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Graduation Ceremony!
Jan. 3rd, 2010 12:44 pmI just went to my high school graduation ceremony yesterday. I want to tell you about the speech I heard.
I suppose I'd better justify myself first.
There was a freak hailstorm on the day of my outdoor graduation ceremony, so we rescheduled for the next weekend, inside the auditorium, but the auditorium roof caved in the day before and we cancelled again.
A week later we had a local movie theatre booked, but there was a bomb scare. The local dance hall the next week was accidentally double-booked and we lost the coin toss. In desperation, we just planned to have it in a parking lot, and this time there was a rain of frogs the night before and the whole place was quarantined. Two other high schools offered their auditoriums, but both of them backed out for fear that they'd get hit by a fire or earthquake or whatever else -- nobody wanted our particular bad luck.
All summer through there were 14 separate attempts to reschedule the graduation, and all failed. Then another remake over Thanksgiving break, but nobody could agree on a date and time. Winter break graduation fell apart due to infighting, and the next spring the class after us refused utterly to let us participate.
Since then, we have had eight more attempts to have our graduation ceremony, each of them foiled, mostly by our increasingly busy lives. This weekend, eighteen and a half years later, we finally managed to have the ceremony. I got my diploma!
The valedictorian gave the speech that she had prepared for the original graduation:
"Soon, fellow graduates, we will be leaving these halls of learning and going out into the Real World. Nothing we have learned here can prepare us for the things we'll see in the Real World. In the Real World, anvils dropped upon your head will cause fractures and concussions, not comical dizziness. In the Real World, when your eyes jump out of your head from surprise you may be blind for life. In the Real World, cars cannot talk, or see through their headlamps, or smile with their front bumper. In the Real World, people are more likely to watch contrived and as-yet-unwritten awkward living situations on MTV rather than invent invisibility potions. In the Real World, all numbers can be expressed in decimal representation, though not necessarily finite or repeating. In the Real World, there are too many bridges that Roy Orbison can burn. Please keep all this in mind as you go out and face this new decade of the nineties."
The more things change, the less they stay the same.
I suppose I'd better justify myself first.
There was a freak hailstorm on the day of my outdoor graduation ceremony, so we rescheduled for the next weekend, inside the auditorium, but the auditorium roof caved in the day before and we cancelled again.
A week later we had a local movie theatre booked, but there was a bomb scare. The local dance hall the next week was accidentally double-booked and we lost the coin toss. In desperation, we just planned to have it in a parking lot, and this time there was a rain of frogs the night before and the whole place was quarantined. Two other high schools offered their auditoriums, but both of them backed out for fear that they'd get hit by a fire or earthquake or whatever else -- nobody wanted our particular bad luck.
All summer through there were 14 separate attempts to reschedule the graduation, and all failed. Then another remake over Thanksgiving break, but nobody could agree on a date and time. Winter break graduation fell apart due to infighting, and the next spring the class after us refused utterly to let us participate.
Since then, we have had eight more attempts to have our graduation ceremony, each of them foiled, mostly by our increasingly busy lives. This weekend, eighteen and a half years later, we finally managed to have the ceremony. I got my diploma!
The valedictorian gave the speech that she had prepared for the original graduation:
"Soon, fellow graduates, we will be leaving these halls of learning and going out into the Real World. Nothing we have learned here can prepare us for the things we'll see in the Real World. In the Real World, anvils dropped upon your head will cause fractures and concussions, not comical dizziness. In the Real World, when your eyes jump out of your head from surprise you may be blind for life. In the Real World, cars cannot talk, or see through their headlamps, or smile with their front bumper. In the Real World, people are more likely to watch contrived and as-yet-unwritten awkward living situations on MTV rather than invent invisibility potions. In the Real World, all numbers can be expressed in decimal representation, though not necessarily finite or repeating. In the Real World, there are too many bridges that Roy Orbison can burn. Please keep all this in mind as you go out and face this new decade of the nineties."
The more things change, the less they stay the same.
