Ah, the last column of the semester. You don’t know how happy this makes me—not to be writing for the last time, mind you, just to know that after this week and a few exams, it’ll all be over.

Until next semester that is. Unlike me, some of you lucky souls will be graduating soon. Graduation is a subject that fascinates me. I often wonder what it would be like.

First, you have to get out of your house, apartment or, God forbid, the dorms. That’s always fun. You stand there and stare at your feet while the landlord goes through tallying up the loss of your security deposit.

You pray he doesn’t see all the toothpaste filling in the plaster holes or the big wad of once-soggy toilet paper you’ve stuffed into the fist-hole in the wall.

Once that’s done with, you, maybe, pay off your bills so your roomate doesn’t get stuck with a $300 Contel bill. You pack up your things, (don’t forget the pets), and then what?

Do you move back home and listen to your parents harp at you ‘til you find a job? If you’re lucky, you won’t be asked to pay any rent and maybe they’ll even like you for the first two weeks until they realize what college has done to your level of social etiquette and domestic habits.

Chances are, at least the family dog will like you, since no one has played with him for four to five years, until he has a heart attack trying to adjust to the new levels of activity you’ll put him through out of sheer boredom.

Okay, time to get serious and find a job! So, what do you do when no one responds to your resumes? I’d like to know that just for future reference. I guess you start checking the want ads or call up some distant relatives and see if they can squeeze you into someone’s company.

Say you find a job you can be reasonably happy with for a while: When’s a good time to stop freeloading off mom and dad and find a place of your own? When hell freezes over, right?

Or for others, it’s as soon as you can possibly afford it, lest your mother will continue to destroy your life by trying to organize it for you.

So you get your own place. At last—complete privacy. You move in your things and suddenly realize you don’t have as much as you thought you had. Maybe you tack up a few of the cheap, cellophaned posters that you used to have here until you can afford to buy something real.

Then one night, everything’s nice and quiet except for the couple whaling on each other upstairs. You lean back in your nice, luxurious beanbag chair and you think about your old friends from school who are doing so much better than you.

So you go to the minifrig on the kitchen floor and grab a beer. Then, you ring up some friends you haven’t talked to in a while to see if anyone will save you from solitude, and you find that they’re all married!!!

They tell you cute little stories about the honeymoon and, feeling a little nauscious, you politely refuse their invitations to come see the new china cabinet. Then you hang up the phone and resign yourself to watching television and smoking ‘til your lungs hurt.

It makes me jealous. Really.

I wonder how long it takes until people really start missing this place—the sardine crunch of DeKalb bars, the smell of cadavers in Anderson Hall, late nights at Tom and Jerry’s or Round the Clock, after-hours, “beach” parties at the filthy lagoons, JLS protests and term papers. You know—the good old days.

In all seriousness, I think it all works out about right. You know that old saying about it being a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there? Well that’s kind of how college is.

Although some of us are doing a pretty good job of making it a permanent arrangement. Sure, you’ll miss it a little after graduation. Just don’t forget the rest of us back here who’ll still be measuring our success in terms of semesters.