| All good things must come to an end. Whether it is a high school sport or a really great newspaper column, everything has an impending end. Typically, saying goodbye to these things can be rather glum. With the end of the year just around the corner, seniors are probably saying tearful goodbyes to their friends or favorite teachers.
Or perhaps they are counting down the days until they finally depart from the school, like me.
As the year draws to a close, the school hypes up graduation as this bittersweet event. The school tries to remind the students of all the glamorous memories they had with their fellow peers. The phrase “high school is the best time of your life” is thrown around a lot. Honestly, if high school was the best time of one’s life, that individual is in for one great surprise once they start having to pay bills.
There is more to life than just having the most friends or that insanely useless math concept that is taught for some reason. Sure everybody knows this, but knowing about it and experiencing it are two completely different things.
Unlike that song they play at the end of the year, Graduation Song (Friends Forever) by Vitamin C, we will most likely not be friends forever. Besides the obvious fact that the average human lifespan is about 75 years, it is not a realistic expectation. Life just tends to happen, people move, interests change, it is just a fact of life. I could be wrong though, life is unpredictable like that.
In retrospect to the grand book known as life, high school is a very short four years in comparison to what is to come. Provided that the time spent, or wasted, in high school can determine what experience one might have with college or otherwise, it seems like a rather bold assumption that high school was the greatest years of anyone’s life. Life has more challenges than recently-implemented rudimentary standardized tests or an irritability long essay about some dead poet. There are also taxes, mortgages, getting married, having a family, and ultimately the apparent satisfaction of raising a child for eighteen-to-twenty-five years of someone’s life. Emphasis on apparent, could the tax benefits really be that great?
After four confounding years spent here, I cannot wait to begin the next chapter of my anarchic life.
Here is a final goodbye to those who actually took the time to read these columns. My musings were apparently very fascinating to some people, or so I am told. Thanks for reading and inflating my gargantuan ego, it is greatly appreciated. Best of luck to the graduating class which, for once, Yates does not seem to entirely hate. |
