All-American, or something.

I live in a great town.

Today, I walked to the little nail place I frequent. It's run by an awesome Vietnamese couple and it's the best little nail place in walking distance from my apartment. That may not sound like a great review but there are actually at least three others that I don't frequent. Regardless! It's a good place.

Today, I was there for about an hour and a half. During that hour and a half, this little salon was packed with women. There were four high school seniors getting their nails done for senior prom. They came in pairs, and I could tell they weren't friends at school by the way they spoke to each other, but they bonded over prom dress colors and nail polish matching and hair styles and after-prom activities (which I assume all parties were embellishing, because, well, come on).

There were two older ladies chattering away about their children and grandchildren, and somehow discovered that one lady's niece is married to the other lady's nephew! Small world this is. (In my family, there's no possible way these women would not know each other, but that is far beyond the point.)

I'd been chatting with the prom girls a bit, asking them about their dresses and stuff, because what else do you do in a nail salon for 90 minutes? Anyway, one of the girls asked me about my senior prom, and my face must have lit up because they all did a silly high school girl "ooooh" thing. I laughed and said that I went to senior prom with my best friend and like 20something of our other best friends. And that everyone was beautiful and everyone had a great time and that he's still my best friend and many of us are still really good friends and will be really good friends forever. And that I can't wait to still be friends with them when all of our kids go to prom at the same high school. That's a lofty dream, but, hey, it's a dream.

The point of this is not prom. The point of this is America. In this country, in this state, in this city, there are people who are living their lives and loving each other and existing in harmony together. In the salon today there were people of six different ethnicities speaking four different languages. And we had common family, common friends, common experiences.

This is a nation of people who are not so different at the core. Nobody talked party affiliations, nobody talked religious differences, nobody talked race relations. And these girls could have just as easily not cared about each other's prom plans. And those women only found out that they had common family because they were busy telling each other all about how proud they were of their kids and of their kids and how many things their kids had in common, even though they grew up on totally different sides of town.

And maybe this is totally reading way too far into a couple of salon conversations, but I could just have easily not cared about the beautiful city and state and country I live in and then you wouldn't be reading this and loving your society a little bit more than you did ten minutes ago.

Ke$ha is in my head. Thanks, Nick Miller.

Spent literally the whole day working on my room. Put books on the new shelves, clothes in the new dresser, and tackled the behemoth which is my desk. For the last two years, things have been piling on my desk with no intention of ever going anywhere. I spent hours today going through the piles of papers and books and just...things! It was really unbelievable. What was funniest about the whole process was finding my old journals and a lot of old photographs. I have to admit I spent an hour reading journals from junior and senior year of high school. It's unbelievable how many of the entries and problems center around people I don't even speak to anymore. There are pages and pages cataloguing drama with Hayden, Casey, Gibby, Jenny...it's really hard for me to read. I wish I could have known then that now, none of that shit matters. And then I look at things that go on today and wonder if they're going to be those non-issues in a few years. But are they? Or are they the ones worth fighting for? It's an age-old dilemma for me, really.

But the best part was how happy most of it was. High school was brilliant and I had a fabulous time. There are so many entries about how much fun I was having with Nick, Tom, Fletcher, Vean, Jimmy, Shaun, Clay, Dory, Evan, Hayden, Richelle, Cory, Eric, Lauren, Nick, Lily...it was really a great time. It was nice to revisit all of those moments, knowing that I wasn't exaggerating any part of it. It really did rule that hard.

One thing I wrote was that I think that Tom and I are going to be friends forever. I'd like to say that's still something I hold on to. And there are so many days of "today I didn't really do much except hang out with Fletcher...but I'd say that's a pretty good day no matter what." Hahaha sometimes things don't really change at all. A day with Fletch still sounds like a pretty good day no matter what. And there's so much hilarious stuff about Nick and Tom's crazy antics, and all the mischief we got into without ever really getting into any trouble. Those are some good boys right there. I feel a little better about life today.

What would have been my commencement speech.

I was sitting in the Centrum earlier this semester with my dear friends, the Monday/Wednesday/Friday lunch bunch. We were talking about our first days at CLU. Between the five of us, we have five different stories. Two traditional freshmen – one from out of state and the other from just around the corner in Moorpark. Three transfers – one from a four-year university, one from two different four-year universities, and one from Moorpark College. Yet, here we sat, together in our senior year, reveling in our experience at CLU. It is our different paths yet common goals that make us the CLU family.

I spent this year as Presidential Host Coordinator, so I spent a lot of time in the Office of Undergraduate Admission welcoming students to consider CLU their home. We give tours, basically as an excuse to talk to a student for an hour under the guise that we’re showing them around campus. It is our goal to help them understand who we are, who they are, and how CLU can unite us. On a tour, as we approach the Enormous Luther, our beloved Gumby, I explain why he’s here. He represents the enormous impact that Martin Luther had on the church. I extrapolate this to the enormous impact that we as CLU students will have on this world.

Here at CLU we have been given the unforgettable opportunity to grow in our understandings of faith and of reason, through organizations like Lord of Life, People of Prayer, Secular Student Alliance, and classes like Faith and Reason with professors like Dr. Streeter and Dr. Bersley. We have found ourselves dedicated to service of others through our time with Stine Odegard in the Community Service Center. This year, we as a campus committed to 50 service projects in honor of our 50th anniversary. We built houses with Habitat for Humanity. We stayed overnight at homeless shelters and the Prototypes women’s shelter. We beautified our campus with native plants to save our precious resources; we dug a new community garden. We have been committed to justice for all – through the Center for Equality and Justice, the Gay/Straight Alliance, Feminism Is…, College Democrats and College Republicans, the Not For Sale movement, anti-war protests, and a benefit concert for Haiti. We are, through all of these things, confident in our identity and vocation. We have cultivated the abilities and the strength to go out into this world to eloquently express our ideas and dreams.

We know who we are and who we will become. A fellow member of my senior class once said, “I came to college to figure out what I wanted to do. I am graduating knowing who I want to be.”

We are a senior class of amazing diversity of knowledge, experience, and things to offer this world. We will leave this place and journey all over the globe. Some of us will be lucky enough to return to CLU for graduate school, or sometime in the future as faculty or staff. It is our joy to call CLU our home now and forever.

As we sat in the Centrum and looked back just a few years, this University was looking back 50. Now that’s time for change. We can hardly imagine life without Gilbert, Humanities, Samuelson Chapel, and the countless other buildings that we now enter every day. As our alums and friends come back to CLU, there is always something new. Things are happening here at CLU. We have been educated as leaders for a global society, and we are working to make choices and changes here that reflect that. We have studied abroad and returned with knowledge and memories and revolutionary ideas about how CLU can grow.

It is up to us, now, as alumni, to put that into action. We have done what we could as students to make life at CLU fantastic. It is now our responsibility to go out and be who CLU has made us to be, and also to encourage future students to make CLU their home. This should not be difficult. What is difficult is knowing that we will not return to CLU this fall. We will not move into these residence halls we have come to love. We will not walk down the academic corridor to another class. We will not scan the posters at the flagpole for the latest goings-on. We will be out there in the world, fulfilling our promise.