A ticket to the real world

hkronmueller

It's summertime.

The sun is shining, the birds are chirping and I am green. Green with envy, that is.

OK, maybe the sun isn't shining, but I'm still jealous of children who get to spend their summer afternoons splashing around at the pool, playing tag in their back yards or taking a nap on the couch.

I was recently talking with a friend who graduated from Southeast Missouri State University in May. She just started her first full-time job and is discovering that summers are no longer times to spend lazy days drifting in and out of sleep between soap operas or traveling to the mall.

Some people think the diploma you receive upon graduation from college is your ticket to wealth and happiness. It's your ticket to the real world. It's your license to take a job that doesn't require you to say "would you like fries with that?" or "may I put that on your store charge card?"

It's the document you spent four -- or five, or six -- years trying to attain so that you will no longer be confined to life in a classroom.

When I was a student at Southeast, I couldn't wait to get my hands on the notebook-sized piece of paper which proclaimed to the world, "I have spent 124 hours in a classroom learning things I will likely never use in the real world. Now please, hire me!"

A year later I, like my friend Laurie who has been out of school for two years, want to go back to "staying up all night, skipping classes and having no real responsibilities."

It's no fun going to bed before David Letterman is over.

And it's definitely no fun waking up before Martha Stewart comes on in the morning.

When I was in college I scheduled my classes to begin no earlier than 10 a.m., and even that was stretching it.

During the summer I spent mornings and afternoons on the couch, straying from it only when it became necessary to refill my glass of soda or use the bathroom. Then I pulled myself out of the house to work for five hours at a department store in the mall.

Back then, five hours seemed like an eternity. I thought I would die if I had to work for five more minutes or ask one more customer if they found everything they were looking for.

The only saving grace was that the job was providing me with money to blow later in the night when I met up with my friends.

During my last two summers in college, I worked at Riverport Amphitheater in Maryland Heights, Mo., selling T-shirts and other concert merchandise.

That was the best job I ever had. We got to sit around and listen to concerts all day and make money doing it!

In the real world, there is no such thing as summer. At least not the same kind of summer. In the real world, it's just like every other day of the year, only warmer.

Last weekend as I was driving to a friend's house just as it was getting dark, I noticed a field full of lightning bugs flying through the grass. It reminded me of when I was a kid, running through my back yard with a jar trying to catch the little bugs so I could keep them for a night light.

My mom used to gross my friends and me out when she would tell us when she was a kid she would take off the bugs' lights and put them on her shoelaces.

I never took out their lights because I thought it would hurt them. Little did I realize at the time, but my makeshift night lights hurt them just the same, because in the morning they would all be dead.

I guess if there's anything good about having to work all summer, it's that when I eventually have kids of my own I'll get to experience a part of it all over again, just like my mom did when I was a kid.

Heather Kronmueller is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.