Many of you have already taken this step. You’ve cried sentimental tears or jumped for joy as you packed up boxes and drove away from your home for the past few years. But if you have the pleasure of a quarter or trimester system you, like me, are lucky enough to have a smidgen of time left.

A lot of people have been worrying about the typical things that soon to be grads and recent grads worry about: getting a job, finding an apartment, moving, paying bills, insurance, liver recovery, taxes. I am stressed and concerned about all of these things. But I’m also stressed about some basic issues I haven’t considered until recently, like friendships.

For many grads, we’ll be moving away from the network of friends we’ve created over the past four years. For me, I will be moving clear across the country and my insecurities are rising. All my friendships are about to change and come June 14, I will be in a Long Distance (Best Friend Forever) Relationship.

I’ve met people and created friendships that I never thought I’d make during college. I realize it’s a cliché to stay that “college is the best four years of your life”, but because of the people I’ve met here, I actually believe in it. And now I am afraid of losing all the people and friendships I’ve become so close to.

I know, I know – thanks to the world of social networking I’ll probably know what my friends are doing (in great detail) on a day to day basis. Technology certainly has made life easier for us. Unlike our parents’ generation, we won’t have to deal with separation as much. We won’t have to write letters or track each other down in phone books anymore if we lose touch. We can just Google each other.

But computers and the internet can’t substitute friends. Some critics say that social networking can improve friendships as people feel more connected and involved in other people’s lives. They know each other’s whereabouts and recent activities. But others say social networking is too superficial to create lasting bonds and actually leads to fewer deep friendships. People don’t feel the need to reach out as much and actually continue a friendship with someone because they feel that they already are connected.

And here I am, listening to depressing John Mayer music and sifting through my thousands of college pictures wondering if emails and texts and Facebook updates are going to be enough. I’m nervous and scared and sad about my friendships I made during college and how they will be once it’s over.

Once the geography changes… will the friendships change too?

Are you worried about keeping in touch with friends after college?

It was refreshing to talk to a guy who shared my interests and taste, because in New York it was hard to find someone I had anything in common with. I felt like I’d struck gold, and then I remembered: I wasn’t in New York anymore. This was Los Angeles, a city full of my kind of people.

It’s not just a myth that everyone in Los Angeles works in the entertainment industry in one capacity or another; you’re hard pressed to find someone with no industry connections. Everyone in LA seems to have a script they wrote tucked under their arm, and most would rather win an Oscar than a Nobel Peace Prize. Some might hate this, but I love it and talking to this guy at Coach & Horses felt incredibly good.

Unlike life on this side of the cap and gown, people who share your interests – or at least similar day-to-day experiences – constantly surround you in college. There are shared teachers, shared majors, friends, gossip, dining halls; you get the idea. While in college I’d always make sure to get to my classes early on the first day of the semester so I could scope out each guy, tallying in my head who I’d date or hook up with. Eye candy and silly class crushes are what got me through Expository Writing and Brit Lit. I had the security of knowing that if I met a guy in class I knew he was around my age, was also interested in writing and literature, and was at least intelligent enough to get into college.

Post-graduation, the convenient college admissions funnel that weeds out the freaks and morons is gone. You’re suddenly thrown into a pool of singles that would appear to be an endless sea of possibilities, but is actually the ninth circle of hell. Instead of bars full of potential boyfriends, there are bars full of unemployed college dropouts, divorced guys, and (in one particular encounter of mine), sleazy paparazzi photographers.

If you live in a multi-industry city like New York, you’re going to meet people from many varied professions and backgrounds. If you like this, then you’re in luck. If you’re more interested in meeting people on a similar career track and with similar life experiences (like the good old college days), there are a few tricks I’ve learned.

First, find an after-work bar near your office; there’s a better chance there that you’ll meet someone with a job similar to your own. If not, you will at least meet people who have come from a job, and not some freaks off the streets.

Second, accept the reality of your location. If you want to meet a stockbroker and you live in Los Angeles, you might just be out of luck, or at the least you’re going to have to search pretty hard.

Third, and most important: try to keep an open mind. Bill Gates, after all, was a drop-out (yeah, it was from Harvard, but still), so you never know if that unemployed college-failure ordering his scotch-on-the-rocks at the bar is the future richest, smartest, wittiest and most-successful man in the world.

Growing up, I was daddy’s little girl. If my mom said I couldn’t have ice cream after dinner, I’d run to my dad; if my mom said I couldn’t stay out past eleven on a school night, I knew dad could be convinced. I was never really a tomboy (except for that brief period when I was five and told everyone I was a boy, but that’s not important right now…), but I always got along with guys better than I did with girls. Anyone who has seen Mean Girls and/or was picked on by other girls in high school knows why. Girls can be horrible to each other. Girls can be judgmental, catty, and sometimes just plain bitches. After being tormented by other girls all through school, I found it incredibly hard to get close to girls, and incredibly easy to get close to guys.

