Somehow, spending three hours listening to strangers talk about strangers, while sitting in the company of
strangers, isn’t my idea of fun. So there I am, third row, second from the aisle. On my left, a vaguely-familiar guy from one of my 4th year classes. On my right, a girl who I knew in high school who hasn’t said more than two words to me in 5 years. Two rows in front of me is Halina from Mandala, one row behind me is SaintofKillers. Two rows back and about 12 chairs away is SonOfAngron and somewhere in the dense crowd in the back are mike, unit and lizz. I think I spot sushi running around there somewhere too.
I am aware that these affairs are put together mainly for the parents’ sake, so I sit through it as calmly as possible. About 45 minutes into the ceremony, I am ready to streak the fucking crowd.
My favorite moment is when Prof. Defeo takes 20 minutes to introduce the guest speaker, who in turn, takes about 30 minutes giving a speech that boiled down to, “It’s a shitty world out there. Get ready to bend over alot.”
SonOfAngron’s favorite moment was when some random fucking baritone singer gets up on stage and sings us 2 songs about as old as my great-grandmother. Jesus Christ, this is the College of Fine Arts, you schmuck, not the College of Geriatric Senile Retards.
After about two hours of massively inept foreplay, we finally get around to the candlelighting. Ah, I think. Now we’re getting somewhere. But the candlelighting process takes the better part of an hour, with about 80 students getting up one at a time and lighting a fucking candle that would get blown out by a breeze two minutes later.
Once #80 is called, everyone’s hands are sore and calloused from clapping endlessly. Mental Note for Next Year’s Graduation Ceremony: Prepare canned applause, and laugh tracks for the speakers’ inane attempt at humor.
A lot of people will probably disagree with me here and say that tonight was a momentous occasion that should be remembered fondly and with care. The thing is, I don’t get the sentiment in saying goodbye to people who you will most likely be working with or working against within the next couple of years. Sure some of us will have kids, get cancer or have a fatal accident, but for the most part, nobody’s going anywhere. And even if they did, so what?
I figure, as long as your close friends stay close, then everyone else is just background noise. (And by “close friends” I mean people who you don’t have to see everyfuckingday to feel close to.)
I love the idea of not knowing what’s gonna happen and who you’re going to have to screw over next. And I think that if I was going to feel emotional about anything, it would be because now I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life. Tomorrow I’ll wake up and have absolutely no idea what my day will be like.
My life is a great blank piece of paper again, and I love every square inch of it.