Survival Guide # 6 - How To Survive A Budget Airline

These days, it no longer seems enough to get around with just a car or an EZ link card, you need peddles and an inflatable boat, which makes travelling on a budget airline worthwhile again.

How to survive a budget airline.

1. Emergency exit seats

‘Leg room space’ is a term that was thrown out the equation when they created budget airlines whose true motto is “discomfort for all who is cheap”. The seats are so cramp, the only way you can have any remote comfort is unless you plan on amputating your legs after the flight, or you are a leprechaun.

Your best bet is to be seated at the emergency exits. Beg, bribe or flash a boob if you need to secure the seats, but it’s imperative that you get it if you intend to feel your legs after the flight. You might be the first to die if the doors blow open in mid flight, but at least you’ll be comfortable till that happens.

2. Turbulence

You are in a plane that offers $1 flights, either way, your best bet of surviving a turbulence is praying that your seat belt works and that they aren’t going to be charging for life-jackets. I’ve learnt from a recent trip that when they tell you to return to your seats in an event of a turbulence, they are kidding around with you. Being in the toilet is just about the worst place to be, it’s just like sleeping next to the propellers.

3. Entertainment

There should be a law that mandates that any time spent in the air over an hour should be accompanied by a private in-flight screen that comes with the best selection Hollywood has to offer. Since this is a flight that charges everything down to the air we breathe, a laptop or portable DVD player is your best friend since Lassie.

You need to ration your bag with magazines, playing cards or a blowup doll, just pack anything that will keep you from slitting your wrist in mid air. You’ll need it.

4. Alcohol

If you need to smuggle anything on board, let it be a whole range of vodka or sleeping pills, because you will need this when all else fails. Somehow time passes faster when you are asleep, or drunk – doubly fast when it’s both. So the key here is to make a 3 hour flight to Bangkok feel like a trip from Kallang to Bedok.

5. Parachute

Airlines allow you to hand carry luggage on board, so let’s be smart about it and make it something that counts, like a parachute. There are things in life that we must always be wary of, like strangers, ex-girlfriends, cholesterol, condoms and unknown flashing lights from a video camera – sometimes all those collectively. And budget airlines ranks in at the top with them.

Let’s look at this objectively, you will be spending hours on the plane torturing yourself because you decided saving money on airfare was an astute decision like voting against communism, but it actually means that you just saved enough money to invest in a parachute.

If that plane goes down, in that instance before that, you’ll be the most popular person on board, because you will have that one thing that actually mattered.

Survival Guide # 5 - How To Survive a Birthday

If you’re old enough to lift a glass of champagne, then you’ve probably experienced a birthday laced with alcohol and the only memory you have is shaking hands with random people and going to sleep hugging the toilet bowl.

How to survive a birthday.

1. Pacing

A birthday without alcohol is blasphemous, much like yawning in church or steak with ketchup, but binge drinking when you don’t have the capacity is just stupid. The key to surviving begins with pacing yourself through all the mindless toasting. It’s not going to be easy, because somehow your friends are always dumber on your birthdays when they think it’s a great idea to get you drunk fast.

Think about it people, when the birthday guy is smashed, someone has to look after him and the party ends earlier. So unless you are rushing home to watch Oprah, don’t rush it. It’s paramount that all your friends understand that this is a birthday celebration and not some competition on who gets to kill your liver. It’s about having fun and you can’t be doing that if you’re passed out on the dance floor.

2. Birthday drinks

I never understood the ritualistic suicide of having a flaming drink for birthday. No one ever enjoys it and people buy you that because they are cheap and they want you drunk fast. It’s a veteran rule to never mix drinks if you intend to leave the night with your dignity – and sometimes chastity – intact. One birthday I attended, it started with a flaming lambo and it ended with him giving the pavement a blowjob – 23 minutes later.

Remember it’s your birthday, you’re entitled to piss on traffic lights with impunity, so what is saying ‘No’ to certain drinks, so long as you are still religiously drinking. Sure, they’ll frown and throw big words like, ‘wah lau’ or ‘buay steady’, but it’s your birthday, so you can probably afford to lose a couple of friends.

3. Yell A lot

Friends will stop making you drink so long as they know that you are inebriated – it’s an obsession, like collecting stamps, vanity and necrophilia. Never tell people you are drunk because people who are drunk will never admit that they are. Yelling helps. Drunk people yell a lot.

4. Going on the offensive

This is a great strategy if your friends are lightweights. Always do group toastings so that you don’t fall into a precarious position of having individuals taking turns to drink with you. So long as they see that you are drinking, you’ll be fine. Be in control, so always pour your own drinks and follow each sip with a question so that it distracts them from noticing your glass.

