Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Is This The End? I Certainly Hope Not!

So I graduated a week or two ago. The beginning of June, in fact.

You may be asking, "why hasn't he written a blog post sooner? Surely he's excited!" Well, you've obviously been reading my blog post for a while. If you have, you're an idiot for not realizing how lazy I really am. Here I am, two weeks on my hands since my graduation, and I'm a practical recluse. Can I even keep using this blog, with no stress to vent on it? The posts will definitely become less frequent, but I will keep it going. I kinda have to, at this point.

Literally me
Maybe some music will help as I recount these past two weeks.



Anything is possible with a good battle soundtrack. That, and 10mg of adderall to keep you focused.

The week of graduation taught me a few things (the two weeks afterwards less so). There were three main events of this week: Senior Salute, Graduation, and Project Graduation.

Since LASA and LBJ are technically separate schools but we take part in graduation together, LASA has this thing called Senior Salute. Basically, it's our half of a separate graduation, where all the LASA students line up and are appreciated for being LASA students specifically, with all our inside jokes about the faculty and the class of 2016. At Graduation we can't give out specific awards from the teachers, much less make jokes about how they're ALL being awarded to Ethan Russo, the class's know-it-all who's surprisingly legit. At Senior Salute, we appreciate just LASA, have the class's achievements put on display, as well as the faculty poking fun at us in return. It's a small ceremony, and that means when I tell Ms. Kocian, the college counselor, to call me up as "Captain Dirk Yaple", there's a good chance she'll do it. Add in my carrying a juice box up onto the stage, and that probability increases. Never underestimate a juice box, kids.

Graduation was something else entirely. Senior Salute was the night I wanted to keep, it was my night of glory, and I almost didn't want to go to graduation, but I did, in the hopes I could make it better. I may not have been called Captain Dirk Yaple, but there are times I don't want to be, times where I'm content just to be Dirk Yaple. Again, a juice box in hand, snuck in under your gown, helps with this. Better still, there was a camera pointed at every graduate as they walked onstage, so when I walked on, I toasted the camera and took a good long sip. Such was life.

If someone photoshops a juice box into Nux's hand, I would be so happy.
Then, during graduation, there was the empty silence where someone went up and talked. Most of the time it was the principals, but I enjoyed hearing the speeches done by each school's valedictorians and salutatorians (Ethan Russo, naturally, was our valedictorian, no surprise there). For a moment in my boredom, I wondered what if I was supposed to give a speech and wasn't told about it and would have to improvise it on the spot. My ideas went towards the idea of our belief that we will change the world through our determination, and then the fantasy bored me. Our salutatorian went up and gave his own speech about how we were a generation who had grown up within the information age, and how that might influence events, while Ethan Russo gave a speech about the importance of friendship within the remainder of our lives. 

Their speeches reminded me of the isolated celebrations of senior salute, the ceremony simply for LASA. It's a bit of a discrepancy when we're compared to LBJ, as while LBJ students are congratulating themselves for earning an associate's degree during high school, our salutatorian is going to UT to research plasma physics as a precursor to learning about nuclear fission. There's the team that makes it to the championships every year, and then there's the team that's just happy to be there. I'm not sure what else to say about this, but good for them. Everyone has their day. They had theirs, I had mine.


That night, from midnight to 6, we had project graduation, the lock-in at the YMCA specifically for the seniors of LASA. There we all just had fun. I had a lightsaber duel with a friend, kicked ass at twister, and most importantly, watched a hypnotist do a little comedy routine, which helped me solidify my own ideas about my career path. No, I didn't see someone walk like a chicken and think "I wanna do that!" For a while, I've been obsessed with hypnotism and the effect it can have on our subjective psyche. I don't wanna be a hypnotist in the sense that that performer was, because that's not really hypnotism. With that guy, the most powerful force backing his hypnotism was peer pressure. Who wants to be that asshole, right?

True hypnotism isn't in front of an audience, true hypnotism is a belief one accepts in their own eyes, be it true by everyone else's standards. Hypnotism is (most of the time) only possible with an audience of one. Hypnotherapy is more up that alley, no matter how much I'd like to see Sydney fangirl over Derian Golden's ass again. That shit was hilarious, especially considering she was hypnotized to not remember until 2 minutes later. I wish I'd had a camera then.
Y'all got some summer reading to do!
Fuck, I'm gonna miss LASA. It's only this semester I learned about the free breakfast! Sure, it was stressful, but I liked it, it gave me motivation to keep going, and allowed me a constant source of distraction to work on other things, like fanfiction. I find it a lot more inspiring to ignore what a teacher's droning on and instead just write for pages on end. I have several open projects, including a letter to my uncle, which I haven't even touched yet! One of these is my Person Of Interest crossover with Agents Of Shield, but the reasoning for that is that the final episode premieres tonight, and I can't keep writing until I know how it really ends. 

Back to LASA (I'll write another blog post specifically about POI and why everyone should watch it), it was a home to me. It was a place where someone could be weird and absolutely no one gave a fuck in a negative fashion. It was a homebrew of enthusiasm not just for learning, but for life. In the students were displayed a determination to keep going, no matter the stress, and I admire that most of all about them.

LASA was the greatest and most defining experience of my life, and I'll never ever forget who I became from it.

I became me.