Big Big Thank You

More to follow on this later, but this weekend my parents hosted a going away party for me in Binghamton.  My little sister gave me the greatest gift I have ever received.

Gaylen, you are the best sister anyone could ever dream of.  You mean so much to me.  Watching you grow into yourself these last few years has been amazing, and I can only think what the next years have in store.

To everyone who contributed- Well done, you made me cry like a baby.  Seriously though, you are all awesome.  Thank you so much.

Graduation, and Home Again.

Unpacking from college, and getting ready to put most of my belongings into storage for several years, I found an old notebook from the end of freshman year.  Reading over it now, I am struck both by the things that have stayed the same– friend’s support, petty drama, bragging about my sister– and the huge gap between how I saw myself then and how I see myself now.

During freshman year, I was desperate to find what it was I was “meant to do.”  It’s all well and good to grow up in a supportive family where you are told you can be anything you want to in life, but that leaves a lot of possibilities.  This question consumed page after page of this notebook.  So here we are, three years, a degree, and many nights of thinking about it later, and I still don’t have the foggiest idea where I’ll end up.  What I have done is stop losing sleep over it.

When people ask me why I’m joining the Peace Corps, my answers vary from the dense of duty I feel, to the benefits for returned volunteers, to the huge opportunity it represents.  In the end though, the biggest reason is that it just feels like the right thing to do.  Regardless of day to day anxieties about logistics or leaving home, there is a sense that this is the right thing for me to do, at the right time.  Somehow I think that is how I will know what to do once I get back – it will feel like this decision feels now.

I don’t mean to trivialize leaving, or the difficulty in saying goodbye to everyone who has meant so much to me [Hardly!  As I'm transposing this, I've just had a weekend of saying goodbye to friends and family for two years].  On the contrary, I don’t think I would be able to go through with this unless I was sure it was the right thing for me to be doing, at the right time to be doing it.

To change topics a bit, we received our staging kits this weekend.  Staging will begin June 2 in Philadelphia, not far from Independence Hall.  Fitting, I suppose.  I’m looking forward to meeting the other CHED trainees, and putting voices and faces to names.  I suspect we will all know each other very well by the time training is over.

Graduation

Closing Remarks given at Senior Convocation, May 9, 2008:

When this year began, the senior Orientation Leaders were asked to reflect on St. Mary’s, both as the place we have lived for four years, and as the community we belong to.  As we sat talking, the question came up:  what is the best part of St. Mary’s?  Many things were suggested, from the approachability of out professors to the beauty of our surroundings.  In the end, most of us agreed that we were sitting with the best part of St. Mary’s—the students.

Over the last four years, we have laughed at each other’s jokes, cried with each other’s heartbreaks, rejoiced at each other’s successes.  In four years we have come from being five hundred strangers to the tightest knit community many of us have ever been a part of.

Tomorrow is graduation.  Parents and family have already started to arrive, and some have come a long way indeed.  Tomorrow we will be here, in these seats again. Tomorrow we will in front of the family and faculty who have supported us, and pushed us ever higher.  Tomorrow is a celebration of their work and effort, as much as ours.

Tonight though, is for us.  As students, we have grown to love this place and each.  In just a few days we will be dispersed across the country and the globe.  While we will all take a part of St. Mary’s with us wherever we are going, tonight we are all still here.   Enjoy yourselves, and enjoy each other.

_________

I suppose that’s one of the few perks of being elected to something.  Every once in awhile you get to tell everyone what’s on your mind.

Graduation was on Saturday, and as of tonight I am back home in Binghamton, a (proud?) graduate of St. Mary’s College of Maryland.  I still haven’t quite worked through that in my head, but I’m getting there.  I got back home to find my staging packet had arrived, so Peace Corps training is suddenly seeming much more real.  Three weeks from tomorrow I’ll be leaving Binghamton.  Talk about a head trip.