Undergraduates take heed: Soon, regardless of your protests, you will be rudely gripped and flung into adulthood.
Upon graduation you will have to get a job. (Note: Jobs are not cool. My friend Brian has a job. He doesn't like it. This is the extent of my research.)
Eventually, you may buy a house, get married, buy a car, or spawn a horde of demon children much like the ones that scream bloody murder in the supermarket. Oh, how I wish I could silence the children.
Yes, friends (I say "friends" but don't really mean it), college will be over, and adulthood follows - or does it really?
For some of you, graduation is your chance to run free, to be someone, to enter into the world, both feet ablaze with ambition, and scream to the heavens: "Hey, world, check me out! I have a degree and stuff!"
You will be like that guy in the Monster.com commercial, dancing, wearing a necktie, or perhaps you will be like all the other people in that commercial, who are ambitious and young, but not shown doing any actual work.
However, some of us tend to think these ambitious people eat lead paint, and so we hold on to college as though we are being thrown from a moving vehicle - by our parents.
We don't want to move to Broad Ripple immediately after graduation. We don't want PT Cruisers. We don't want to hear the phrase, "Is it good for the company?"
So, can you really just "keep going" to school?
No, you cannot "keep going" without someone catching on, such as a parent who pays the bill, or a registrar who determines that you have 966 credits and have been an undergraduate for three decades.
However, there's a loophole called "grad school."
At least two people in the world attend grad school (the other being my friend Dave, who goes to Michigan State). I asked him once, "How do you do it?" He said something like, "Are you kidding? Every 'adult' I know is unhappy, and I climb rocks in the summer."
Dave is 34. He doesn't even have a pet.
Sure, there are cons to graduate school. Yes, it's harder, but most people in grad school are also there because they're not intimidated by something being hard. We just don't want to be normal (whatever that is).
People will call you "career student." Though you will try to tell them that "career student" is more fun than "career manure spreader," they won't buy it.
Undergraduates will make fun of you for being old. You'll accidentally mention a show you saw when you were a kid, or offer sage advice, and they'll ask one of a variety of smart-ass questions:
"Dude. How old are you?"
"They had TV when you were a kid?"
"When was that? During the Nixon administration?"
(These same undergraduates will befriend you, and then ask you to buy beer.)
The taunts don't bother me, though, for I imagine each of them at my age, except divorced, with demon children, horrible jobs and mortgages they can't afford. Yes, I'm evil.
So, you heard it here: If "normal adulthood" conjures negative images and college is your idea of paradise, check out grad school.
If not, I hear the manure business is good.
Write to John at kingseyeland@bsu.edu
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