Why My Graduation Kicked Your Graduation’s Monkey Butt

I received a mass e-mail from my step mom congratulating both my sister and I on our graduations this week.  Mine from college.  Hers from preschool.

PRESCHOOL?!  With a cap and gown and everything?!  

Why, yes.  It turns out while I was going across the stage in my black gown and gold and white chords, celebrating 17+ years of schooling (you can tell I’m a liberal arts major when I had to get out my computer calculator to double check the number), my little sister was wearing her white cap and gown, crying that some other little girl stole her hair tie.

And since both of us are now graduates, my competitive side feels the need to compare and contrast our accomplishments to see which of us is more successful.

1. After two years of preschool, my little sister can now sing almost the entire alphabet (not quite ‘x-y-z’).
2. She can touch her toes and almost tie her shoes. I can’t touch my toes.
3. She can tell you when you’re completely wrong.  Especially when you’re wrong about who gets the last piece of dessert.  Or who actually won Candy Land. (You might have thought you won the game from the directions, but she’ll keep you in line of what did and didn’t happen.)
4. She knows that pink always matches pink, regardless of what shade it is.
5. She can name all the Disney Princesses in her eight o’clock bedtime sleep.

And what can liberal arts majors do?

1. We can also tell you you’re wrong, and sometimes convince you you’re wrong, even when you might possibly be right.
2. We can sound pretentious in any cocktail conversation by name dropping the most obscure authors and artists we can think to name.
3. We can tie our shoes, if we believe in the concept of shoes.
4. We can say the alphabet in a foreign language, maybe sometimes slurring our speech because we learned it from a drunk, womanizing professor.
5. Depending what scene we associate with, we may find ourselves wearing two different shades of pink and a tie around our heads to be “ironic.”
6. We can get a job and do “real world” activities…but it might have nothing to do with our major.

In the end, I’m not really sure who wins.  Because I hear there are naps in kindergarten.  And that sounds pretty nice.

-The Boxcar Children