For the past week my wife and I have been social butterflies. By the end of tomorrow evening we’ll have hung out with different people five different times. That’s more social interaction than I ever got in college. The amazing this is that we can actually sit around our family room and talk for several hours without ever doing anything. No games, no movies, no organized interaction. Just talking. Isn’t this what adults do?

You know it’s bad news when you actually read your college’s alumni magazine and think it’s helping you stay in touch. Some days I begin to think I really am an adult. A friend sent an e-mail the other day ranting about how he’d suddenly become an adult without realizing it. I wanted to point out that he’ll be attending grad school in the fall and technically still hasn’t entered the real world. He’s got a doctorate to go before he enters the real world, and at that point you’re well beyond anything resembling a normal adult.

Some days I just feel like an adult. A stack of bills waits for me on the kitchen table. I walk in the door at 5:30 and feel like taking a nap. I actually eat vegetables without complaint or sour face. And I’m talking about more than potatoes here. Yesterday I caught myself complaining about how the service station had cheated me and how I should just do it myself and save a few bucks.

But every now and then there’s a glimmer of hope. My new bike has given me a lot of hope lately, although I do wear a helmet, which is a very responsible, adult thing to do. But I also jerk the handlebars up when I hit a bump and race minivans down subdivision streets. I even heft the bike on my shoulder and haul it up three flights of stairs after a long ride without complaint. And then, the best glimmer of all, I say out loud to no one in particular, “That felt good,” instead of, “I’m going to feel that in the morning.”

The world can be an interesting place. One morning you’re walking through the rain to the bus stop, slumping into the seat in a total daze, arriving at 14th and Hennepin before you know it. Another day you’re taking the 7F past the Minnehaha Market for the first time, wondering at the passing houses in this quiet section of St. Paul you’ve never seen before. You notice the red and white sign alerting people of the close circuit television surveillance and you wonder about the small house with the front porch and what it’d be like to move in there.

All in a sudden daze, a passing moment, a flicker on the television screen.

There’s an old brick building I pass everyday. It’s less than a block from my apartment, across the street from the Valvoline place that charges too much for an oil change. On the corner there’s an Oriental Supermarket. The signs in the window are in another language. The brick building is three stories high. Apartment windows can be seen above the Oriental market, the kind of windows old, half-crazed geniuses stare out of. The kind of windows that make for the kind of apartment you wish you could find, but never will.

A few weeks ago something strange happened to that red brick building. One day I walked by and everything was perfectly normal. The next day I walked by and bits of brick and concrete dust littered the sidewalk. There were a few intact bricks, and lots of red chips and shards. I looked skyward to find that part of the edifice had let go and fallen to the sidewalk. Part of the ornate pattern–as ornate as that building got–had given way and crumbled to the street below.

The next day yellow caution tape circled the sidewalk in front of the building, with wooden blockades as rickety as the building itself barring the sidewalk. You had to step into the street to walk around the diversion.

omewhere at some point someone walked those same steps I do every morning, but they had the unfortunate circumstance of being stuck in a particularly negative moment they couldn’t get out of. Perhaps they didn’t find it quite so negative. Perhaps they found it enlightening that the facade of a building could fall down upon them. Perhaps they were merely nobody and only the alley cat watched the bricks fall and shatter across the concrete sidewalk. Perhaps the bricks never did fall.

Every day I walk by, look up to the exposed concrete of the building, which stands out like nakedness, and I wonder what it would have been like to see that moment. Then as I walk by my eyes fall to the pavement, to that one bit of brick lying next to the rickety wooden blockade. That one bit of brick just the right size to sit on my desk and make me think of all the wrong moments and all the right moments and being stuck in between every one. One of these days I’ll pick that broken edifice up off the ground and drop it in my pocket for safe keeping. One of these moments I’ll scoop the red brick up and wonder which moment I’m stuck in.

So my formal education is completed. It’s all official now. I’ve done the little song and dance, I walked across the stage, I posed for the pictures. The diploma is in hand.

At least that’s what they tell me. I think I’m going to miss the classroom. I don’t know about the tests, the busy work, or the group projects. I suppose it’s a package deal. But I’m going to miss formal education. I’m going to miss walking into the classroom and having someone be paid to instruct me. I don’t think I’ve ever realized what a privilege that is. Those teachers were paid to show me how it’s done. And many of them really cared about making sure I got it. That will rarely happen again.

I’m going to miss the passion some of my professors could impart. I remember American Literature in the fall of my sophomore year. We read Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. First of all, I’m not a big fan of poetry. Second of all, I’m not a big fan of poetry. I read the assigned works by these two the night before and didn’t get much out of it. A mess of words that flow pretty well but don’t impart a lot of anything to me. I tossed the book aside and went to watch The Simpsons.

The next morning my professor would be overflowing with exuberance about these poets. He read them with a passion I couldn’t seem to muster. The text came alive, and I actually began to realize there was more to Dickinson than the darkness of a lonely woman.

I’m going to miss that kind of dedication. That willingness to do what it takes to teach these people something. Teaching is not an easy job. There are so many great teachers I’m thankful for. They’ve changed my outlook on life. They’ve made me see things I never noticed before. They’ve shown me that I can do things I’ve never done before.

For all of that they have done, I am truly thankful.

But we all know education is something that never really ends. You keep learning for the rest of your life, it just may not be as rigorous, and the tests don’t come back with red x’s and a percentage at the top. Your learning will continue, and this time the teachers won’t be salaried.

