I don't want a medal or anything. Living twenty years in a row is a pretty good accomplishment and I will gladly take high fives from anyone who puts them up, but this is hardly a time to sit back and bask. Sit up, sit straight, take stock of who you are and what you have done so far with those twenty years. If you are like me, you have not much to show, if you are like me, and we were called forward to face some sort of terrible reckoning for the lives lived and unlived in those twenty consecutive years upon this earth, you would have little grounds for clemency, and your bones would be ash before your judge.

Likely you are not like me, but even still what you have taken a lifetime so far to accomplish, you will out pace and out strip again and again in the coming years and if life were not so then perhaps it would not be a life worth living. What person would stand up and claim with pride that his name was made before his twentieth year, that the apex of his creativity, his soul, his being was reached at such an early age, that man then doomed to slowly fade on the sadder side of his life's climactic parabola, that he may watch that zenith fade from view and that he might cling to photographs and newspaper clippings that once extolled his virility and imagination, but no more his name appears in ink.

Now is the time to take stock in what lies around you. Your chance at reinvention is like wet concrete drying in the sun, move fast and move now because one day you will wake up and you will be one person and you will be that person for the rest of your life. If you are me there are things that you do not like about yourself and so must you be the surgeon to your tumours. Cut them off and cast them away and become the person you know you are. I can give no greater advice, me a man who if there was cosmic justice would surely have his mouth wired shut for what good words could pass through his lips, having made so many poor choices so that he can never be considered a fit leader of men.

Make mistakes now, please and make them big and make them spectacular. Break hearts and break bones and bruise lips and bruise egos and learn from everything because school never ends unless you want it to, unless you close your eyes hum to yourself and hope that whatever the world is beyond your fastened lids is the same as what it was when you closed them. This is a heady time and closing your eyes for just a second may feel right but you can not stop the world from spinning and this blue jewel cares not whether you pay attention or not. Which is why you must, you must pay attention because there is no one to do it for you, it is not a job that can be contracted out.

I am not your father and I should not preach because my words are mostly empty vanities but there is truth I think when I say that when things are said and things are done one must take responsibility, take your pants up from around your knees and accept the things that will not accept you and accept that there are things beyond your control and take responsibility for even those too for then you can say that this rain falls because of me and if you say it loud enough and if the right twinkle rests in your eye there will be some who will look around and wonder if it really only does rain because your voice calls it forth.