Sadly, something I have discovered in the post-college world I now inhabit is that it’s no longer easy to find guys to just be friends with. After you get your diploma and toss your hat up in the air, you’re thrust in to a world where everyone seems to be looking to pair up, and no one just wants to hang out and get a beer.

Sometimes you’ll make friends with people at work, but often you’ll want to keep your work life and your weekend life separate, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll find your weekend-life group of friends has dwindled since graduation. People tend to scatter after college, and often you’ll find that the plans you had with your friends to get a house together in San Francisco, or wherever, has fallen through, and now you’re living in a city with just one or two good friends. So now you want to make more friends, and now you come upon one of the greatest unspoken challenges of being in your 20s: making friends, especially with the opposite gender.

Here’s a scenario that seems to be repeating in my life lately: I’m hanging out with friends at a bar hanging and a guy strikes up a conversation with me. He’s friendly, funny, he’s a writer like me, and he’s got some great anecdotal stories about his first job working as a PA on “Conan O’Brien.” In other words, he’s a catch. He asks me for my number and I hand him my business card. I should be thrilled, except there’s one big problem: I’m not attracted to him. Whatsoever. So how do I forge a friendship with someone I’m going to have to let down?

These are the three options I’ve tried:

1) Give him your number but don’t pick up when he calls asking you out to dinner.

This is a massive waste of a perfectly good business card. Don’t hand out your phone number if you don’t plan on picking up the guy’s call. Although I will say that if he hadn’t asked for dinner and instead invited me to a museum or something else in a more platonic setting, I would have called him back.

2) Go out on a pseudo-date.

I went out on a date with a guy who had awesome credentials but not-so-awesome looks. We got along really well, but at the end of the night I still just wasn’t attracted to him. Even though we had a good time together, and I managed to dodge the goodnight kiss, I blew him off when he called asking for a second date. Looking back on it, I wish I’d tried harder to be friends with him, but I was new to the game, and gave up too easily.

3) Go out and make it subtly clear that you’re not interested in sex.

This is by far my best suggestion. From the get-go, you should set the ground rules. If the guy asks you out for dinner, suggest some happy hour drinks (way too early for a goodnight kiss or a drunken sleepover); if he asks you out for drinks but you’re not ready for one-on-one time, invite him out with your friends. Then, when you are hanging out, try to sneak into the conversation something about a guy at work you’re crushing on or about your vow to be single until you’ve moved out of your parent’s house, found a job, gotten your trust-fund payout at age thirty, whatever.

In my experience, it is possible to forge a friendship with someone of the opposite sex post-college, it just takes a little more work and cunning than it did while in school, and it’s bound to be more awkward. But if you’re a guy’s girl like me, and mean girls have scarred you for life, it’s worth it.

Weren’t you supposed to explore your options? Date? Have fun in your twenties before settling down in your thirties? Now that I’ve graduated, I know exactly why she said it. Dating post-college is a major shock to the system.

I went on a date recently with a guy who I’d met at a poetry reading. I thought he might be a few years older than me and I was okay with that, but on the date it came to light that he was actually many, many years older than me, fourteen to be exact (that’s Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher territory). I figured I’d dated older men before, so I decided to give him a chance. We talked about jobs, our shared neighborhood haunts (we both lived in the East Village), and then the subject of past relationships came up and he told me about his ex.

They were pretty young when they met and were together for six years, they got a dog and when they broke up he kept it. The natural question that popped into my head was: Why didn’t you get married? Then, he dropped the bomb: they had gotten married. I’d somehow found myself on a date with Divorced Guy.

Going into a date blind (different from a blind date), with no idea how old the person is (and no hint as to their marital status), is one of the major post-college dating obstacles I’ve encountered. There’s no longer any guarantee that the person you’re having drinks with isn’t thirty-seven with an ex-wife.

Now I’ve learned ways to sneak in age-inquiring questions when chatting up a guy for the first time. My favorite is to ask what television show was their favorite when they were a kid. “Doug” is a good sign, pre-TV Land “Brady Bunch” is not.

I lived in an ecologically – friendly dorm, ate veggie burgers, created art out of garbage and was generally bored out of my mind. So naturally, the only thing to do was move to Texas. But that’s besides the point.

Liberal arts kids are a unique breed. Instead of being encouraged to use college as a vessel for job placement and perpetual financial security, they are left to their own devices with indirect help from people like Kant and Foucault.

Consequently, post – college, most L.A. kids drift to boring jobs with meager wages in liberal cities, subsisting only with help from their more traditionally successful benefactors (parents). But all this is, of course, just speculation.

