POSTCARD FROM MANHATTAN

Among the many terms unique to college students, along with randomization, concentration, dining hall, proctor, tutorials and other expressions that are specific to particular schools, is a term that has slowly but surely come into vogue at universities across the nation. (Or at least I like to think it has, since I invented it myself.) The term is "real people."

"Real people," as we all know, are people who are not in college. But who are these mythical real people, and what do they really do? While I generally avoid real people at all costs, I have found that at my summer job in New York, I come into daily contact with real people. After careful observation, I can now share my findings with you--because, after all, if you are sitting there reading a college newspaper, the odds are good that you are not a real person. The odds are also good that you might someday find yourself becoming one, so you might as well be prepared.

The first requirement for being a real person, of course, is to be something other than a student. Graduate school--including law school, medical school, business school or even one of those twelve-decade doctoral programs that make being a student into a career--doesn't cut it. Neither do any of those sought-after cures that lucky people use to kill the post-college blues, like "fellowships," "internships," two-year teaching programs, nine-month work programs in Botswana or backpacking trips that follow the trail of McDonald's across the continental United States (funded, of course, by a federal grant). As much as these experiences might differ from college, all of them are nonetheless bound together by a single factor: like college, they are all temporary.

A real person, according to my assessment, is one who goes to work every day, relaxes or does errands in the evenings and on weekends (no homework, imagine!) and supports him or herself financially. Real people live in apartments, not dorms, and they have kitchens, not cafeterias. They are able to feed themselves and wear suits or skirts to work and receive paychecks and pay rent. At the most advanced stages of real-personhood, real people might even get married and have children. At that point, even if one does an about-face and decides to go to graduate school, there's no turning back: apparently, that's when you become stuck in real-person-land forever.

Thus, upon my descent from the land of Student Advantage to the land of student disadvantage, I expected to be confronted by a barrage of real people. And I was, but with an unexpected twist. To my surprise, I found that the vast majority of real people I met who had graduated from college recently--that is, within the past two, three or even four or five years--are living in a state of denial. They are technically real people, but you'd never know it.

True, they are no longer students. True, they are supporting themselves. They wake up early in the morning to go to their jobs, and, in the evenings, they either go out with friends or go home and watch TV. Some of them even wear suits to work. And true, all of them are working at jobs that could conceivably be permanent. But only the tiniest number of them actually think that those jobs will be permanent--or that anything about their current lives might be permanent, for that matter.

Most of them are living lives very much like the ones they lived in college, minus the homework. They live in shared, cramped rooms with college friends, even sometimes with their actual college roommates, lit by rather familiar-looking halogen lamps and decorated with posters, not pictures, on the walls. A handful know how to cook, but those who can cook treat it almost like a hobby, not a daily task. The rest survive on large quantities of frozen food, spaghetti and Ramen Noodles. Some of them have not even bothered to buy beds, sleeping instead on our decade's great symbol of student life, the futon. Others watch "Ally McBeal" and actually identify with it.

But at a deeper level, none of them seem to think of what they're doing as something that they might be doing for good--which, of course, is refreshing for those of us who aren't yet real people and are afraid of becoming them. They talk about getting new jobs, about going back to school, about "taking time off." As one friend who graduated two years ago wrote to me in an e-mail message from work, "The big thing for me now is trying to figure out what to do Next." In all of these things, from the spring-free mattresses to the vague longings (sometimes logical, sometimes not) for Ph.D.'s, there is a single common element, the same element that binds together college, fellowships, internships, nine-month jaunts to measure the biweekly rainfall in Azerbaijan and just about any other project that gets pushed onto unsuspecting young people like ourselves. That element is impermanence.

A few weeks ago as I was moving into my summer residence, I calculated that, if I include summer experiences (as a child, I often attended two different overnight camps in one summer), this was the eighteenth time I have moved into temporary housing, as well as the sixteenth time I have moved into temporary housing with people I do not know. For some reason, the real people who administrate our lives before we join their ranks have decided that people like us can be shuffled around at the drop of a hat, and we have willingly accepted that premise.

Sometimes I wonder whether we aren't a little bit too accepting of it. Naturally it makes sense that we, as students, haven't made up our minds yet about what to do with ourselves. And if you think about it, it also makes sense that conferring a diploma on somebody might not necessarily spark an instantaneous decision. But after a while, doesn't the endless moving, the constant future-looking, the neverending eagerness for what to do Next--doesn't it start to get old?

I have no evidence yet that it does, because even in my (temporary) move to a metropolis supposedly filled with the species, I have yet to meet a bona fide real person who was born after 1972. If you are one, please drop me a line. I want to know what it's really like out there.

Dara Horn '99 is working as a reporter-researcher at Time magazine. She wrote this piece by the light of a halogen lamp, while drinking liquefied bullion cubes from a free mug.