Mind Your Own God Damn Business

Dane Cook: Voted most likely to leave me standing in front of my television, scratching my head and trying to figure what keeps causing the audience to laugh.

It’s that time of year again. Spring is in the air. A young man’s fancy turns to love, my allergies start to be become oppressively awful, I need to figure out a way to survive three months without any income, all of the sports I enjoy go into the off-season, T.V. is nothing but reruns, and it gets miserably hot. Fuck this time of year.

There’s something else going on, though: High school graduation.

I haven’t attended a high school graduation since my little sister’s, but I find them hilarious. Well, actually, I mostly find them boring. The speeches are usually pretty weak, the music sucks, and you spend most of the time watching a bunch of people walk across a stage while they read off names. But there are some very specific things about them that I find hilarious. Specifically, the students.

I think high school seniors are an incredibly entertaining demographic, and the things I find entertaining about them all peak at their high school graduation.

Sure, there are some things that make seniors a little bit difficult to deal with – they tend to think that they’re the center of the universe, they think everyone older than 23 is literally mentally retarded, and they’re usually phoning in high school pretty hard, especially by the end of the year. But they have a quality that I enjoy:

They all think that they’re destined for greatness, and that everyone around them is too. I don’t get enough of that in everyday life.

Most people my age don’t really remember what this feels like, because they’ve been in the labor force for too long. No matter how successful someone is at 30, they’ve had to make compromises of some sort with their life that they never anticipated at 18. Trust me, though. That feeling of greatness saturates high school.

My high school graduation was kind of a hazy blur, especially after a decade, but I remember a few things about it.

I sat next to a girl named Amber who I haven’t seen since. They played that “Rent” song about measuring a year in raindrops, or cups of coffee, or clown porn, or I don’t know what else, but most importantly, in love. I don’t remember if they played “I will remember you” by Sarah McLaughlin, but it seems almost impossible that they didn’t, because I think every high school graduation is contractually obligated to play that song at least once.

More importantly, though, I remember one of the speakers saying something along the lines of “Sitting among you, I see the future of America. I see the next great politicians, artists and scientists.”

William Murderface: Voted most likely to wake up with a clown's hand down his pants.

At every graduation ceremony that I have seen or been a part of since then, one of the speakers has said something along these lines. The next great scientific breakthrough is waiting to be discovered, the next great novel is waiting to be written, the next great guitar solo is waiting to be shredded by someone sitting in the crowd of bright-eyed 18 year olds sitting before them.

Even though I have heard some variation of this at every graduation ceremony that I have ever attended, I never believed it quite as much as I did on the day of my high school graduation. It was the first time that I had really considered the fact that we were on our way to becoming adults, and adults were the ones who ran the country. Someone had to write the great American novel. Someone had to be president in twenty years. Someone had to play quarterback for the Denver Broncos. Why WOULDN’T it be one of us, or, more probably, me specifically doing all three at once?

At 18, I had this sort of vague, undefined idea in my head that I was destined for greatness. I didn’t know what I would be doing, or how I would be doing it, but I was pretty sure that I would be wildly successful.

It was kind of silly, but I don’t think I was the only one thinking that way that day. In fact, the more I get to know high school kids, the more convinced I become that every single one feels this way. The kids with sports scholarships were going to be professional athletes. The kids headed to prestigious colleges were going to cure cancer or be the next Johnny Cochran. The ones spending thirty grand a year going to out of state art school were going to revolutionize musical theater and turn Broadway on its fucking head. Even the depressed, unpopular kids were going to start the greatest band on the planet or write poetry that the generations after them would be studying in school. High school is a great time to over estimate yourself; you’re stuck at home living with your parents, you’re going through a government mandated program, you have clear, easily identifiable and obtainable goals laid out for you by a high school counselor, and you haven’t had very many opportunities to make life-changing choices. High school is a perfect opportunity to believe that you’re destined for greatness.

And, to be fair, some of the people I graduated with have done some pretty amazing things. The kind of things that we all assumed we would be doing when we got out of high school.