There will be mentors who come alongside and teach you a thing or two here and there, if you’re paying attention. There will be people you can learn from, people who can guide you, as long as you’re willing to keep your mind open, and to continue to grow. In a sense you become your own teacher. You can only continue to learn if you are willing to realize the lessons those around you have to teach.

And in that sense my education is not over. And it never will be. For I have a lot to learn about a lot of things.

Today I donned the goofy black robe, the mortar board hat, and the tassel that smacks you in the eye when you walk. Graduation Day. In all honesty it was rather anticlimactic. I actually finished my formal education in December and opted not to participate in the ceremony because I was also getting married, starting a job, and moving in the same week. And by waiting until May I could graduate with my new wife.

So I’ve had my diploma sitting in the filing cabinet since February. Which means all the pomp and circumstance was really just for show. It was just a big photo opportunity. For everyone else it was a culminating experience. They finished their last finals yesterday. They were still packing up their dorm rooms and moving–for some people it was back home, for others it was into a new apartment. They were still looking for jobs and trying to decide what they were going to do in their immediate post-college years.

I, on the other hand, don’t have any of those worries. Yesterday I went to work and answered e-mails and scheduled some articles and did what needed to be done. On Monday I’ll go back, answer more e-mails, and go to a meeting or two. I’ve been living in my apartment since December. I took my last final in December. There’s not much of a change.

But there was a glimmer of something. There was an acknowledgment of my accomplishment. I went to school for three and a half years and earned this really expensive piece of paper that tells me I went to school for three and a half years. But more than that it was the smiles of friends and family that said you’ve worked hard and you’ve learned a thing or two about life. I certainly have a few more things to learn, like how to make loan payments, but it’s a step in a new direction.

It’s not an end, it’s a beginning, as one of the not-so-spectacular graduation speakers said. A new beginning. Not that anything is really over. It’s a transition of sorts. The last five months have been a transition of sorts, and I guess I’m realizing that all of life is transition. It never really settles down enough for you to get used to it.

Connections amaze me. Friendships amaze me. Laughter amazes me. The fact that a Nabisco shelf rescued from the dumpster, disassembled at 2 a.m. in my driveway, transported to Minnesota, and proudly displayed in my Townhouse has become a side-splitting joke at mere mention amazes me. Sometimes I wish friends didn’t have to move away. Sometimes I wish bedtime would never come. Sometimes you want to talk late into the night and not worry about the next morning’s blaring alarm. Sometimes you do.

Sometimes I dream crazy dreams of the things I want to do or the places I want to go or the person I want to become. Sometimes they’re simple things like owning a bike or making a web page, and sometimes they border on the ludicrous, like social revolution and a suburban battlefield. I could fill volumes with the dreams that come in the seven-minute walk to the bus stop. I wish I could capture them all in a phone-book size ledger and cross them off one by one as they come true.

I noticed for the first time today what happens when spring comes. Things grow. Like mad. On the way home I walked past a number of lawns that really needed to be mowed. I also noticed all the plants that were just thriving in the damp soil and bright sunshine. It smelled like life.

I most appreciate the patch of ground next to the sidewalk that sported a garden of weeds of various varieties. I appreciated the weeds for their diversity and their ravenous growth. I couldn’t help but think of my environmental science class in college and how we talked about the suburban lawn as the least diverse ecosystem on the planet. Diverse ecosystems are self-containing, while ecosystems with little or no diversity are on the brink of collapse–unless excess energy is dumped into the ecosystem. Thus fat guys pushing mowers and stretching sprinklers keep the ecosystem alive. Seems like a waste to me.

That’s the one thing I regret about college. I sold my environmental science textbook. Of all the crappy textbooks I still have, that’s the only one I’ve wanted to go back and look stuff up in.

“Every child’s daily desire is basically the same: what kids want from their day is the maximum number of opportunities to exercise their imaginations and bodies via the myriad of activities known as “play.” In America’s vast, cloned suburbs the toys of choice in my day were things like G.I. Joes, Kermit the Frogs and Barbies. In the war zones of the same era the toys of choice were spent cartridges, military insignia and broken guns. The play urge in children is so strong that they will indulge it no matter what imaginary fodder, what playgrounds or what toy materials fate may offer them.”

(from “The Garbage Man’s Daughter,” a short story in the collection River Teeth: Stories and Writings by David James Duncan, page 68)

Why is it adults don’t seek to maximize their playtime? It seems like adults have lost the desire to play, or perhaps, adults have found a new twisted version of play that doesn’t exercise anything but the TV or is at best self-defeating.

I say it’s time to play. Shut the TV off and go play. Build a castle. Paint a picture. Read a book. Throw a Frisbee. Plant a tree. Kids are smart. They do whatever they can to runaway and go play. Sometimes the bills do need to be done and there are things that require our attention. But that excuse can’t work all the time. Go play.

It’s amazing how music can date you. Today my wife was told by fourth graders that she listened to KOOL 108, the Twin Cities oldies station, because she was a U2 fan. Sadly, to today’s generation of kids, U2 is oldies music. You have to listen to rap music to really be cool. All I can say is why won’t rap die?

You know you’re a poor married couple when you go on a picnic and take real plates and silverware because you don’t own any paper plates or plastic silverware.

GMA Week continues. Today the interviews continued one after the other until I couldn