I feel as though around now I have a few obligations that I should be dealing with. For starters, it’s the end of the month, and with no new posts thus far, I feel obligated to at least keep June 2007 on the radar in the archives. (In the event you happen now to be browsing the archives looking for interesting reading material, I apologize.)

If not for the lack of posts, I should probably feel obligated to note that effective sometime this morning until about the 16th of July, I will be off on tour, exploring a musical endeavor and honing my musical abilities. It promises to generate many memories, few (if any) of which will probably be recounted here, primarily for reasons of privacy and of laziness; I do not expect to have Internet access while away.

And even if not for the above two points, I should feel obliged to point out my graduation of about a week ago. And the fact that I gave a speech, an earlier revision of which was inexplicably distributed and printed in two local papers¹. And maybe even the fact that one of those papers (the “better” one), for some reason, threw in a quote that never appeared anywhere in my speech, was never used in any interview (none took place), and was not even necessarily substantiated by the contents of the speech itself².

For the interested, I do supply a complete (and accurate) version of my speech below, and although doing so runs the risk of having my every alteration questioned and analyzed excessively, it’s a chance I’ll take. However, as the clock would suggest, I do not have the time nor the energy to document the differences between the different versions of my speech myself, or more thoroughly lambaste those responsible for these journalistic oversights. I do, after all, have packing to do.

Students, parents, faculty and staff, and other distinguished guests,

Graduation speeches are traditionally a time for the speaker―me―to impart some infinitesimal portion of his vast repository of wisdom unto the masses that stand before him―you. Wish me luck.

Perhaps the high school experience could best be summarized as follows: sometimes, you’re the windshield; sometimes, you’re the bug.

Next bit of wisdom: always have a Plan B.

To my peers: congratulations. The journey to this point in your lives has been perilous; fraught with an abundance of homework, projects, and exams. You’ve overcome numerous hurdles and surmounted countless obstacles.

And now, here we stand, at the end of the worn and beaten path they call high school. At least we can confidently say that the journey has been worth it. Thirteen years of painful, torturous suffering; frequently staying up long enough to see the sun rise―it was all worth it, right?

Well, I truly hate to sound like such a skeptic on such a heavily anticipated, even joyous occasion, but if I’ve learned nothing else over the course of my life, it is to be inquisitive. So, now that we’ve invested thirteen years of our lives in our educations, and with many of us looking forward to college, perhaps it’s most appropriate that we take this time to, well… assess the value of our investment. Justify it, if you will. Perhaps we would do well to reflect on an old adage, provided to us by one Robert Fulghum: all I really need to know I learned in kindergarten.

Now, I certainly don’t mean to belittle the contributions of our high school faculty. Let’s face it, if I were, I’d at least be smart enough to not do it in front of them. (Hi, Mr. Lewis.) But if for no other reason than to assure ourselves that our time here was well spent, I think Mr. Fulghum’s suggestion is at least worth considering.

Kindergarten certainly taught us a lot. We spent time reading, writing, doing math―all sorts of academic things.

But there was more to the importance of kindergarten than the academic. Kindergarten was, for most of us, our first real bit of exposure to each other. We learned how to interact with other people. We learned how to trust them.

Indeed, by the time we left kindergarten, we had already absorbed, in one form or another, many of life’s skills. But that’s not to say that we didn’t get anything out of high school. Perhaps the greatest value of high school wasn’t so much in what new things we learned, but in how our understanding of what we already knew changed.

Take this snippet of advice from Mr. Fulghum, for example: “Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.” Thankfully, John Jay has provided us with the knowledge that this isn’t quite true―because, after all, cookies are nowhere to be found in our cafeteria.

In any event, there is some truth to the idea that what we may have learned early on in life was really refined in high school―that in high school, we just learned to become comfortable with what we already knew. For example, we didn’t necessarily learn to trust other people as much as we learned that we could trust other people. And then we learned to recognize when, perhaps, we couldn’t trust other people. We took what we had already learned and applied it in our lives.

Maybe it was just that―that in high school, we simply became more comfortable with things. It was a long time ago that the foundation for our lives was set, but it was our time spent in high school that finally let it settle.

So maybe our investment was worth it.

Now that we’ve spent four years becoming comfortable with things, it is, of course, only appropriate that we cast away all that we have come to know to be true―lunchrooms that only serve nutritious foods, bells reliably ushering us from place to place every forty minutes, and napkins that cost ten cents.

As the future approaches, perhaps the only thing left to learn is how to become comfortable with change.

Finally, I would be remiss if I neglected to recognize two important groups of people tonight: our teachers, and our families. Although their roles may be diminished in the years to come, it is they who have been responsible, in large part, for helping us reach this point, and it is to them that we should be grateful.

So, to our teachers: thank you. To our families and friends: thank you. And to my fellow students of the graduating class of 2007: good luck, and Godspeed.

1. To be truthful, it is not so inexplicable–the principal forwarded the draft copy I sent him to these papers, and although one of the papers received the final version before press time, it did not, for some reason, appear in its correct form there either. So inexplicable, no–unpleasant, however, yes. [↩]
2. This phenomenon, it seems, was not limited to my case–it appeared that the author of the article demonstrated an aptitude for created quotes that read more like first-person paraphrases than, say, actual quotes. [↩]

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