Here is my contribution.

My college had an unconventional method of picking graduation speakers from the student body. Instead of having a Valedictorian speak, my college chose via a blind submission process, with students writing proposed speeches ahead of time, and the speech - not the speaker - was chosen.

Or this is how we were told the process worked.

I wrote a real gem of a speech. I think I still have a copy somewhere - maybe even a shorthand draft that I scribbled out while sitting by our college's lake - but haven't actually read it, so who knows if it is actually all that great or if I was convinced it was because I was a borderline burnout who believed in himself a little bit too much.

My speech wasn't chosen in the end, and I remember speaking with the student president - who sat on the panel of speech-choosing-people - and he told me that I was actually his choice, but that the Dean liked another speech, and he felt really bad about it. The guy who was chosen was actually a really good friend of mine and was in my a capella group, so I was actually pretty upbeat about it, despite my disappointment in not being chosen.

Fast-forward a couple weeks to commencement and, well, there's no other way to put this - my friend's speech was TERRIBLE. Guys in my row were vocally incredulous, with "is this guy fucking serious?" being the common refrain. Only one person I spoke to that day actually liked it, and that was the twelve year-old brother of one of my best friends. Other than a twelve year old, everyone else gave it a resounding "that was fucking awful."

At some point that night, as we drank through our last night on campus, I was sitting on a patio at, as chance would have it, the graduation speaker's townhouse. He was not actually home, but we had many mutual friends, including one of his roommates who I was drinking etc with that night. And after a few adult beverages etc (heavy emphasis on the etc), I got a little ragestormy about the shit speech we had to sit through and how it was terrible, and how my speech was considerably better. My friends actually had me fucking recite it, and I got thunderous applause.

And then we realized that the friend/shitty speech writer/commencement ruiner who we thought had been out at another friend's place was actually upstairs in his room right above the patio and had been listening to the whole thing.

Nice guy, actually. It's sad. We haven't spoken since.