Whether you live on campus, have an apartment or a house, you will inevitably want to decorate your crib to make you feel more at home in your new surrounding. Everyone has his own sense of style and wants to feel original, so most students will lavishly decorate their rooms with posters, pictures and perhaps the occasional X-BOX to make them feel comfortable, but it's the more creative "fixtures" or adornments that go the extra mile to help you adjust to life without Mom and your old room.

Perhaps you will decide to garnish your entire ceiling with hundreds of cellophane flowers you meticulously make on Saturday nights, hang up an oversized map and check off each state from where your previous hook ups claim to reside or just put an oversized concrete gargoyle on your roof. All of these ideas and thousands more are performed by college students everywhere because it allows them to make their residences uniquely theirs.

To help make us unique in a dorm of 250 students, my T-wing has decided to take up blasphemy and keep a section idol. Apparently, someone was quite taken with his appearance at the Salvation Army shop in town, and after paying $1 for him; this object went from trash to divine status.

Being the stereotypical Italian cook with a full moustache and chef's hat, the figurine looks like a washed-up Nintendo Mario trying to make a dent in the culinary field. By his outward appearance with spaghetti pouches and blue ascot, he looks like he may have found a new niche. He may be just a baker, or actually a ceramic foot-tall rendition of one, but in some respects, he has become the section's golden calf, allowing us to be original.

Unfortunately, he is presently on hiatus somewhere in our common room, but when he isn't hiding from his worshippers, he prefers being in the glamour of the camera. His main purpose in life is to be a trophy that is photographed with friends and well-wishers in the section.

We've actually created a collage of pictures of visiting alumni, friends from back home and other members of the section carrying the esteemed James like some sort of hunting trophy. There's only one rule when taking your picture with James, though: Once a pose has been taken, it cannot be used twice.

Thinking of a new pose can be half the fun of a section idol. Cradling, shaving and using him as a protective barrier in front of some guy's privies have been taken since James has arrived, and every week a handful of new poses are added to the list. Sooner or later the cream white wall in our section will be papered with a colorful assortment of humorous pictures and little James smiling away in each photograph.

Having a section idol is only one of an endless assortment of ideas out there to allow you to make your home for the year unique. Originality and humor are key to keeping your sanity in college. And if a ceiling covered in cellophane flowers makes you feel special, then by all means start buying that plastic wrap, but then again worshipping an idol is also acceptable.

• `James the Baker'