I didn’t do the voice.
I thought about it, and it has to be said that it would have been fun if I had, but there are times when that is enough of a justification to do something and there are times when it isn’t, and this was one of those latter times. Some events call for more respect than that, and what can you do but give it?
Last night was the graduation ceremony down at Home Campus. I always like going to those, even if my role is usually just to dress the set. They line the faculty up onstage, and even though I’m mostly an advisor these days I do qualify by virtue of my occasional history class. This year we had enough graduates that we wouldn’t have fit into the theater so we held it in the gym, which I prefer. There’s more room for guests, and the logistics of it are simpler. Also, oddly enough, the lighting is better.
This is always a wonderful event. Those students have worked very hard to get to where they are, often in the face of rather long odds. These are not the sort of students who have it all laid out in front of them with a smooth and uncluttered path to tread. They’re often first-generation college students, with nobody at home who can explain the strange cultural expectations of a university. That’s a lot of what my job is, really. I tell them to think of themselves as anthropologists. It’s not a difficult culture to master, but neither is it intuitive. They almost all work outside the home, and there are only so many hours in a day. Every hour working is an hour not spent studying, after all. Many have families of their own, and the rest are often living with their families. Sometimes both at once. A lot are immigrants or the children of immigrants – the sorts of people this country should be celebrating – and they have other cultures to figure out as well. And here they are. They’ve put in the work, they’ve done what was asked – often quite well – and they’re ready to move on to the next level.
How could you not love such an event?
Plus, we keep it short. Not for Home Campus is the four-hour marathon that you find at other schools! Nope! We understand what people want in these ceremonies. They want to have a bit of ritual. They want to Do The Thing – or if they’re in the audience, to see their child/sibling/friend Do The Thing. And then they want to leave. I love that we understand and honor this.
This year I volunteered to read the names of the graduates as they walked across the stage. We do that. We’re a small campus so you can take the time to let each one be recognized by name, and they’ve earned it. Also, a lot of my advisees were graduating this year and I wanted to do that for them. I spent a fair amount of time before the ceremony walking up to various graduates and saying “Hi! I’m the guy reading your name! How do you say it?” and they’d laugh and tell me.
It occurred to me that doing this in a Pro Wrestling Announcer Voice would be a lot of fun (“And in THIS CORNER! Graduating with a DEGREE in SOCIAL WORK! JOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHNNNNNN DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOE!!”). And it would have been. But this was not an event about me and the last thing I should be doing up there was turning it into one. If I did my job right nobody would remember I was there at all. They’d only remember the graduates.
It went well. The speeches were to the point and in the spirit of things. The graduates all walked across the stage and shook hands with our Campus Dean and then with the Chancellor of the Mother Ship Campus. I didn’t mess up any name irretrievably and only two or three in small ways. The students also were allowed to have me thank people – mostly their family and friends, it turned out, and the occasional professor – but a couple of them thanked me and it was kind of strange to go Third Person and read that, but if they’re going to put it in then I figured I should honor that. And then we were all out on the lawn, taking pictures and catching up, perhaps for the last time before they scattered to their next thing.
There is nothing quite like the sheer unadulterated happiness after a graduation, when it finally hits them that they really did do that thing.
I will miss my students. You get to know them pretty well as an advisor – much more so than as a professor, in my experience. They’re good people and I’ve enjoyed talking with them. But it was time for them to move on to new things, and next year there will be new students to get to know.
And if one of them invited me to join them in a celebratory beverage after all was said and done, well, I’m not going to say no.
Some things you celebrate.
Wednesday, May 15, 2024
Monday, May 13, 2024
Frivolity and Protest
We watched the finals of Eurovision on Saturday.
Normally this would be about as controversial as watching an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and nearly as much high camp fun. Eurovision, for those of you who live in the US or in caves, is a song contest featuring one entry from each of the nations who subscribe to the European Broadcasting Union television service (which is how you get Australia and Azerbaijan, for example), though not every country makes it to the broadcast semi-finals and final. It’s a contest, after all. The songs have to be three minutes or less, and in recent years they’ve been a festival of gender-bending, pyrotechnics, strobe lights (oh, so many strobe lights – don’t even think of watching if you have any kind of seizure disorder), intricate choreography, scantily clad backup singers (mostly men this year), and thumping club beats.
