAT GRASS!" stuffed the grass clump into his mouth, and ran like the devil himself was after me.

For a few weeks after that, I was constantly looking over my shoulder to make sure he wasn’t sneaking up on me for revenge.

5) Feeding a friend a "sand ball of death" is a good way to be sent to the office of student discipline and welfare (OSDW).

Later that same school year, there was an abandoned stable at the back of the football field where my friends and I would chill and play our war games. One day we all were thoroughly tired of using sticks as guns, pretending to shoot each other, and the cheating that inevitably occurred. ("I shot you. You’re dead." "I shot you first. I’m not dead. You are." "I had a bulletproof vest. Lie down and play dead." "I had a gun that goes through bulletproof vests. I’m still alive." "I had a shield that counters guns that shoot through bulletproof vests. You’re dead.") I scooped up a double handful of sand, moistened it from a nearby hose, and molded it into a ball. I crept behind the most blatant cheater of them all and shoved the death ball into his mouth. Fleeing the scene once again, I was about to disappear into the men’s toilets when an officer of the Office Of Student Discipline And Welfare (OSDW) caught me. With a firm grip on my ear, he marched me to the OSDW and issued me a sad slip. It was basically a piece of paper with a sad face on it. So much for the "D" in OSDW.

6) Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is a helluva lot more fun than boxing.

I trained at a boxing center along Gilmore for about a year before I got bored to death of it. It’s a great workout, but it gets extremely repetitive. I wound up doing the same punch combos, the same drills, and the same workouts week after week, and it eventually bored me stiff. So I decided to take up BJJ, since that’s what a bunch of UFC fighters use. BJJ is fantastic. You rely on technique rather than brute strength, using locks, chokes, and other submissions, so it’s possible to beat a guy bigger and badder than you if you’re skilled enough. BJJ is all about grappling and ground fighting. There are hundreds of different moves that revolve around a few basic principles, and you can make up your own as long as you follow those principles. For example, there are many different ways of sweeping a person sitting on your chest, but most of them revolve around the principle of a table. A table with four legs is stable. Remove one leg, and it’s wobbly, but it can still stand. Remove another leg on the same side, and it will topple over. I take my classes at a building in Capitolyo, and if you’re interested in trying it out you can text my trainer at 0916-347-9218.

7) Holding your breath as long as you possibly can will clear up your clogged nose.

I’ve got allergic rhinitis. Sometimes my nose clogs up for no reason. When that happens, I hold my breath for as long as I can (usually about 30 seconds) then breathe shallowly for a few minutes after that. Lo and behold, my nose unclogs.

8) Sitting at your computer for extended periods of time makes your back snap, crackle, and pop.

Every time I use my Mac for more than two hours, my back starts aching. When I twist it around, you can hear it crack from across the room. Possibly it’s the way I sit, but I try to sit up as straight as I can. I like cracking my back anyway; in the same way I like cracking my neck, my knuckles, my elbows, and my toes.

9) Reading Stephen King novels is a great way to get rid of insomnia.

Some nights, I just can’t sleep. What I do is get a Stephen King novel, start reading at 11, and finish at two or three in the morning. His books are so exciting that I find putting them down an exercise in futility, and by the time the book is through it’s really late and I find that I’m sleepy. Usually I’m off to Never Neverland by the time my head hits the pillow, although there is the rare occasion when I’m finally about to fall asleep and I discover that I have to use the john.

10) Owning a teddy bear at the age of 16 isn’t such a wuss thing.

My great-grandmother gave me a teddy bear when I was born. I slept with it until I was 15, so great was its sentimental value to me. I used to play with that bear a lot, making it fight my GI Joes and X-Men action figures. It’d always win, because it was The Great One. I nearly bashed its eyes out making it face-butt Wolverine once, but Teddy only suffered two cracked glass eyes. It looks like he has cataracts now. His fur is falling off on his belly, back and armpits. Why, one would ask, would a guy like me keep a rundown teddy bear? Beats me.