The other day, I made a terrifying discovery. I’m 22 and preparing to work at a real newspaper in a sizable metropolitan area. That means, technically, I will be a young urban professional — a yuppie!

Time out for a quick Q&A on yuppies:

Q: What exactly is a yuppie?

A: One source describes them as “soulless, emotionless slaves of white collar labor.”

Q: And what source is that?

A: Why, it’s the handy-dandy oppressive language guide handed out to student leaders in our university’s own dorms by Residence Life. Isn’t that funny?

Q: I’m supposed to ask the questions.

A: Sorry.

Q: Then again, why am I asking any questions? This information could have been given in a brief sentence or two — doesn’t this protracted Q&A format just needlessly fill space?

A: Exactly.

Anyhow, I realized I was unprepared for yuppie living. My trips to Starbucks are few and far between, Volkswagens are out of my price range (so are bicycles for that matter), and I’ve never even been to an Ikea. Even if I could hide those facts, eventually fellow yuppies would invite me to play squash, and then the jig would really be up.

Luckily, I’ve been able to console myself. Because though I might face the harsh realities of yuppie-dom, at least I’m not getting married.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I think marriage is a wonderful thing, and I hope one day to be married myself, maybe even without the help of a mail-order service. I just think getting married now is too early, mainly for two reasons.

First, recent college graduates don’t make a lot of money, which means they likely aren’t able to afford suitable trappings and accommodations to properly commemorate this sacred event. And by suitable trappings and accommodations, of course, I mean an open bar at the reception.

Second, marriage is often followed by children, and I doubt the parenting qualifications of many people I know who are soon getting married.

I’m not questioning their personal responsibility or nurturing capabilities; I just have the very firm belief that anyone in the United States who wants to have a child should have spent at least one summer as a camp counselor.

Perhaps the only parenting qualification I have is my own experience as a counselor at a reputable youth organization, which for reasons of journalistic integrity I will only identify by its initials: YMCA.

Working as a camp counselor will teach any would-be parent the wide range of child behavior and emotion. One minute, a camper will be hooting and hollering, dancing around without a care in the world; the next minute, he will calmly walk over to you in a straightforward manner, motion you down to look at him eye-to-eye, and then tell you in an earnest, adult voice that he has to go potty RIGHT NOW.

Also, this experience helps you practice watching children at all times, to prevent them, in the case of parenting, from falling down stairs and swallowing small objects and in the case of camp counseling, from beating the tar out of each other.

Finally, working as a camp counselor will prepare you for a lifetime of filling out child-related forms. Specifically, tax forms.

I had a terrible time filling out my taxes, even though I took calculus in high school and, more importantly, own a signed copy of “Dave Barry’s Money Secrets.” But even I was relieved to skip the dependent children portion, and I have extensive practice filling out camp incident report forms.

In a simpler world, camps would not have incident report forms. If Billy hit Johnny, I would tell the director, who would tell the parents, who would ignore it because the whole reason they sent Billy to camp was so someone else could deal with his disciplinary problems. But now, because of transparency and insurance and the greaseball explosion in our nation’s law schools, I had to fill out a form about it.

I know, I know, I’m making children seem like a hassle when they are a blessing and the future of our country. I guess I’m just a little harried figuring out how to finance this Jetta.