Congraduations!

"Congraduations!" my mom said to me last Friday. Everyone knows that the greatest compliment one can pay is to repeat something you've said to others. I've already repeated this clever salutation several times as occasion requires, and with great results, I might add. (p.s. Eirene read this and informed me that I had spelled congratulations wrong. It's a pun, guys...get it? Graduation?? Congraduation??)

So, I finally finished.

You might wonder to yourself that "my goodness, it has been nearly seven years since she graduated (or...left) highschool!" True, true. But in my defense I did take two years off for the mission, so it was merely a healthy five-year graduation plan. I won't mention that I spent more than one summer cramming in more school, to "speed-up the process." I will also not mention (or dwell on) the fact that I began in English, switched to Music, dabbled in Interior Design, experimented with Communications, bored myself to tears for an entire semester in *Therapeutic Recreation of all things, and then faced the inevitable, and realized that my home was, and always will be, in English.

Ah, yes...English. The major that homes the eccentric, the eclectic, the impractical, the analytical, the wanderers, the rebels, the pre-law students, and me. I've always felt myself to be on the outside of this deep, brooding community of students; I yearned to banter as they did, to extract absurd and/or insightful meanings from the texts, to confidently throw around literary terms terms such as "farce," "nemesis," "hyperbole," and the like. I was intimidated by the depth I could never quite penetrate. Until of course, I committed myself to join them. When I finally stopped fooling around and embraced my inner English Major, I settled in comfortably with the "impenetrable" crowd. My last year was spent making up for the lost time; I bantered triumphantly with the best of them. One of my professors (I won't publish his name to protect his BYU behind) affectionately called me a smart *ss.

So I may not really know what I want to be when I grow up... I may not really have any marketable skills... I may even take a job that pays 8.00 dollars an hour and has nothing to do with my major...

But dang-it, I enjoyed every minute of my education.


*I do NOT wish to offend any of you who are affiliated with Therapeutic Recreation. It is by all accounts very respectable, and for the many compelling reasons I was drawn to it. I was, unfortunately, hypnotized by the mission into believing that I had the enthusiasm and compassion that would naturally be required to excel in that major, hence the hasty return to English.