Hats Off

I am precisely the wrong level of bald these days.

There was a time when I had a thick head of hair, the sort of hair that required thinning every time I went to a barber in order to keep it under control. That time was very long ago, however, and it isn’t coming back. I am okay with this. I may not age gracefully, but I will age openly.

We spent about two hours way up at the top of the football stadium for Lauren’s graduation a couple of weeks ago. While it was not a hot day the way it could have been it was definitely a cloudless and sunny day, and when you are that far up in a stadium there is no cover. You are just out there in the bright sunshine, eyes focused downward toward the field, head exposed to the sun.

I do not like wearing hats when it is warmer than about 50F (10C). They’re just not comfortable in those conditions. I bought a summer hat in Rome a couple of years ago because it was 101F (38C) under vibrantly clear blue skies the entire time we were there and it was impressed upon me that a hat would be bought either by me or for me and that if I wanted any say in the matter I would choose the former option. It was a fairly nice looking straw hat shaped more or less like a fedora and I probably paid more for it than I should have because I got it from a guy selling things from a cart on a Roman street during tourist season and that’s just how that works, but it served me well until I got to the Bari airport and left it in security because I’m not used to wearing hats in the summertime and as soon as I put it on the conveyor belt to go through the scanner it vanished entirely from my memory and the next time I thought about it I was in an entirely different (and rather cooler) country.

We went back to Rome the following year and I did not buy a replacement hat. It went okay anyway.

The hats I actually own here at home are either winter hats or baseball caps, the latter emblazoned with pretty much every conceivable logo except that of a baseball team, as is the American habit, though I do have a couple of those as well. They’re not really warm-weather hats, in my opinion.

All of this is to say that I spent my time way up at the top of that stadium in the bright sunshine without a hat.

The problem, of course, is that I still have too much hair to just slather my head with sunscreen the way I could do if I were balder but not nearly enough hair to protect my head from the sun the way it could in the Before times.

The results were, shall we say, predictable.

Fortunately there weren’t any lasting consequences that have made themselves apparent so far. It was slightly uncomfortable for a few days, and then there was a long period of healing which was actually more uncomfortable in some ways. I think I’m good now. I have a baseline tan on the top of my head in preparation for a summer of sun and I suppose that’s not a bad thing either.

But I may need to buy another of those straw fedoras.

1BR Safari

It has been a very long time since I went apartment hunting.

The last time I did that was in 1993 when I moved to Iowa. I was living in Pittsburgh at the time and planning to start my PhD program so that April I flew out to Cedar Rapids, rented a car, and drove down to a motel in Iowa City where I stayed for a few days and saw as many apartments as I could fit into my schedule. On the plus side, I ended up with a very nice apartment with good neighbors and a kind landlord and I lived there for the entire time I was in Iowa City. On the down side, I got into a minor fender bender with the rental car in the motel parking lot and when I turned on the news later that night a good chunk of Waco TX had burned down. So it was kind of a mixed bag as far as the experience went.

Oliver is going to graduate school in the fall for his MA and since he has no experience in apartment hunting and Kim was tied down with various work commitments this week it fell to me to go with him as the Experienced Hand in this matter, experience being a relative thing. He and Kim had gone out a few weeks ago to attend a conference there and meet the folks in his new department and they’d had a lovely time of it, so it seemed fair that it would be my turn to visit the place anyway.

We drove out yesterday, checked into the hotel, and scouted out a couple of places that he’d found on Zillow or other similar things that didn’t exist the last time I had to do this. It’s a brave new world out there. We found them pretty easily and checked out the neighborhoods, which all seemed fine, before deciding that it was dinner time. After a rigorous process of figuring out what was a) enticing and b) within walking distance of the hotel we settled on a lovely little ramen place and it was only after we’d sat down at the table that Oliver realized this was the exact place he’d gone with Kim the last time he was there despite them staying at a different and much more distant hotel. Same table, in fact. Good food, though – you have to give them that. We also walked around the downtown for a bit. It's a bit ragged around the edges but lively and interesting, and that's not a bad thing for a downtown.

Today we looked at the insides of the apartments.

There are a lot of very small apartments in that town, all of which are on the second floor and only accessible by staircases barely wider than I am which will make moving furniture an interesting proposition in much the same way that three-headed frogs are … interesting. We will tell those tales for a long time, though, no doubt.

