I have a few words of advice for the coming season’s crop of reality TV show contestants:

1. Your few weeks on a TV show don’t qualify as a “journey,” so stop calling it that. A journey is more along the lines of 30 years of marriage to a homeless person, or starting a five-star window cleaning business, or creating a big cat reserve for the orphans of poached tigers, lions, and leopards. Making bad music videos for Ford commercials or practicing dance routines about a man who cheated on his wife who he loves and who loves him but feels so betrayed so they keep running together and then pushing off and running away from each other; those don’t count as journeys. They just don’t. I don’t know how else to put it.

Finally, someone giving voice to the unappreciated world of crash test dummy love

2. When you are done with your performance and are standing with the host and this host is telling people they can call or text to vote for you, don’t come up with a funny or charming routine for flashing your voting numbers with your fingers or pantomiming them with your mouth. This is lame and obnoxious 100% of the time, every time, all of the time, forever. The best thing to do is smile naturally into the camera and let Seacrest do the talking. Seacrest was created for this express purpose, in the same way that a shovel was made to dig. So leave the charming and the winking and the grinning to Seacrest.

3. Don’t pretend that you’ll be heartbroken when your acquaintance of 4 days gets eliminated. Also, when it’s down to you and one other contestant, don’t lie about it not mattering to you who wins because you both deserve it and you’ll be so happy either way. It doesn’t matter to you whether you become a multimillionaire international celebrity who goes clubbing with Jacob the werewolf, or spend the next 10 years performing at county fairs and high school reunions before finally taking that inside sales job at your uncle’s equipment rental store? Either one of those paths is just fine by you?

4. Don’t talk about the Hot Tamale Train like it’s a real train. It isn’t. The Heber Creeper and Santa Fe Express are real trains. The Hot Tamale Train is just an expression Mary made up that means you are really working it and doing a great job. So don’t talk about how bad you want to ride the Hot Tamale Train and how thrilled you are that Mary said you were on it tonight.

My bad; I guess it is a real train

5. Don’t talk about other contestants not being there for the “right reasons.” This makes you sound very unintelligent and unoriginal. If you’re trying to find your husband on reality t.v., you are all, by definition, there for the wrong reasons.

6. Don’t do a joke or song when meeting the Bachelor to make yourself stand out. If you tell him a weird muffin joke, you will stand out, but only as the weirdo who told the muffin joke, so that doesn’t help you.

Just be yourself, do what the viewers expect you to do (sing, dance, make out with a stranger in a hot tub), and hope for the best.

What advice do you have for these contestants?