Boston College Graduation

The Boston College graduation started early on Monday at 9:00a.m. The cab we took there was more than a tight squeeze. I had to sit in the front seat because there wasn’t enough leg room for anybody but a short person. The back wasn’t all that much better. But none of cabs were big at all.

The cabby wanted to drop us off seriously far away from the college because of traffic. I think he was afraid of losing money getting out of there. But we didn’t pay for a cab just to walk ten blocks after we got there, thanks. We had him drop us off at the church, which was the edge of campus.

So here’s the thing about the BC graduation. It’s outside on a football field. So while you think it’s a good idea to wear nice fancy clothes to graduation, you’re wrong. Because you end up sitting on the same bleachers that beer drinking, loogie spitting,ketchup spilling fans sit on. It is so cold that I can cut glass. The metal bleachers are sucking the heat out of your butt and just when you think the misery will end, it starts to rain. Icicles are forming on the tip of your nose and this is all before the actual graduation starts.

I am so cold that I pay for an overpriced BC blanket and ponchos, but that does not help with the cold. So we decided to go inside to the basketball court where you could watch on big screen TVs. Your graduate won’t know because everyone who’s graduating appears in the first half of the ceremony. There is a symbolic accepting of the different colleges/schools (undergrad,law,etc) before the guest speaker comes on and tells you how much you suck as a generation.

I don’t remember who he was other than that he was a documentary film maker. He tells the class about how technology addicted they are and how they should commune more with nature. I don’t know who’s children he’s been hanging out with, but isn’t it the young people pushing for green everything and a smaller carbon footprint? Who do you think embraces that thought? You’d think that the new generation is a bunch of drooling slacktards texting each other while watching 18 hours of television a day.

Don’t you think that telling them that the world is hard and hard work will be required to achieve your dreams, but nothing can stop you from what you want to do, and, I don’t know, give them some hope and encouragement would be good to send them off in their adventures as grownups? It shouldn’t be a platform for your gripes with young people.

So anyway, after all that is intermission. It’s lunchtime, but it’s not a long enough time for you to go eat something. You have to stand in the hellaciously long lines at concessions to get a hot dog and if you’re lucky, a stale pretzel. We trekked a bit and got a some sandwiches at a gift shop. And we ate that in a hurried and greedy fashion, snorting it up like starving inmates given gruel and then trekking back out into the cold and wind to watch your actual student get a diploma.

The great thing about this part is that they call about four names a minute. With about nine million graduating underclassmen, they are done in about three hours. The in-laws last name is luckily H, and we were able to stay long enough to watch The Little Sister’s name get called and we screamed for her before taking off. Because, you see, I had made flight reservations that night to go home. Had I realized that the graduation was an all day event, I would have been more prepared.

We took the green line back to the hotel snatch up our stuff and then cab it to the airport where we grabbed a quick dinner before flying back home.

So here’s the lesson for the day. If a child of yours is graduating from Boston College, bring a sleeping bag to keep you warm. Preferably a zero degree bag to fight off windchill. And bring an umbrella because it will rain on you, because it hates you. And lastly bring a snack and water. Pretend like you’re going on a short camping trip because you will be roughing it out there on the bleachers.

And that concludes the Boston Trip!

Crossposted to Samantha Ling, Dreamwidth and Livejournal