A Cynic's Guide To Graduation
I don't think I'm a cynic; some people have told me I'm actually extremely idealistic. I won't admit to either one; I think doing so would heavily limit one's potential, because some things just deserve cynicism. Is graduation one of them? Perhaps, perhaps not. But the treatment of graduation usually is. First thing yesterday morning, I sat in my school's auditorium for graduation practice. I was completely surrounded by superseniors, pot smokers, ICP fans, and probation violators - in short, the opposite of MENSA. As I listened to the people to my immediate left and right (one of whom, Jeff Chaff, was a good childhood friend before we went our seperate ways...literally and figuratively) converse about their big pre-graduation smokeout and consequent trip down to the police station (having a weed party at the end of the month is like Christmas to quota-seeking officers), I noticed that our beloved principal with the phallic head Mr. Carr was blathering on about the importance of graduation. (I was able to block it out at first because most cliched speeches just tend to float into the background for me.) "Today is a momentous occasion, the first day of the rest of your life in many respects, and we wouldn't want to cheapen its importance by behaving inappropriately, so let's get a few ground rules straight..." I yawned and went back to the dumbass crew. "...this huge fuckin' rush of adrenaline, and I tore out running like a bat out of hell, but it was fuckin' pitch black, so this huge fuckin' tree branch smacks into my face and I'm fuckin' sprawled out on the ground, and that's when I hear the officers running through the yard..." It was like deciding whether to watch a Hallmark Channel TV Movie or a fast-paced action movie starring a complete dumbass. Kind of like "Speed."
After an interminable hour and a half of this, we went off to the senior breakfast. The food was decent and the coffee was plentiful, but the real reason we were there was to collect our senior awards. There was a controversy this year regarding the tradition; last year, in one of the most wicked examples of irony I've ever heard, the person who was voted "Biggest Complainer" actually complained about the dubious honour. Señor Carr responded by eliminating the voting altogether, instead of just getting rid of some of the awards people are more touchy about or, you know, telling people to GET THE FUCK OVER IT. But a petition was circulated to bring it back (let's hear it for student demonstration!) and a more neutered version was presented this year. I'm apparently "Most Likely To Invent Something," which is nice, but a little vague. (It would be better to be "Most Likely To Patent Something" - ideas are free, patents get you money.) We then watched the senior slideshow: a collage of pictures from the past 4 years of high school life. The soundtrack consisted of some hiphop bastardization of "Canon in D" with shitty nostalgic lyrics, "I'll Be There For You", and...wait for it...arpeggio in G...breakdown....arpeggio in G...another fucking breakdown...OVERUSED CHORD SEQUENCE...WHAT ELSE CAN IT BE...THAT'S RIGHT, IT'S FUCKIN' "GOOD RIDDANCE (TIME OF YOUR LIFE)!" Every graduation party in existence, every deadbeat guitarist who can string together 4 chords, every television series finale since 1997 has been infected by this musical holocaust. I'm not the boy who cried sellout; I think Billie Joe Armstrong is a solid songwriter and Green Day is a tight, talented band...but their songs can be so universally likable that they are embraced by everyone, whether they have musical taste or not. The band can be found on seemingly every teenagers iPod (right in between "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Vertigo"), as if to give the normally Top 40-fawning listeners a bit of punk credibility. Well, that's not how it works. This song may have given Green Day credibility in the sense that they were brave enough to record an acoustic song that wouldn't be out of place as a prom theme, but the only credibility it gives to Green Day's fairweather fans is the mark of a Grade A, 100% pure, top of the line state of the art bog standard poseur. Scenesterisms aside, the song really is mawkish, predictable and overly sappy - which I guess is the point, but that doesn't excuse its flaws. If ever a song made you long for an inoperable ear tumor, it would be this one. Our "senior sponsor" Ms. Morrow heard Ian and I making tetchy remarks about the music choice, though, and told us "there is no cynicism at senior breakfast!" And again I wondered about why a lack of cynicism was so important in graduation. Is it really so necessary to take the proceedings seriously? Sure, we won't be coming back to the high school, but the best years of our lives are far from over. We're not significantly wiser or mature (the anecdotes from the Pot Posse cemented that), nor is our education finished (at least for most of us). In fact, one could make a case that the main thing a high school diploma gets us is an overqualification for work opportunities at McDonald's. Cynical? Why the hell not?
