I got a text from my mother recently that said: ‘[Your sister] went to take her SATs this morning.’

There were a couple of things about this message that blew my mind. Thing number one: Despite my mother having text messaging service for the past few months, I am still always overcome with a bizarre combination of disbelief and amazement whenever I see a text message from her. My mother can text! I’m so proud. Two: My sister is really getting old. Three: If my sister is getting really old, that only means ‘

I’m getting really old, too.

Before reaching for Tylenol Arthritis, I chose to pontificate over this concept for a little bit.

My sister and I are four years apart, so we have always shared similar landmarks. When she was graduating middle school, I was graduating high school. Our height discrepancy ‘ she’s markedly taller than me ‘ always had people asking if I was excited for high school, despite my Binghamton University sweatshirt, which I wore with extreme ‘I’m-going-to-college!’ pride my senior year of high school. And when she graduates high school, I’ll be graduating college.

So, she recently took a big exam to prepare her for future, and where was my parallel? Absolutely nowhere ‘ I mean, unless you count my daily tribulations as that bumbling college junior in oversized shades as congruent to the supposedly life-determining examination that a high school junior takes.

Every stupid or little thing one does every day could contribute to his or her future, and measure his or her competency at life, in the same way that not filling in the bubbles with a No. 2 pencil could drive someone from Harvard to ‘ well, not Harvard.

While I haven’t recently sat for hours trying to deconstruct algebra into a language I can speak, I have recently learned how to somewhat manage a monthly budget. If I fail at that exam, I go broke, and will presumably have to subsist off stale produce. If I don’t take out the garbage, bugs will accumulate. If I don’t clean up after myself, little fairies aren’t going to come in and sweep up after me, and my mother won’t call me and remind me to, either.

While my daily little life tests may not amount to one administered by the College Board, I’d like to wager that if you don’t start possessing some simple life skills by some point in college, real life will only look that much more daunting. No big exam board is going to gauge my ‘ or anyone’s ‘ competency as a human being, but I’m starting to develop an inner voice that sounds a little like William Shatner’s, telling me whether I’m doing a good job at growing up.

I’m kind of on a point system, too. I gain points when I food shop economically, lose points when I buy things because the boxes are pretty. I gain points when I budget my time efficiently; I lose points when I stay awake until 2 a.m. doing absolutely nothing ‘ you would think a magic show erupts in my closet or something. I gain points when I enjoy myself, and lose points when I rush to the next moment ‘ or just start Googling medical conditions’.

I don’t know what all of these points add up to, and I don’t know what my ‘score’ would be, but I’m willing to say that, while I’m not quite ready to move into that daunting beast known as real life, I would say that I’m almost ready. This is good, because I have one more year to mess up, learn, re-examine and assess myself before I venture off into that wonderfully exciting mess of the unknown.

While we don’t have numbers or points to gauge where we stand in life, we certainly have a couple of tools: a conscience, common sense, wisdom, bank statements, overflowing garbage cans and, perhaps, one of those little celebrity-sounding voices. I highly recommend picking up one of those voices, Shatner-sounding or not. It at least puts reading bank statements and taking out the garbage on a more interesting level.