Despite my firmly held beliefs on learning certain things from firsthand experience, there are a number of lessons that I believe one can and should heed from a distance. Here are a few I hope you can appreciate from far, far away:

1. If left to achieve a state of enlightenment for several days, a bowl containing the remnants of a cereal and milk breakfast will develop a surprisingly thick blue skin. Maybe it was an uneaten blue moon from the Lucky Charms, maybe 2% milk just naturally turns a striking pale blue shade if allowed to fester, but the lesson here is to wash a cereal bowl after use on day 1, or at least well before the cultures start to develop their own ecosystem and religions.
2. Do you like bacon? What about cheese? Fancy a good steak? Well, tough luck if you wander into the woods and get bitten by a lone star tick carrying alpha gal! You won’t be enjoying the aforementioned foods for years to come if you’re lucky, unless you have a kink for hives, sobbing, and trying to evacuate digestive system contents through both ends simultaneously.
3. Congratulations, your new puppy has just learned to climb the stairs! Has it been more than 2 hours since he’s been outside? Oh. Maybe you should check on him? Preferably before he pees upstairs and the urine has had time to slowly drip between imperceptible spaces in the floorboards and soak into the ceiling of the room below.
4. Speaking of urine, if you make the mistake of picking up an upset dog to stop him from biting your older dog the airborne dog can urinate several feet across a room, thereby creating a urine-based sprinkler effect.
5. Pro tip: if your lip is bleeding, reach for a tissue to staunch the flow. Do not attempt to solve the problem by sucking your own lip, because you will end up with a mouthful of blood.
6. So you’ve decided to experiment with masonry! The future buyer of your house will not appreciate your efforts to repair the crumbling corner of the brick house by stuffing it with bubble wrap and gravel. If you believe this is a practical solution to holding up the corner of a 65+ year old house, please seek an alternate profession.
7. The socket in your parents’ dimmer lamp from the seventies doesn’t actually need a light bulb in it to complete the circuit if you stick your fingers in it.
8. Your clothes may smell fresh if you confuse the liquid softener compartment for the detergent compartment for an entire year, but they probably won’t be very clean.
9. Microwaved aluminum looks like a fun Van De Graaff generator, but it’s still a bad idea.
10. It is actually possible to get motion sickness while on horseback.

Still with me? Excellent. A bonus pearl of wisdom: never combine blue cheese with apple juice, because together, they taste like vomit.

Arcade Fire: Everything Now