Rule 1: Have a duplicate. All of me have an identical twin, so this is absolutely necessary. It may seem like a daunting task, but I assure you that if you begin looking early, you will have a solid chance. Within seventy-two hours of your creation should be enough time to accomplish this.

Rule 2: Play far too many video games. These games do nothing for you, and yet you will continue to play them. Why? Because Dota.

Rule 3: Feel like you should care more about school, but don’t. You will go to a nation-renowned school for it’s intense academics! Yet you will find yourself not caring enough about your grades beyond the placating of your family.

Rule 4: Be confused while everyone else at your school does the complete opposite of Rule 3. Your peers will work way too hard. This will be painfully evident in your sophomore year of high school, because your school is known not only for its academics, but for its depressingly numerous suicides.

Rule 5: Be an uncompromising and extremely active nerd. Read absurdly long novels on the internet! Watch and read obscure TV shows and comics! Play Dungeons and Dragons! Create and play homebrewed Dungeons and Dragons based off aforementioned comics and novels! Make costumes of characters from those novels and tv shows, or from video games referenced in Rule 2!  Go to nerd conventions! Wear your costumes to those nerd conventions! Rant about your interests in your “How to” essays! Become self referential in your “How to” essays!

Rule 6: Wear one of three or four hoodies always. You must become unfashionable. Accept it.  You’ll slowly accumulate and phase out different jackets, so there’s some room for growth, but not enough to be anything but unfashionable.

Rule 7: Have very little cold resistance. You will need to shiver. You must be weak to the cold.

Rule 8: Luckily, you will disgust other people by having an absurdly high heat tolerance! Compared to your native Texas, Californian summers are nothing. You will burn, and you will love it. Just don’t stay in the sun too long. You get sunburns. Wear long sleeves perhaps.

Rule 9: Be arrogant in your intelligence, but simultaneously be aware of that arrogance. Privately, you are certain that you are very intelligent. But you have coasted on it as far as possible and are stagnating grade-wise. See Rule 3 for the natural continuation of this rule.

Rule 10: Eat at the same lunch table every day. And by every day, you mean every school day without a club during lunch. You will eat lunch at the table in the landing in the middle of the N building stairs. You will love this table. You helped it get to where it is during the Great Ascension(where you and some friends hauled it up half a flight of stairs). You’ll also call your table “The Bench”, despite it being a table.

Rule 11: Be nearly immune to stress. You will think to yourself, “Is it apathy or arrogance that breeds my critically low levels of stress?”. This question will not be answered for you.                                                                                                       

Rule 12: Stutter and misspeak around strangers, but sprint through and stumble over your words with friends. Despite your stresslessness, you will become nearly incompetent at speaking with strangers. You will manage, but the road will be rocky and be full of misunderstandings. Meanwhile, your friends will receive thousand word rants on topics ranging from mechanical ideas to what book, TV show or comic you’re currently reading. These rants will be only half coherent.

Rule 14: Think yourself rational yet paradoxically be superstitious. (Knocks on wood)

Rule 15: Concoct crazy plans with your group of friends. Lift a 400 pound table up half a flight of stairs! Buy an umbrella for that table! Make your table mobile by adding pedals and wheels! Build an aluminum foundry! Build motorcycles and race them! Drag race your friends Miata in your dad’s Lexus!(Don’t actually do this, just plan to) Play catch with a still-burning blowtorch! You will be glad you have two engineers as friends, and two doctors as parents.

Rule 16: Write humorous and self referential “How to” essay about yourself, then submit it!