Remember, it’s you against the horde, just imagine yourself to be Rambo or Hitler because for some reason, everyone is going to be picking on you. If all else fails, I hear McDonald’s has a great birthday package available.

Survival Guide # 4 - How To Survive WAking Up To A Stranger

Sometimes in life, we lose our battles with alcohol and wake up with alcohol amnesia wondering where we are. Sometimes we wake up next to the toilet bowl, in hotel rooms, and if you’re really lucky, with a condom in your ass.

How to survive waking up with a stranger – in a strange place.

1. Stay

CalmPanic is always the first error a person can commit in this situation, other than getting drunk which was what led you to this in the first place. Relax, take a minute to recollect the night’s escapades and it that fails, take another minute to formulate an exit plan, which includes calculating the nearest route to the door or out the toilet window.

2. Exit Plans

Don’t ask questions unless you intend for a sobriety shag in the morning. Crying, regrets and self berating can be done in the cab. The paramount concern now is to bail when they are asleep.

If you’re unlucky enough to wake up to a “good morning”, then all conversational structures should be shape with politeness and engagement, so long as the other party is good looking. If they are ugly, a quick gorge to their eye should suffice, before charging for the door.

3. Excuses

Always blame it on alcohol so you won’t be labeled with big words like promiscuous, amoral or decadent. After all, alcohol is the explanation of unwanted pregnancies, domestic violence and UFO sightings.Only use this if you are entirely sure you don’t want to wake up next to them again, ever. If not, conversational cues to prompt a name should be inserted right after, “hello” and somewhere before “can you call me a cab?”.

4. Denial

Denial is great for feeding your conscience and to make the situation more awkward. It’s even better than conjuring excuses because you don’t need to validate your lie or hear what the other party has to say. Let’s just hope you won’t be seeing yourself on YouTube.

5. Yelling

Should all else fail, yelling is the best way to get out of your predicament. It won’t be pretty, but if you do it well enough, you can cause the other party great panic and guilt True professionals at yelling have been known to make people defecate in their pants.

6. Milk it for it’s worth

When all else is lost, you should probably make the most out of it, like breakfast in bed, a free ride home or invoicing them for your hourly rate. You’ve already lost your dignity, the least you can do is to take their money.

Survival Guide # 3- How To Survive Being Dump

At some point in time, every human will go through pitfalls of life, like heartbreaks, bad sex, retrenchment, obesity and ugly children. Sure, there are easy solutions to these like, infanticide, genocide, robbing a bank or bulimia, but when there isn’t any chicken soup left for the heart, this is what you’ll need for breakups.

How to survive being dumped

1. Occupy yourself

Breakups are always hard to get over because you sit there and wallow in self pity, thinking of what you did wrong or what you could have done, when you know very well that a deeper cleavage or fancier car was what they dumped you for.

To break away from this chain of social regression, you need to stop thinking, and what better way than to occupy yourself with other trivialities like reading, travelling, doing sports or surfing for porn. It’s all about channeling your energy on something more positive.

2. Make use of friends

God gave us friends for a purpose other than to boost our Facebook profiles, form organized crime syndicates or make up a mahjong game. Friends are there because in times like these, they are a catharsis to loneliness. Hanging out with friends is the best immediate way to pass time and to bitch incessantly about that ex’s, because friends are willing to listen to sob stories if they need to.

3. Alcohol

Alcohol is after all, the solution to all problems – and the creation as well. You’d be amaze at what a tray of tequila can do for your self esteem, because with the right dosage, music and peer pressure, you might find yourself from wailing at home senselessly to dancing topless sensibly on the bar top.

Think of it this way, if you take it excessively, it might be dangerous and you might pass out and wake up a day later, but that also means you got through a day without felling emotionally vulnerable. Great job.

4. Get Even

Revenge is the dish best served cold, but I say, it’s also the best story you can tell your ex about the time you hooked up with their best friend. Love makes people stupid and falling out of it just makes you bitter. So, when you’re still stupid and bitter, things like rebound dates, revenge sex and burning their cars would sound like the best idea since man decided to add cheese to toast, but is it really?

Revenge as I would say, is like a Guatemalan whore with silicon tits and syphilis. It might like a good idea, but the consequences might be something you cannot handle. The best way to getting even is to move on fast and strong, because you’d have bettered them psychologically and showed that they never really meant that much.

Or maybe if chance permits, a quick jab to your ex’s face followed with a strong knuckle to the throat delivered with your master hand should do the trick. Remember, crying is okay, but it always looks better when someone else is doing it.

