Everyone's free to speak

The year I graduated from middle school, a song and spoken-word piece narrated by Baz Lurhman was released. The single featured a man's voice presenting an irreverent commencement speech. It was entitled "Everyone's Free to Wear Sunscreen."

Instantly a hit, and now much-parodied [HTML_REMOVED] Chris Rock's "No Sex in the Champagne Room" comes to mind [HTML_REMOVED] "Everyone's Free to Wear Sunscreen" was falsely attributed as an MIT commencement speech given by Kurt Vonnegut. It was actually based on a June 1, 1997, Chicago Tribune column written by Mary Schmich. In her introduction to the column, Schmich described it as the commencement address she would give, were she asked to give one.

I remember listening to the song's advice earnestly, with every ounce of my 14-year-old body. Much of it seemed so simple: "Do one thing every day that scares you. ... Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees." You'll miss them when they're gone, ... Floss."

"I could do this," I thought, brightly optimistic before the time of APs, SATs, MIPs, birth control, car-crashes, massive break-outs, break-ups and break-downs. Even the more difficult advice ("Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself") seemed doable.

Eight years has passed, and what a difference almost a decade makes. I'm nowhere closer to putting jealousy behind me than the time Kelly Morkill beat me out for the part of Emily Webb in Bellarmine Preparatory School's production of Our Town.

I'll probably never be asked to give a large, sweeping commencement speech, and it's not because I'd probably get booed off stage by someone's grandmother for telling the wrong sort of jokes. It's because I believe "advice, like youth, is (indeed) wasted on the young." But that's what parting columns and commencement speeches are all about: last thoughts full of someone's trite advice.

My column has never been about advice, and it never will be. It has, however, been about self-expression, and if I could offer the campus community one last submission, it would be this: Make your own advice, and express yourself more.

Of all the problems and disputes my friends and I have come up against in the last four years, the majority of them could have been solved if someone had merely spoken up and expressed him- or herself.

He doesn't treat you right? Why don't you tell him?

A professor was unfair? Why don't you confront her?

If there's a problem you keep witnessing, why not talk to someone about it?

Better still, why don't you write an editorial about it?

Why don't you write an editorial that speaks to the things you love in the world, the things you detest and the things you wish were different?

Why don't you express yourself in a way that effects change?

Next year, another young, blond columnist with a penchant for shoes, Mexican food, vodka tonics, the environment, pop culture and educational issues will probably take my place, and that's fine. That's the way of things.

I leave the University and The Daily, however, knowing there is power in advocacy and self-expression.

I wish more people knew about this power.

And I probably couldn't end on a better note than Schmich: "Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth."

She's right. Except, when I look back at the past four years, at no point during the times when I honestly expressed myself do I feel the need to wipe off and paint over the "ugly parts."

Reach columnist Maureen Trantham at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.