For the past three years, I’ve lived with a group of eight incredible individuals. Yes, eight of them – six girls, one cardboard cutout of Legolas and one dinosaur.

And by dinosaur, I don’t mean “really old person who refuses to graduate and quit marching band.” I mean Tooter, the little yellow Beanie Baby who has become our apartment mascot.

To be exact, Tooter is a parasaurolophus. His name comes from the bony crest extending from the back of his skull, thought to aid in communication. Although fancy scientific studies suggest the noise produced was a low rumbling, I prefer to think that it made sounds like “hork, hork, hork” and “aROOOOgah!”

While it’s possible the crest was used to attract mates, alas, Tooter has had no such luck. With the recent spate of happy engagements among my friends, I’ve come to realize that Tooter needs someone special in his life, too. He’s the kind of hadrosaurid any troll, Barbie or barrel of monkeys would be lucky to have.

Tooter first gained fame in our apartment as an alarm clock. When one of our friends fell asleep on the floor, Tooter crept up to his ear.

“Mister Joey,” he said in his adorable, squeaky voice, his yellow eyes peering into Joey’s. “Wake up! The movie’s over, it’s time to get up! Jooooooeeeeeey!”

Now, who wouldn’t want to wake up to that every morning? Of course, when Tooter is feeling more rambunctious, he often wakes people up by flying across the room and crash landing on their face.

Come to think of it, Tooter is an extremely helpful guy. When pre-Picnic Day preparations kept me from attending my own surprise birthday party, Tooter stepped up to the plate (literally) and blew out my candles for me. Though his birthday was technically the day before, he was more than willing to accept the party in my honor.

An active member of the household, Tooter often volunteers as apartment décor. He has participated in both Nativity and Noah’s Ark scenes on the coffee table, standing in for the traditionally underrepresented dinosaur demographic in such displays. Most recently, we gave him tissue-paper wings and a paperclip halo and stuck him atop our Christmas tree.

Tooter is also a world-traveler and enjoys spending holidays abroad. Last Thanksgiving, we mailed him to our roommate in Paris, and for the Fourth of July, he accompanied me to India. He plans to go to Maui after graduating this June.

As you can see, my dinosaur friend is more than deserving of the very best mate. Unfortunately, due to the tragic missteps so many of us make, he hasn’t been very lucky in love.

For instance, he once dated a slinky. Though it was very attractive and could do some cool tricks on the stairs, it was very uncommunicative and just wouldn’t talk about its feelings.

Understandably, this emotional unavailability frustrated Tooter, and they went their separate ways (in fact, the slinky went several separate ways itself). Now, Tooter knows he’s looking for someone who can be open and vulnerable with him.

Next, Tooter made the mistake of giving himself to someone with a diametrically-opposed worldview. He started seeing another dinosaur Beanie Baby named Toothy, a carnivore. Tooter, on the other hand, is an herbivore, subsisting on algal goo from Putah Creek and the occasional cookie.

They still had a lot in common – their Late Cretaceous origins, bipedal capacities and a love of crochet. But after spending time with Toothy, Tooter started noticing a strange hunger when hanging out with his other friends. He even nibbled on Mr. Sheepie once or twice, much to his shame. The night Toothy took a bite out of Tooter’s leg, he knew it was over. They were just too different.

It’s not merely that Tooter goes out with the wrong toys. He’s too insecure to pursue the right ones. For years, he pined after my brother’s plush crocodile, Cranky. She was beautiful, kind and scalier than anyone he’d ever laid eyes on.

She just seemed too good for him. So he settled for slinkies and T. rexes who didn’t love him the way he deserved to be loved. Only after Cranky was happily married to a fine teddy bear from Germany did she tell Tooter she’d adored and respected him all along. Who knows what could have happened if he’d taken a chance with Cranky?

But that ship has sailed, and Tooter is looking for love anew. He’s willing to wait for the right toy – someone pure of heart and fuzzy of face. Until then, he’ll be chilling at my apartment, scaring napping people, illustrating Bible stories and stealing birthday parties.

BETH SEKISHIRO is not kidding. She really does want to throw Tooter a wedding sometime soon. To set your stuffed animal up with Tooter, contact her at blseki@ucdavis.edu.

I’m a housewife in training.

Living with my boyfriend Arthur has helped fine-tune all my domestic expertise, particularly in the fields of laundry, cleaning and nagging. (Arthur tackles the cooking. It’s a sign of the Apocalypse when I set foot in the kitchen.)

So while you and your friends are out partying, drinking a little too much and taking pictures that you’ll soon de-tag once they show up on Facebook, Arthur and I are at home, enjoying the pasta he made and hanging our jeans in the closet. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Take last Wednesday night, for instance. Instead of reading Jane Eyre for class like a good boy, I was in the living room, cuddled up with Arthur, watching TBS. Anticipating an upcoming “Sex and the City” rerun, I reluctantly sat through an episode of “Everybody Loves Raymond.”

From what I remember, Ray and Debra were in a huge argument over a can opener. The fight then grew to include Frank and Marie before becoming a “men versus women” shout fest.

