I’m afraid this is where we part ways. In two weeks, the time will come for me to enter into the glorious “real world” that everyone is so excited about being in … bitter, yet excited.

In two weeks, it will be my time to forget about all my “utopian” fantasies and join the proud masses who embrace a world that is no less a fantasy. Just like everyone else, I will throw out my crazy college “utopia-dreams” for that long-shot “American Dream” that the “real world” has promised me.

I’m going to have to work very hard to earn the respect of those around me. I’ll have to find a job that may not be all that I expected, but makes some good money.

Maybe I’ll earn enough to buy myself an SUV. Maybe I’ll even cover it with little American flags, just to show everyone that I’m now a proud member of “the real world.”

There will be some things that I know I won’t be doing. For one thing, the glorious “real world” doesn’t have time for any complicated literature. So, it looks like I’ll have to get into the habit of reading something more with the times.

I’m so terribly sorry, Dr. Marx, Kissinger, Veblen, Zinn, Huberman, Einstein, and Feynman. Make room for Hannity, Savage, and even Jesse Ventura -“real world” literature.

Every now and then, I’ll pick up a copy of the Collegian and slam some columnist for not being like me, in the “real world.” Maybe I’ll give him the line that they gave me, you know, “Some day you will have to be in the real world and make money. Maybe then, you won’t be a liberal, blah blah blah…”

Yes! That’ll change his stupid opinion about the Iraq war! (Silly child.) You see, in the “real world,” it’s every man for himself. When someone dies, it’s one less person you’ll have to compete with. Good.

If I work hard enough and do what I’m told, I’m going to have a house with beautiful green grass, a white picket fence and a big American flag on an aluminum pole. I’ll live in a neighborhood where everyone respects me because I work really hard and have a lot of stuff to show for it.

My son will be captain of the football team at his high school, not to mention class president. Every week, I’ll go to his games and eventually encourage him to accept that scholarship that Harvard has been offering him. You know, with one of those “man-to-man” talks.

Every summer, my family and I will go to Cape Cod, where my beautiful, never-aging wife and I will lay on the beach and watch the sun set, holding hands.

This is the payoff of life in the “real world.” My individual happiness and vast consumption habits will be proof that in the “real world,” all you have to do is work hard and good things will come to you. If only those Africans or Palestinians just realized this, maybe they too can have what the “real world” promises all of us.

I realize now that in this whole time, I have been wrong. I foolishly sold my readers a world where those who gain at the expense of others are immoral. In the “real world,” we call it “business.”

It’s what improves the quality of our lives. The real world promises that just as long as you partake in this “business,” there’s the possibility you will live like “The Donald.”

In the “real world,” we will live our lives knowing that we have done well for ourselves. Even if inflation spins out of control and wipes out your retirement fund, the only dignified thing to do is realize that the “real world” entails some risk and although you have worked for sixty years and had nothing to show for it but a sore back, you at least have your pride. You can look right into the mirror and say how you feel with one word that says it all: “Sucker.”

You know, maybe Arthur Miller was right. Maybe it really is a tragedy that we sacrifice our lives for that little piece of dignity and “opportunity” that the “real world” promises us. And with that is my message to those who worship a life in the “real world”: Keep it.

Never again will I buy into the sick fantasy that a life in constant pursuit of material wealth and dignity will have anything for me in the end.

In the “real world” I am a commodity, where the only people measuring my worth are shareholders.

We wake up in our sixties and realize that despite all the material wealth we have striven for, life only became harder. Families have broken apart, bones became brittle, and one after another, our dreams have been discarded into the dustbin marked, “Childish Utopia.” And for some reason, we’re proud of it. Those who look on in disgust just don’t get it.

But, whether you are the manager of a big firm or a janitor, in the end, there is no first class ticket to your grave. Don’t let the fantastic delusions of the “real world” tell you otherwise.

Mark Ostroff is a Collegian columnist.