Welcome to Cal. By this time, thanks to the massive spiritual coming-together of 18 year-olds freed for the first time in a new city and kegs of Natural Ice freed to flow once again from their summer hiatus in retched-beer oblivion, you’ve all had your initial opportunities to get your feet and silk boxers (you rich Orange County sons of bitches!) wet in experimenting with alcohol.

Beer aside, chances are that your experiments with real alcohol, that is to say, booze; grandpa’s cough syrup; the magic monkey juice; the sweet elixir of life; the Kentucky one-eyed beaver dancing hog trickle; have been limited to Albertson’s brand charcoal-filtered vodka and, if you’re lucky, Ron Rico rum. These boozes are to the world of spirits what Ron Jeremy is to the world of porn: they provide a lot of initial bang, but in the end they’re really just unattractive overweight men with hairy backs and freakish dongs. If you really want to impress your friends, scare your RA, and make your parents consider sending you to a St. Jude Retreat instead of sending you money every month, it behooves you to know your boozes.

There’s no better way to get people to think you’re an alcoholic then to have an extensive collection of whiskies in your closet. Because even the guy down the hall who drinks a case of beer every night and the chick next door who tosses down ten cosmopolitans before going off to be prematurely ejaculated upon by some frat boy will think you have the drinking problem. If you’re drinking Jack Daniel’s, stop. Evoking Animal House stopped being cool fifteen years ago.

For impressing the ladies, fine vodka always does the trick or, failing that, an ice-cold bottle of cheap vodka. Ladies are easy to impress. Just remember the golden rule of spirits: If it’s clear, the girls come near; if it’s dark, that’s the best time to awkwardly try to make out with them.

Gin , another staple spirit, is only appropriate if you’re a sixty-year old man, or when served with tonic water. Don’t try to fool your parents if they come into town and take you grocery shopping and tell them that you’re buying eight bottles of tonic water because “you like the taste.” Unless you have malaria, nobody actually drinks straight tonic water.

Tequila should not be consumed under any circumstances, except for the one circumstance when it’s consumed off the firm torso of a drunken reveler in Cancun. Even then, only if it’s Patron or better. Seriously, you should’ve stopped drinking Cuervo in junior high.

There’s something about good spiced rum that’ll get your whole dorm singing. Don’t let the often homoerotic imagery of pirates and cabana boys on the bottles make you feel like you’re doing something unmanly. Because you’re not.

You should only have brandy, cognac, sherry and other fruit-derived boozes in your cabinet if you’re totally comfortable with being perceived as either A: a self-important pseudo-intellectual tiny-penised poseur or B: a self-aggrandizing tiny-penised hip-hop street pimp wannabe. Courvoisier doesn’t impress anyone who can actually spell “Courvoisier.”

The most important thing to remember while selecting and enjoying your booze is to always enjoy in moderation. Unlike beer, drinking 40 ounces of vodka will, in all likelihood, kill you. This is okay if you want to die, but if you die you’ll never be able to score with that girl, which was the whole reason why you bought that vodka in the first place. Ah, the irony of a wasted life.