We had some time between viewings and as the day wore on we occupied ourselves with lunch (not the ramen place again, though we did briefly consider it), a visit to the world’s least organized used book store, quick stop into a Middle Eastern grocery, a scouting expedition to a supermarket to see what they had, and a tour of the campus in search of visitor parking which we eventually found enough of to take a quick look at the student union, the library, and Oliver’s department. I bought a mug at the bookstore in the student union for my collection because it seemed appropriate. I have mugs for every college Lauren and Oliver have attended now.

Eventually Oliver settled on an apartment – the last one we looked at, which was a very nice little studio in a bright purple house – and then we headed home.

It’s starting to get more real for all of us now.

In a couple of months Oliver will be off to the next phase of his life, and with Lauren pursuing her own graduate degree this means that Kim and I will be empty nesters for real. We’ve had a couple of trial runs at that, and I have to say I was always glad to have them back for however long they stayed with us. A family fills a home with noise and activity, and there’s a space left open when that goes away. But that is the order of things. They're supposed to do that.

There will be visits and stories, though, and those will be good.

Celebrating the Graduate

We’re getting to be pretty good at these graduation parties. Experience helps.

When Lauren graduated from Main Campus University a couple of weeks ago we asked her what she wanted for her graduation party and she said she wanted pretty much what we did for her high school graduation party, except without the bouncy house. We are all older now and considerably less bouncy than we used to be, after all, and this seemed a wise choice.

Plus, it’s not like we had the bouncy house for her high school party either. It was arranged and ready to go, but at 6:30am on the day of the party the rental place called and pointed my attention to the forecast (notably the phrase “high winds”) and canceled on us. In the end the winds stayed away and we had a good party without it.

This year we figured we’d skip the middleman and just not worry about it.

So we set about to organizing one (1) Midwestern Graduation Party (tm). I have to say that this is one of the nicer traditions I’ve discovered since moving to this part of the country and I’m kind of sorry we didn’t do this sort of thing in the Philadelphia area when I was graduating from various institutions of secondary and higher education. Basically it’s an open house. You fire up the grill and cook burgers, dogs, and brats for those who wish them – and as has become standard for our version of this festival, we contacted one of our local Mexican restaurants, one of the ones where you go in and discover you’re the only one speaking English in the entire place, and bought many pounds of birria, asada, and al pastor for a taco bar to go with it all – and then clear out the garage and set up the buffet in there. Side dishes tend to accumulate, large bowls of various kinds of chips and dips appear at the far end of the table, drinks are put into carefully separated coolers (Soft Drinks, Water/Seltzer, and Alcohol) and there’s a veggie tray for people who like to pretend this can be a healthy meal and a sheet cake for the rest of us.

We sent out graduation announcements with invitations on the back even before Lauren graduated. Kim and I cleared out the local Costco a week or so ago and then spent much of the intervening time obtaining all of the things that we either didn’t think to buy there or decided to get somewhere else where the minimum purchase unit was not the pallet. Friday and Saturday we got the place ready, de-shamble-izing the garage, setting up chairs and tables, prepping all the things that couldn’t really be prepped too far in advance, and waiting for people to show up.

And show up they did!

We had Family!

We had the Parent Friends, though to be honest there’s not much of a gap between those and the Graduate Friends or the Family since we all tend to get along.

And there were, as noted, the Graduate Friends, most of whom were people from Our Little Town and their partners, since the difference between a college graduation and a high school graduation is how many of the people taking part in the former ceremony have come from other places and not Here. People scatter. We are always happy to see old friends, though. Some of them have more or less grown up at our house anyway.

Although several of Lauren’s friends from the martini bar where she works just off campus made the journey down as well, and that was kind of them.

They brought with them a bottle of 138-proof dark rum that I actually liked, which was a huge surprise to me since I generally don’t like rum at all. Perhaps it has been long enough since I tried it that I should do some investigating on this subject.

People came and stayed for a bit, shared some food and stories, and moved on while others came in to do the same thing, as befits an open house. We had a lovely time of it. Some escaped the camera, some didn’t.

Eventually the party broke into three groups. Lauren and much of the Graduate Friends group walked over to the local soft-serve ice cream place for a while before returning briefly and then heading out for their own celebrations, which you can do once you reach a certain age in this country. Oliver and some of his friends hung out in the garage for a bit trading stories about the old days – stories that at some point required reference to yearbooks for corroboration. Kim and I joined for a little bit, as did Lauren and the ice cream group, but mostly we and some of the Parent Friends went inside where it was notably warmer and traded our stories there for a while.

