Via car, with your parents
Stare broodingly out the window while your mom aggressively interrogates you on your romantic prospects. Pray for the sweet embrace of death.
Via car, with someone you randomly met on Facebook who promised to drive you home
Stare desperately out the window while you try to block out their terrible taste in music. It feels like worms are burrowing into your eardrums. Alternatively, their car is extremely dirty and there actually are worms burrowing into your eardrums. Or it’s all a ploy to keep you docile so they can ferry you off to their Murder Palace and eat you alive, but not before collecting the $114.58 in gas money you promised to pay them beforehand.
Via commercial airline
Wedge yourself into your economy class middle seat like the base animal you are. Try to stare threateningly out the window, but your seething manful gaze is blocked by the stomach of the world-champion sumo wrestler sitting next to you. To establish dominance over your fellow beasts, recline your seat as far back as it will go and enjoy the feeble thumping on the back of your seat that indicates the life slowly leaving your first victim. For extra points, listen to dubstep through your headphones on maximum volume so that your sick beats can infiltrate your pressurized cage and mark the territory as yours. Is there a crying baby? Hiss at it like a goose.
Via commercial airline, but business or first class
Have a complimentary glass or two of champagne and cackle quietly to yourself at the sound of ambient dubstep emanating quietly from second—sorry, economy—class.
Via private jet
Stare anxiously out the window because you’re not sure you’re emotionally prepared for that two-week Caribbean yacht cruise with—God forbid—your family. Maybe pop a Xanax or five. Hope you didn’t forget to wipe your shoes on the peasants’ faces before you left!
Via USG bus
Slump sensually (you hope) on the shoulder of the objectively attractive person next to you in hopes of kindling a relationship. Wake up ten hours later in an abandoned bus lot. Realize you bought the ticket for the wrong city because, despite the B+ you got in your writing seminar freshman year, you are illiterate. Call your mom. Cry. Refer back to the top of this list.
Via train
If you enter the secret code on the machines at the Dinky station, you’ll get a ticket for the Polar Express and terrifying, robotic, putty-faced Tom Hanks will appear to whisk you off to the gulag where you’ll spend the rest of your days working yourself to exhaustion in order to meet an ever-rising quota…which seems a lot like what you’re already doing. Go for it.
Via chariot of flame, pulled by thirteen giant bats, who are also on fire
At precisely midnight, steal into McCosh and draw an enormous pentagram on one of the chalkboards. Light everything on fire and grunt loudly and rhythmically to a Taylor Swift song of your choice (ALL HAIL OUR EARTHLY DEMONIC QUEEN) until the bats appear to bear you unto your true domain. If it works, congratulations! You are actually Satan. Have a holly jolly Christmas in hell, or whatever.
– JMJ ’18. Illustrated by RRF ’17 & AZ ’16.