Just so you know, the Real World sucks.
When I say "The Real World Sucks" I don't mean the show about seven strangers picked to live in a house and have their lives taped. I have no problem with those people. I'm talking about the Real World that you find yourself in when you graduate college. When I graduated high school 6 years ago, my parents threw me a party. To this day I only remember one thing about that party: my 35 year old cousin pulling me aside and saying, "Enjoy College, it's the best four to seven years of your life." I now realize that he's wasn't making a joke.
Because I'm stupid, I graduated from the University of New Hampshire in four years. But it allowed me to realize that graduating college and joining the Real World in fact, sucks. Here are seven reasons why.
1. You lose a staggering amount of your ability to binge drink.
Just to get it out of the way, I don't think my former drinking ability was any different from anyone I went to college with. Every Thursday, Friday, or Saturday night I'd grab a roommate, and we'd split a 30 of Keystone Light (Coors Light when we were trying to be classy) and go nuts. It was not uncommon to drink between 12-20 beers on any given night. This was the standard for everyone I knew. Now, those days are long gone. I have to do things like "pace myself" and "avoid jager shots unless I want to blackout". It's really depressing.
2. Drinking on a Tuesday Night is no longer socially acceptable.
Every Tuesday night, everyone who was 21 went to the bar. It's just what you did. If you were to do that post graduation, you'd be considered an alcoholic, and your parents would stage an intervention. Which brings me to number three...
3. You end up living with your parents for some period of time.
Not good. Not good at all. First, you have to get over a lot of rituals you got used to. For example, whenever my roommates or I took a piss, you didn't need to close the door, as long as your back was facing out towards the room. Plus, there was a "If its yellow, let it mellow" philosophy in place. Since then I've been yelled at to "Close the goddamn door" by my dad several times, and "Flush the toilet, you animal" by my mom several times. Also, disposing trash out of a window into a bush while yelling "Tree of Filth!" isn't something you can do under ANY circumstances. And don't even think about leaving crushed beer cans on the kitchen counter or using a bong as the centerpiece for the coffee table.
4. Trips to the bar are waaaaaaaaaaay more expensive.
For example, a pitcher of beer at a UNH bar usually costs a dollar. Now, a single Coors Light draft costs three dollars...and that’s at a cheap bar. So instead of paying 20 dollars to get drunk, its around 40, even accounting for the fact that you can't drink like you used to, you wuss.
5. Your friends start to die.
I graduated about 20 months ago. Since then, I've had three friends get married, and the friend who 2 years ago would have listed "The time I did a four beer funnel" in the top 5 moments of his life bought a house with his wife and has reservations about having parties there. Seriously.
6. You become the creepy old guy.
When you graduate, you'll still have friends left up at school. That first year, you'll take weekend trips up there and get drunk with the underclassmen that used to worship you. Usually this happens at the bar, and its fine. But if you ever go out to a house party, when people ask you what year you are, you'll have to say, "Oh...I don't go to school hear anymore. I already graduated..." and by that point, the person will be sufficiently creeped out never to talk to you again. Awesome.
7. You start to work.
Before you graduated, you probably had a schedule worked out with no classes before 11, and all of them on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday...and you probably skipped half of those classes anyway. Kiss those days goodbye. Do you realize most "real jobs" require you to be there by 8 am? Or that you can't just decide "screw it, I'll get the notes from someone else" and not show up?
Those are just 7 things off the top of my head. Trust me, there are more. So my advice to the class of 2006 is to start failing those spring semester classes as quickly as possible. There is still time for you to go on the 5 year plan and be a super senior.
Then, after that, go to grad school.