Fast forward a few hours. I'm in the gym trying to ignore the people next to me (who have stopped talking about their exploits at the police station long enough to congratulate each other on actually passing a test on basic American government) and playing with the annoying tassel upon my cap when it is announced with little fanfare that we are beginning to march our way into the auditorium. As I faintly hear the beginning of "Pomp And Circumstance" in the distance, I start getting a little watery. Not in the crying sense, like my sister (who has a Pavlovian reaction to cry every time she hears the song), but in the sense that I realized it probably wasn't a very good idea to have a can of Pepsi, a bottle of water and 3 glasses of Limeade earlier in the day. Fortunately, I took my mind off of it and the evening flowed well (groan). We started off with the National Anthem (of America, of course, although I'd have preferred singing the anthem of the Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen). According to tradition, hats are supposed to be removed out of respect...I've never been sure about what's so disrespectful about wearing a hat, after 12 years of having them banned in school. Hey, what if it's a hat that says "LET FREEDOM RING" or "FDNY" or "LAURA BUSH IS ONE FINE PIECE OF ASS" or something patriotic like that? Is it still disrespectful for some reason? It's just a piece of clothing guys. It should be neutral. If you don't want me to take my pants off every time I say the Pledge of Allegiance, I should be able to keep my goddamn hat where it is. But I caved to peer pressure and removed the cap. I tell you, normal hat hair is one thing, but graduation cap hair is excruciating. I'm not sure what kind of unholy cross between Robert Smith and Don King I must've looked like, but those in the crowd got to see a great new hairstyle. One thing I've always found interesting about graduation ceremonies is that the students seem to be displayed to the audience just so the speakers can have a visual aid to use when talking to the crowd about life after high school. During most performances, not just graduations, looking at the people in the crowd while performing is just as much of a show as the audience watching the action on the stage. This did not disappoint, as the crowd was filled with interesting members...especially when the band started playing. They played something called "The Jig Is Up," and I actually saw audience members crying. Keep in mind that the only way the song choice could have been less appropriate, nostalgic, or wistful would be if the band took my advice and did an orchestral arrangement of "Seven Nation Army." It was like weeping while hearing "Immigrant Song." While some outpoured their emotions in that way, I was enjoying an especially amusing audience member fighting a contentious battle against his eyelids...and losing. This fellow (I believe a member of the Durrani party) was so sure that nobody could see him that he gave up and began to revel in his drowsiness, only to wake himself up and pretend nothing had happened when the speeches began.