Jerry Orbach: Voted most likely to put baby in the corner.

What I didn’t realize until a few years later, though, was that the speaker was only giving us half of the story. He left out the part of the speech that said “I also see America’s next garbage men, meth addicts and fry cooks out there today. I see the guy who will fail out of college during his first semester and then work as a barista, smoke a lot of pot and live with two of his friends in a one bedroom apartment for the next twenty years of his life. I see the girl who thinks she’s going be a fashion designer in New York who is going to accidentally get pregnant her freshman year, drop out of school, marry the father, get a job working for State Farm and raise a couple of kids in walking distance from the home she grew up in. I see the guy who will stumble through a four year degree in eight years and work as a substitute teacher who writes blog posts about the things he shouts when he has an orgasm. No one will be paying him for it, and it will get him in frequent legal trouble, but he’ll keep doing it anyway, because he’s an idiot. Worst of all, I see the guy who’s going to meet all of his goals and realize that he hates his life anyway. What I’m trying to say, people, is that I see a stadium full of teenagers with stars in their eyes that are, for the most part, going to be settling for mediocrity or worse when they realize that life isn’t going to have a guidance counselor telling them what to do all the time. By definition, if some of you here are going to be extraordinary, that means that most of you have to be average! HA-DO-KEN!!!”

So why did the speaker leave that part out? A few reasons.

First of all, it’s a total downer. Well, maybe not. It might be hilarious, as evidenced by Matt Foley, motivational speaker. Probably a downer though.

Second of all, he would be wasting his breath, because no high school senior would believe you if you told them any of that. They are way too jacked about their life. All they want to do is tell each other what a long, strange trip it’s been, compliment each other on the song lyrics that they used for their senior quotes, admire their sweet senior picture that shows them sitting by a tree and staring pensively towards the horizon with a guitar in their hands, and most importantly, get the hell out of this shit-hole town and move to the cosmopolitan college town of Topeka, Kansas, or Lansing, Michigan.

Besides, that speaker was just some tired old man, and none of that shit he said is going to matter anyway when they’re living on a moon base and seducing hot aliens with sweet licks on their space guitar. Hell, even the people who are planning to go to a trade school or get married and have kids are completely fired up. No matter what their plans are for the future, they are VERY excited about them and have trouble imagining the rest of their life as anything other than pure euphoria.

Is that over the top optimism and enthusiasm a little bit silly? Probably. Unrealistic? Definitely.

But it’s also kind of fun to be around people like that, and it’s really hard to not get excited for people who believe that their dreams, no matter how far-fetched, are not only completely reasonable and obtainable, but almost inevitable.

Humpty: Voted most likely to tickle your rear in a 69, using his "humpty nose"

During the last week of school this year, I overheard one student talk about how excited he was to get into computer science and how much money he was going to make.

Another one told me that he was planning to work for a while before deciding if he wanted to go to college or maybe do trade school instead. I think it’s a pretty good idea, but he was fired up out of his mind about it.

One girl was headed to an art school in California where she was going to get a photography degree at the price of $30,000 a year. If someone my age were going to do this, they would probably feel the need to point out that they knew it was a little bit silly, but they loved photography, or they were aware that it was risky to spend $120,000 to get a degree in such a highly competitive area. Not this girl though. No embarrassment, no worry, just pure, unadulterated enthusiasm about how awesome it was going to be to go to school in California to learn about something she loved and then become a photographer.

I can get on board for that. It’s fun to be around people who think that way. I know that not all of them will succeed, and even the ones that do will probably have to come to terms with the fact that things aren’t as perfect as they imagined, but it’s infections to be around people who are that fired up. I spend a lot of time explaining to myself why it’s unreasonable and unrealistic for me to want or expect any of the things I want out of life, and it’s fun to watch a bunch of 18 year old Tony Robbins’ talking with each other about all of the cool shit that they’re going to do.

So congratulations, class of 2009. I see the next time travelling cosmonaut movie star out there amongst you, even if it’s not as clearly as you can see him. Now go out there and chase your dreams, you crazy motherfuckers. I love you guys.