i attended a Young Leaders Forum workshop at the vancouver school board office today. a very official, big hairy deal. there were about thirty or so students from all over the vancouver school district there. also there were some really important people there. some of them kind of scared me because they were CEOs and worked for the NY Stock Exchange and whatnot.

anyway there was a session in which the eight or so important "young leaders" made short speeches, and the photographer and the ctv cameramen went INSANE, shooting from every angle possible. click click click the whole time. it was stupid and kind of distracting, but i guess thats how things are. the speeches were generic and cliche for the most part, except for this highly intelligent mcgill professor/laywer, Payam, and this one woman, Ester, who was a Rwandan genocide survivor.

their two speeches were nothing short of amazing. Ester's story about her experience in the genocide kind of stole the show, being so ... i dont even know the word for it. crazy and fascinating in a horror sort of way, although not shocking or surprising.

after the hour-long speech session, the students were divided into 4 different groups to go to different rooms. each room got 2 "leaders". i was in Payam and Ester's group. then all the students were engaged in a fat discussion. the discussion kind of veered towards the Human Rights direction coz Ester was in the group and obviously it was the most relevant to her.

to be honest, the discussion was both enlightening and extremely pretentious, i felt like i was in a group of political yuppies. there was this one girl, ivet, who kept trying to digress from what we were talking about and tried to use as many four-syllabled words as possible... that was really annoying. ew. even the way she took notes was SO GODDAMNED ANNOYING, i was like, barf you.

some of the students were obviously trying to show off what seemed to me as the little they knew... or not. maybe they were all just oh-so-intelligent. i dunno. as grandiose as it was, it was pretty illuminating, although all we talked about was basic things and taking initiatives. we talked about rwanda and darfur, sudan for a while too.

photo by peter

as soon as the workshop ended, i had to race over all the way to UBC because i'm in the school senior band and today we were to play at the grade 12 graduation ceremony as usual - and i was late for that. the weather was shit, it rained like CRAZY (its been humid/hot all week, and the one day it would be beneficial to be sunny, it decideds to pour).

made it to UBC's Chan Centre for Performing Arts somewhat on time... it seemed to me our band played like shit this year but who gives a crap when all you're playing is background music while people enter the venue plus O Canada. and a big fanfare for the principalprincipal herself, which she specially request-demanded. shudder.

our performance was somewhat mediocre but good enough. we totally dont deserve to play in such a beautiful/prestigious venue (all the big classical/jazz musicians play there) but whatever. the whole Graduation Ceremony at our school is a fat sophisticated event, complete with gleaming trophies and gold embossed programs. eee.

seeing the grade 12s in black gowns made me apprehensive for next year, though. in exactly one year from now on.... i'll be walking down the exact same aisle as a grad. oh god.