Convocation has passed, and already I miss the sound of ritualized trauma as seniors physically detain fourth graders and serenade them with the melodious strains of Surgere. My three minutes of glory—under the searing August sun, my Westridge whites sending my Fearlessly Evolved Thinker WomanTM education heavenward—are over, and I’m reflecting on what it all means. See, in listening to my classmates do their best I’m-Olaf-with-an-awful-head-cold-but-sing-I-must-at-church impressions, I think I found something. Not God. How blasé. No—in analyzing the line, “Within our Latin motto lies a hidden meaning too,” I was struck by the sudden realization that after six years on this hallowed ground, I have finally stumbled upon the significance of this line. I have found the hidden meaning in Surgere Tentamus. 

GAY

As Kurt Cobain plaintively intones in “All Apologies,” everyone is gay. The queerness is as visceral as an 18th century portrait of a dead buck surrounded by beagles. The competition to attract the two masc lesbians in every grade is nearly as primal. 

SMELL

No matter how many cans of Glade’s Apple Cinnamon Sparkly Spice maintenance sprays in the bathrooms, they will always smell. The hauntingly subtle aroma of rotten egg, farts, and urine-soaked paper product linger outside the history classrooms like a phone-glued freshman on a “bathroom break.” 

Come to think of it, most of the sacrosanct educational spaces on campus smell. Karma came for the English Department in the form of a truly unbearable stench—forcing a relocation just in time for Poetry Anthology season. And the distinctly gaseous flavor of the subterranean prison where Spyglass, multiple math classes, and the two people in your grade you forgot about convene is an urban legend. 

‘FITS

The last hidden meaning? The uniform. Convocation, with its smokin’ hot bleached-out-cardboard-shirt/pleated-golf-skirt-obtained-from-the-sketchiest-corner-of-Amazon lewk, is the only day you’ll find the student body actually in uniform. And I swear I saw some tails poking out of the obnoxiously white bottoms. No, on all other days, the campus is awash in a multitude of non-Westridge colors, non-Westridge logos, and the sartorial choices of that one person who seems like they just pulled up from Sequoia. But don’t take my word for it. Step outside. Breathe in the stench. Watch the gays. Spot the two people in uniform and the fifty about to be dress-coded. This is Westridge. This is what it means to strive to rise.