So, we’ve graduated – I say 12 hours late, but I was tired and occupied last night – well, I don’t feel any different. Not really. There’s a marked lack of emotion towards this ceremony. I think, to put it in a word, this graduation ceremony was rather underwhelming.

The highlight for me was probably watching each class video, shown before the classes filed up on stage to receive their bears.

Something funny about that too, somehow. That we were receiving bears - children’s toys – on our junior college graduation day, a day which the teachers kept calling one of our first steps into the adult, working life.

The entire thing just felt rather unnecessary and presumptuous to me and several of my other friends. It felt like an occasion calling for too many speeches, too many handshakes and flashing cameras.

Some of the most important things in junior college cannot be encapsulated by speech and pageantry in a room full of incredibly bored, tired people. Some of these things; the things that really mater, belong to the living, breathing people around us.

I don’t need a formal full-stop to close my junior college chapter, to bring an official end to my junior college years. To me, junior college is so much more than this; junior college was the crazy highs and lows, the first taste of actual, academic failure, the new ways of learning, the ice that wouldn’t break and the warmth I found after. Junior college is those shared pockets of quiet, those comforting chats in empty classrooms, the class discussions on – of all things - economics, the yelling at math worksheets that refused to do themselves and new bridges being built.

it’s the little things that count

And it is, it really is, the tiniest, little-est things that count, that make you smile.

I won’t be naïve and say that these friendships will last; I know some won’t. But I can look back on these wild, crazy days and say, definitely, that I’m glad to have been a part of ohsexaywunfour and the mad, quirky doings of the ‘BITE ME’ class.
……

Possibly I will write a longer entry when time warrants, but, I must add, if you had asked me this same question two years ago, at the start of school, this is what I would have said:

I would have told you I honestly didn’t like my class very much. I would have told you I didn’t know why they insisted doing – to me – completely bewildering ‘class bonding’ activities together, that I completely didn’t see any interest in at all. I would have told you I wished I were in that other class, and asked myself why I had even come to this confounded school in the first place.

But now?

I have found you, friends, a fantastic (and to some of my friends, fantastical) group of people called the Tahanners, someone who almost feels like another brother…and I’ve learnt things about myself, seen some people in a different light, and forged friendships with people whom were possibly just mere acquaintances two years ago.

Now, this confounded school perhaps isn’t quite so confounded anymore.

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