Survival Guide # 2 - How to Survive a Blind Date

How to survive a blind date?

Some point in time, when you are driven by boredom, desperation or nosey friends, you will be thrown into a situation where you have to contend for your survival in a blind date. It can be a disastrous experience. I know so because once I met this girl who had eyes so spaced apart, if they were higher up her head, she would have qualified as a frog.

1. Background check

Don’t make the same mistake I did. Always run a photo check when possible on who you are meeting and verify it with network tools like Facebook, though it’s not always accurate. Once on MySpace, I did a random search and I selected ‘athletic’ as body type and what looked like contestants of The Biggest Loser still popped up.

I know these defeats the purpose of a blind date, but ask yourself; do you really want to risk meeting up with an obese transvestite with a missing ear?

2. Choosing a location

Avoid overtly crowded places if you have no idea how the other person looks like. The last thing you need is bumping into friends who will Twitter about your alopecia plagued date. However, the great thing about crowds is that it’s a natural smokescreen if you need to bail even before a proper introduction.Similarly, avoid deserted areas unless you are aiming to get raped – which I must say is an ambitious goal for a first date.

3. Choosing an activity

Movies make the ideal blind date activity, simply because you don’t need to look at each other and there isn’t a need to create a conversation for a good 2 hours. So you don’t have to be dreading through coffee listening to the other person’s hobbies that might include erection killing cues like ‘social work’ and ‘stamp collecting’.

Never plan anything fancy because the less time you spend on one the better. If they are really worth your time, it’s called a second date.

4. Making conversations

Women should know that men don’t really give a shit about what you are saying, as long as you have a plunging neckline and cleavage that they can talk to. Being rude is a great way to shorten a date. There will be a lot of yelling, but they will leave eventually.

5. Planning your escape

Always formulate an exit strategy before the date, just so that you don’t need to slit your wrist - or theirs – if anything goes wrong. Something like have someone call you 30 minutes into the date or read your imaginary text message. Excusing yourself with reasons like, dinner with the folks, saving the world and booty calls have proved to be adequate. You might also want to sacrifice your family members through a fake accident if you need to bail immediately.

There’s really nothing wrong about cutting off a blind date, because giving people who are clearly unequal, equal chances, is called Communism. We don’t support that.

Survival Guide # 1 - How to survive Thai Discos

The world as they say, is a battlefield. So how are we to get through life if we don’t have mace, a chastity belt or Chuck Norris? If you are lucky, it’s called a revolver. For the rest of you, thankfully you have me for your one stop survival guide.

How to survive Thai/Viet Discos?

It’s the new hangout for days that you need loud music and the clubs aren’t in operation. It ain’t classy but if you are looking for an adventure, then this is where you will find, decadence, vice, over-priced tequila shots and if you are really lucky, STDs.

1. Rejecting lady drinks

Women here generally make a living out of peddling drinks for tips. They are generally deaf because they don’t take no for an answer and they approach you with the best pickup lines. There was this one girl who came over because she said I sent her a signal despite the fact that I hardly even looked at her. I was convinced she was either a dolphin or a Nokia phone.

If saying no isn’t enough, you can move to another table. Do not even bother with an introductory handshake because trivial niceties are only signs of weakness here. If she still does not get the message, a quick jab to her throat should solve it.

2. Hanging Garlands

It’s about showing support to the dancers. It’s about status. It’s about bragging rights. But really, is there a point to this when it’s not like it gets you an instant orgasm. That money goes to better use like, paying taxes, Gucci or Toto. Don’t worry about charity, your $50 won’t save a life despite what they tell you.

If a dancer really likes you, you don’t need to hang a garland to get her attention. You don’t want to be competing with a horde of cash happy men who believe garlands can unzip pants faster. Let the others tip, whilst you enjoy the show. It’s not like they will stop dancing anyway.

3. Don’t be fooled by sweet talk

Girls there will butter you with so many pleasantries that they can make a 2 inch penis sound like Sea Biscuit. Don’t be fooled into thinking a couple of tequila shots will get them naked. Love is a commodified item you can get there for 3 tequila shots, or if you are really in a rush, you can get them to propose to you for $200.

4. Appreciating the scene

The best way to digest these bars is with a drink at a corner of a bar, where you can appreciate all the clockworks of the place from a safe distance. It’s like a meat market, where people peddle shots, morals and themselves.

You can join the fray if you wish to, because what fun is there in staying sober because we all know that with enough alcohol, everything is a good idea. Just remember, if you are ever in doubt, more vodka usually solves the problems. After all, alcohol is the solution to all problems.