Is there anything more boring than graduation? Let me run through a few possibilities, then dismiss them: 1) Watching barbers give haircuts; 2) Waiting for charcoal to get white; 3) Listening to Mitch Miller records; 4) Interstates. No, all those things are more interesting than graduation.
Fortunately, I don't have to go to any graduations this year. The only thing I like about graduation is hearing its theme song, "Pomp and Circumstance." It's perhaps the most perfect endless song. It just keeps shuffling along as long as people are shuffling in. One year I sat in a position where I had a great view of the band. The band conductor keeps them going through the generations and cycles of that song's duration. But with the last kid, the one who's name starts with Zzzz, the band members' eyes jump down to the big final finish, and they carry out the song's ultimate destiny and it is resolved.
One other year I was smart enough to sit up on the very last row of the bleachers and they had open windows right there. There was just the slightest breeze, but the gym was totally hot. Looking down around the room, with no air conditioning, the programs were being put to necessary use as fans. But with our slight breeze we were the most comfortable folks in the room, along with our fellow backbenchers.
Another year I was trying a whole psychic, empathic, yet mischievous thing. A kid sitting a couple rows down and right at the edge of the bleachers was playing a handheld video game. I was trying mental effort, kinesis, willpower, and the same kind of shifting power you use when bowling, to make his hands heat up to an unbearable temperature so he would lose his grasp on the video game and it would go crashing to the floor. As it turned out I either wasn't successful at this, or my better angels, whom I am barely on speaking terms with, interceded to spare him and to save me from psychic inflation. I was just watching Excalibur the other day, and you might remember that part where Arthur abuses his powers with his sword and defeats Lancelot in combat? I was doing the same thing, seeking to do something unjust, and something spared me the grief. (Or perhaps what I was attempting is impossible. But coincidences aren't impossible.) How great it would've been, but I'd have paid for it in some way!
Graduations. So terrible.
