Eastern Illinois Graduation
May 5, 2008
First I want to say thank you to all my peeps, for giving me ideas for the commencement speech I gave on Saturday at Eastern Illinois University. It was a totally wild experience. I flew to Chicago on Friday night, and my parents picked me up at Midway and we drove to Charleston from there. The ceremony was on Saturday at noon, and of course I wrote the speech about an hour prior. It definitely got me out of my element, that’s for sure. First off, the whole aura of graduation is so prim and proper and I had to wear the typical black hat and gown. It was all I could do to refrain from not demonstrating a palm strike on the university president after he introduced me, simply out of habit. Furthermore, this was one of the first speeches I ever gave that did not include the word “ass” in some fashion. (kick ass, bad ass, whoop ass, etc.) When I got up to the podium in front of thousands of people, I immediately learned two things. First, I could only speak to the graduates sitting directly in front and below me. If I lifted my head even slightly to address the crowd in the bleachers, my damn hat would fall off. Second, I had to avoid looking at the jumbotron video screen which was projecting a ginormous image of myself speaking. But anyway, it went very well and it was a really cool and exciting day. It’s always hard to be in Charleston, just because it’s a reminder of some pretty bad times. (mostly the murder trial for Shannon’s killer) but I try very hard to never let the few bad memories outshine the thousands of good ones. I’m going to post a video of my speech shortly…
Click here to read a newspaper article about the speech.
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