WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE, I sort of accidentally didn't make any friends for two years. My school was located in Los Angeles, which meant that it was full of orange guys with muscles and hard hair and girls wearing those tiny shorts that said "LOOK AT MY ASSHOLE" across the buns. And also Ugg boots, and Malibu rum, and people who thought a good career would be "shock jock," and business majors who wore suits every Friday and couldn't wait to go buy companies from nice old men and split them up and sell them for parts like Richard Gere in Pretty Woman before he learns the meaning of feelings. Basically, I didn't fit in (or at least that's what my self-pity told me).

And because I didn't make a single friend, I spent two years living in 100-square-foot rooms with randomly assigned strangers. (This was amazing for comedy purposes, but shitty for not-crying-every-day purposes.)

The first stranger was a shaky Texan model who ate nothing but canned tuna mixed with ketchup, shared a twin bed with her shaky Texan mother whenever she came to visit, and pulverized large sections of our asbestos ceiling trying to hang up her totally psychedelic black-light posters, a transgression for which we were each fined $100, which is still an astronomical amount to me and I have a job now. (She affixed the black light itself to the wall with Scotch tape. Betcha didn't know: The sound of a black light crashing to the linoleum floor in the dead of night sounds strikingly similar to a madman crashing through the window in order to skin some freshmen!) One time this roommate broke up with her faraway Texan boyfriend and listened to "Bittersweet Symphony" on repeat for three days. Sometimes I would find her hair in my bed. I lived with her for an entire year.

The second stranger was from Bangladesh ("It's pronounced BONG-gladesh"). She smoked two packs of Newports a day (TWO, like as in the number two), wallpapered our entire room with Absolut vodka ads, and only owned two videocassettes: A League of Their Own and Erin Brockovich. Over and over she watched them. Any time of the day or night, I'd come home and there she'd be—shades shut tight against the LA sun, tucked up in bed beneath a halo of wackily revamped vodka bottles, stinking of menthol and laughing, yet again, because there's no crying in baseball. I only lasted half a year with that one.

Now. Clearly I was also a dick. I had no self-confidence, I wore ugly clothes, and I made sure to hate everyone preemptively before they could learn to hate me, because they were pretty and wore shorts. But also, OH MY GOD THOSE GUYS WERE TOTAL DICKS. Seriously, two packs of menthols!? Who ARE you!?!?

So listen, children. Learn from me. Make your own friends in college. Don't trust the administration to do this important job for you.

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