As a result, Gawker has decided that liberal arts schools are incredibly annoying. Really, I can’t blame them, even though the bulk of their readers are wayward liberal arts grads.

I suggest you read up on these little gems of colleges and decide for yourself. Most of these schools you probably haven’t even heard of, but I guarantee that these schools are special, special places. So special you can major in things like creativity and graduate in four years only having taken two classes.

It is hard to imagine living without these awesome people.

But, you just might have to.

Everyone is now going in different directions and will soon be spread across the country starting their post college lives. Everyone will have new jobs, new friends and new people to take absurd selfies with (though this time during happy hour instead of at your house party). Sure, there is AIM, Facebook and free nights and weekends on your cell phone, but who is to say that these people won’t dump you the minute they hit the real world?

I am no Miss Cleo (a psychic who used to have commercials in the early nineties … maybe you remember her?), so I can’t tell you for sure what is coming in your future. I am, however, in your shoes and have learned quite a bit in the past 2 months.

1. Keeping in touch with friends from school is hard. Thanks to new technology – text-messaging, AIM, wireless internet, email and cell phones – keeping in touch with people has never been easier. Despite those helpful little ditties, finding the time to call all your old homies is difficult.

Between the working, paying bills, doing laundry and trying to navigate this thing we call life, there is little time in the day to call everyone you know and catch up on life.

2. But, it is not impossible. If your school friends are that important to you, you will find the time to keep them in your life. There is plenty of time when you are walking home from work, taking a lunch and laying around on a weekend to make a phone call. Even better, thanks to the joys of the internet, you can email or blog weekly updates to keep your friends in the loop. It may not be the most personal thing, but at least you are all aware of the daily occurrences in each other’s lives.

3. Don’t get too caught up in the past. It is understandable to hold onto your oldest friends. In fact, it would be completely rude to move away “tata!” from all those people who were there for you at your worst (i.e. slumped over the toilet bowl promising God you would never. drink. again.). But, if keeping in touch with your old friends has completely hindered your ability to make new friends, you may want to reconsider your actions. You want to hold onto these people – obviously – but you can’t let it get in the way of adjusting to your new life. You will need your old friends as you travel through life, but you also need the new ones who will be around for the daily grind.

4. Be patient. Just because you have some time to chat on the phone doesn’t mean your friends are always sitting by their phones waiting for you to call. They may be working late, away from their phones enjoying city life. You may go weeks without talking to a certain person, but that does not mean they have completely forgotten you. As soon as you finally do find him or her, you will realize that nothing has changed.

Ah. One less thing to worry about.

Next on the worry agenda: cleaning the tub. Fuck.

Well, much to my joy and surprise, I can watch every episode I missed of any show on a new website: tvlinks. This fabulous wealth of entertainment contains links to just about any show you could ever want to see. Most of the recent hot shows like Entourage and Lost are updated with the current episodes. Or, if you feel like a blast from the past, check out the links to shows like Friends or Sex and the City.

Last night, I literally spent the entire evening catching up on the past season of Desperate Housewives. I would’ve never had time for this during the last semester — being home and completely finished with college leaves me with a lot of free time aka delaying adulthood.

So, thank you tvlinks for providing me with one more way to keep my mind off of grown up things like health insurance, a career and apartment rentals. I hope that you all check it out and catch up on the important television world during your summer vacation.

Apparently, I will have a life crisis sooner than I previously thought: the “Quarterlife Crisis.”

It’s a relatively recent phenomenon that is now recognized by many therapists and professionals in the mental health field, and refers to the years out of college when reality sets in. Technically, it is “a period of anxiety, uncertainty and inner turmoil that often accompanies the transition to adulthood.”

Awesome, can’t wait. Basically, young, twentysomethings realize that their entry level jobs suck and that a successful career isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Ahhh, please don’t make me graduate on Sunday! I don’t want to deal with life, especially this new crisis that I will apparently go through.

Thanks to Lauren, we all know that life sucks after college, and I can’t say that I am looking forward to having a “real life.” And on top of that, I must prepare myself for the onset of a quarterlife crisis.

What happened to the good old days when I was so excited to graduate because the possibilities were endless? The world was my oyster, as they say. Now, I would rather crawl into an oyster shell and hibernate for the next ten years.

If anyone else is as worried as me about the future, you should check out this website: Quarterlifecrisis.com. It describes itself as “a one-stop info shop for recent grads and beyond,” which is exactly the kind of comfort I need right now.

Facing a quarterlife crisis is a very scary thing, and it has made me realize just how thankful I am for the short time I have left to embrace college life. So, for the next couple nights, you can find me at the bar attempting to delay the real world for just one more weekend.