I would have to say the best learning experience in college probably exists outside of classrooms. It is the experience of living alone. And away from your parents.

This is important because, as you probably already know, your parents are directly responsible for most of the things you have done wrong, such as drinking until your lips grow callouses, fooling around in phone booths and forgetting to eat during the month of November.

Your parents are responsible because they told you never to do any of these things, and really left you no choice.

And so living away from your parents is a welcome respite from all this harmful advice. And it's kind of fun. But it's also difficult.

It's often difficult to decorate some generic lime green room where hundreds -- maybe even thousands -- of other people have already lived and make it distinctly yours.

It's not always easy to find color combinations to go with whatever the hell that bluish goo was that you spilled on the ceiling. It's not always easy to find posters that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also sexually stimulating.

And it's never easy to convince guests that dirty underwear is a very hip decorative motif ("Chicks in New York are living with guys just for their dirty shorts").

But I've gotten pretty good at it. In fact, my rooms at college have been so definitively me that I could take anyone who even remotely knows me, show them my room and without telling them I live there they would be able to immediately say, "The person who lives here is not responsible enough to be given a banana to play with."

And they would be right as rain because some of my rooms have indeed borne a close resemblance to many of the rooms pictured in photos accompanying news stories about self-immolation or teen-suicide pacts.

But I think it's OK to live like a crazy person at college. I think that because I'm a very perceptive person and paranoid as hell. And so I see college as a crazy place filled with crazy people, who at any given time may either show you their genitalia or ask you for a donation to a worthy cause.

And you have to figure out which it's going to be before you reach for your spare change.

But no matter how or where you live, there are many interesting and useful things to be learned by living on your own.

For instance, when I lived in the dorms, I learned that by simply bouncing a golf ball on the floor over and over, a person on the top floor can actually break a person on the bottom floor's will to live.

There are also a lot of good things to be learned from fraternities and sororities, but I don't know anything about them because I never joined one. This is mainly because of something that happened to me as a freshman. It was something called a Rush Tap and it no longer exists.

I was at a Rush Tap at a certain fraternity. And I was standing by the keg listening to one of the brothers talk. The brother was dangerously intoxicated, hanging onto the keg tap for dear life, and by my estimate, not much more than three feet tall. He was telling us why we should join his fraternity.

"Ish jush nah hah," he said. Which makes no sense at all.

But we understood him. We understood him because we had been saying things like that all night. We spoke the dialect. And what he said was, "A fraternity is not just a place to party," meaning they learn lots of other useful stuff, such as secret handshakes and the Kappa Kappa Gamma doughnut song.

And I'm sure he was right. I'm sure the Greek life is an excellent way to spend your college years. It's just, at the time the brother was saying this, there were about 150 wasted teenagers there, breaking furniture and jumping around like professional wrestlers. I was skeptical.

I think the two best places to live while in college are in houses and apartments. These will give you the feel of being truly independent. And after four years of college, I've learned a few important things that could make life easier for some of you. And I don't mind passing them on.

The first thing is cooking. The best way to cook things for yourself that are not only nutritious and edible but also very tasty is to eat out all the time.

The second thing is how to get organized. Take all your important things -- syllabi, resumes, student audits, notes, tuition receipts, phone numbers on matchbook covers and the TV Guide -- and put them in alphabetical order. Then stand in the middle of your room and throw them up into the air so that they scatter all over the floor. Now you know where everything is. It is on the floor.

The third thing is cleaning. In order to combat the clutter that accumulates from time to time, I recommend a thorough sweeping of your room ... with fire. Or moving every three or four weeks.

And finally, the most important thing is to never, no matter what, ever let your parents through the door.