Shawn Patrick Green Arizona Daily Wildcat

Ah, graduation! That special time in your life when you can finally ask that age-old question, "Fuck, now what?"

For a select few of you, mainly those with technical degrees, jobs have been eagerly awaiting your release from college to snap you up and throw money at you and fan you with palm fronds.

For others, like myself, with worthless majors like creative writing, theater or any other culture-producing degree, lifetime unemployment is pretty much built into the job description. In fact, if you get offered a job, my recommendation is to reject it. Those sneaky bastards can't fool you. The poor sap who takes that job is on his way to a career, while the rest of us know full well that the reason we majored in an artistic field is to avoid getting a job at all costs.

But, before you get too concerned with post-college life, you have to survive the actual graduation ceremony. A perfect example of the perils involved in a graduation is at the end when a hail of caps and tortillas needs to be carefully averted. Those graduation caps have pointy edges with a penchant for eye poking and tassels just begging to lash you across the face.

And don't even get me started on tortillas. According to the university mandate, tortillas have the potential to "cause excessive fun-having or to create an atmosphere conducive to generating memories. We here at the UA strongly discourage fun and memories. We also hate puppies." Granted, I don't have the mandate in front of me, so I may have paraphrased and/or completely made up some and/or most of that.

There are other difficult tasks necessary to successfully complete a graduation ceremony, mainly involving sitting and standing at varying intervals, or even walking across a stage! Those graduates aware of what they're in for often hire personal trainers during the hectic weeks before the ceremony to ensure correct, efficient movements.

Another important consideration is that you must prepare yourself to stay awake and alert throughout the proceedings or you'll miss your kudos. This is crucial because there are quite a few people who aren't you who are probably going to be mentioned now and again, even though they know full well that no one cares about them because they aren't you.

Finally, once all that pointless crap is over, you'll get a piece of paper. The efficiency machine that is the UA has effectively turned your thousands of dollars, years of mental anguish and sleepless nights, and an average of 2.6 tons of printer paper and ink into a convenient little paper rectangle you can fit in your filing cabinet and never look at again.

Now that you've graduated and either have a job or don't, it's time to enter this "real world" that we've all heard so much about. The real world is much like the fake world we've been living in, except it doesn't have nearly as many hot chicks (especially relative to the UA).

These normal looking women, who I prefer to call "uglies," will allow you to better concentrate on your job. This is a good thing, because your job is really all you have left going for you now (unless, of course, you want to do something crazy like have a family, make friends or get a hobby).

Another important difference in the real world is that many students who've been dependent on their parents for their entire lives up to this point will finally be able to break free from the shackles of their parents, journey toward virtually limitless horizons and fully realize the liberating feelings that go hand in hand with living in a cardboard box on a street corner.

Parents of graduates tend to divert to a unique form of love that psychologists have dubbed the "Screw You, Get a Damn Job" method. The effectiveness of this method has yet to be proven, but many speculate that most often the ultimate result is the living-at-home-until-you're-30 lifestyle.

So congratulations graduates! Your shining moment is soon to come, and you can finally venture into the world with the satisfaction of knowing that your thousands of dollars and college degree will at last get you the respect you so greatly deserve from your coworkers at Office Max. My advice is to quit your part-time job and do whatever you love to do, regardless of what your diploma says on it.

Speaking of which, if any of you know someone in need of a humorist, hit me up, would you?