The feeling of graduating was so much different than I anticipated it would be.
On Friday, as I wrote before, it finally hit me that I was going to graduate - I went into full-fledged, "Holy shit, I'm graduating from college and I have no idea what to do with my life!!!!!" panic mode. I must have spent two or three hours pacing around trying to sort things out in my head lol.
Later in the day I spoke with a friend who had gone through the same routine only a day earlier. Except now she was not thinking about that at all - instead, she was thinking only about how much fun she would have at the graduation ceremony and the celebration everyone was going to have afterward. She had forgotten all about her fears and insecurities, or had at least brushed them aside temporarily, and had replaced them with genuine excitement about an event she should have been excited about.
Speaking with her made me feel better and allowed me to view graduation with a bit more perspective. Sure, you don't always know what the hell you're going to do once you leave college, but why worry about that before you have to? Graduation is a time to celebrate years of hard ass work. Why spend the day in a state of panic when you should just let loose and have fun?
And that led to yesterday ... I was incredibly serene the whole time leading up to graduation. I thought leaving behind everything I loved about school would be too much to bear, and I would be bawling like a damned baby. Instead, when I finally walked up to receive my diploma, a tremendous wave of relief spread through me. Seventeen years of schooling - done. God, I think only college graduates can understand how fucking good it feels to type that. I have never cared less about school than I did this last quarter; to be honest, I mailed in pretty much everything academically. School can be fun, but it can also be a horribly frustrating experience. And now I won't have to deal with that anymore.
It feels so good.
I'll always cherish the great memories I built during my four years at Cal Poly Pomona, especially my two years working for The Poly Post. But while I'll always keep them deep within my heart, I suppose I realized yesterday that it isn't good to grasp at something you have to move on from. The Post was the most fun time I've ever had, but I cannot keep it forever - that's life. What I can keep forever, however, are the people. My friends. They will be with me long after The Post evolves into something completely different than it was during my time. I wouldn't have it any other way.
So, instead of eulogizing what I was going to lose, I instead celebrated what I had - my friends, my memories, my life - and what I was going to gain - a future. Last night was the happiest I could possibly imagine being.
The party afterward was a lot of fun, too. We piled into a party bus filled with random booze and made our way to Pasadena (I didn't have much, myself, because I am generally not a drinker, though my friends are desperate to change that lol). It was a fun night filled with dancing, talking and making sure people didn't kill themselves on the way home. (It is very strange being one of the more sober people among a group that is bombed out of its mind.)
Even though I didn't do much drinking, I had an adventure of my own on the way home. My friend Casey and I helped get a few people to their apartments, and then we settled in our friend Erica's apartment to rest up a bit around 3:30 a.m. Casey was sober enough to drive people around the largely empty Cal Poly Pomona campus, but he wasn't sober enough to give me a ride home. Around 4:30 I decided to wait for a bus to get me back home.
And, um, I ended up waiting about an hour. There was much cursing, which was softened a bit because I was super tired (up until this point, of course, I hadn't slept a wink the entire evening). Eventually I got on the bus, wandered off at the stop and called my dad at 6 a.m. asking to be picked up. Good times, good times. Never thought I'd be doing that (and 99 percent sober, even), but you know, new experiences.
College was a fun run. Now it is on to life. I think I'm ready for it.
