Sherman Ave Freshman Guide: Your Dorm Room

This is probably how you want your dorm room to look.

This is probably not how your dorm room is going to look.

In fact, there aren't even pictures of how your dorm is going to look because nobody wants to photograph that shit.  Ikea has been lying to you. Sorry. But your quarters are not going to appear as if an interior decorator casually sharted copies of Ladies' Home Journal all over the coffee table.

Here's what it's actually going to consist of:

1. Storage: Squeezing all the necessities, a few luxuries, and two adult-sized humans into a closet the size of Miley Cyrus' dignity is like playing Tetris with Beelzebub. To accomplish this, you will play the well-known game of Crate Sardines. There will be hidden crates everywhere: under your bed, in your closet, IN YOUR MOUTH. The crates will take over your room like Rosie O’Donnell in an elevator. Deal with it. .
2. Laundry: You just won't have time or energy or motivation to put it away. It will probably live in a hamper [glorified mesh crate] til the next time you wear it. Or, if you want a stationary safari vacation, you can accidentally coordinate your laundry with roomz so you both need to hang your delicates at the same time and you will string clothesline around the room and make Laundry Jungle, Indiana Jones theme song optional. .
3. A bed: And it will take up most of your space. Unless you can put crates on the ceiling, loft your bed (even a little). The depth of human capacity for survival in the face of adversity predicts that you'll still be able to crawl in when you're wasted. And if not? Survival of the fittest. .
4. Your desk and everything on it: Since your desk and maybe window ledge are the only flat open spaces, they function as desk, dresser top, kitchen table, food preparation area, general catch-all, and possibly sex lounge if you're into that. Items that would not usually live on a desk will therefore live on your desk. Example: depending on the season, there will be accessible at all times either a coffee mug or shot glass which will not be clean or even moderately rinsed because that would imply it wasn't in use and one or both of those two items is always in use. .
5. Your roommate: Want to know what's not in that picture of an ideal dorm room? OTHER HUMANS. That's PROBABLY because they're ugly. Or messy cockblocking fratstars. Or annoying nocturnal perfectionists. Or they're totally nice and you know what, it's just hard to live with other people. Go easy on your roommate- they're putting up with that grody shot glass.