GQ

my eyes found the following letter on the last page of this month's GQ magazine, and then my heart fell a little in love with it. i've re-typed the letter word for word below and chosen to make my favorite parts bold so you would pay close attention to them, for these parts are humorously--and in a way, painfully--accurate when it comes to the realities that fresh college graduates face...

dear (possibly doomed) class of 2010,

"well, you finally made it. you graduated! you spent four years (or eight, or ten-no judgements!) and eleventy billion dollars of your parents money, and now you're a bunch of learned-ass adults. or maybe you just spent forty-five minutes on the university of pheonix web site, clicked print diploma, and went back downstairs to do a couple of pre-family guy bong rips, because hangin' out on the quad with a bunch of losers doesn't fit into your life-plan right this second. either way: bravo, madams and sirs. (and we're just kidding, university of phoenix! you are totally a prestigious institution. you're both the harvard and the sorbonne of internet colleges. go, fighting, uh, phoenixes!)

sure, you may be leaving college with eight-figure student-loan and credit card balances, a substance-abuse problem that makes tom sizemore look like ian mackaye, opr an un-livedownable nickname like knothole or meat-flaps. that viral video of your mishap on diaper night at the gamma house might still be getting crazy digg hits. but it doesn't mater, because you're leaving. with a degree. you're a bachelor of something, meat-flaps, and nobody can take that away form you.

now for the bad news. you're joining theworkforce in the middle of a jobless recovery, which is basically the o'doul's of economic rallies. it's no picnic out here. or, okay, it's a picnic, but it's a cormac mccarthy the road type of picnic, there's not enough canned peaches in the shopping cart, and everybody's calling dibs on the one bullet. and also there are fire ants. mighty institutions people once took for granted-banks, newspapers, american idol-are crumbling, and while most of them deserve to, the problem with a world without majority institutions is that mighty institutions used to employ a lot of people. you could always get The Man to finance your lifestyle. no more. that unpaid internship you've got your eye on? be prepared to fight somebody for t. possibly your dad.

frankly, we're wondering if you guys are going to be able to handle malaise 2.0. most of you were born in 1988, which means you were 3 years old when nevermind came out (which makes us about 826). you've never know hardship. you've never paid money for a cd, waited for a vhs tape of a batman movie starring val kilmer instead of patrick bateman to rewind, or wondered if the call you needed to make was important enough to risk a case of pay-phone-receiver-borne-ear-herpes. you've also never lived in a world without the internet, which means you've grown up with an exaggerated sense of your own importance. sheltered in stuffed-animal-filled bedrooms by your parents more fearful of your falling prey to pedophiles than their own parents were of the a-bomb, you posted 'response' videos on youtube; poured out your every typeable thought on a glittering, blinking myspace page; exchanged tweets with @aplusk. you had access to all the machinery of self-promotion before you really had a self. you thought of fame as a birthright. and now you've been booted into a world that will lol at your sense of awesome-life-entitlement, then offer to 'hire' you to blog for free.

before you ask: no, we're not hiring. but look on the bright side! since you're fresh out of college, you've got a wealth of transferable life skills that'll help you tackle the harsh realities you're about to face. you know how to harmoniously share an apartment the size of an entenmann's box with six other people and sleep comfortably on a canyoned futon that works days as a couch. you're practically a seasoned recession vet already!

we know how we sound, oh-tenners. we sound old. carson daly old. eddie vedder old. and jealous. we did not, after all, actually graduate form college. we went, and then we went less often, and then we decided we were finished. (it's one of the few things we have in common with kanye west. that and night terrors. and a yen for bionic ladies who kinda look like grace jones). but once we made that decision, we set about starting a life, secure in the knowledge that-because we'd never actually done anything-no one gave a crap about us or our burning conviction that we were too good to make some dudes latte. we advise you to proceed under the same assumption, graduates. having a thousand facebook friends means about as much in 2010 as a personalized-license-plate key chain meant in 1990. we live in a moment when anybody can make a mistake for themselves; the game you're suiting up for is about making that name matter. even if it's meat-flaps."