Graduation is nothing special. Special is spending a day at Disney World to treat yourself because you are special. Special is walking across a stage, having your photo taken multiple times, and then sitting back down only to stand back up to walk out and away from your present moment significance.

Graduating is like going to the movies. Everyone has their roles: speakers share inspirational monologues, the narrator runs the opening and closing credits while hinting at scenes to come despite the spec scripts audiences are given, and the students are the actors in a silent film, tragically anxious and brave.

Little does the audience know that these student-actors are method actors too. After the last act, they can't shake their performance off. The picture is still in motion and they know of and are used to their comfortable certainties.

The story they told, a trilogy and a prequel, leads audiences wanting something new, a sequel this time. The director wants new talent to write the script. That's not how they see the character. Recasting, reshooting, and the release date has been postponed.

Production purgatory.

Broken legs are good luck charms and compliments in disguise somehow. The image reminds you of rejection and failure parting ways or sharing unfairly.

Do what you love and love what you do, but why did they have to make love so expensive? You don't think there's a budget, not even one that GoFundMe or Patreon can reach.

Then you remember that you can't eat money. There is no school of life; no campus, no buildings, no classrooms, for the school of life. Life is a full-time education, you make mistakes, you learn and learn again, whether you want to or not.

Institutions prepare you for the real world with rules, but the real world does its best to ban and revise the rule book. The show must go on, not this one, but yours.

You saved every paper and notebook from freshman year, not so you could cheat but remember in the hopes to study them again. The past is a sentimental foundation in time filled with strategy. It knows how you got here and it could find out where you are going.

Definition and reinvention. Discipline and repetition. Challenge and creativity. Preparation and action. These are the marks of a student of life.

Funny, you have the personal hygiene of a celibate dentist but you don't know how to wash your own laundry. They call you a millennial; a name designated for the future if only you knew which kind. Apocalyptic dystopia? Post-apocalyptic? Apocalyptic utopia? Cybernetic, cyberpunk Judgment Day?

Your third eye is blind to the punctual future. For now, the patient present will continue to wait, but not long.

The curtain calls you back for an encore. They liked it when you walked in place.

This time they expect a crawl but you know better than to lead with expectations.

Run, don't walk.