Credits and Emotions

Wow. Way better than last year, mostly due to the much lighter (and happier) mood surrounding the past choir year. Congratulations to Mark, Jenny, Lovik and Adrian on their adventures to their respective colleges. And, many thanks to a couple of great friends over the past few years, Ian and Si, for delivering probably the best couple of choir banquet senior speeches I'd heard in quite some time, and for helping me through my senior year a couple years ago.

That was the choir banquet that my ex-church had held at the end of each choir year for about a decade. I remember, with each passing year, eagerly anticipating delivering my speech, sharing with the crowd before me my happy experiences in the choir, and thanking the people that helped me grow, both friends and adults. Then some crazy stuff happened at the church that left me bitter (I may detail in future posts), and when it came time to write my speech the following spring, I was just completely shot of my happiness in trying to detail everything I had wanted to share. So, long story short, I wrote a speech but never delivered it, and again I was filled with this combination of bitterness and sickness due to the lingering culture that cause the church to crumble in the first place.

So where am I going with this? Several of the speeches that were delivered tonight were pretty much the type of speech I always wanted to deliver, ones full of happiness and reminiscence, and gratitude. At the same time, listening for the first time to people of younger years than I delivering their speeches, I felt like that guy who was in a coma while the Red Sox won the World Series. I felt like I completely missed out, as if I didn't actually graduate, even though I am officially an alumnus. So where do I take this new emotional information? Do I store it in the back of my head, hoping to forget it forever, or do I live with it, understanding that I did indeed graduate from the choir, but without doing what I had wanted to do most for many years? That is the issue with which I have to grapple. But, at the same time, I keep living my life, and I keep in contact with those friends that I made through the choir and the church.

Once, again, congrats to the graduates, and thanks for making it a better event than what I had to endure a year ago.