Return to Sender: Countdown to Diploma

Dear Everyone (yet again):

Graduation is now close enough that I can count hours rather than days. This is it, folks. The end of the line.

I've been crying a lot, but that's not surprising to anyone who knows me well. I cry at Hallmark commercials. But I'm still surprising myself, getting misty when I see little kids playing under the button, completely oblivious to the things that happen beneath the button after-hours, or when I see tourists posing on the urine-drenched Ben Franklin statue near the Compass. These last four years have literally flown by. Yesterday at dinner, I ran into someone who I met when touring Penn as a pre-frosh, but we remembered our terrible tour guide so well that it felt like only yesterday that our misguided guide decided to forego the dining hall in favor of New Deck, and even managed to talk the three high school kids' way in.

As you read this, my parents and maternal grandparents are flying halfway across the country to see me handed my fake diploma (we get the real ones mailed to us in July, apparently), to drink a lot of free champagne, and to essentially see that I haven't wasted the last four years of my life. Up until a few days ago, that would have been much harder. But I was roused from a nap early Monday evening with a phone call offering me a job in Center City. I haven't formally accepted the offer yet (I'm weighing my options), but it's comforting to know that I won't be homeless and unemployed.

Well, not unemployed anyway. My lease officially ends at twelve noon on the twenty-fifth of this month, and because I'm not sure whether I'll be in Philadelphia for sure, I haven't started looking for a place to stay. Tick tock tick tock. For the first time in twenty years I'm not in school and have no scholastic commitments, but in many ways I'm more stressed than ever before. If this is what the real world is like, I'm not sure I'm excited to be joining it. Maybe I'll just go back to school and get a PhD. In... something. So long as it keeps me in school (and funded!) for another few years, I'll even go to grad school for the perennial favorite, underwater basketweaving.

But I didn't take the GREs and it's too late to apply anywhere now, so I've got to wait at least a year. Until then, I guess I'm set to become a real, legitimate, tax-paying member of society. And that scares the crap outta me.

It looks like rain this weekend. And Penn's graduation is outside. And our (black!) regalia apparently bleeds when wet. As such, I plan on wearing all black underneath. It seems appropriate. I'll be dressing for the funeral of my undergraduate career. Goodbye, Class of 2006. I'll miss the times we shared.

Image shown is a facsimile of the diploma that this writer will soon have in her possession, via the Penn Bookstore.