Many people pitched in to help bring the food inside but beyond that we didn’t worry too much about cleaning up until this morning. It had been a fine and memorable party, and the chairs would still be there in the driveway when the sun came back up.

Congratulations Lauren! I’m proud of you.

Commence and Be Recognized

We had our commencement ceremony down at Home Campus the other night. You should have been there.

One of the things that I like about our campus is that we still have our own ceremony even after we were absorbed into the Mother Ship Campus a few years ago. MSC has their ceremony a few days before ours – they have two, in fact, because they don’t have an indoor space big enough to have it all at once – and then we have ours. They send some of the top administrative people down to our ceremony because they’ve been good about supporting us, but mostly it’s just us in the gym because we can fit more people into the audience than if we hold it in the theater and you want to share this moment with as many people as you can.

It's a fairly compact ceremony for all that. A welcome. A few speeches. The names. One of the things we figured out a while ago is that people want to come and See The People Do The Thing and then leave so we moved most of the awards to a separate ceremony a bit earlier in the month and just focus on the graduates for this one. The whole commencement clocks in at about an hour and a quarter, which is pretty much exactly the right amount of time for it – not so brief as to feel like we’re skimping on the graduates, but not so long as to drag on.

For the second year in a row it’s been my job to read the names of the graduates as they walk across the stage, which is a lovely job to have. They hand me a card with their names, their plans, and any thank-yous they want me to announce as they walk onto the stage, and then they get their moment to shake hands with the bigwigs and be applauded by their family and friends. They’ve worked hard to be standing there. Many of them never thought they would get that far – some never thought they’d go to college at all – and they should be recognized by name for their achievements.

Not all of our students make it to graduation, of course. Some find that college isn’t for them. Some transfer before they earn their degree. Some get the degree but decide that the ceremony just isn’t something they want to do. Some graduated a while ago – everyone from the December grads to the August grads marches in May – and are long gone from the area. Some have families, jobs, and events that have higher priority for their time. But many of them march, because rituals matter and it’s good to stop for a bit and acknowledge the progress you’ve made.

It's a small campus, so we know them. I had 29 advisees eligible to walk across the stage, and good chunk of them decided to come to the ceremony, which means I had a significant percentage of the students there that night. I work in an intensive advising program so I get to know them better than most and it’s always such a lovely thing to see them there. A few former students came back as well – some for their siblings because we’re that kind of place, and others just because. It was good to catch up with them afterward.

This is why we do this.

This is why we have the appointments and remind them of the deadlines and fill out the forms that they need fill out to fix whatever went wrong or grant permission for the things they want to try. This is why we have the staff meetings and the trainings for new systems and old problems and different ways to try things.

All for this night. All to see them rewarded for the work they put in and to send them off to the next thing in their lives.

Congratulations to the graduates!

And don’t be strangers, y’hear?

Looking at the World Through Eurovision

We spent a good chunk of last week watching Eurovision because it is a pointlessly enjoyable thing and there should be more of those in this world.

For those of you who have not had the pleasure, it’s basically a song contest. It’s been running since 1956, and every country that subscribes to some vague European television consortium gets to submit a song. This is why Australia and most of the Caucasus countries are members. They have two semi-finals and a final, all held in the country that won the last one. The host country and the five biggest sponsors (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK) all get a free pass to the final but the others have to get through on the combined votes of national juries and popular voting. The acts tend to be power ballads, Nordic heavy metal, a few comic relief numbers, and enough high camp and gender fluidity to pucker the asshole of every Republican in North Carolina. The winner gets a strange looking glass trophy, the adulation of the crowd, a huge recording contract to be named later (one assumes), and the national responsibility for hosting all of this the following year.

There’s always a strange undercurrent to it, though.

Most obviously, even though it is supposed to be nonpolitical it never is. It really can’t be, when you think about it. Russia has justifiably not been allowed back since it invaded Ukraine and it was no accident that Ukraine was declared the winner the following year in what was the most obvious sympathy vote in history. Why Israel is allowed to participate after nearly two full years of genocidal war crimes in Gaza when Russia remains banned is therefore a mystery for the ages – from a moral standpoint there is precious little to distinguish them and what little there is makes Israel look worse.

And before anyone gets cranked up at me about that, my advice to you is not to do that.

