"Parmesan [...] might be just a hair too serious for the occasion."

in the interest of being a better, more helpful person, i'd like to translate the 12 steps to pasta salad in this 600ish-word slate article that i'm sure the author actually was paid to write, because i know many of my readers are not culinary masters and really could use the art of making pasta salad broken down into plain, working-man's english.

1. people who are making their own pasta from scratch are not reading this article. so just use regular noodles that you find wherever! don't cook them too much--if you are wandering off to do blow or smoke cigarettes you're just going to screw this up. why are you even trying to do this?
2. much like a regular salad, you want to put some oil in your dressing. for those of you who have failed common sense 101, butter gets harder when it's cold so don't melt that and put it in your pasta salad.
3. store-bought filled pasta is gross. don't buy it. i don't care how hungover you are.
4. the types of pasta you do want to use are noodles, pasta, noodles, pasta, and pasta. ha ha ha! let's be serious here. anything but a long noodle. unless you're making an asian pasta salad! oh god, just give up now. you have no idea what is going on, do you?
5. mayo is gross, you big fatty. don't glob it on top of a bunch of noodles. you might as well top it off with some frosted flakes and some weed if you're just going to do that! (note: all bets are off if you are adding lobster to your salad; lobster is very classy so it offsets how white trash and disgusting you are, lobbing mayo all over linguine like a common retard.)
6. when i said mayo was off-limits, you totally thought to put ranch dressing on instead, weren't you? plebeian. what kind of pasta salad are you even making?
7. please, please, stop trying to use vegetables to be "festive" without giving any thought to how you are using them. peppers are not confetti!
8. hey, you know what you should actually consider doing? seasoning your sauces. i mean, you don't have to. it's not like you'd even be able to tell the difference, you mayonnaise-guzzling freak.
9. this one's a little out there: have you considered...cheese?
10. here's another weird one: ever consider putting some kind of flavorful meat or assertive vegetable in your salad?
11. oh, hey, don't, like, let it just sit around. it might get weird, or bugs might sit on it. you should eat it at some point. except that you've probably made this complicated, sophisticated dish all wrong, so maybe you should just throw it out at this point.
12. profit!