The first speech was by our valedictorian, Lauren Pierson. Now, Lauren's a good friend and one of the nicest people I know, so it's a shame that my cynicism reared its ugly head when her speech began. Oh, I set out to listen with an open mind, but then the opening line came: "We have reached the end of a long road." I think there's a machine somewhere that writes commencement speeches on command for orators running low on inspiration, and one of its most commonly used conceits is the road metaphor. It's simple, trite, and polite. Roads are long, roads end, roads can be bumpy, roads can have twists and turns, roads lead to brand new unknown places. The valedictorian is, in theory, the smartest student in the entire school, so it's a shame that, year after year, the speeches are so formulaic. I'm not expecting rhetoric up to the caliber of Martin Luther King or anything, but if there's any opportunity to give a speech that extra bang, they should definitely give it a shot. (Hey neat, I just used the words 'Martin Luther King,' 'shot,' 'bang,' and 'caliber' in the same sentence. I just ordered tickets for a rocket train to Hell.) Paul's speech had an open admission that he didn't have a lot of inspiration for writing a commencement speech. Come on, guys! You're being given an open forum for your thoughts, you should run wild with them...the audience will usually follow you as you chase them. This was the case with Ms. Schmidt's excellent speech; it may have gained some points with me because she referenced a few in-jokes I was privvy to and seemed to be speaking about me at times (no big head here, honest!), but it was very emotional without being heavyhanded and transcended the pedestrian nature of most commencement speeches. I gave it a thumbs aloft, which is more than can be said for the choir's two songs. First of all, by this time, we were all getting a little restless, and my mind had personally wandered to a great idea for a Hitchcock movie (chew on this, bitches: a guy goes to the men's room into a stall. Suddenly, he hears a murder going on outside the stall in the bathroom. He tries to make a cell phone call to the police, but he is overheard and the murderers decide that he knows too much so they hold him captive in the loo. He can't see any of the action, he just hears it, and from here the suspense comes. Might not be a good enough plotline for a whole movie, but it'd kick ass as a short film.), so the choir was not very welcomed. Secondly, while the songs were sung decently (I guess), the songwriting left much to be desired. I tuned out the lyrics for the most part after hearing a few objectionable phrases about the day being done or a setting sun or some shit, but the music was craftsmanlike to the extreme. If you looked up cliched in the dictionary, you would not only find the example of people saying "if you look up so and so in the dictionary, you'll find a picture of such and such," but you'd also be instructed to see also the chord sequence of these songs. I heard a flatted sixth in the latter one of the songs and it was like eyesight to the blind. Boo to unimaginative tunesmiths. Bah, at least it wasn't "Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)."
And then we graduated. Not a lot to speak of here, I think they do it the same as anywhere else, so nothing out of the ordinary happened. Except, of course for hearing the peanut gallery on either side of me snicker at a fellow with the middle name of "Buck" and respond to the middle initial of another with "you know what that F stands for." *world-weary sigh* This is what I'm not going to miss about high school. Think about it a second. You're forced to go to a building for four years with a couple hundred other people chosen not based on interest or intellect but on their geographic proximity to the school and age. Every once in a while you'll meet someone whom you click with, but for the most part you have to deal with assholes, preppies, druggies, dumbasses, jocks, geeks, sluts, cripples, hicks, thugs, goths, and people who think it's a good idea to wear T-shirts that say "sometimes I pee when I laugh." If you manage to separate the wheat from the chaff (OHHHH pwned l0lz), you'll find some decent people, though, and if you get on with them well enough, you'll contact them after school is over. It's far from the end, people. As long as we're not all locked in our rooms playing Playstation and eating Cheetos and being generally misanthropic, friendships aren't going to die here. They're just going to be tempered less by homework and complaints about the obstinance of the administration. And I can say, without a spot of cynicism, that this is pretty wicked.
After an interminable hour and a half of this, we went off to the senior breakfast. The food was decent and the coffee was plentiful, but the real reason we were there was to collect our senior awards. There was a controversy this year regarding the tradition; last year, in one of the most wicked examples of irony I've ever heard, the person who was voted "Biggest Complainer" actually complained about the dubious honour. Señor Carr responded by eliminating the voting altogether, instead of just getting rid of some of the awards people are more touchy about or, you know, telling people to GET THE FUCK OVER IT. But a petition was circulated to bring it back (let's hear it for student demonstration!) and a more neutered version was presented this year. I'm apparently "Most Likely To Invent Something," which is nice, but a little vague. (It would be better to