I grew up in a Jewish area, where the public schools got Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana off. Many of my friends, two of my first three girlfriends, and an entire branch of my family are Jewish. I am therefore extremely well aware that the sovereign state of Israel is emphatically not the same thing as the Jewish people, the Jewish faith, or Jewish culture and can and should be judged separately on its own actions like any other nation state. The idea that criticism of Israel automatically amounts to antisemitism is morally leprous and anyone making that argument should feel shame unto the third generation for even bringing such nonsense into the public sphere.

What the sovereign state of Israel is doing in Gaza is genocide, pure and simple. They went far beyond what they were permitted by reasonable self-defense within weeks of the Hamas assault that started this round of violence between them. There is no theory of self-defense that allows a nation to go out of its way to starve children and deliberately assassinate medical workers. The mere fact that the sovereign state of Israel was allowed to send an act was a travesty.

We did our best to ignore that act, which it turned out wasn’t all that hard since it was the sort of nondescript song that mid-level FM radio stations use to fill up the gaps between commercials without having to shell out too much for royalties. Even on its merits it was meh.

How it got so many votes is therefore rather curious and I look forward to a transparent explanation for this, since that did not match what I saw or what I’ve heard since from others. I suspect the Eurovision organizers breathed a sigh of relief when it did not win, though, as otherwise next year’s event would have been the smallest on record.

The other acts, though? Those were a lot of fun.

The 70s were back this year in both costuming and hair styling, though oddly enough the outfits were surprisingly modest all around. No, I’m not talking about the Finns. Or Malta. Or the Danes. Or the Spanish. But for the most part? Fairly tame.

My favorites this year were the Swiss song (an endearingly lovely ballad), the Italian song (another quiet song that contained the immortal line “Living life is a child’s game, mother would tell me as I fell out of trees”) and the Latvian song (absolutely killer harmonies), but there were a bunch more that I enjoyed thoroughly. I almost always like the German song, seemingly alone in the world sometimes.

Coming in on the comic relief side, you had Estonia’s deliriously skewed paean to Italy (“Espresso Macchiato”) with the priceless line “Life is like spaghetti – it’s hard until you make it,” the Swedish song (an ode to saunas), and the Australian song (a double-entendre-filled love song about milkshakes that somehow didn’t make it through to the final). The Icelanders looked like they were 12 and deserved more points than they got.

I kept a running list of favorites in order as I watched. Of course I did. There’s a reason I ended up in academia.

The Austrian song won in the end, and while it wasn’t my favorite I did enjoy it – it was a definite WOW moment of a performance and probably the only time a countertenor operatic solo has taken home the trophy. There can’t have been too many of those over the last seven decades of competition, can there? Surely not.

We celebrated Mother’s Day yesterday and since Kim is a huge Eurovision fan and the reason the rest of us have gotten into it that’s mostly what we did – we tried to cut ourselves off from social media enough to avoid finding out the results and watched the replay of the final on Sunday, and then we had homemade pizzas to celebrate because Mother’s Day is a good holiday to celebrate.

Eurovision is one of those grand and goofy events that defy explanation, that seems to succeed in spite of its best efforts not to, and which no matter how much you think you won’t you know you will in fact watch it again next year because of course you will, and there is some redemption in that after all.

News and Updates

1. The semester is now officially over and there is nothing left but the graduating, which is always a good place to be. I turned in the last of my grades this afternoon. I’ll miss those students – they’re all most of the way across the state and some of them I’ve had for the entire year, and I’ll not be seeing them again unless something very unusual happens. My advisees down at Home Campus who are graduating I will see at least once more, most of them, but then they’re off as well. It’s the circle of academic life, I suppose.

2. I won’t miss all of them, though, particularly in my other class. AI has made a qualitative leap forward in the last few months and I have had too many performances of the Academic Integrity Song & Dance routine because of that. AI is making people exponentially more stupid in a way that you can actually track in real time, and having a front-row seat to that debacle has been dispiriting at best.

3. We may need to call it a day for Oliver’s tree. When Oliver was a baby there was a huge straight-line windstorm that blew through Our Little Town and wiped out dozens of trees in our neighborhood, so one of the local tree-centered alliances offered to plant a tree in the terrace of everyone who asked and we ended up with a European hornbeam. It grew pretty well until a couple of years ago when the neighbor’s maple tree split and had to be removed and from then on our tree had no protection from the storms and high winds that seem to be more and more common these days. It lost its top third a few weeks after that, and today when I came home from work after two solid days of high winds and occasional storms both of the major branches on the north side were either on the ground or hanging by a thread. We’ll take the latter one off and see if the tree survives or not, but I’m not really optimistic. It was a nice little tree. Still is, at least for now.

