Regardless of what you do decide to do, it’s important to take care when choosing a roommate. If you choose well, you’ll have someone to enjoy the good and the bad times with, a shoulder to cry on, and someone to watch your back and to keep you on track when you need it.

If your roommate is a less than ideal match-up, it can make your life miserable. Around this same time last semester, I found myself desperately needing to find a place to live. I was short on time and on cash, and I was running out of options.

As luck would have it, I had a friend who was in a similar boat at the time. To protect his identity, we’ll call him Homer. We both decided that sharing an apartment would be mutually beneficial. So we went apartment hunting, and within a week, we had a place of our own. Things were looking good.

Or so I thought. The first couple of weeks were good, but as the weeks went on, we began to notice each other’s idiosyncrasies. Homer would keep really weird hours, even for someone on this campus. I’m sure that I got on his nerves too, but this notebook isn’t about me.

Things just weren’t playing out as either of us had expected. I can’t really say that I was terribly sad to hear that he was moving out—he had managed to make my life miserable for the three months that we were roommates.

So Homer went off on his own, and I remained in the apartment. I wish that things didn’t turn out this way. I don’t really use Homer’s room; it just has a couple of boxes that would otherwise sit in my closet. I don’t really want to use it either.

I haven’t spoken with Homer since he left. At this point, I don’t even know how to find him.

By now you’re thinking to yourself, “Okay, so what the heck is this guy getting at? He just rambled on for five hundred words about this Homer guy, what’s it got to do with me?”