Graduation Day

Gaddamit! I fumbled out of my seat and tried my best not to trip over and look obvious that I was rushing to the side of the stage. It's hard to contain your emotions specially when you just heard (and found out for that matter) that your daughter got 2nd place overall at her school.

They took the special exams for forced ranking some 2 weeks ago, and we knew that she was running for a slot at the top 3 graduates. She has consitently been in the principal's list since 1st quarter, so it shouldn't have been any surprise to me. But I really didnt know how it felt like until I went through it... that is, to be called up on stage to pin an award on you daughter in front of the whole school, parents, teachers and classmates at PICC. And it was 2nd place.. overall the entire prep class of 39 graduates. Damn I am proud of her!

I was fucking smiling and smirking all through out the rest of the event. Nevermind that the whole thing was almost 3 hours long. Nevermind that it was almost 11:00 AM and I didnt have anything for breakfast. Nothing was gonna ruin my mood. I cant beleive there's so much raucus over this cheap piece of metal. But I had butterflies in my stomach nevertheless. It was awesome!

I only regret that my father never got to enjoy too much of this when I was a punk kid. In fact, I can remember only a few times that they had the chance to come up the stage and pin an award on me. And I must admit... as happy as I was walking up those steps, a sudden jolt of this made me realize what I deprived my parents of. But past is past, and I can no longer go back to kicking the shit out of everybody through my academe years. What I did manage to do, is outdo a lot of my peers in my batch by accomplish everything that I have done so far. When most of my peers are still climbing the corporate ladder to middle management, I have already been keeping the sit warm for several years now.

I recently took some time to look at several MBA programs and was extremely dissapointed with what I saw. All of the theses were either an evaluation, assesment, or analysis. Fuck that! I've done the actual implementations of these motherfuckers. I dont care how good your research was... you don't know until you actually roll your sleeves and implements something. That's when you really know if what you've been saying was dead accurate or if was just horse shit.

I dont remember how many times potential employers have asked me the question:

"I can see you've got experience, but bon't you think it's still a disadvantage for you to be gunning for a management role like this one at your young age?"

I always tell them:

"On the contrary, I think it's one of my biggest assets. How many people my age can do this job and do it well?"