Let’s face facts:

I’m a mess. I can barely make breakfast for myself without accidentally setting something on fire or punching people in the face. So I really have no business giving people advice on finding an apartment.

That said, the one benefit of having everything in your life be a horrible, horrible mistake is that you can provide excellent advice on how NOT to do things. With that in mind, may I present Paul Ryan’s guide to finding a new apartment.

Step one:

Drink heavily
Finding a new apartment is like getting laid: You have to drastically lower your expectations if you want to actually be happy with the options that are in your league. So grab a bottle of whiskey and don’t stop drinking until that 200 square foot studio apartment in the middle of the ghetto looks SEXY.

Step two:

Murder all of
your current roommates
If you’re between the ages of 1 and 120, you’re officially too old to have a roommate. However, people are cheap, so your friends will likely try their hardest to join in on your apartment hunt. This is unacceptable. Life is difficult enough without other people eating your food, drinking your soda and contaminating your heroin syringes with various letter-graded forms of hepatitis. Tell them to go to hell. This is your apartment, and you can’t have other people mucking it up. Since you’ve already gotten yourself liquored up, this awkward confrontation should be much easier than usual.

Step three:

Stumble drunkenly around a neighborhood where you’d like to live.
Sure, you could find an apartment through Craigslist or paid websites, but everyone does that. And with your horrible credit rating, you really can’t afford the competition. But do you know what no one does? Gets drunk and stumbles around a neighborhood searching for listings that are off the grid. A 2012 study I made up found that nearly 89 percent of landlords are illiterate baboons who refuse to acknowledge that the internet exists. Take advantage of that.

Not only will these landlords put up with your increasingly worrisome drinking problem, they’ll probably put up with lots of other things, like the large collection of bottles you’ll leave strewn around the hallways of the building, often times with you passed out and still holding them. Such a landlord will also likely put up with the angry booing that comes from your apartment when you see a celebrity on TV that you dislike, or the loud arguments that occur when your girlfriend realizes you rented an apartment that is infested with bedbugs.

Step four:

Drink heavily
All that walking around probably sobered you up. That’s no way to go through life, son. Get back on that horse.

Step five:

Check for bedbugs
You can tell an apartment has bedbugs by the black streaks on the floor, left by the previous tenant’s sneakers when he sprinted out of the unit while tearing up his lease. You can also tell because your immigrant neighbors will often shout “Los diablo de insectos!” as the landlord is showing you the place.

If you find yourself in a bedbug infested apartment, the most effective way of getting rid of them is to strip naked, set the entire building on fire with all your possessions in it, and then sprint to the nearest car wash and run through it backwards. In fact, that’s pretty much the ONLY way to get rid of them. They’re the reason everyone hates New Yorkers.

Step six:

Drink heavily
What started as a clever scheme to lower your inhibitions and find you a slutty apartment have now turned into a legitimate substance abuse problem. USA! USA! USA!

Step seven:

Depressed and
defeated, have a nervous
breakdown and sign a lease
for an overpriced dump so
you can move on with
your terrible life
Who gives a shit? Who cares if it sucks! I’m tired of this running around bullshit! If I have to view one more apartment where the pictures posted were completely fake and the rent jumped up $200 because two people applied for it, then I’m gonna start cutting myself. Just give me whatever’s available that doesn’t have a mountain of drama attached to it. I don’t care where it’s located or how many people in the building listen to rap music, just move my stuff in so I can live my damn life again.

Step eight:
Drink until you’re dead
God knows you’ve earned it.