After a nice meal with my girlfriend the waitress slid me the bill and before she was able to clear the table I had calculated the appropriate tip, shelled out the total and thanked her for the meal. I stood up and wrapped my girl in her coat and, giving the hostess a polite ‘thank you,’ I pushed the door open and followed my date into the night. I was wearing a buttoned-down shirt with a dinner jacket. I had cologne on, and my shoes were laced properly and tightly. My teeth, hair and fingernails were all clean.
   Where did this guy come from?
   A few years ago you could find me on the couch of a Vermont apartment eating macaroni and cheese out of the pot with basketball shorts on, watching Seinfeld reruns until 4:00 a.m. I added pseudo-intellectual lyrics to mundane chord progressions as I sat in my room lamenting the tragedy of the working class world and my own, seemingly endless disposition. What that ‘disposition’ entailed escaped me then as it does now, and was probably nothing more than a specter spawned by my own laziness. In short, I was a college student – reluctant to face the cold hard facts: it was time to grow up.
   High school students are dabblers, and that is half the fun. You get to join clubs and choose elective classes. You get a taste of freedom, but still you are fed by your parents. You sleep under their roof but, nonetheless, the illusion is intact and serves to bolster you for the post-graduation days.
   The way that college is structured is brilliant. You start in a dorm, surrounded by a newfound, seemingly infinite freedom. Suddenly no one is telling you what to do or when to do it. Some classes don’t even require your attendance. Slowly you are introduced to upper-classmen who live in apartments. The idea grows in your head until, one year, you decide it is time to move out of the dorms.
   This is the natural progression. I remember coming home from college and doing excessive work for my folks, eager to help out and show my brother I had grown up. I was a man, or so I thought.
   But inside there was never a definitive change. I had always thought the switch would be a loud, thundering crack, and I would one day find myself on the other side of sloth and childhood, ready to obey the alarm clock and pay attention to grooming. I thought my maturation would be cut and dry, an overnight affair in which I would go to bed listening to “Rage Against the Machine” and wake up with a desire turn up the public radio. I was wrong.
   The transition into young-adulthood came formless. The problem with my thinking was I was always putting the cart before the horse. I did not start making plans to act older and then – presto-change-o – become older. I did not buy a watch and say ‘OK Stowe, from this day forward you are going to be on time,’ or ‘no more late nights’ – these things just began to happen. Time scraps any blueprint you can muster.
   More and more I found myself not planning to be responsible, but wanting to. I stopped calling out of work entirely. I started paying attention to the amount of sleep I was getting and what sort of foods I was putting in my body. I don’t drink cheap beer anymore because I don’t like the way it tastes. I listen to public radio because I am whole-heartedly interested in the world I live in and I read more non-fiction than ever before because I actually like learning about things that really happened.
   What this all has provided for me is stability. The word seems scary, boring, lackluster: I don’t even like writing it. But it is the truth. I like going to sleep knowing that tomorrow I will go to work at a stable job doing something I love. I like waking up early and having time before lunch, instead of rolling out of bed to watch the “Simpsons” with a bowl of cereal and I like the confidence that has been birthed from all of this responsibility.
   I am not super human. I still miss deadlines from time to time, I still wake up late or spend the afternoon in my pajamas: but things are much improved. I cannot tell you exactly when all of this happened, only that I know it did happen, or is currently happening to me.  
   For those of you about to enter the real world my message to you is relax. Our parents never read a manual on how to hold a job or act their age, it just happened to them as it will happen to you. Your passions will reach out from you like the arms of an amoeba and the things you love will mature you as they did me and the wild world will find a spot for you, whether you like it or not.