It's about as substantive as a meringue, but there is room in the world for ridiculous things.
This year, however, there were Politics.
You see, Israel is one of the members of this group – home of some of the biggest advertisers, in fact. Their song made it into the semifinals. And – again, speaking to those of you living in caves – Israel has spent the last several months committing atrocities and war crimes in Gaza at a pace and scale that would be astonishing in a less angry and jaded world and which the Israeli government doesn’t seem inclined to stop despite the condemnation of pretty much every country on earth including, at long last and with no small amount of foot-dragging, the US.
On the one hand, Russia hasn’t been invited to Eurovision since their invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – another barbaric collection of war crimes and atrocities – so there is legitimate question as to why Israel was allowed to compete. And the EBU managed to make that situation even worse by cracking down on any level of dissent and banning one of the more popular performers – the guy from the Netherlands – on a separate pretext mere hours before the final though it was not unnoticed by all onlookers that he was perhaps the most outspoken critic of the decision to allow Israel to perform.
On the other hand, they were allowed to compete, and not watching the show was not going to change anything that was happening in Gaza. In my own personal experience, the fact that we were watching actually led to more and more in-depth discussion of the crisis there, so at least in this instance the calls for boycotts were a bit misplaced. Protests I understand – there’s a lot there to protest. But the Israeli government hasn’t been swayed by diplomatic isolation, moral failure, or the increasingly obvious fact that they have no strategy and no end game beyond blind destruction and counterproductive force, so I suspect that they wouldn’t be all that interested in the viewership figures from Eurovision either.
So we watched.
And all of that notwithstanding (“Yes, Mrs. Lincoln, we know, but what did you think of the play?”) it was a reasonably fun and entertaining time.
Lauren, Max, and Anita came down from Main Campus U for the evening, and eventually Nolan joined us as well. We had a fine dinner of Things You Can Eat In Front of the Television (can’t beat homemade chicken strips!), an array of snacks, and a pitcher of Aperol Spritz because it is the most summery and European of beverages. We found enough chairs for everyone.
We all agreed that the recent peak of Eurovision was 2021, perhaps because they had two years to think about the songs since the 2020 version was canceled by the plague, but there were some good songs this year as well.
Finland’s utterly goofy hard rock performance was a house favorite, though you knew going in that they weren’t going to win with it for the same reason that comedies almost never win Best Picture Oscars – they seem frivolous and when you have an event that is itself frivolous you can’t go further in that direction. There has to be contrast. The Finns should have won last year, as even the Swedish hosts seemed to admit, and it was nice to see last year’s Finnish group invited back to perform their song again.
Luxembourg had what I felt was the best of the actual contenders, and my top seven were rounded out by Norway, Italy, Croatia, France (a power ballad with an astonishing a capella section) and Estonia. I still think that San Marino got robbed for not being promoted to the final, and the Czechs deserved better as well.
On the flip side, I have no idea what the Irish singer was trying to accomplish, but that was seven motifs in search of a song and it didn’t really hold together as anything. At least it was interesting, though. A surprising number of the performances could best be described as “workmanlike” – decent songs you’d hear at a dance club without really noticing them at all.
They managed to get through the Israeli performance – another bland club song that was inexplicably popular with the voting audience – without too much damage, though not without a chorus of boos and no small amount of cold shoulders all around. So it goes.
The Swiss performer won and I suppose it wasn’t a bad song though as with last year’s winner I had it ranked 8th on my list. But I am old and out of touch, so what do I know.
Here is hoping that for next year’s show the news will have calmed down a bit, that the total level of barbarism will have declined, and that this ridiculous event will be allowed to focus on music instead of being used to highlight the atrocities of the world.
I’m not holding my breath. But one can always hope.
Normally this would be about as controversial as watching an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and nearly as much high camp fun. Eurovision, for those of you who live in the US or in caves, is a song contest featuring one entry from each of the nations who subscribe to the European Broadcasting Union television service (which is how you get Australia and Azerbaijan, for example), though not every country makes it to the broadcast semi-finals and final. It’s a contest, after all. The songs have to be three minutes or less, and in recent years they’ve been a festival of gender-bending, pyrotechnics, strobe lights (oh, so many strobe lights – don’t even think of watching if you have any kind of seizure disorder), intricate choreography, scantily clad backup singers (mostly men this year), and thumping club beats.
