{"id":338,"date":"2013-05-16T21:50:33","date_gmt":"2013-05-17T02:50:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/simplechara.wordpress.com\/?p=338"},"modified":"2013-05-16T21:50:33","modified_gmt":"2013-05-17T02:50:33","slug":"commencement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecharalife.com\/?p=338","title":{"rendered":"Commencement"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been home almost a week now, and I still haven&#8217;t written about graduation. But that&#8217;s because it&#8217;s difficult to write about a place and people that you love, and yet won&#8217;t be seeing for awhile. That&#8217;s kind of what this blog started out as: a way to reminisce about Paris, a place I love and enjoy so much. But even though I spent a lot of time in Paris and grew to love it even more than before, Rice is different in that I&#8217;ve cultivated so many friendships there, I&#8217;ve learned so much about the world and myself, and even though Houston isn&#8217;t my favorite place, it can be because of the people there.<\/p>\n<p>Graduation took place this past Saturday, on May 11th. For months, my roommates, friends, and I had been talking about the weather, hoping that it wouldn&#8217;t be rainy or humid or hot. If anyone knows Houston, the weather can be four different things before 5 PM. And, since Rice holds their graduation outside, there are bound to be times when things just don&#8217;t work out. A few days before, the weather said it would be raining the whole morning of graduation, and then stop right after at noon. I thought to myself, &#8220;Really? Really?!&#8221; I didn&#8217;t want my family to be separated (each graduate gets two &#8220;Inclement Weather&#8221; tickets if the graduation has to be held inside, because there&#8217;s not enough space for everyone&#8217;s family and friends to fit in Tudor Fieldhouse, which is why it&#8217;s held outside on the quad) on a day that was meant to be spent together with one&#8217;s closest family and friends.<\/p>\n<p>So I prayed that it wouldn&#8217;t rain. My parents prayed&#8230;everyone I knew was praying that the rain would hold off until after the ceremony! And what happened? On Saturday, not only did it not rain during the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=1x6ymwJHYSk&amp;list=UUv9Cpo9OqV8_kEyKfCDnScA&amp;index=3\">ceremony<\/a>, but I didn&#8217;t see a drop of rain all day long. It made my graduation day such a blessing, and allowed me to focus on my last day at Rice.<\/p>\n<p>It was a whirlwind of beautiful, hot weather, family, friends, smiles, and tears, and one that I wouldn&#8217;t change for anything. Congratulations to Rice&#8217;s 100th graduating class, the amazing Class of 2013!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been home almost a week now, and I still haven&#8217;t written about graduation. But that&#8217;s because it&#8217;s difficult to write about a place and people that you love, and yet won&#8217;t be seeing for awhile. That&#8217;s kind of what this blog started out as: a way to reminisce about Paris, a place I love [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[35,38,80,101,121,172,179,215,221],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecharalife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecharalife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecharalife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecharalife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecharalife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thecharalife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecharalife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecharalife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecharalife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}