My little sister is screaming and shouting and jumping up and down, waving an I.D. card with a signature scrawled on it in black in front of my face. She just saw Harry Connick Jr. — her obsession of obsessions — sing in Boston. She bought him a dozen red roses, fought her way to the front of the crowd, and got his autograph. “He touched my hand,” she cooed, smiling. Dressed in a black T-shirt with a smooth ole Harry photograph on it, she is the portrait of a teenage geek.

I, picking at the remnants of my 22nd birthday cake, paint a different sort of picture: one of a girl trying to be a woman. Not so long ago, I was a giggling teen-age freak. Then I went away to college, which was supposed to make me grow up. It didn’t. I just metamorphosed into a giggling young-adult freak. When I was handed my diploma at graduation, I did not undergo some wonderful transformation from naïveté to maturity. True, I was no longer an inexperienced dork. I was a slightly more experienced dork with a B.A. in journalism.

I soon put my degree to good use. After a summer of life-on- the-edge work as a “delicatessen engineer” at a Winooski supermarket, I decided that the thrill of slicing macaroni-and-cheese loaf wasn’t worth the possibility that I was going to chop my fingers off. So when a newspaper job came along, I took it. I was thrilled. So were my friends. We jumped up and down at the idea that I was going to be a “for-real” grown-up. The night before I was to start my new job, we celebrated by flailing incongruously to ’80s cheese rock.

With my muscles sore and my brain still bopping to Bananarama, I went to work. I went, in fact, to a sales meeting. Everybody looked older and wiser and cleaner than me. Since I couldn’t think of anything to say, I just smiled, trying to look like I had a clue. 

And I didn’t catch on too quickly. The shock of trying to operate a multi-line phone system and attempting to look knowledgeable while my 5’6″ body was seated behind a desk roughly the size of an oil tanker was a bit much for me. Hey, I was a mere student recently. Back then, the telephone was something you called home on to ask for money. A desk was where you sat while trying to keep awake during lectures on the wonderfulness of Catholicism. 

But not my desk. My huge monster desk was something I sat dwarfed behind while trying to stick things in my vertical files, create a computer database and smile perkily whenever someone walked in the door. As I struggled to transfer line 1 to line 12 while talking recycling with the building super, a sick feeling washed over my body: I am a grown-up. This isn’t a part to play; this shit’s for real.

When you’re a student, you’re golden. You have a roof over your head, three square meals a day, a ready supply of legal and not-so-legal stimulants, and the energy to use them. This is not so for adults. I work at least 10 hours a day, six or seven days a week. When I get home, my evening excitement involves scrubbing the bathroom floor, doing the dishes, watching some TV and sleeping. A party for me is a glass of wine and a bubble bath. By myself. 

Worse than the lack of energy is this: When you’re a student, you can fuck up. A lot. Hey, you’re still a kid. You’re just learning. But as soon as you graduate, the rules change. If you fuck up, you can lose your job. This isn’t a grease-slingin’, minimum-wage job. This is a “my mom and dad and me shelled out 80 grand so I could do this for the rest of my life” job. You can’t move from professional job to professional job as easily as you can fast-food-restaurant hop.

And you can’t act the way you do in fast-food joints, either. I’m always getting told to clean up my desk. That my clothes would look better if they were ironed, that my hair could use combing, that I shouldn’t talk so fast or so loud or so soft or at all. The sad truth is this: My grandmother was right. It ain’t da education, it’s da polish. Sure, it’s nice that you can parse every verb in the French language. But can you speak it while keeping your spine straight and your saliva in your mouth?

But this doesn’t mean that the grown-up world is all dull and dreary. People treat you with respect. You have a lot of responsibility, but no one looks down on you. If you’re hired in the real world, it’s because someone has confidence that you can do a job fit for a grown-up.

Oh, and there’s another benefit: After hours, you can still act however you want. Which is what I did this weekend. I spun around in the yard with my five-year-old cousin Michelle until I thought I was going to puke. I used lots of toilet humor. And when my sister came in, freaking over Harry, I managed a totally sincere, “Oh, my God.”

This article appears in October 11 • 1995.