SMU Swan song

I’ve been thinking about this commentary for some time now, and I must admit it has been a difficult task deciding how to end my career as an undergraduate newspaper columnist. As many of you may have expected, I pondered the possibility of having one last rant, one final hit-’em-where-it-hurts sort of thing.

If I had gone that route, I’m sure I would have explored the boringly sad and normal future of most of my fellow classmates. I would have discussed how so many of my peers would be embarking on the lives of their parents, lives locked in luxury, spent producing babies while enslaved to some corporate-whore job, a mortgage, monthly BMW payments and yearly donations to Cox and the Republican party. I would have tickled-your-fancy with cute little statistics concerning alcohol and prescription drug addiction among depressed and lonely twenty-somethings of our generation. Perhaps, though I am not sure, I would have made some religious comment (Heaven forbid!) concerning the subtle fanaticism that is suffocating our state and nation, chaining society to the bedposts of ignorance and hate.

But that’s unhappy stuff, so I’ll go a different way.

I am thankful for my time here at SMU. Though I will spend much of my time in the forthcoming months explaining to my new friends in Boston that I did actually attend a recognized university and, while in attendance at that “Christian” school in Dallas, that no, I was not forced to sign any form prohibiting me from attending dancehalls or restaurants that served to African-Americans or Catholics. In fact, I will explain to the Yankees, I was able to enjoy a fairly “diverse” four years at SMU, making lifelong friends from all sorts of backgrounds. Moreover, I did have a home, of sorts, that I loved and will think of fondly for the rest of my days.

Therefore, I would like to spend just a few moments thanking some people.

Firstly, thank you to my friends. Thank you for the love and laughs you have provided me with for these four strange years.

Thank you fellow senior Hunts for our now four year-long camaraderie. Many of you – and you know who you are – have maintained a support system that has assisted me in my growth and evolution as a person and a student. I look forward to seeing how your lives will end up, how you will blossom into creative and complex artists, lawyers, doctors, writers, scientists and – most importantly – terribly loving and passionate people.

To my Paris friends, I would like to thank you for the past two years of our friendship. You made my experience abroad as well as my experience back in the States incredibly life-changing, unexpectedly rich and full of vitality (including, of course, perhaps too many late nights spent intoxicating ourselves). I hope that we keep in touch as we disperse throughout the country and the world, as we seek to make names for ourselves and achieve the aspirations we’ve been talking about for so long now.

Finally, thank you to all the wonderful professors I’ve had over the years. As I have searched to reach my own understanding of the world, I have had the tremendous opportunity to be led in the right direction by some of the most caring and talented people I have ever known. Thank you for dedicating your lives to teaching, to helping lost little kids like myself find their way.

To end, I will leave you all with a bit of wisdom that I myself hope to embrace throughout my life:

Be different. Don’t let your lives end at graduation. Make choices for yourselves and don’t allow others to make them for you. Be open to change and diversity. Learn to love and appreciate ideas and people that appear completely foreign to you. Be happy. Dedicate your lives to the simple things. Believe that the world can be a better place and that you can help in the process. Live big lives; live wild and diverse lives and don’t limit yourselves to what’s safe. Be happy. Be different.

Thank you for everything.

Ciao.