It's about as substantive as a meringue, but there is room in the world for ridiculous things.
This year, however, there were Politics.
You see, Israel is one of the members of this group – home of some of the biggest advertisers, in fact. Their song made it into the semifinals. And – again, speaking to those of you living in caves – Israel has spent the last several months committing atrocities and war crimes in Gaza at a pace and scale that would be astonishing in a less angry and jaded world and which the Israeli government doesn’t seem inclined to stop despite the condemnation of pretty much every country on earth including, at long last and with no small amount of foot-dragging, the US.
On the one hand, Russia hasn’t been invited to Eurovision since their invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – another barbaric collection of war crimes and atrocities – so there is legitimate question as to why Israel was allowed to compete. And the EBU managed to make that situation even worse by cracking down on any level of dissent and banning one of the more popular performers – the guy from the Netherlands – on a separate pretext mere hours before the final though it was not unnoticed by all onlookers that he was perhaps the most outspoken critic of the decision to allow Israel to perform.
On the other hand, they were allowed to compete, and not watching the show was not going to change anything that was happening in Gaza. In my own personal experience, the fact that we were watching actually led to more and more in-depth discussion of the crisis there, so at least in this instance the calls for boycotts were a bit misplaced. Protests I understand – there’s a lot there to protest. But the Israeli government hasn’t been swayed by diplomatic isolation, moral failure, or the increasingly obvious fact that they have no strategy and no end game beyond blind destruction and counterproductive force, so I suspect that they wouldn’t be all that interested in the viewership figures from Eurovision either.
So we watched.
And all of that notwithstanding (“Yes, Mrs. Lincoln, we know, but what did you think of the play?”) it was a reasonably fun and entertaining time.
Lauren, Max, and Anita came down from Main Campus U for the evening, and eventually Nolan joined us as well. We had a fine dinner of Things You Can Eat In Front of the Television (can’t beat homemade chicken strips!), an array of snacks, and a pitcher of Aperol Spritz because it is the most summery and European of beverages. We found enough chairs for everyone.
We all agreed that the recent peak of Eurovision was 2021, perhaps because they had two years to think about the songs since the 2020 version was canceled by the plague, but there were some good songs this year as well.
Finland’s utterly goofy hard rock performance was a house favorite, though you knew going in that they weren’t going to win with it for the same reason that comedies almost never win Best Picture Oscars – they seem frivolous and when you have an event that is itself frivolous you can’t go further in that direction. There has to be contrast. The Finns should have won last year, as even the Swedish hosts seemed to admit, and it was nice to see last year’s Finnish group invited back to perform their song again.
Luxembourg had what I felt was the best of the actual contenders, and my top seven were rounded out by Norway, Italy, Croatia, France (a power ballad with an astonishing a capella section) and Estonia. I still think that San Marino got robbed for not being promoted to the final, and the Czechs deserved better as well.
On the flip side, I have no idea what the Irish singer was trying to accomplish, but that was seven motifs in search of a song and it didn’t really hold together as anything. At least it was interesting, though. A surprising number of the performances could best be described as “workmanlike” – decent songs you’d hear at a dance club without really noticing them at all.
They managed to get through the Israeli performance – another bland club song that was inexplicably popular with the voting audience – without too much damage, though not without a chorus of boos and no small amount of cold shoulders all around. So it goes.
The Swiss performer won and I suppose it wasn’t a bad song though as with last year’s winner I had it ranked 8th on my list. But I am old and out of touch, so what do I know.
Here is hoping that for next year’s show the news will have calmed down a bit, that the total level of barbarism will have declined, and that this ridiculous event will be allowed to focus on music instead of being used to highlight the atrocities of the world.
I’m not holding my breath. But one can always hope.
Saturday, May 4, 2024
News and Updates
1. So apparently I can receive email at the address on the sidebar but I can’t actually respond to it. This has been going on for a while and I thought I’d gotten that resolved only to discover that I had not. I will have to get that looked at again to see if I can find a solution. In the meantime, thank you for the kind words, Llana! I did get your message.