4. I’m not much of a bicycle person. I haven’t ridden one for more than five minutes at a go in decades, and while I am a fan of a fair number of rather niche sports (curling, for example), long-distance cycling races have never been my thing. But after I got home from last summer’s visit to the Italian hill town where my great-grandparents were born I signed up for the town Facebook page and it’s been nice being able to keep up with the place and have that connection. A couple of weeks ago they announced that the Giro d’Italia – the Italian version of the Tour de France, as near as I can tell, or maybe the Tour is the French version of the Giro – would be passing right down the main street of Ruoti on May 15. Given the time differences there was no chance of me seeing it live, but when I got home from work yesterday I found the replay of that stage (complete with vibrantly Irish announcers for some reason) and watched until I saw things I recognized. It was really lovely to see the riders zip along the crowd-lined street and think, “I know that place! I have met some of those people!” It is the sense of connection that makes us human, I think, and you need that reminder now and then. Buon giorno, Ruoti!

5. I’m not Catholic, but I suspect I’m going to like this new Pope.

This is on top of the fact that, as a Villanova University graduate, he may be the first pope in history to have ever eaten a genuine cheesesteak. Chicago has claimed him, but that’s just an accident of birth. He went to the Philadelphia metro area voluntarily.

6. Now that the semester is over I have time to look at the things we’re planning for the summer and I think I will rest when classes start up again in the fall. It’s going to be that kind of summer. All good things, mind you, and in the end I will be glad I did them. But very, very busy.

7. I am mystified by spreadsheets. If I play my cards right I will retire before ever being asked to learn Microsoft Excel in any systematic or in depth sort of way. There are a lot of computer programs that I feel that way about, to be honest, but Excel is the only one that I get asked to use at work. It took me a decade to figure out how to freeze the first column of a spreadsheet, and every time I want to sort anything I have to spend fifteen minutes relearning how. So I leave the spreadsheets to Kim, as she enjoys them. Much of our summer is sitting on at least four different spreadsheets now and it’s all rather overwhelming.

8. This is the year when I may not actually bother with my annual Books Read post. I’m just not reading much these days. If I hurry, I may finish my fifth book soon – one per month, in other words – which just three or four years ago was something I did by the end of January. It’s been a time. There’s a great little meme that floats by my social media feed a lot recently where the original post is lamenting how little they accomplish nowadays and then “the tiny me in OSHA-approved Hi-Vis Gear who lives in my brain and pulls all the levers” says, “Boss, it’s the fascism.” Yeah, I feel that.

9. On the other hand, I hope springs eternal and it turns out that Christopher Moore and Fredrik Backman have both published new books this year so perhaps things will rebound. No promises.

10. The hockey playoffs are continuing even though my Flyers didn’t get anywhere near them. The Premier League has a few more weeks to go and Wolves won’t actually be relegated as looked all but certain in January. Eurovision has returned with its usual assortment of camp, gender fluidity, power ballads, lasers, and inexplicable voting decisions and that will likely get a post of its own soon because sometimes you just have to spend some time talking about the harmlessly weird things that entertain you. Home Campus had its semi-annual potluck this week and you cannot go wrong with a potluck in the midwest. My Wordle streak and Spelling Bee “Genius” streak are still alive and I am learning by osmosis what a Pikman Bloom is even if I am not personally involved in that quest. There is good in this world, after all.

A Graduation in May

We spent most of the weekend up at Main Campus University because after four years of hard work and fond memories, Lauren is now a college graduate.

On the one hand this does not surprise me in the least. She has put in the work, handled the responsibilities and done well there, and as someone who works in higher education myself I know how this process goes. If you do those things for long enough they will hand you a diploma. On the other hand, even as a professional historian it does sometimes sneak up on me how quickly the time goes by.

There were two ceremonies, when all was said and done.

Oliver, Kim and I headed up on Friday for the small ceremony – the one that was for the people in Lauren’s specific program. MCU is a very, very big place – big enough that they might have named the movie franchise after it, for all I know – and it’s good that they have these human-scale ceremonies where each graduate gets recognized by name and everyone gets to see them up close.

