Speeches are Fun

So now I'm officially done with high school. It's weird, thinking that if I didn't want to, I would never have to go to school again. Of course, in reality I still have another four years, because I don't want to be homeless/live in a box/live in my parents' basement. But still. I'm practically a legal adult, guys. In commemoration of this momentous event, and because apparently everyone who heard it liked it and because you get to read my salutatorian speech. Whee!






Good evening, ladies and gentleman. As some of you probably know, I wasn’t thrilled when I found out that the salutatorian had to give a speech too - I offered Blake five dollars to do it for me. He refused. I’ve winged most of the speeches I ever had to give, so I was nervous. I had no idea about a topic, I had no idea what anecdotes I wanted to include – nothing. I was stuck staring at a blank screen. I searched my past for something on which to base my speech – the least idea of what I might write. I thought about how my class might take anything I say on a certain topic in the light of how they view me. I thought about how I viewed my class. Then I thought about what I was doing, and I realized that I was focusing on the past. I was focusing on what we have been, rather than what we will be. And that’s what graduating is about. Right now, we’re transitioning from our past, from what we’ve done, to our future and what we are going to do.

Right now, we’re completely defined by our pasts. Most of us have been together for four years now, and we’ve all done something that people remember. We’ve probably all done something we wish everyone else would forget, too. I know that I’ve never lived down G1H1 or my Iron Curtain comment – strangely enough, Mr. V was behind both of those. We’ve had to live with stuff like our GPA, our past relationships, and others’ perceptions of us. But now, we’re moving on. We are getting a clean slate, a chance to start over. Once we leave here, we won’t be surrounded by forty-seven people who know us too well. We’ll be around new people, who judge us on our own merits, not our past. We can be the people we want to be.

Graduation is not an ending, it is a beginning. We are moving forward, to new things, new ideas, new people and places. We should not be sad at losing anything, because if we truly value something or someone, we’ll keep in touch. And no matter what, we’ll always have the memories. I don’t think any of us will ever forget Chase's bitty wanter, John's amazing hair in the musical Thirteen, and Meg’s ACL. We’ll remember Guy Levine the push-up machine, Lucas’s floor-rattling bass voice, and Bryce’s drive to win everything he does. We’ll remember Anthony and French 5’s strange obsession with Joel, Madame's husband, Jenny’s artistic abilities, and Gloria’s award-winning cows. Just because high school is finished doesn’t mean we can’t hold on to the memories. Those will be with us forever.

And the best part is that now we get to start making new memories. We are going to new places, we’ll meet new people. We’ll make the best decisions of our lives, but probably a few mistakes along the way. We’ll have our friends, we’ll have our families, and best of all, we have the world. We have the rest of our lives. We have, to quote a famous Doctor, “All of time and space; everywhere and anywhere; every star that ever was. Where do you want to start?”