The Car Crash that is Graduation

By Mink

So my little sister graduated college yesterday, a lovely occasion. Well not exactly, I'm certainly proud of the kid even if we had our doubts. The sis and I recently had a lunch convo that went something like this:

Cum Laude graduate: Jon, I got a job as a teacher in Los Angeles and I'm moving this summer.
Me: Fantastic. I am so proud of you being all grownz up.
Cum Laude: Yeah so I need a car. Can you buy a new one and I take yours.
Me: Nah sorry I don't have the cash for that now and besides it would never make the trip out there since the brakes and engine are on life support not to mention the defroster isn't operational.
Cum Laude: Well I wouldn't need to drive it out there, I could just ship it.
Me: True, but that's kind of expensive
Cum Laude: Really? I thought its cheap to send them out there by boat?
Me: Boat? You sure about that?
Cum Laude: Yeah isn't that how they ship em?
Me: Over what body of water?
Cum Laude: The gulf of Mexico?

Anyway, even if her geography is more than a little remedial she was going to get a diploma, so I felt like she earned the right to make her family sit through something that is about as painful as being in a car crash only far less exciting. (my co-blogger's brother also graduated but the graduate himself made the wise choice to skip the 2 hour torture session)

The way it works at UMD is that each department holds its own graduation and the sister was going to be receiving a degree in History (even if she also thinks that California is where the constitution was written). To add to the brutally long commencement address by one of the professors we also had to endure an elaborate description of each of the PHD graduates fine work. Now don't get me wrong, if I wrote a scholarly 535 page PHD paper entitled: "Married to Empire: Ruling Class Masculinity, and the Asexual Ideal in Late Victorian Britain," besides becoming asexual myself I would also demand that a room full of proud family members and graduates with no plans of advanced history degrees be subject to hearing all about why Queen Victoria never turned in her V-card and how that influenced an entire generation.

But since it was clear that they weren't handing me a PHD, I joined the rest of the audience in staring at my cuticles as each PHD advisor got up there to share the enthralling highlights of each paper. Basically the only things that saved me from my ripping out my upper back hair were cell phone text messaging and the asanine word associations that my brother and I started doing with the graduate's names on the program. My two favorite names in the whole graduating class were: Elizabeth Woodhead Nutting (comments to yourself) and Ashley Tease.

After two grueling hours the misery was over and we could now eat. Sure, the rents and grandrents were proud and even emotional but I am pretty confident that a ceremony consisting solely of the awarding the diplomas followed by some photograph taking would've produced the same effect. I turned to my brother at the end of the debacle and informed him that he would need to switch from his Biology major over to Physical Education if he wanted me to even consider attending his graduation.