{"id":6584,"date":"2015-05-17T06:35:50","date_gmt":"2015-05-17T12:35:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=6584"},"modified":"2015-05-19T07:11:46","modified_gmt":"2015-05-19T13:11:46","slug":"prairie-lights-graduates-the-future-is-yours-but-dont-rush","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2015\/05\/prairie-lights-graduates-the-future-is-yours-but-dont-rush\/","title":{"rendered":"Graduates, the future is yours, but don’t rush"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Commence\"<\/a>

In years past, these sort of people would have delivered your commencement addresses, and they would not have delivered them to your phones.<\/p><\/div>\n

Graduates, first let me apologize for not actually appearing at your graduation ceremony.<\/p>\n

But surely you will understand, even if your parents do not, that flesh-and-blood commencement speakers are relics of the past. Indeed, some of those speakers were themselves relics, tired old politicians and so-called self-made men who dispensed fool\u2019s-gold wisdom about \u201cthe real world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Accordingly, your school administrators have chosen to allow you to read this speech on your phones, since they knew that all of you would have been staring at your phones during the speech anyway. That was a good decision, an example of the kind of forward-looking, keeping-up-with-the-times, oh-what\u2019s-the-use thinking that we need in our schools.<\/p>\n

I have been asked to congratulate you on your academic achievements, but come on, a high school diploma? Hell, I\u2019ve<\/em> got one of those. It\u2019s around here somewhere. But what I mean is, you don\u2019t need to be dwelling on your high school experience.<\/p>\n

You will be reminded of it, whether you want to be or not, every night for the next several years, in all sorts of odd dreams where you are walking down a crowded hallway in your underwear. You will only stop having those dreams if you go to college, in which case you will dream for the rest of your life about showing up three days late for a final, or of being strangely unable to respond to a simple question from a professor.<\/p>\n

It has been said that no matter what you do in your life, everyone you meet will remind you of somebody you knew, or at least knew of, in high school. It\u2019s true. We all become ourselves in high school, except that in the pressure-cooker environment of high school, we are actually exaggerated versions of ourselves, which is why those types are so easy to recognize later in life.<\/p>\n

Do you remember that one bully, not very smart but convinced of his superiority to everyone else, with enough money from his parents to think he didn\u2019t have to work for money, utterly unable to sympathize with other people?<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>You will probably work for that guy someday. But the good news? You won\u2019t be in high school anymore, so you will actually feel sorry for the big dopey bastard. You\u2019ll still want to punch him in the nose, but you won\u2019t need to.<\/p>\n

But here I am dwelling on high school, when we need to be looking at your future. The future is important because that\u2019s where all the money is. You can even make money in something called the futures market, and if I were your age I would try to figure out what that\u2019s all about.<\/p>\n

Speaking of my age, I don\u2019t expect you to believe this, but when I was in high school there were ads on television that showed a man in a white lab coat ministering to a roomful of enormous computing machines (so primitive I hesitate even to call them computers). The tagline on the ad was: \u201cDo you want to work with your hands without getting your fingernails dirty?\u201d<\/p>\n

I wanted to work with my head without getting a concussion, so I became a reporter. But the point is, something you take for granted is going to seem hilariously absurd to people younger than you, maybe even those poor freshmen you laughed at all this year.<\/p>\n

As a wise man once said (I\u2019m pretty sure I read the book in high school), the only constant in life is change. That means you shouldn\u2019t worry too much about what you need to do to prepare for life in the real world (which is just like high school but with shorter spells of terror and exhilaration).<\/p>\n

For instance, what if you go to medical school and after 10 more years of absolutely mind-numbing education, just before you graduate, somebody invents a magic pill that cures every illness? Or what if you earn an advanced degree in English literature, only to discover that English is a dead language? You may scoff, but it happened to the Romans.<\/p>\n

So my advice to you\u2014and at this point you might want to stare at your phones in a thoughtful manner\u2014is to get out and experience the world for five or 10 years. Let the future unfold for a bit while you go out and live in the present, which is the best tense by far.<\/p>\n

Visit foreign countries, learn another language, read \u201cWar and Peace.\u201d In fact, read \u201cWar and Peace\u201d right now. You won\u2019t regret it. Plant a garden, learn to play a zither. Learn how to tune a zither. Ride a donkey across North Dakota. Post a video of highlights of your trip across North Dakota on YouTube. Emphasize your donkey\u2019s personality, which is the key to this sort of documentary.<\/p>\n

OK, I\u2019m probably getting too specific. I guess what I\u2019m really telling you is that I wish I hadn\u2019t been quite so eager to enter the real world, by which I mean several buildings, where I worked for something like 35 years. Stay out of buildings as much as possible for the next few years.<\/p>\n

And put away your goddamned phones.<\/p>\n

Thank you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Graduates, first let me apologize for not actually appearing at your graduation ceremony. But surely you will understand, even if your parents do not, that flesh-and-blood commencement speakers are relics of the past. Indeed, some of those speakers were themselves relics, tired old politicians and so-called self-made men who dispensed fool\u2019s-gold wisdom about \u201cthe real […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6585,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[2497,2495,2496],"class_list":["post-6584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-prairie-lights","tag-war-and-peace","tag-commencement","tag-high-school-graduation","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}