Published: April 9, 2009

What does graduation mean to you? To me, it means résumé seminars, long bouts of weeping, marking every inch of my dorm with “Feifei wuz here” in Sharpie, packing suitcases and moving into not-so-deluxe apartments in the sky.

Graduation is the start of the major leagues, my friends. It is when the world finally sees what we’re really made of. Will we crumble under the pressures of finding work during the worst economic recession in 70-odd years and start panhandling on the street? Will we try to avoid the sky-high New York City rents and move back home with our well-intentioned, slightly-musty-smelling parents? Will we fall victim to the physical dangers of living in a hard-ground-tall-building-steep-stairway-mold-vermin-infested-high-crime-rate city right after our student health insurance plans run out?

Whatever terrible thing that waits to befall us, the one thing I can guarantee is this: say goodbye to happiness, folks. Say goodbye to innocence. Say goodbye to everything you think you know about yourself.

After graduation, life will be different. We’ll stop thinking about our hedonist urges and obsess about that monthly utility bill. Creature comforts that we’ll soon shuck off include:

• Activism: I know you all are here, and I know you all are queer and that we should all get used to it. But even if I agree with you guys on that one, I’m going to be a little too busy trying to put food on the table to stand in the middle of the street and make out with other women. Idealism is a good thing—it’s a necessary component of social progress and innovation. But it’s a hell of a lot easier to have ideals when Mommy and Daddy are paying for the rent, for the food you eat, for those books full of those things called “ideas” and for those clothes on your back. Ever wonder why Wal-Mart is still in business? Well, Joe the Art Student may hate big business, but his counterpart, Joe the Plumber, doesn’t—he doesn’t have the option of worrying about conglomeration or environmental policies because he’s trying to buy all his kids toothbrushes on his salary. As adults, I hope that we find the time and energy to care about the grand ideals of freedom and justice. But I doubt we will.
• The nightlife: Unless you’re headed off to the green shores of Ireland, alcoholism will only hurt your chances at an enjoyable adult life. Not only will the idea of blowing a couple hundred bucks on the siren song of “premium” vodka seem foolish to your post-graduate self, but most of us will be so bone-tired after our 60-hour workweeks as production assistants, paralegals, med students and Starbucks baristas that we’d rather sleep for 15 hours straight than go bar-hopping. Sure, we’ll have a few drinks at happy hour and network with a couple of third-year associates, but months will go by—even the memories of vomiting our guts and dinners out into the gleaming, smirking face of the toilet will fade. Sad, I know. Look on the bright side: after we get married, move out to Long Island and bring children into the world, we won’t even miss being young because we’ll all be too busy dying on the inside.
• Art, movies and travel: At this point, student discounts have become imprinted in my DNA. Imagine a world where going to the Met means paying the full suggested admission price, where you have to pay the adult price at movie theatres, where “backpacking in Europe for a semester” becomes “avoiding real issues.” Did we take advantage of this time to read and learn and dance and touch and hear and walk and discuss poetry and sleep in hostels and go watch “The Dark Knight” like 14 times? I did. But only because Christian Bale is a fox. There are no “post-graduate discounts.” We’ll just be old and screwed.

Life is good without responsibilities. But it seems that we at Fordham don’t quite realize that, as students, we got away with so much more than we will after graduation. As a school, we’ve all been pretty precocious in terms of jobs, internships, fashion, real estate. Our mommas didn’t raise no dummies, some would say, and the differences between student and adult life are lessened by our environment: we’re going from vodka cranberries to highballs, not keg stands to cognacs in a snifter. Still, brace yourselves. You’re about to get kicked so hard in the ass that you’ll wear it for a hat. A stupid-looking hat.

It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be depressing. It’s going to make us all wish that we could stay in school and nurse on the meaty teats of youth just a bit longer. Good luck with all that, fellow graduates. Now that I think about it, I won’t have to face the same crisis because I, unlike all of you, have my looks to fall back on.