The proper care and feeding of boys.

My last year of college, I lived with six boys between the ages of 19 and 21. That is a lot of boys. The experience was both amazingly fun and surprisingly traumatic, often both at the same time. I am almost tempted to write a memoir of my year in boy-life, but in the meantime I've compiled a small self-help guide for any other poor girl who finds herself in my situation--God help her. I didn't follow all these tips, but I wish I had. They are as follows:

1. Buy ear plugs. Boys make noise—lots of it—and usually resent being asked (told, begged) to shut up. The first time you’re awoken by a 4 AM mini-rave in the room next door, you’ll be tempted to go complain, but that wears off. It’s much easier to just put in the ear-plugs, roll over, and go back to bed.

2. Pick your battles wisely. Don’t even mention the empty beer cans on the floor. Save your righteous anger for the seldom-emptied cat box or the dishes that have been molding for weeks on the counter.
2.a If you’re smart, you won’t have dishes at all, but just encourage the boys to eat finger-foods like carrots and beer.

3. Buy a coat. Then put it on, and be willing to go outside to pay the Pizza/Chinese/Thai food delivery guy. Your willingness to actually move will probably buy you some points, that can be traded in for silence when you’re really desperate.

4. If you’re a smoker, always have cigarettes on hand, and be willing to share. Always have a lighter, and don’t let that thing out of your sight. Not even for a second, not even once.

5. Pretend like you don’t completely hate the Maxim calendar on the wall. It’ll throw them for a loop and you’re always at an advantage if you’ve caught them off guard. Once the thrill of the calendar has worn off, they’ll be willing to replace it with something funny and less offensive, since the only reason for putting it up in the first place was to infuriate you.

6. MAINTAIN VIGILANCE. My boys hid a small, flat tape recorder under a chair, so that every time someone sat on it, it played Natasha Beddingfield’s new hit. Not knowing where the sound came from almost drove me insane. So MAINTAIN VIGILANCE. You never know when they’ll get it into their heads to start fucking with you, and this can range from practical jokes with bad pop songs to dosing you with acid. (Really.) Never, ever, let your guard down.

7. Get better at MarioKart. Loosing just makes you stand out even more as a “girl.” Winning won’t benefit you in any appreciable way, but the personal satisfaction counts for something.

8. Stop fearing explosives. Get comfortable with them. My apartment had rockets, and fireworks, and gunpowder strewn about for the duration of the time I lived there. As a matter of fact, stop being so concerned with personal safety in general. Really, it’s over-rated.

9. Maintain personal space. Buy a lock if you have to, and use it. Sometimes the only recourse you will have is to retreat, and hibernate in your room until the winter of your discontent has passed. The Bush administration has shown us that we can still claim victory if we use the words “tactical redeployment” instead of retreat.

10. Remember that it is unequivocally illegal to murder someone in all fifty US states and territories. Repeat this to yourself when the going gets tough. Picture what it would be like to spend the next fifty years in jail, take a deep breath, put down your weapon, and walk away from the offender in question. This will come in handy a lot more than you'd expect.

This is not so much advice as a general fact: your friends/family/acquaintances will start refusing to come over because of the smell/noise/chaos. The sooner you get used to this, the better off you'll be. Being a social pariah isn't as bad as it sounds, and you'll probably find that, between late-night beer runs and day-long cleaning sessions, the boys have replaced your "normal friends" anyway.