The speech that will not be given
My mom is, right now, working on a speech to give this sunday at my last summer league home dive meet. I feel like all of this is idiotic, in reality. So, since my mother and brother have pushed me to the breaking point about it and I'm hiding in my room so as not to be part of the process, here goes for the speech that I would have written and my mom certainly isn't going to give.
Elizabeth Finn has always been far too thoughtful to be a particularly good diver. Since she was born, it's been the case that she would much rather read - or possibly write - a book than actually excersize. When she was five years old she was the worst little gymnast in her gymnastics class, but on account of a Russian Coach (perhaps a psychotic Russian Coach) she somehow amassed skills to fool people into thinking that she was a natural athlete. When she started diving in 1997, after five years of Acrobatics, she was doing a pretty good job at the trickery. By now, she has convinced several coaches and even more divers that she has natural talent, which is blatantly false. Elizabeth is, and has always been, a mediocre diver with a stubborn streak a mile wide.
This isn't quite what you want to hear, is it? You don't want to think that you've been duped, you would rather hear a Cinderella story of a girl who tried hard and suceeded, wouldn't you? The glittering fable of one of your steadfast and stalwart role models? A speech expounding on her virtues? Another salve to your injured sensibilities, to make the graduating senior feel loved and welcomed? But really, when it comes down to it, how she actually feels isn't important to you or to her. It's just another drop in the bucket and complimenting her about her wonderful diving career that has consistently fallen just short of her own expectations and the expectations that everyone, the entire fucking duped world, put out for her isn't going to help anything.
Stop deluding yourselves. You'd rather talk about yourselves or your children and so would most people, but you said you wanted to hear about Elizabeth and here it is. So far, her diving career has culminated in a concussion after a face plant on the three meter that set her out of diving for six months. At the moment she is entirely unsatisfied both with how much she is diving and how well she is diving, but has managed to pull a muscle in her hand that hurts like the dickens every time she gets out of the pool (or opens a door, for that matter) and convinced her headaches to come back in some absolutely fucking wonderful sort of relapse type deal. At this rate, it will become absolutely insufferable right in time for her college season to begin again, but she doesn't intend to tell any of the authorities about it, because to be quite honest she's not going to put up with another six fucking months of no physical excersize just because of a face plant. And so, more likely than not, she'll have some sort of brain damage and lose the one thing that she had and all those other divers didn't - the ability to think and to concentrate.
And that brings us up to today. This is Elizabeth's last dual meet on the Glenwood team and she'll probably celebrate it by botching two of the dives that she's had for the past five years and successfully completing one of them, and that would be a good record for her anymore. She can look forward to getting to All-Stars by the skin of her teeth and doing poorly there, once again scoring second place at all her college meets, and trying to fit in time to go to the lab around a coach who thinks that her first priority in life should be diving, even though she is going to the University of Chicago, home of the famous college president who said "When I get the urge to excersize, I lie down until it passes" and the gigantic college library built on top of the defunct football feild. Oh, and all of you forgetting about her and just remembering that year when you had a coach, an assistant coach, and an assistant assistant coach, and how strange that was.
But that's life, and that's all there is to it. So let's pretend that I just spent the past ten minutes talking about how much Elizabeth loves diving and Glenwood, and how successful she's been and how wonderful she is, and how much she loves coaching all of the Glenwood divers, and then we can clap and smile and laugh and get along just fine, and no one will think about the gray reality that this is a mediocre year and she is a mediocre diver, and no one will talk about the depressing truth that life doesn't live up to expectations, it lives differently from expectations, and loves to prove wrong every generalization and Truth with a capital T that you can make. But now that we're getting into Marx, we'd better stop. Because while you at least claimed to want to listen to me talk about Elizabeth's life, I know that you could care less about Marx.
I feel like it is a family event and therefore the obscenities wouldn't go over very well. Also, my mom wouldn't read a speech like that no matter what happened. And really, it would take all these people who think they like me and turn them into angry offended parents of angry offended children. And that's not cool.
Elizabeth Finn has always been far too thoughtful to be a particularly good diver. Since she was born, it's been the case that she would much rather read - or possibly write - a book than actually excersize. When she was five years old she was the worst little gymnast in her gymnastics class, but on account of a Russian Coach (perhaps a psychotic Russian Coach) she somehow amassed skills to fool people into thinking that she was a natural athlete. When she started diving in 1997, after five years of Acrobatics, she was doing a pretty good job at the trickery. By now, she has convinced several coaches and even more divers that she has natural talent, which is blatantly false. Elizabeth is, and has always been, a mediocre diver with a stubborn streak a mile wide.
This isn't quite what you want to hear, is it? You don't want to think that you've been duped, you would rather hear a Cinderella story of a girl who tried hard and suceeded, wouldn't you? The glittering fable of one of your steadfast and stalwart role models? A speech expounding on her virtues? Another salve to your injured sensibilities, to make the graduating senior feel loved and welcomed? But really, when it comes down to it, how she actually feels isn't important to you or to her. It's just another drop in the bucket and complimenting her about her wonderful diving career that has consistently fallen just short of her own expectations and the expectations that everyone, the entire fucking duped world, put out for her isn't going to help anything.
Stop deluding yourselves. You'd rather talk about yourselves or your children and so would most people, but you said you wanted to hear about Elizabeth and here it is. So far, her diving career has culminated in a concussion after a face plant on the three meter that set her out of diving for six months. At the moment she is entirely unsatisfied both with how much she is diving and how well she is diving, but has managed to pull a muscle in her hand that hurts like the dickens every time she gets out of the pool (or opens a door, for that matter) and convinced her headaches to come back in some absolutely fucking wonderful sort of relapse type deal. At this rate, it will become absolutely insufferable right in time for her college season to begin again, but she doesn't intend to tell any of the authorities about it, because to be quite honest she's not going to put up with another six fucking months of no physical excersize just because of a face plant. And so, more likely than not, she'll have some sort of brain damage and lose the one thing that she had and all those other divers didn't - the ability to think and to concentrate.
And that brings us up to today. This is Elizabeth's last dual meet on the Glenwood team and she'll probably celebrate it by botching two of the dives that she's had for the past five years and successfully completing one of them, and that would be a good record for her anymore. She can look forward to getting to All-Stars by the skin of her teeth and doing poorly there, once again scoring second place at all her college meets, and trying to fit in time to go to the lab around a coach who thinks that her first priority in life should be diving, even though she is going to the University of Chicago, home of the famous college president who said "When I get the urge to excersize, I lie down until it passes" and the gigantic college library built on top of the defunct football feild. Oh, and all of you forgetting about her and just remembering that year when you had a coach, an assistant coach, and an assistant assistant coach, and how strange that was.
But that's life, and that's all there is to it. So let's pretend that I just spent the past ten minutes talking about how much Elizabeth loves diving and Glenwood, and how successful she's been and how wonderful she is, and how much she loves coaching all of the Glenwood divers, and then we can clap and smile and laugh and get along just fine, and no one will think about the gray reality that this is a mediocre year and she is a mediocre diver, and no one will talk about the depressing truth that life doesn't live up to expectations, it lives differently from expectations, and loves to prove wrong every generalization and Truth with a capital T that you can make. But now that we're getting into Marx, we'd better stop. Because while you at least claimed to want to listen to me talk about Elizabeth's life, I know that you could care less about Marx.
I feel like it is a family event and therefore the obscenities wouldn't go over very well. Also, my mom wouldn't read a speech like that no matter what happened. And really, it would take all these people who think they like me and turn them into angry offended parents of angry offended children. And that's not cool.