Last week, my brother Barbara graduated from college. (Remember Barbara? If not, here’s what you need to know: 1. He is my younger brother–I have an older one, too.  2. Barbara is not his given name, but it is my nickname for him. I call him Barbara affectionately, because 3. Barbara is awesome.)

So anyway: Barbara graduated.

Graduating from college is a special rite of passage, where highlights include the end of your student loan checks, the beginning of your student loan bills and the slow but persistent suffocation of your youth and dignity. Yippee!

If you’re a new grad, congratulations! Life is about to get slightly more complicated.

Here’s what you have to look forward to:

(If you’re currently unemployed, these activities may look familiar.)

Recent college grads, I know this chart doesn’t look much different from how you’re used to running things. You’re probably thinking: “Trade ‘applying and interviewing for jobs’ with ‘going to class’ and ‘weeping quietly over my degree’ for ‘worrying about entering an abysmal job market’, and you’ve just described the last two years of my life. What’s the big deal?”

The big deal is this: You’re a GROWN UP now. And being a grown up is total bullshit. So unless you can find a way to save yourself from the fate of adulthood, you are about to enter a world of pain. The kind of pain where you realize that every movie about a plucky young kid who graduates from college and, after a few musical montages, becomes the champion of everything is a total sham.

You might be thinking: “I know movies aren’t real life.” To which I’d say: “Your logical reasoning proves you probably got your money’s worth in school. Movies aren’t even close to real life, but you know what’s a little too close to real life? The movie Office Space. Steel yourself, folks.”

Wisely, Barbara has been brainstorming options to prolong or even completely avoid the awkward and painful transition into adulthood for some time. He debated graduate school, entertained a few fruitless job interviews and then he made a decision: He is going to hike the Appalachian Trail.

The Appalachian Trial is 2,181 miles long, stretching from Mount Katahdin, Maine to Springer Mountain, Georgia (or from Georgia to Maine depending on where you want to start.) Traveling the full distance of the trail takes hikers around 6 months.

Hiking the Appalachian Trail is a lifelong dream of Barbara’s, and one that he feels he is best-prepared to accomplish immediately after finishing school. I can’t say I disagree; one is never more prepared to bathe sparingly and sleep on a mound of dirt every night than immediately after four years of doing essentially the same thing in college.

But when he called to ask for my advice about the trip, I decided to recuse myself for the following reasons: First, I would miss Barbara if he was gone for 6 months. Presently, we talk almost every day, and surely, he’ll be too busy fighting off black bears, traversing trails and conserving cell phone battery life to take my every call.

Second, and I realize I’m about to say something controversial here, I’m not terribly enthusiastic about the outdoors. I’m not agoraphobic or anything, but my research has shown that the longer I am outside, the more I dislike the outdoors.

Here’s a chart reflecting my findings.

Below you’ll see where I have altered the chart to indicate how I think I might feel about the outdoors while hiking down the Appalachian Trail.

If you can take away only two things from these charts, I want them to be that: 1. My hatred of being outside increases exponentially as time passes and 2. I’m not 100 percent clear on how graphs and/or other matters pertaining to math work.

Leave it to Barbara to use living outside, the one thing more heinous than growing up, to defer immediate adulthood. Given the choice, though, I’d pick growing up.

My distaste for the outdoors is not due to lack of in-your-face nature time. My father LOVED camping when I was a kid. To date, I have been camping more than 20 times, at various ages and times of year.

I have been camping in sunny-time weather.

But camping in sunny-time weather just makes me wonder what I’m supposed to do when I’m not checking the tent for bugs and wishing I wasn’t stuck in a land forgotten by time, Wi-Fi and probably the police, too.

I’ve also been rainy-time camping, which is even worse than it sounds, because everything gets waterlogged and smelly, including your will to live.

(Related: When camping in the rain, you should never try to dry soaking-wet shoes over a camp fire. The rubber soles will melt and/or bubble.) (But if you’re not a 7-year-old girl who is left more-or-less unsupervised by your you-can-do-anything-you-want-when-we’re-camping-just-don’t-die father, then you probably already know this.)

But I think what has turned me against the outdoors forever is knowing how lonely it feels like to sleep in a tent in the middle of nowhere.

Even if I’m on a group camping trip. Even if there are other people in my tent. As soon as the sun goes down, my anxiety sets in, because as far as I’m concerned, every night that you’re camping is the darkest night your soul has ever seen.

Night-time camping is when I lay awake for hours and wish I had brought Tylenol PM or a baseball bat to knock myself out.

I trust you’re starting to understand why I told Barbara I was unqualified to advise him on whether to make the trip down the Appalachian Trail. “You know I wouldn’t do it” was about all I could manage beyond the requisite “Yes! Live your dream! Fly like a butterfly” or whatever.

But just so you don’t think I’m a total monster who hates trees and sunshine, I feel like I should add that I respect the environment, and I have been known to appreciate nature and the outdoors in moderation.

I even drive a hybrid, and on a number of occasions, I’ve gone to great lengths to avoid hurting even the smallest animal.

For example, when I go running, I am always doing my part to protect nature’s creatures.

I always scan the road and adjusting my steps to avoid trampling anything.

Even if this ends terribly for me, because caterpillars are assholes for setting a trap in the middle of the road, knowing how tragically uncoordinated I am.

See? I’m not a heartless monster. I would rather fall and skin my face than step on a caterpillar in it’s somewhat natural habitat of my suburban neighborhood streets.

It’s fair to say, though, that I like the outdoors best when I am appreciating it in small doses or from afar. Because if nature’s creatures get too close to me or intrude on what I like to regard as my natural habitat…When I find a bug in my house, for example? Well, then it’s Game Over.