So there I was, as happy and home-loving as can be, being bombarded with the less pleasant end of domestic life. I was content and cuddly, while the characters of the show were arguing worse than gays do while debating the age-old “Britney vs. Beyonce” squabble.

I got to thinking. Sure, I could easily tell you that home life with Arthur is always peachy and happy-go-lucky. But that’s not always true.

He and I have been Ray and Debra many a time, arguing over complete nonsense. To be honest, some of the things we argue about tend to not matter at all, nor do they deserve the huge dispute. One of us always ends up crying after a blowup over uncapped toothpaste, clutter or forgetting to put the juice back in the fridge. Our biggest tiff: I get angry because I think he’s ignoring me when he really isn’t. Stupid, right?

The point is even the best of us have tempers – and within a relationship, those tempers get tested. No matter how perfect you think your relationship is or how well you two get along – or even how great the sex is – arguments will happen. They’re natural and inevitable. So don’t be frontin’ about how you and your partner never fight or always agree on everything because that’s more of a fairy tale than Cinderella.

I’ll admit it: I’m really stubborn. I tend to not find anything wrong with what I did or said that made Arthur upset with me. I always see myself as the “right one” in the altercation and I’m quick to make Arthur apologize. (Sorry, baby.)

What a lot of us (including me) don’t always realize is there are two sides to every argument, and there isn’t always a right or wrong. It’s not fair to blame your partner for everything. (Unless the whore cheated on you – that’s when you push his or her ass in front of a moving bus.)

From my own experiences, I’ve learned that, yes, it’s a lost cause trying to avoid an argument. Something your partner says or does will get under your skin. It could build up if you don’t express how you feel from the very beginning. Then when you explode, the ugly side you don’t ever want your partner to see is revealed.

So my advice is this: If you get in argument with your other half, be rational and talk. We all know it’s best to talk it through, but sometimes we hold back. Don’t do that. Get everything out on the table, in the open, in each other’s faces. It may sting a bit, but you’ll be happier in the long run when you’re upfront with each other.

Don’t blame your partner. I doubt any of your partners would intentionally hurt you (save assholes) so give them the benefit of the doubt. Don’t call them a liar, don’t say they don’t care about you and don’t ever get too dramatic.

Let your guard down. This can be hard if you’re like me because I’m rather hardheaded and think I’m always right. But if you really care for your partner, you’ll hear him or her out and remember that they have feelings, too.

Never get physical. Use words, not fists – unless your boyfriend is Tiger Woods and you caught him sleeping with 20 other women, in which case you can go ahead and do some damage.

If the fighting never seems to fade for you and your partner and you get into it every day, then perhaps staying in the relationship isn’t healthy. If you’ve done all you can to try to work your problems out and they don’t seem to get any better, maybe calling it quits is the only option. Constantly being at each other’s throats is not fair to either of you – you don’t need it. So take a deep breath and start thinking about the perfect “it’s not you, it’s me” speech.

So remember, arguments will happen. But hey, along with fights comes the hot, make-up sex.

MARIO LUGO is working on his stubbornness and trying not to let things get to him so much. If you, too, need to work on your temper, e-mail him at mlugo@ucdavis.edu for some assistance.

I’ve known Frank since grade school. When he tells me he wants to go to the open casting call for the reality-TV show “Survivor,” I’m neither shocked nor surprised. I’m not proud to admit it, but we’ve been watching that shit since we were 12.

On paper, “Survivor” is a show where a group of strangers compete for $1,000,000 while stranded on an island by voting one another off until two are left. Once you get to the final two, you have to persuade the people you voted off why you deserve to be the last remaining survivor. Then they vote for who they think that actually is.

Of course, we were too young back then to understand the backstabbing beauty of corporate culture in a yearly campaign to pervert natural wildernesses, one third-world country at a time. We just liked watching people lose it.

Nine years later, “Survivor” is on season 19, and Frank is working for Deloitte to help billion-dollar corporations pay as little taxes as necessary. On my side of California, I get paid to design brochures to make people think Davis facilities are a lot nicer than they actually are.

Tuesday morning, we wake up at 5:30 a.m. to make the drive out to Cabazon for the open casting call. It’s only about halfway through the drive when we realize we’re headed for an Indian casino.

Again, I’m neither shocked nor surprised. For a game accused of being a microcosm for American capitalism, it’s painfully appropriate to hold the casting call at a casino accused as a microcosm for the myth of the American Dream. Everyone enters through those golden doors thinking they can strike it rich, but only the lucky – not the deserving – ever get there.

Whereas “Survivor” may sound like a relay race where the smartest and the strongest always win, that fortunately is not the case. On the drive to the casino, Frank tells me about the most recent winner: an unintelligent Christian blonde girl who looks like she could jump off the TV screen and fit in your shirt pocket. The runner up was pissed because he was stronger, smarter and therefore more deserving. But the vote was near unanimous.

“That’s just how it works in the corporate world,” Frank justifies. “Yeah, you could be a great worker, but if you pissed anyone off and you didn’t make any friends, your hard work doesn’t get anywhere.”

This isn’t surprising coming from someone who smiled his way up from high school ASB to Deloitte.

