I am writing this as a guideline for what not to do when moving off campus for the first time next, or any subsequent, semester. Please heed these stories, from my own personal experience, and choose your neighborhoods and, more importantly, housemates judiciously.

The first indication that our neighborhood might be, perhaps, less than ideal was when someone offered my mother “crack” when she came to visit.

My housemates are also pretty stupid: “Hollywood” initiated an activity in our house that entails lining beer cans up in a row and competing to see who can shoot more of them with a BB gun (yes, inside the house) — hard, metal BBs ricocheting off walls and hitting unsuspecting people (me) trying to watch playoff baseball. He also lit a smoke bomb so powerful that the fire department (three trucks) and police (three officers) came to our house. He spent a few hours in jail, and his legacy of idiocy grew. He also threw firecrackers at a puppy. Had I known he had a propensity for throwing Chinese explosives at innocent puppies, I would have likely screened him more diligently as a housemate — take a lesson.

“SoySauce” is an interesting personality. He has a chain-smoking cigar addiction, irons every article of clothing he owns with obsessive-compulsive precision and enjoys preparing and eating fried sardines (to our dismay).

“Fullbaked” smokes more blunts than I eat servings of vegetables in a given day. He is a remarkably smart individual, but his room would lead one to believe Hurricane Katrina made its way to Binghamton. He has a tendency to leave his roaches all over the house, particularly in a cup upstairs aptly dubbed the “blunt cup,” for it typically contains about three fluid ounces of water and the remnants of 10 blunts. Yet despite his habit, he is the most harmless person to live with. Lesson: potheads are OK, even if you, like me, don’t smoke.

“Dr. J” is a peculiar character with many admirers. His recent endeavors to find female companionship have been so unsuccessful that every time another member of the house says hi to a girl, he queries in great detail exactly “how you pulled that off.” He also occasionally has trouble remembering just which house is ours … the other night he walked into a neighboring house around 4 a.m. This resulted in a trip to the hospital to x-ray the spot on his head where the neighbor’s fist landed.

“MassTransit” lives on the same floor as me, in the corner, but I’m not quite sure he is a resident here; he is strikingly familiar to “the guy” in Jay and Silent Bob. Additionally, he does not have a car, so on those days he elects to go to class, he is often seen bargaining for rides. Lesson: establish ground rules for this if you are living with someone who doesn’t have a car.

“Rage” is, as the name implies, a man who approaches life with a degree of fury. He is a wizard on all things baseball and insists that he was at one point a pitching prospect. Granted a shoulder injury, playing catch with him mostly involves running and jumping over fences for balls … unfortunately, crack-heads typically reside on the other side of that fence. “Rage” is capable of honing this fury into ambition, and when he does he is a surprisingly effective person … such as the time he dislocated my shoulder for leaving the door open.

“Curry” is about as lovable as a teddy bear bursting at the seams with candy, with a 3.9 GPA. But he has one particular fetish that is seemingly inconsistent with the rest of his personality: he loves to break furniture with baseball bats. Viciously and unprovoked, he destroys everything from dressers to desks, often causing collateral damage in the process. He is a man of many contradictions and lots of early-morning masturbating, which he is, disturbingly, not bashful about.

It’s worth noting that everyone that lives in this house is at least marginally intelligent, and that when we are together the potential for great things does exist. For example, we took the garbage out on time last week (but not this week). We are also very compassionate. Yesterday “Dr. J” and I encountered an unknown person, not wearing shoes, smoking some sort of pipe contraption in our neighbor’s backyard. We left her alone.