1. Make peace with your parents. Whether you finally recognize that they actually have your best interests in mind or you forgive them for being flawed human beings, you can’t happily enter adulthood with that familial brand of resentment. 2. Kiss someone you think is out of your league; kiss models and med students and entrepreneurs with part-time lives in Dubai and don’t worry about if they’re going to call you afterward. 3. Minimize your passivity. 4. Work a service job to gain some understanding of how tipping works, how to keep your cool around assholes, how a few kind words can change someone’s day. 5. Recognize freedom as a 5:30 a.m. trip to the diner with a bunch of strangers you’ve just met. 6. Try not to beat yourself up over having obtained a ‘useless’ Bachelor’s Degree. Debt is hell, and things didn’t pan out quite like you expected, but you did get to go to college, and having a degree isn’t the worst thing in the world to have. We will figure this …

A workmate just sent me this poem a while ago, and I think it’s really nice, apt and totally applies to my life right now. Somebody said that it couldn’t be done, But, he with a chuckle replied That “maybe it couldn’t” but he would be one Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried. So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin On his face. If he worried he hid it. He started to sing as he tackled the thing That couldn’t be done, as he did it. Somebody scoffed: “Oh, you’ll never do that; At least no one we know has done it”; But he took off his coat and he took off his hat, And the first thing we knew he’d begun it. With a lift of his chin and a bit of a grin, Without any doubting or quiddit, He started to sing as he tackled the thing That couldn’t be done, and he did it. There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done, There are thousands …