Parking around MCU is never easy and on a day where almost every sub-unit of the place was having a ceremony for their own graduates at the same time that the first-year students were moving out of the dorms it was particularly tricky, which is why I ended up dropping Kim and Oliver off a short walk from the site of the ceremony and then venturing off to find a place to deposit the vehicle. Fortunately I know where the lots are and knew there’d be one with space. Unfortunately there reason it had space is because it was in the next county over. But I am a fairly fast walker, so I made it to the ceremony with plenty of time to spare.

I got in a lot of steps this weekend. It is healthy to see your child graduate, it turns out.

It was a lovely ceremony. For these events they let you all sit interspersed with the graduates and each other and we sat at a table with a couple of Lauren’s friends and their families, noshing on the provided tasties and generally enjoying ourselves while waiting for the event to begin.

Eventually someone official went up to the podium and there was a welcome message or two, after which they called up all of the graduate students being awarded their degrees and then the dozen or so undergraduates with this particular major. The department chair handed them a certificate and posed for pictures, and we all applauded. I like that they call the students up by name. There is a lot of work that goes into this moment, and these students should be recognized for it.

Afterward there was much milling about and happy conversation, some posing for pictures, and a general sense that this was, indeed a very good day.

It was a gorgeous late spring day – the kind of day that makes you think you should just hang out and enjoy the sunshine – and we took full advantage of it by wandering around the campus, taking photos at various places, and generally basking in the glow of Lauren’s achievement.

The first stop, of course, was the Terrace by the lake because that’s what MCU is known for. It’s a vibrant place, and after a while we found some seats and ate the chocolate covered strawberries that they’d told us we could take as we were leaving the ceremony because they don’t really keep and someone should eat them, right?

From there we walked up the hill to the Lincoln statue. Every college should have a Lincoln statue.

It’s interesting how even with as often as we’ve been to this campus there are still a few places we’d never visited and Lauren took us around to some of her haunts. We spent some time in a quiet classroom in the building where her Department is mostly located and mostly just enjoyed ourselves in conversation. There’s a nice little courtyard right outside of the building that I’d never seen before, and it’s a nice place to spend time.

Eventually we started to get hungry for dinner, though, and Lauren had requested that we go to her favorite little spot on campus – a low-key and friendly Peruvian place where the food is good and the vibes are better and we had a grand time hanging out, just the four of us. This is how many of our best moments as a family are spent, after all, gathered around a table filled with good food, talking about everything and nothing in particular.

They had a backdrop on the wall where you could get your picture taken and they’d put you on their Instagram story, and how could anyone turn that down?

We rode the bus back to the car after that, took Lauren home briefly so she could drop off her stuff and then deposited her at a friend’s gathering before heading home.

Saturday started a bit earlier, and it was just me and Kim heading up to the big ceremony at the football stadium. Oliver had work to do – he knew he could only go to one of the ceremonies and chose the more human-scale one, which was a good choice. We were all suitably attired for the day, however.

Kim and I went straight to the same remote parking lot because we knew that was where we’d end up anyway and then met up with Lauren’s roommates Aleksia and Anita at their apartment. Eventually we gathered up a pretty good sized crew and then hiked over to the stadium.

MCU has been holding graduation ceremonies for more than a century and a half now. They’ve seen this one coming since September and no doubt by sometime last month they had a fair handle on how many of the roughly ten thousand graduates were likely to attend and based on that, at least from a statistical perspective, how many guests they would probably have invited to see them graduate. Somehow, though, word of this did not reach the people planning the actual event, and getting into the stadium was quite an experience for both guests and, according to Lauren, graduates as well. It took us nearly 45 minutes to get into the stadium once we’d gotten in line and then only because they started opening other gates for us right before the ceremony started, and we ended up sitting about three rows from the very top of the stadium.

Admittedly the view was spectacular from that vantage, and the weather was glorious – breezy and mild, though with enough bright sunshine to sunburn the unwary if they weren’t careful. If you look carefully, you can see Lauren in the very last row of the block of students second from the right at the back of the graduates. She’s the blonde one.

We couldn’t hear much from our vantage point – it was kind of like being in Charlie Brown’s classroom, in some ways (WAA-wa-WAA-wa-WAAAAAaaaa) – but apparently the sound was much better further down and the graduates could hear pretty well. They laughed and applauded in what seemed like the right places, anyway. The speeches were subtitled on the big screen so we could follow along, and they were livestreamed as well. At one point Kim actually logged in and listened to the main speaker that way. He seemed to understand the assignment, which is always a good thing in a graduation speaker.

