Endnotes and Acknowledgments

I've written my last honours paper today. Barring the possibility of failing, I'm done with my undergrads. It's been a good three years, and some of those days have actually been rather good, as well. I'm not very efficient at the task of personal happiness; I tend to check the teeth of all my gift horses, and get stuck in the eye by enemy spears.

But what does not kill us simply makes us stranger, to quote the Joker (r.i.p, Heath Ledger), and there's no doubt that JUDE encourages strangeness. Or perhaps it's simply that strange people come to the forefront in JUDE. Don't know, can't say, wouldn't make a difference.

I do know I love JUDE with a passion only equal to the way I despise it, sometimes. I have been content here, someetimes I've been ecstatic, at a word, an approving nod or passing smile, at any acknowledgment that my often unacceptable insanities are alright, here.

I do know I've been frustrated that we're often treated as somehow a little less than other batches. Which is probably an unwise thing to articulate, but it's true. Or maybe it's simply that we've been terribly unlucky; we have.

I do know I've realised that I shall never be a nice person, however much I try, but shall always be vicious. But I've learnt to hide it better than I used to, and that's something, at least. It isn't that I'm malicious, but I think I try too little to be civil.

I do know, and this is the best of all these little nuggets of knowledge, that the few friends I have I'm madly in love with, and if I have to leave them I'll be more than a little heart-broken. And perhaps even better is the fact that I feel some strange bond of kinship even with those I am not close to, even with the very few I fail entirely to comprehend.

I do know I'm grateful for these years, and that my first instinct of JUDE as home was in no way wrong. Thank you, everyone.