2. We’re done with classes down at Home Campus and this coming week will be the end of classes for Remote Campus and as much as I enjoy teaching and advising and seeing my students I have to admit I’m looking forward to the break.
3. Standing between me and that break there is a pile of grading and at least one new lecture to write. Last year my US2 class stopped at 2008, and I’d really like to get to the Trump Insurrection while I’m still legally able to discuss it (in the event that der Sturmtrumper seizes power again I suspect that all sorts of things will be declared crimes against the state) but it looks like I will run out of time around 2016 this year. We’ll see how much I want to condense. I have all sorts of things I need to put in to make that discussion thorough and I’ve been trying to organize it all over the last couple of weeks, and to be honest it really hasn’t done my blood pressure any favors.
4. Don’t you think he looks tired?
5. And can we just skip ahead to the part with the Daleks now?
6. Summer plans are afoot, and if all goes well there will be quite the variety of things to write about, though that will depend on energy levels and advisability. This is a billboard, after all, not a diary.
7. I am not sure why the cat insists on hollering at us at 6:40am. It isn’t food – we have the feeder set to go off at 6:30 and it does – I hear it go off a minute or so after my alarm does. It’s not that she wants company, since I come down around 7 and she ends up hollering again at 7:10 or so. She is old and not that bright and who knows what goes on in the mind of a cat in the best of times.
8. I find myself on yet another hiring committee, and while it is a necessary thing and it seems to be going well it is, in the end, one more thing on a long list of things. I do miss my carefully maintained anonymity when it came to being tagged for committees. I suspect it will not return.
9. I don’t watch much television these days, not out of any particular objection to doing so but more because I find it makes me uncomfortable and I have to go somewhere else and do other things. I’m not sure why. I can certainly stare at a computer screen indefinitely, so it’s not as simple as screen time. And there are many objectively good things being aired right now, as I discover when I do force myself to sit through some of the things that Kim watches (Stanley Tucci is a marvel, and that’s all there is to say about that). I keep hoping this will change, but it has been over a decade now and so far it has not. We'll see.
10. I may have found a recipe for pasta amatriciana that actually works, and there are few things in the world better than stumbling into a good recipe.
2. We’re done with classes down at Home Campus and this coming week will be the end of classes for Remote Campus and as much as I enjoy teaching and advising and seeing my students I have to admit I’m looking forward to the break.
3. Standing between me and that break there is a pile of grading and at least one new lecture to write. Last year my US2 class stopped at 2008, and I’d really like to get to the Trump Insurrection while I’m still legally able to discuss it (in the event that der Sturmtrumper seizes power again I suspect that all sorts of things will be declared crimes against the state) but it looks like I will run out of time around 2016 this year. We’ll see how much I want to condense. I have all sorts of things I need to put in to make that discussion thorough and I’ve been trying to organize it all over the last couple of weeks, and to be honest it really hasn’t done my blood pressure any favors.
4. Don’t you think he looks tired?
5. And can we just skip ahead to the part with the Daleks now?
6. Summer plans are afoot, and if all goes well there will be quite the variety of things to write about, though that will depend on energy levels and advisability. This is a billboard, after all, not a diary.
7. I am not sure why the cat insists on hollering at us at 6:40am. It isn’t food – we have the feeder set to go off at 6:30 and it does – I hear it go off a minute or so after my alarm does. It’s not that she wants company, since I come down around 7 and she ends up hollering again at 7:10 or so. She is old and not that bright and who knows what goes on in the mind of a cat in the best of times.
8. I find myself on yet another hiring committee, and while it is a necessary thing and it seems to be going well it is, in the end, one more thing on a long list of things. I do miss my carefully maintained anonymity when it came to being tagged for committees. I suspect it will not return.
9. I don’t watch much television these days, not out of any particular objection to doing so but more because I find it makes me uncomfortable and I have to go somewhere else and do other things. I’m not sure why. I can certainly stare at a computer screen indefinitely, so it’s not as simple as screen time. And there are many objectively good things being aired right now, as I discover when I do force myself to sit through some of the things that Kim watches (Stanley Tucci is a marvel, and that’s all there is to say about that). I keep hoping this will change, but it has been over a decade now and so far it has not. We'll see.
10. I may have found a recipe for pasta amatriciana that actually works, and there are few things in the world better than stumbling into a good recipe.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)