Once we enter the casino, we each get a wristband, though Frank is the only one applying. When he goes in for his interview, I wait in the food court. I scan the area, trying to determine who’s here to try out for “Survivor” and who’s here to strike it rich the non-televised way. This one flamboyant guy behind me instructs his friend to introduce herself as “Mexapino” during her casting interview to give her mixed-race looks some spice.

Another girl behind me is dressed in a fitted, black dress and a pair of power heels. I can only see the back of her head. Her lightly-dyed brown hair makes me think she’s one of those Asian girls in one of those business frats who wear suits during the day, but bust out the emerald-green dress and the fake eyelashes by night.

But then she turns sideways, and she’s a white woman in her 40s. She smiles toward the man she’s with, and I notice the neon green wristband as her sleeve slides down her wrist. He’s wearing one, too.

At first, I think there are only a couple people wearing wristbands, but as I look more closely, eating my orange chicken from Panda Express, I notice almost everyone in the food court has one – the two guys to my left dressed for a weekend in Miami, the middle-aged woman eating noodles alone on my right.

When I see these wristbands, I feel as if I’m looking in on a secret I wasn’t invited to see – a vulnerability I only stumbled upon by accident. And when they see my wristband, we share that vulnerability despite how different we may be. No one sitting in this food court has a better shot than another, and we’re all here for the same thing, whether trying out for “Survivor,” sitting at the slot machines or trying to make a living in God-blessed America.

We’re all trying to strike it rich. We’re all trying to get famous. No matter who we are, we all know one thing: To die unnoticed means to not live at all.

GEOFF MAK needs an ENL 110B book and a digital camera to borrow for winter quarter. E-mail him at gemak@ucdavis.edu if you want to save his academic life.

So while wasting the all-too precious winter break away (i.e. through browsing Yahoo! articles), I learned that the three most common New Year’s resolutions are losing weight, quitting smoking and drinking less.

Although these facts caused some snickering on my part at the narcissistic nature of us Americans, it hit me that I have never even really bothered to have a New Year’s resolution in my 19 years of existence. (The elementary school ones when you make stuff up like “I will wash my dog better” don’t count. That probably wasn’t something to be very proud of, either.)

This was enough to get me motivated to bust out a pen and paper – or rather, open a Word document – and attempt to write a list out.

I figured the Yahoo! article would be a helpful reference for examples of what my New Year’s resolution should be. After all, the top three resolutions seem especially likely on a college student’s list.

However, I had to stop kidding myself. None of the top three resolutions are remotely possible for me.

I know I’m not even going to bother trying to go on a diet, as my “diets” tend to last half way through one meal of plain salad.

I hate the smell of smoke so much that I seriously debated joining the “I HATE people who smoke” group on Facebook. (Trust me, that was a big deal since I also hate the outrageous amount of things you can be “fans” of on Facebook …)

Finally, drinking less? I’m underage, so am I even allowed to admit that I drink AT ALL? (Not that I do drink. No, really. I don’t.) So just based on public scrutiny, there goes that option …

So what could be a legitimate resolution for me? I pondered that question while simultaneously checking my grades (damn, no A’s.) And THAT caused the epiphany – no, not the “study more to get better grades” epiphany, but the “procrastinate less to have more time to at least think about studying” epiphany.

How would I be able to actually end this procrastination? Why, of course, by slowly breaking bondage with Facebook (my consideration to even join that silly “I HATE people who smoke” Facebook group was a sign for me to get off the site ASAP).

Trust me, Facebook is a huge threat. It’s the ultimate grade-killer that sneaks in from the back of your mind and slowly slaughters what’s left of your thoughts as you attempt to keep up with your reading before you inevitably fall behind.

Not only that, refreshing the page every 10 seconds only to see statuses about all your friends’ lack of focus doesn’t help much, either. The saying “misery loves company” can only go so far. When the “company” happens to be a few hundred miserable, procrastinating online friends, that’s a little too much.

I figured I could survive (albeit meagerly) with logging onto Facebook roughly twice a week: Thursdays to post these columns (how else will my minimal audience read these?) and whenever my Facebook-oriented aunt bugs me to Facebook chat with her.

While I fiendishly placed all the blame on Facebook, I have to admit, there was a point where I felt a little foolish. How could I place all the blame on one silly little website? That’s when I decided to add a little thing called AIM onto the resolution list.

Now, normally I don’t have a problem with chatting online, except for the fact that my conversations tend to last the entire night. And into early morning – the day before a paper is due.

Trust me, these conversations range anywhere from debating the definition of “noob” to the thoughts of a philosophical thesis. (I might as well actually be writing that philosophical paper rather than bickering about it online.) So goodbye to time-wasting, late-night convos!

I’m just praying this all works out. How could it possibly not? It’s much easier than eating plain salad for an entire year. (But in case I do fail, there’s always that salad hiding in the corner of the fridge.)

TIFFANY LEW wrote part of this column over winter break. She didn’t finish it until the night before it was due. Resolution: Failed. Contact her at tjlew@ucdavis.edu to share your New Year’s resolution successes/failures.