a chapter comes to a close...

       i don't know this emotion--happiness and emptiness all in one. i just hugged my best friend goodbye and watched him drive away. it'll only be a couple months before i fly down to visit, but it's still weird. when you live with a guy for three years and see him every day, you just get used to it. i know we'll always be really good friends, but things will probably never be like they were again. makes it kinda difficult to fall in love with people (and i mean this only in every good meaning of the word) when eventually you find yourself having to pick up and move on. i don't really understand it, i guess. i think God's helping me with it, though. i'm really sad about it, but i still feel a certain amount of peace about it. like it's all going to be good. and i'm trying to think about it as a chapter coming to an end, but the story continues. you can't write off major characters in the beginning of a story. it's still not easy, though. i'm seriously going to miss the guy. and all my friends there.

       kinda funny that i started with that when i definitely graduated yesterday. it's been on the mind a lot, though. definitely more important to me. but yeah. graduation. it was looong. they split the graduations up into the different schools and spread them out over the weekend, but my school still had about 1,000 people walking (of about 5,000 graduates this semester). i was surprised that the english majors made up one of the largest groups in the college of arts and sciences. and that's just those that walked. knowing how fickle we english majors are, i'm sure a lot didn't walk. the speaker (no idea who he was) wasn't that great. just okay. he talked about how our generation could multitask because we had facebook and ipods. and how that means we were the future of the nation--even the world. kinda laughable. then we started walking. they grouped us by major--not alphabetically, which i expected them to do, but on reflection that would have been insane--and we ended up just a little ahead of the middle. i walked across the stage around the two hour mark. i left about a half-hour later (about 1/3 of the graduates did likewise) and that was when they were getting to about the middle. i was told i didn't miss anything.

       funny story, though--i haven't graduated yet. i just walked.  yup. my actual graduation date is now in august. i have an online class that won't be finished for a few weeks, but which would have been an automatic "f" had i graduated this month. this way i'll get a degree. and i'll soon be done. for now.

       and i move in to the liahona house on june first. kinda excited. i don't think i told you that, that i got the job i'd been wanting. good news there. and i think it will be good for me to be among friends still. really didn't want to live at home. and i'm still not sure what i want to do, so it'd be kinda pointless to go to grad. school quite yet. and i wouldn't be able to get much of a job yet. i don't know. i'll look around a little. see what happens. happy about the house, though. i definitely learned in all of this that it's just good to trust God. and i'm sure i'll be relearning that same lesson very soon. again. i'm home for now, though. it's good to be back, bittersweet as this day has been. made a chocolate cheesecake for mom and it was excellent. anyway, take care all. i'll be around soon.

       later.