"Not a girl, not yet a woman"

There are many wonderful things about being a grad student. The not-so-wonderful one is that until you go gray, everyone thinks you are a college student, with all that this implies in contemporary America. Real estate brokers treat you like a child incapable of paying rent on even the saddest of 100th floor walk-ups. When you walk around NYU with your backpack, you get the, "ugh, NYU students" glare from passersby, distraught over their neighborhood's purple-flag "invasion." Meanwhile, to Student Health, a student is a student, so they assume that you spend your weekends (no, weekdays and weekends) in a drug-induced haze, hooking up with everything that moves, and ask you your "major," at which point you attempt to explain that you are, for their purposes, middle-aged, and they don't buy it for a minute. You still speak to job-having friends and family about things like "final papers" and "spring break," which will forever sound like you're referring to five paragraphs and Cancun. You know you're a grown-up, but anyone who has to claim this about herself is, of course, a child.