My fellow seniors,
We made it!
I am so proud of us for making it.
And you should be proud, too.
We, the class of this year, are about to enter a new world. It's a world that may seem scary, or exciting, or some third word, but it's also a world full of possibility.
Let's take a second to thank all the parents in the room. Without the parents, none of us would be here. And now let's never mention our parents again.
This is the beginning of an amazing journey, as well as the beginning of a long, semi-metaphorical remark of feigned reflection that quickly turns into a shout out. Shout out to you, popular doofus! Isn't it nice that we can get one last laugh at his expense? But don't worry because he enjoys the attention!
It's incredible how quickly these past four years have gone by. Thinking back to that first day as a freshmen, I couldn't believe how scared I was, and even if I wasn't, it definitely benefits this story to pretend that I was. Everything was so new and intimidating, like every single time you experience significant change in life. But we kept moving along, pushing through, and look at us now: we own this school! Not legally, of course, but figuratively, once you ignore the presence of teachers and administrators.
Go name of our mascot!
I'm going to make sure I mention having a dream, which in turn leads into a sentence that ends on the word INDEPENDENCE! Now here's a quotation about freedom or hardship or journeys from a contemporary musician or Dr. Seuss.
Seniors, today is the first day of the rest of our lives. Tomorrow will also be the first day of the rest of our lives, but that doesn't matter. Only today matters. Today, and also the vague notion of The Future, where we will succeed or not based on decisions we cannot even begin to fathom at this moment. Hey look it's a reference to a local restaurant or coffee shop or movie theater or mall or fast food chain that many of us enjoyed tongue-in-cheekily.
Shout out to a teacher who legitimately influenced me in some way, and then a joke about one of their many quirks so that I don't seem overly sentimental like some big wuss!
You see, life is like the object I chose for this simile. Much like this object, we are a part of it or we are some outside element that influences it. As this object changes, we change as well to keep up with the object's change. The object may hit a speed bump, or is a speed bump itself, but we are all strong cars or workers with jackhammers who don't let speed bumps stop us. We are more than the just the object I chose for this simile, but we will also never be able to separate ourselves from this object, because we had some relationship to it for the past four years.
Uh oh! It's a subtle humorous dig at our school or its facilities or one of its gym teachers. I'm going to wave it off and get serious again.
Because I know, deep down, that I am who I am today because I attended this school. Just as I would be someone else if I went to a different school. Really, if you tried to plot out all the variants of your life based on major decisions made four years prior, you'd go nuts. So what's important is that we don't have to do that, because we only made one decision or had this decision made for us by our parents or countless external factors. Anyway, we're going to be amazing at whatever we do, even if I know for a fact that some of us are financially and socially doomed and may already be drunk at this ceremony.
Here's a list of things our clubs did to raise money for people or charities or concepts balanced alongside a list of sports or arts accomplishments. Here are a trio of important events over the past four years, ending on a funny reference to the last event and an inside joke recognized by less than a third of our class.
And so, my fellow seniors/the mascot-related noun we use for our athletes, let us go forth into this world using the skills we learned here at this school. We are a class made up of this type of person, a different type of person, and a third type of person, and so much more. I can't wait to see what we can accomplish on our own, but I know that no matter what we do or where we go, we will always be plural of the mascot-related noun we use for our athletes for life.
Thank you.
