This column marks exactly — or somewhere close enough to — five weeks of class until a decent part of this readership can no longer count themselves among the school-aged. Believe how pained that sentence was for me to articulate, as I have already stopped speaking to a dozen people for graciously reminding me of it.

Regardless, that horizon, both promising and godforsaken, is looming, and it’s driving me to insanity.

Noah Baumbach, writer and director of “The Squid and the Whale,” and collaborator with Wes Anderson on “The Life Aquatic,” addressed the ennui that I can only assume wracks all college seniors post-spring break in a film called “Kicking and Screaming,” a comedic/horrific interpretation of what happens to fresh college grads who aren’t promised suit jobs as financiers with signing bonuses. It’s a painful focus on the situation I currently find myself in, and predates the painful-for-a-different-reason Will Ferrell comedy of the same name by a little over a decade.

Baumbach’s film doesn’t do much to quell the ever-increasing anxiety hits I’ve been weathering recently — but it does document that at its very least, my situation isn’t phenomenon.

My freshman year, when I listened to my RA (whom I shared a suite with) carp about his lack of a job, salary or discernible future, I was more concerned with settling into this college life to worry about his exiting it. So I chalked his fears and soft sobbing at night up to melodrama. I mean, really, he was taking 12 credits, the bulk of which was composed of Tae Kwon Do and Beginner’s Drawing.

Three years later, as I glaze through my 12 credits of Yoga and Intermediate Spanish, I have a better idea of where he was coming from (a place a lot like Dante’s purgatory, but with less Italians and more television). The time I spend in between manically searching for a job in print media, reading about how jobs in print media are rapidly dissolving and imbibing legally, I use to stare my own murkily discernible future in between the eyes.

If all this has seemed a part too histrionic, my sincerest apologies have already been postmarked to your PO box.

The conceit of this is, of course, largely cathartic, but I’m relatively confidant more than two of you share in this heavy anxiety and general uncertainty, and may take comfort in the fact that there are others among you (SOM respectfully excluded) who are similar straits, and that your situations too, are not phenomenon.

Graduating seems to straddle a sheer line between emancipation and exile. Carte blanche is a close as mid-May, but until then there is enough to meditate on, and plenty to weigh.

— Max Lakin is a senior English and rhetoric major, and the Opinion Editor.