It’s graduation time again!
Yay?
My graduation day was no fun at all. I was in an enormous fight with my boyfriend (we had already decided to break up after graduation, which was, you know, that day, so I’m not sure why we bothered), and I was desperately hungover, so in all my pictures I look pale, nauseous, and near tears. Memories!
And of course the ages-old problem with recent grads is that we all think we will immediately become Oscar-winning actresses (hello!), in-demand journalists making $5/word, or presidents of our very own companies, because we deserve to. To those of you who are graduating this year: you don’t, and this will not happen. Unless you are already wildly rich and/or well-connected, you will probably be getting coffee or waiting tables for awhile while you either work your way into an interesting position or figure out what you want to do, and THAT IS OKAY. Completely, 100% okay. It took me six more years and several soul-crushing failures before I was able to get my wheels more or less on track. (For some excellent post-grad advice from Lilit Marcus, author of Save The Assistants which – plug plug plug – makes an excellent graduation gift, click here.)
Now, about those speeches. Our graduation day speaker in college was Will Ferrell, who funneled a beer on stage (the fact that I couldn’t remember the name of what he did and just had to Google it using the words “beer” and “tube” makes me An Old, I think). And I went to a fancy-pants high school, so our graduation day speaker way back then was Martin Scorsese. Which sounds pretty amazing, right? It was okay. He sort of looked confused about why he was there, said some semi-encouraging things, and went on his way. Nice guy, though.
Anyway, I came across this Deadspin graduation speech via my buddy The Cajun Boy‘s site ages ago, and it remains one of the funniest things I have ever read. Everrr. Read it here, and enjoy.
