the last event held in this venue before today's event was the rodeo, so the venue smelled - more than a wee bit - of cow.

we went to a graduation this morning. i've sat thru my fair share of the pomps & circumstances. i've seen the bagpipers, the barefoot graduates, the sayings pasted to the mortar boards - "hi mom!" "thanks dad!" this morning, several of the girl students - graduates? under grad? don't know. - sang songs they'd written and covers of sentimental moosh before the procession began and that was something i'd never seen -- like a mini-concert while everyone was milling around, trying to find their seats.

i've graduated twice myself - once from high school, once from college. the latter was an outdoor affair in an unshaded field on a fryingly hot day surrounded by people i didn't know very well. the former, however... can you say glory days? at my high school some people played sports, some people were on speech team, some people smoked pot, some dated abundantly, some were in french club or on the yearbook staff, some worked jobs after school. i was valedictorian.

in its truest sense, the position of valedictorian belongs simply to a student who is selected to deliver the farewell, or valedictory, speech to his fellow students at the graduation ceremony. here in the states, the honor is generally confered upon the student with the highest grades. that is what was done at my high school. so, when i say that in high school, i was valedictorian, i am not saying that i just bided my time until spring semester of my senior year, at which point i wrote and delivered a graduation speech. being valedictorian is not one thing that happens in one day. being valedictorian is the culmination of years, months, weeks, days, hours and hours and hours of work. i worked my freaking arse off and i am done apologizing for being so freaking smart.

the high school i attended also has a junior high, but i went to junior high at a different jr hi, so when i came to my high school, i was an unknown quantity. by the end of the first semester freshman year, when the class rankings were posted on the bulletin board in the auditorium, everyone knew where i stood. i stood at #1. (we now live in a world where public recognition of success is thought to be detrimental to the self-esteem of the unsuccessful, which is a grave disservice to the successful folk and to the advancement of success itself.)

i graduated with a gpa just below 4.0 and that was back in the days before they added extra bonus points for advanced or honors or AP classes. that was just pure grades - my calculus grade up against whatever johnny (who now sells insurance) could manage in basic maths or whatever it is the stupid kids take. even without the extra bonus points, i was #1.

i studied a lot. i don't mean like i studied in study hall or that i put in an hour or so a couple nights a week. i mean i studied hours and hours, nearly every night. i read. i underlined. i summarized. i memorized. i highlighted. i reviewed notes. i made new notes. i made songs out of my notes. i made study sheets and practice tests. it's a misconception that high IQ automatically translates to high grades. IQ is talent, genes, something you're born with - grades take work.

i did not ever cheat on even one thing. there was a day the physics teacher accused my partner & i of cheating on our lab results because we got the same results. uh... it's kind of a basic rule of thumb that lab partners will get the same results, and needless to say we'd been getting the same results all year. that was a rather kafkaesque experience and although we got it all straightened out, it was a good lesson in the random quality that life can take on. my entire academic honor reputation was staked on the word of the odd little man who was the physics teacher.

at any rate - i worked. no doubt i am a genius, but they don't designate valedictorian based on potential. valedictorian is about results. and not to be all uphill-both-ways-five-miles-in-the-snow about it, but these were the days before computers. writing an essay meant writing rough drafts and outlines long-hand, revised painstakingly through three or more versions. there was a strict limit on the number of corrections, by scratch-out or white-out, per page. too many correx and you had to do the entire page over again. not like your modern word processor, eh? writing a research paper didn't mean googling - it meant going to an actual liberry with actual books and copying actual phrases onto actual note cards. the note cards themselves were graded - in case you don't know there is a specific format for note cards, or should i say formats, different formats for different type cards.

tedious does not begin to describe the work part - getting the grades. what kind of freak would study for studying's sake? the work part is not what it is all about. the being #1 part - THAT is what it is all about.

it's difficult to be a fan of graduations - trite cliché-filled speeches, figgety kids in the crowd, too hot, too cold, endless parades of graduates punctuated by senseless yelling accompanied by even senselesser air horns and cowbells. but because my high school graduation was icing on a very difficult and long-baking cake - a red velvet russian double chocolate tiramisu hummingbird baked alaska king cake -- because of that, my high school graduation was solid, and because it was solid, the memory of it buoys all the graduations i attend. while i realize that the pomp & circumstance can be wearisome, i do so enjoy a chance to bask in the glow of a shared camaraderie with the valedictorian, for whom this day is the glory day.