In case you missed the various tweets, Facebook statuses, yaks, subtle reminders in conversation, less than subtle reminders in conversation, or the various times I yelled it across campus: I am a graduate.

I finished my classes, turned in most of my assignments, completed an e-portfolio that will never see the light of day, sucked up to all the people who had the power to stop me from graduating and now I’m done and ready to move on.

Except…there are a few more months left on the lease to this house, and I still work at my old job at CCYC except I’m there in a full-time capacity, also I still go to Wyse third to talk about philosophy with Joe and Paul, and I am still in all of the clubs I was in, and I still use my @goshen.edu email address.

BUT OTHER THAN THOSE, I am now living the life of a “real adult.”

Or at least that’s what parents, and relatives, and strangers and pretty much everyone keeps telling me.

Here are some of the scattered learnings I have accumulated on being a “real adult.”

1. You can spend an entire day doing nothing.

For me this was Sunday, usually a holy day for me, not in that I would go to church as much as in I would worship my coffee mug and do all the homework I put off for a week.

This Sunday, however, the closest I came to working was nursing a mean hangover.

2. Your friends are all grumpy.

I don’t know what it is about this semester but all of my friends have less time to hang out, their answers are terser.

Sometimes they complain that I’m distracting them from homework, at which point I give them helpful hints from when I was a student.

3. The fact that you have free time becomes a closely guarded secret.

Once you tell people you have free time, they start asking you to do stuff, and no matter how many times you tell them that you in fact have finished doing things and are done doing anything you still end up writing a Funnies article that’s not all that funny.

4. All your standards for writing drop.

For instance I told Anneliese that I would write four hundred words for this article and as I write this I am five words away. I’m done.