Four years ought to be a long time. It’s an entire presidential administration. It’s long enough for a drunken episode to become a child who can dress itself and speak in complete sentences.

Four years. As I write this there is a stack of grad school-related papers on my desk, glaring at me and ruffling itself impatiently. I’m on track to finish college in four years, the prescribed plan, going easy on the finances and the ridicule. All is as it should be. I’m a model student, preparing to burst forth from the cocoon of undergrad life into a no-holds-barred orgy of orations and flapping robes. Hurrah!

Yes, indeed, I certainly am excited to be in my senior year. So much so that I’m seriously considering adding a major so I can stay longer. Film, maybe. Oh, and women’s studies. And also accounting, dairy science, nuclear engineering and dance. That should keep me busy for the next 11 years or so. I might actually be ready to take on the real world by the time I’m 33.

Wait, that’s a lie.

What, after all, does the real world have to offer? Why would I ever want to enter it? I am thinking at this moment of my three favorite recent graduates. One works in a parking ramp. One spends his days marking off list items and also bits of his soul. One, speaking of the loss of soul, works 60-hour weeks plus frequent business travel plus continual unpaid worrying. Of the three, I’d take, uh, the option where I stay the hell out of the workforce.

That’s where grad school comes in; it’s largely a stalling tactic. Also, the application process is something even I, who have been known to forget where I live, can manage. Standardized testing is best undergone on autopilot. Most professors are too polite to refuse recommendation requests.

And school, beautiful school, is familiar. Change is scary. I know how to be a student, and I’ll do it as long as I possibly can, simply because I fear having to be anything else.

It’s not just the horrors of the working world that repel me. Being a student — a traditional undergrad, that is — represents an entire lifestyle of irresponsibility and excess, if you do it right. I have failed at the excess; I haven’t been properly drunk since about July, for instance. But getting the two-for-one Tuesday pizza special and living off it for the next three days? Pure heaven. Not paying the phone bill? No problem; I won’t care about my credit until I need it to buy a car or something, and as a creative writing major, I doubt I’ll ever be in a position to buy a car.

In fact, I’d go as far as to say that I have an unusual gift for irresponsibility. I don’t mean to brag, but, well, there it is. Sadly, that gift goes often unappreciated in the adult world.

For instance, it’s rarely considered charming to forget you have a spouse. And I totally would. I’d be gaily checking the “Single” box on my tax forms, accepting proposals left and right, disappearing for days at a time.

That’s all beside the point, though. The point, I’m pretty sure, is that I can’t see a single reason why I should start being a grownup any time soon. The hallmarks of the student world are things like taking a study break to have sex in a dark corner of the library, not that anyone I know has ever done or would ever consider doing that. The hallmarks of the adult world are things like having children and then giving them all your time and money for the next 18 to 20 years. Adults think logically, cook nutritiously and invest. They get up at the same time every day. The word “summer” is meaningless to them; by the time they get home from work, the best of the sun is gone.

Hey, adult readers: Are you depressed yet?

Here’s the problem with my Peter Pan plan, though: you can only get just so many graduate and postgraduate degrees before you lose all faculty for human interaction and your brain causes your skull to crack. Not to mention money. And eventually I would run out of good degrees and be stuck with a PhD in the Sociology of Bookkeeping or something (Corndogology? Critical Hedgehog Theories?).

So I guess I’ll have to grow up sometime. But I can still kick and scratch and bite as I’m being dragged into the real world. I can inflict some damage on the way in.

Jackie May ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in English. She is not really this pessimistic.