At the three-quarter mark we all did the Jump Around, because that’s what you do at MCU.

And at the end they shot off fireworks, which were very impressive but they didn’t think too carefully about where the wind was blowing and for a while you couldn’t see anything inside the stadium, and that’s probably as good a signal that you should be leaving as any, really.  They piped us out to the tune of Pink Pony Club.

After an abortive attempt to meet up at a local landmark after the ceremony was defeated by the sheer weight of the crowd, we went back to Lauren’s apartment and mostly just hung out for the afternoon. Anita’s parents were there, as was Chase, and Owen stopped by with green-tea shots. We got take-out wings for lunch because we could do that – my guess is that every sit-down restaurant in the county was probably jammed with parents and graduates at that moment so take-out seemed the best option and who can say no to good wings? – and enjoyed ourselves.

For dinner we had reservations far enough outside of town to escape the graduation crush, at a Genuine Wisconsin Supper Club – the sort of place where the salad bar has iceberg lettuce and Bacos and you get the prime rib because that’s what you do and it's good. We met Kim’s parents and brother there, as well as Aleksia, Chase, and Kyler, and it was a lovely time indeed.

We stopped at a supermarket on the way back into town to stock up because even graduates have to eat, and eventually we dropped Lauren off at her place and went back home, tired but happy.

Congratulations, Lauren. You worked hard and did well, and I’m proud of you.

News and Updates

1. So it looks like these quick posts are the best I’m going to do for the moment. What can I say? It’s been that kind of time.

2. I keep thinking I’ll get to another Further Notes From the Coup post but every day is another avalanche of Fascism and right now I just don’t have the time or spoons to write about it. All I’m going to say is that if you’re not incandescently angry about the ongoing and fully intentional destruction of the American republic from within you’re not paying attention.

3. Today was my annual day to try to care about horse racing. It’s not that I have anything against the sport other than the fact that the main actors involved are all people with way too much money and not nearly enough social skills, and the people I know who enjoy watching this sort of thing are perfectly fine. But horses have never done much for me and watching them run does even less. Nevertheless, every year we sit down and watch the Kentucky Derby because why not? It’s a whole day of buildup for about 2 minutes of action which is kind of like … uh … never mind … but the actual race is kind of fun to watch. This year they held it in a swamp and by the time it was over everything was so covered in mud that nobody could actually tell who won other than it wasn’t the horse I picked at random right before the race because the horses I choose generally take several days to finish. If you go to Louisville right now and see a horse rounding the third turn in the dark, that’s probably the one I was cheering for.

4. I spent much of today making stuffed shells, a process that requires me to make gravy (spaghetti sauce to the uninitiated) beforehand, and now my house smells like my childhood. I suppose there are worse things it could smell like.

5. The semester is rapidly coming to an end and pretty soon the chaos and activity of summer will descend upon me. At some point I really do need to clear out my office as it is a mass of paper and vague intentions.

6. I should also mow the lawn. Perhaps tomorrow. It is a task that offers no rewards at all, but at some point you realize that it is approaching harvest height and needs to be chopped down. But the pollinators, I cry! Yeah, right, says the City. Cut the grass.

7. We’ve been back to working in the office for almost four years now and somehow I still haven’t quite remembered how to pack a lunch. It’s always such a scramble in the morning. I don’t remember it being that much of a trial before the pandemic, but then that was another world.

8. It is a strange thing working in higher education in a country whose pig-ignorant rulers are determined to destroy every vestige of independent thought and scholarship. At this point it is entirely likely that I will not have a job in the fall and that this will be the least of my problems. If I suddenly stop posting, have someone check El Salvador for me.

9. In the last two weeks it has been anywhere from 28F (-3C) to 85F (30C) here in Our Little Town. It has rained. The sun has shone. The next town over got baseball-sized hail. So far no tornadoes, though the sirens did go off at one point. It's been a time.

10. I put up a little poll every Monday morning in the lobby area where my office is, and students and staff have gotten into the habit of coming by to cast their vote – they put their hash marks down, and sometimes add answers to the ones I listed and then those get hash marks of their own. It’s a nice little distraction and it gets people talking a bit. Last week’s poll was a question about what you would do if you discovered the True Meaning of Life but it was really embarrassing, and the responses were pretty much across the board though there was a clear winner (“Spread the word anyway”). My favorite response, though, came from the person who wrote “Bokonon” as an answer. There are still a few Vonnegut fans left after all, it seems.