You’ll try to avoid getting stuck on one of these if you know what’s best for your health

We all know the feeling: you’re riding the subway down to Penn Station, you have half an hour before your train leaves, you’re desperately telling yourself that everything will be fine – and then, without even the slightest warning, the train just stops. It stops! Right in the middle of the track! Between stops! Is this even allowed? Whether it is or isn’t, the outcome is the same: your stress level, which you previously thought was at its peak, has now risen tenfold.

Taking public transportation is a gamble on your best days, much less when you have planes, trains, buses, or other vehicles to catch in order to get home for Thanksgiving. But unfortunately, as broke college students, many of us can’t afford to take cabs or ubers (or have never taken a cab or uber before and are, at this point, too afraid to ask how exactly it’s done), and thus, we must brave the terrors of finicky public transportation. Of course, this isn’t to say that private transportation doesn’t have some faults, too – the likelihood of you facing a ridiculously short time between connecting flights or an Amtrak train conductor who keeps making mysterious announcements about arrival time is, sadly, very high. And, perhaps worst of all, when you’re on a subway, or in the air, or riding through the Midwest, a quality internet connection is rare, making distracting yourself from your problems so much harder.

With that in mind, Bwog has kindly put together a list of things you can think about while stuck without wifi to reduce the stress of travel delays, travel mishaps, or any other travel confusions that might affect you as you travel home this Thanksgiving.

1. Imagine you’re a dog in Riverside Park. Those dogs always seem to have the best times – running around, totally carefree, with so much to see and smell. They never worry about colliding with people on the paths, much less arriving in specific places at specific times. Pretend you’re chasing a squirrel and you’ll be set for at least a few minutes.

2. Make up life stories for everyone else on your train/bus/plane/whatever. The less realistic, the better. That lady is totally a florist by day, crime-fighting hacker by night. That old guy looks like a hobo, but he knows how to make the finest cheese the world has ever tasted. Those two middle-school-aged kids are on their way to fight a bunch of monsters out of ancient Greek mythology and take back Manhatten from the titans. And so on.

3. Imagine you have superpowers, get out of the train/bus/plane/whatever, and push it to where you need to go. And then, once you’ve done that, imagine what else you can do with those superpowers. Will you fight crime? Cause crime? Terrify the pigeons of Manhattan into moving somewhere else? The possibilities are endless.

4. Listen to Yorktown from the Hamilton musical a few times. It’s hard to be stressed out about your own problems if you’re hearing a group of revolutionaries sing about the pressure they’re under to defeat the British army and create the first democratic nation in the world. You only have to get somewhere on time, not fight for your life. Plus, the music is very catchy.

5. Imagine you’re lying on a beach in the middle of summer. Sand between your toes, warm sun on your back, the ocean rolling in and out in the distance … Pretend you’re the picture of internal peace, and it might happen. Just make sure to jog yourself out of it when you have to pay attention to your surroundings again.

6. Recite some multiplication tables, the Periodic Table, Latin verb declensions, or anything else applicable to your course of study. This one is not recommended if you had a particularly hard test on one of these subjects earlier that day, but it’s certainly a way to pass time.

7. Try to write a quality poop joke. Imagine you’re surrounded by a mob of six-year-old boys. You need to impress them or they’ll start attacking you. The pressure is on, and the topic is poop.

8. Advanced version of #7: try to write a quality Shakespearean dick joke. There’s no dick joke like a Shakespearean dick joke, but they’re not easy to write. You need to be both dirty and cunning. It’s a challenge not quite like any other. (Look here for examples.)

9. List the foods you can’t wait to eat when you get home. Not that we don’t love Ferris, John Jay, JJs, and Hewitt, just that – well, we don’t always love Ferris, John Jay, JJs, and Hewitt. Well, alright, maybe JJs. We also don’t always love our inability to turn the depressing amount of food in our fridges into something actually edible.

10. Rehearse ridiculous stories you won’t tell your parents. Get the story of that time you were almost CAVA’d for getting ridiculously drunk and tripping down a flight of stairs out of your system now, so that it won’t accidentally slip out at the dinner table.

11. Rehearse mundane stories you will tell your parents. You need to have some stock answers ready, and they need to sound both pretentious and believable. University Writing doesn’t prepare you for this shit. (But Bwog might.)

12. Plan out your Netflix-watching schedule. Jessica Jones just came out, you heard Master of None is pretty good, you definitely want to finish watching Friends so that you can actually get the references people make … But then, you also have to sleep, and talk to people … This might be the most productive use of time on the list.

13. Imagine punching Donald Trump in the face. Not a long one, but incredibly satisfying. Imagine how his toupee would fly off his head, the look of shock on his face as you shout something satisfying about women’s rights, the applause afterwards …

14. Find out how many High School Musical lyrics you remember. We’re all in this together, once we know, that we are, we’re all stars, and we see that … Our childhood obsessions stick with us longer than we’d ever expect them to. Oh, well, at least it’s a way to pass time.

15. Rank your personal top 5 Bwog posts. This last one might take the longest of all – it’s by far the most challenging. How could you choose only 5? (We sure couldn’t.)