be "Most Likely To Patent Something" - ideas are free, patents get you money.) We then watched the senior slideshow: a collage of pictures from the past 4 years of high school life. The soundtrack consisted of some hiphop bastardization of "Canon in D" with shitty nostalgic lyrics, "I'll Be There For You", and...wait for it...arpeggio in G...breakdown....arpeggio in G...another fucking breakdown...OVERUSED CHORD SEQUENCE...WHAT ELSE CAN IT BE...THAT'S RIGHT, IT'S FUCKIN' "GOOD RIDDANCE (TIME OF YOUR LIFE)!" Every graduation party in existence, every deadbeat guitarist who can string together 4 chords, every television series finale since 1997 has been infected by this musical holocaust. I'm not the boy who cried sellout; I think Billie Joe Armstrong is a solid songwriter and Green Day is a tight, talented band...but their songs can be so universally likable that they are embraced by everyone, whether they have musical taste or not. The band can be found on seemingly every teenagers iPod (right in between "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Vertigo"), as if to give the normally Top 40-fawning listeners a bit of punk credibility. Well, that's not how it works. This song may have given Green Day credibility in the sense that they were brave enough to record an acoustic song that wouldn't be out of place as a prom theme, but the only credibility it gives to Green Day's fairweather fans is the mark of a Grade A, 100% pure, top of the line state of the art bog standard poseur. Scenesterisms aside, the song really is mawkish, predictable and overly sappy - which I guess is the point, but that doesn't excuse its flaws. If ever a song made you long for an inoperable ear tumor, it would be this one. Our "senior sponsor" Ms. Morrow heard Ian and I making tetchy remarks about the music choice, though, and told us "there is no cynicism at senior breakfast!" And again I wondered about why a lack of cynicism was so important in graduation. Is it really so necessary to take the proceedings seriously? Sure, we won't be coming back to the high school, but the best years of our lives are far from over. We're not significantly wiser or mature (the anecdotes from the Pot Posse cemented that), nor is our education finished (at least for most of us). In fact, one could make a case that the main thing a high school diploma gets us is an overqualification for work opportunities at McDonald's. Cynical? Why the hell not?
Fast forward a few hours. I'm in the gym trying to ignore the people next to me (who have stopped talking about their exploits at the police station long enough to congratulate each other on actually passing a test on basic American government) and playing with the annoying tassel upon my cap when it is announced with little fanfare that we are beginning to march our way into the auditorium. As I faintly hear the beginning of "Pomp And Circumstance" in the distance, I start getting a little watery. Not in the crying sense, like my sister (who has a Pavlovian reaction to cry every time she hears the song), but in the sense that I realized it probably wasn't a very good idea to have a can of Pepsi, a bottle of water and 3 glasses of Limeade earlier in the day. Fortunately, I took my mind off of it and the evening flowed well (groan). We started off with the National Anthem (of America, of course, although I'd have preferred singing the anthem of the Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen). According to tradition, hats are supposed to be removed out of respect...I've never been sure about what's so disrespectful about wearing a hat, after 12 years of having them banned in school. Hey, what if it's a hat that says "LET FREEDOM RING" or "FDNY" or "LAURA BUSH IS ONE FINE PIECE OF ASS" or something patriotic like that? Is it still disrespectful for some reason? It's just a piece of clothing guys. It should be neutral. If you don't want me to take my pants off every time I say the Pledge of Allegiance, I should be able to keep my goddamn hat where it is. But I caved to peer pressure and removed the cap. I tell you, normal hat hair is one thing, but graduation cap hair is excruciating. I'm not sure what kind of unholy cross between Robert Smith and Don King I must've looked like, but those in the crowd got to see a great new hairstyle. One thing I've always found interesting about graduation ceremonies is that the students seem to be displayed to the audience just so the speakers can have a visual aid to use when talking to the crowd about life after high school. During most performances, not just graduations, looking at the people in the crowd while performing is just as much of a show as the audience watching the action on the stage. This did not disappoint, as the crowd was filled with interesting members...especially when the band started playing. They played something called "The Jig Is Up," and I actually saw audience members crying. Keep in mind that the only way the song choice could have been less appropriate, nostalgic, or wistful would be if the band took my advice and did an orchestral arrangement of "Seven Nation Army." It was like weeping while hearing "Immigrant Song." While some outpoured their emotions in that way, I was enjoying an especially amusing audience member fighting a contentious battle against his eyelids...and losing. This fellow (I believe a member of the Durrani party) was so sure that nobody could see him that he gave up and began to revel in his drowsiness, only to wake himself up and pretend nothing had happened when the speeches began.
