BYU

What a badass motherfucker they were unleashing on an unsuspecting world.

You gotta love unpacking old boxes full of pictures you thought you’d burned years ago, only to find gems like this one which, if I ever ran for office, could be used against me to prove what a poseur I really am.

I wore those Adidas trainers to commencement activities as a final FUCK YOU to the BYU administration who wanted me to wear white pumps and flesh tone pantyhose in a show of reverence toward the occasion. Could I have been more ferocious? I just thought that if given a choice, God would totally choose the Adidas over pantyhose, and who am I to question God’s will?

I must have made some sort of lasting impression because they refused to send me my diploma on grounds that I had two outstanding parking tickets. I couldn’t have cared less about the actual piece of paper, and I thought that if I didn’t have the physical diploma no one could ever prove I had actually gone to BYU. That way I could go on forever pretending that I had never attended college, which in the grand scheme of things would have gotten me as far as earning a degree from BYU anyway.

But BYU, not unlike the Mormon Church itself, is persistent and will find you no matter where you hide. After months of sending warnings to my old address they began sending my very Republican and very old-fashioned father notices that they were going to send a collection agency after his daughter if she didn’t get in touch and pay those two tickets. If there ever were two words in the English language that could set my father ON FIRE, it’s collection and agency (followed closely by Bill and Clinton, but that’s another story, one that features me saying, “I would have lied about it, too,” and my father disowning me for the first of several times).

Needless to say I paid those two tickets, for a whopping total of $20. They sent the diploma to my father who had it professionally framed, and I found it at the bottom of a box this morning where it shall stay FOREVER.