Graduation. If you're a senior and you read that you probably just got a rush of adrenaline, and if you're not a senior reading this you probably got some far off fanciful look in your eye.

For many, it marks some sort of completion, closure, of adolescence in a ritualized ceremony, one of the last of its kind in our culture.

Not everyone makes it this far (just look around during an assembly as the size of each class slowly deteriorates). In fact, every year on average 1.2 million kids in the United States will drop out of high school. That’s one student every 26 seconds. And Oregon has the second to lowest graduation rate in the country at 68.7% in 2014.

 For those who do make it, however, it offers some form of recognition to the past 13 years of our lives and all the entailing work, relationships, and full spectrum of emotions. 

It is a time of smiles, tears, and endless clichés, but surprisingly you find that you don't mind them too much. It marks the final "last" of high school that you will experience, and it both exhilarate and even saddens you a little to know that you will never again be a compulsory student. That the people you have gone to school with for the past 4+ years will be flung across the country choosing their own paths.

But it will not be perfect. There will be drama, tears, heartache, confounding decisions, and the mother of all anticlimaxes as you feel they simply rush over your name and you receive an empty folder.

If you search for perfection, you will find it in the editing room of whichever movie you got this particular ideal from. But let me say this as well; you will never have another high school graduation. Regardless of what it turns out to be, this is what you have, and these are the moments and these are the people that will last in the archives of your memory.

So, well done. However you may feel about the ceremony or this time in general, simply keep in mind that these ARE the "good ol' days," the days that you will remember and talk about for the rest of your life. Whatever you choose to do with that is up to you.