By Anonymous
Ask Stanley is an anonymous advice column that will be posted monthly. Check your ystuds and sstuds for question submission details.
Dear Stanley,
I disagree politically with my roommates. What should I do when the conversation steers toward politics without damaging the feeling of security in our dorm?
Sara
Deflection, deflection, deflection. Change the conversation as quickly as you can when the political winds start to blow through your room. It’s best to have topics up your sleeve which you could miraculously whip out to dazzle them into forgetting about the political discussion. Alternatively, you could adopt the tactic Switzerland used in World War II. Simply embrace a neutral “middle-of-the-road” approach on anything political. It’s all about preserving the peace. Otherwise, you could always follow the advice my dear mother used to give me: put up or shut up.
Dear Stanley,
I’m having some trouble with my work ethic. I can’t seem to get in the right mindset for over a couple of hours and eventually I get distracted and stop working. How do I fix this?
Jake
CLOSE YOUR YOUTUBE TAB NOW. Go on… I’m waiting… Congratulations, you’ve taken the first important step towards having a work ethic. Now, think of something you want to achieve, say a 1000-word paper. We all know that you probably won’t complete it all in one shot, so chop that goal in half, and then slice that goal in half again. You wouldn’t eat a sushi roll as a log, would you? No. You need to have it in bite-size portions. Carry out your goal bit by bit and reward yourself for doing so. Take it slow and get it done. Plus, the sooner you get it done, the sooner you can reopen that tab and return to watching a video about ice-skating cats and what not. But don’t take too long of a break in between completing your goals — much like sushi, your momentum will decay and go stale after a couple days. And no one likes rancid sushi. It stinks.
Dear Stanley,
A lot of the people that I text on What’s App usually take a long time to respond (we are talking days) and sometimes they don’t even bother answering me at all. How can I stop people from ghosting me?
Lisa
Oh, Lisa. Lisa, Lisa, Lisa. Stop texting them. Just call them. Or the next time you see them face-to-face, just stare at them blankly and respond to nothing. After they start to get a bit irritated, tell them that that’s how you feel when they don’t respond to your texts.
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