The first speech was by our valedictorian, Lauren Pierson. Now, Lauren's a good friend and one of the nicest people I know, so it's a shame that my cynicism reared its ugly head when her speech began. Oh, I set out to listen with an open mind, but then the opening line came: "We have reached the end of a long road." I think there's a machine somewhere that writes commencement speeches on command for orators running low on inspiration, and one of its most commonly used conceits is the road metaphor. It's simple, trite, and polite. Roads are long, roads end, roads can be bumpy, roads can have twists and turns, roads lead to brand new unknown places. The valedictorian is, in theory, the smartest student in the entire school, so it's a shame that, year after year, the speeches are so formulaic. I'm not expecting rhetoric up to the caliber of Martin Luther King or anything, but if there's any opportunity to give a speech that extra bang, they should definitely give it a shot. (Hey neat, I just used the words 'Martin Luther King,' 'shot,' 'bang,' and 'caliber' in the same sentence. I just ordered tickets for a rocket train to Hell.) Paul's speech had an open admission that he didn't have a lot of inspiration for writing a commencement speech. Come on, guys! You're being given an open forum for your thoughts, you should run wild with them...the audience will usually follow you as you chase them. This was the case with Ms. Schmidt's excellent speech; it may have gained some points with me because she referenced a few in-jokes I was privvy to and seemed to be speaking about me at times (no big head here, honest!), but it was very emotional without being heavyhanded and transcended the pedestrian nature of most commencement speeches. I gave it a thumbs aloft, which is more than can be said for the choir's two songs. First of all, by this time, we were all getting a little restless, and my mind had personally wandered to a great idea for a Hitchcock movie (chew on this, bitches: a guy goes to the men's room into a stall. Suddenly, he hears a murder going on outside the stall in the bathroom. He tries to make a cell phone call to the police, but he is overheard and the murderers decide that he knows too much so they hold him captive in the loo. He can't see any of the action, he just hears it, and from here the suspense comes. Might not be a good enough plotline for a whole movie, but it'd kick ass as a short film.), so the choir was not very welcomed. Secondly, while the songs were sung decently (I guess), the songwriting left much to be desired. I tuned out the lyrics for the most part after hearing a few objectionable phrases about the day being done or a setting sun or some shit, but the music was craftsmanlike to the extreme. If you looked up cliched in the dictionary, you would not only find the example of people saying "if you look up so and so in the dictionary, you'll find a picture of such and such," but you'd also be instructed to see also the chord sequence of these songs. I heard a flatted sixth in the latter one of the songs and it was like eyesight to the blind. Boo to unimaginative tunesmiths. Bah, at least it wasn't "Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)."
And then we graduated. Not a lot to speak of here, I think they do it the same as anywhere else, so nothing out of the ordinary happened. Except, of course for hearing the peanut gallery on either side of me snicker at a fellow with the middle name of "Buck" and respond to the middle initial of another with "you know what that F stands for." *world-weary sigh* This is what I'm not going to miss about high school. Think about it a second. You're forced to go to a building for four years with a couple hundred other people chosen not based on interest or intellect but on their geographic proximity to the school and age. Every once in a while you'll meet someone whom you click with, but for the most part you have to deal with assholes, preppies, druggies, dumbasses, jocks, geeks, sluts, cripples, hicks, thugs, goths, and people who think it's a good idea to wear T-shirts that say "sometimes I pee when I laugh." If you manage to separate the wheat from the chaff (OHHHH pwned l0lz), you'll find some decent people, though, and if you get on with them well enough, you'll contact them after school is over. It's far from the end, people. As long as we're not all locked in our rooms playing Playstation and eating Cheetos and being generally misanthropic, friendships aren't going to die here. They're just going to be tempered less by homework and complaints about the obstinance of the administration. And I can say, without a spot of cynicism, that this is pretty wicked.