May 30, 2005

Four years. Four wonderful, long, exhilarating, long, glorious, long years. And I have Harding University to thank. For those of you just joining us, I (a pronoun commonly referring to Chris in C-File land) just graduated from Harding University, a graduation that I must say was VERY official, based on the VERY official ceremony we had that I know was VERY official because it was VERY long. They even announced that it would be VERY long at the opening of the graduation ceremony. “This is the highest number of seniors we've ever graduated from any one year at Harding,” they announced in a momentous sort of voice, as if that number were fluctuating up and down as opposed to continually rising.

Graduation is a magical (long) experience during which, after four years of building friendships with people from all across the country but mostly Texas, you get to bask in all the applause you have so rightfully earned, which sounds suspiciously like less applause then everyone else is getting, including that guy whose B.O. has felled so many indigenous species of animal life that the Environmental Protection Agency has added him to their federal watch list. Oh, sure, the crowd will ROAR for him. But for you? A paltry few pity claps.

Of course, the acoustics in the Ganus Athletic Center All-Purpose Poorly Air Conditioned Activity Center aren't so great, so it's possible I didn't hear all the people applauding. Yeah, that's it. Of course that's it. Silly me. I mean, I did hear several people say they clapped for me afterwards, and they certainly seemed sincere. They probably just got drowned out in all the people's heads falling over onto the bleacher row in front of them from boredom.

Graduation is a wonderful experience, and the best part is the part where school is over. No more stupid papers and life-consuming projects! Until grad school! Yay! Three cheers for receiving money for labor instead of paying money to labor! Except for grad school!

However, I have to say that are numerous things I will miss about Harding University. It was a special place. A swampy sort of place, but a special swampy sort of place. A place where each and every one of us came to share certain experiences, experiences that we could bond over, mostly by loudly complaining about them. “Chapel sucks!” we might say, and then proceed to share a hearty laugh over it. “You're right! Wanna bond over that shared experience?” “Okay!” And so it would go. It's like you were intimate friends with everybody there!

You see, at Harding, which is a cHuRch of ChriST university (I can never remember whether to capitalize it or not), the students are routinely forced to obey certain “rules,” in an effort to spread the Christian way of life by mimicking the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. Okay, so it wasn't that bad. Girls only had to be completely covered in public on Tuesdays, for example. But nonetheless, there were many rules, some of them ridiculous, others merely ludicrous, but all of them annoying. The underlying advantage, however, was momentous (meaning great, not that it lasted a moment). By forcing freedom-loving people to drop out or conform, Harding ensured a level of cultural homogeneity that other universities would kill for.

Oh, don't get me wrong. Everybody talks about “diversity” as if it were some magic great solution to everything, but nobody really means it. This is because we all know that diversity leads directly to things like Bosnia-Herzegovina, and that's just too many consonants from the last bit of the alphabet. So we laud “diversity,” while secretly using it to mean “people dress differently and continually invent new and goofy ways to express simple ideas,” but really we like it when everybody thinks like us on the fundamentals. I mean, who doesn't?

It's wonderfully liberating to finally be able to be around people who think exactly like me. Yup, just like me. Yup… just… like… oh, who am I kidding? Nobody thinks like me. Everybody's still a dang Democrat or conservative cHuRCH of ChRisTer. But you know what? It's okay, because we all agree on the fundamentals. That being, the suckage of chapel.

Aw, man, there's something I won't miss about Harding. Drag myself out of bed before 9 a.m. every single morning and trudge over to the Benson to sit and listen to some freshman tell us how he got called by somebody to lead chapel last night and just had NO IDEA what he was going to talk about so he thought and thought and thought and finally he saw a bicycle wheel or a yarmulke and got to thinking that our relationship with God is really just like that yarmulke and now everybody please sing hymn number 459 except for the four rows around Chris Guin specifically – they can chat loudly about acid reflux disease as if they are doing their neighbors a great public service.

But there are many things I will miss. Like all those good times with good peoples, filming monkey puppets for videos that were ignored by the entire communications faculty one by one, watching the cafeteria burn to a crisp, ballet dancing, seeing countless operas in Memphis, hiking through Petit Jean, performing Tell Me a Beautiful Lie to the group in London (and getting meaningful, interested feedback!), watching wildlife on the hills of Inverness, never winning a single game of Risk, staying up all night making cowboys sing on cue, beating Sam Travaglini at Super Monkey Ball, pretending to be a cult around a bonfire, watching Buffy DVDs without a care in the world. Memories to last a lifetime, or until I suffer a massive concussion. Whichever.

A fond farewell to Harding, and good riddance to Arkansas swampiness. It's New England time now.