i asked a senior to sign my yearbook and told him to make it meaningful, but i could tell from the smirk on his face that he didn't really mean what he wrote when he gave it back to me.
i promised myself that i wouldn't read anyone's comment until the day after school ended but a sentence or two of his caught my eye. so of course i broke my own promise and read it.

I wish I could be there when you realize that everything you're doing now is more important than any grade you'll ever get. Don't let the world pass you by.

I knew it was a bunch of BS. He had helped me write a board application earlier in the year and it went more or less along the same lines. But either way, it made me think.
I didn't exactly enjoy my sophomore year. Nothing exciting happened, nothing out of the ordinary. My teachers taught the same way, every day, and nothing truly truly truly memorable happened. If Monday was the first day of school all over again there wouldn't have been a difference. But something else that he wrote- that i was ambitious. Yes, i tried hard- very hard, actually, to make it to the top, to be number one. But i did that every day too, and the monotony of it bored me.
But was it really my teachers' fault that i became almost bored to death? Maybe it was mine. Maybe because I chose to forget what happened in the day because none of it mattered at the time. Maybe because I chose to close myself off from the rest of the world and concentrate on one specific thing each day, without realizing what was going on around me. the experiences i went through, the memories i made- i chose to forget them all.
i let the world pass me by while i was trying to get all A's, i let the world pass me by while i was trying to impress others, i let everything fall apart while i was trying to put my life together.
And now i know.
While others are vowing to do better next year and to get better grades, I will promise myself that I'm going to enjoy school- actually enjoy what I'm going through because it will shape ME- it will make me who I am.
So would you take a look a that, Mr. Huy Dao. I don't think I've fully realized it yet, with finals swooping down on me and a transcript that really really really doesn't want another B. But i'm getting closer, closer to admitting that maybe what you wrote in my yearbook wasn't BS afterall.