This Thingamajigger Was Looking Lonely and Neglected

Yeah, sorry about that. A trip home this weekend -- both for my sister's graduation (I am old) and pour la fete de mamans -- inevitably wound up sidetracking me, largely because I had, in a most bizarre turn of events, completed all my work before I left. As a habitual procrastinator, I require work; more specifically, I require deadlines. Otherwise, you see, I don't actually do anything. Anything.

That was just FYI. So's this.

On Graduation ceremonies: They are an abomination. At Shippensburg U. -- located in, where else? Shippensburg, PA -- the size of the graduating class was caught in an uncomfortable limbo: nowhere near as large as mine (5,600, I believe), but, at 1,100, not exactly small either. At my graduation, there were two ceremonies: the big one (where parents who paid the tuition got their money back via a speech from Bill Cosby) and numerous smaller ones, broken down by school. Even w/r/t my comparatively shorter show, the system of graduation ceremonies needs to be severely re-structured. Though we were promised a 70-degree day, tops, with clouds in the sky, we arrived on the (of course outdoor) football field to the tune of maybe 95, with no precipitation and, at least for me, no sunglasses. As I sat there through the speech and then the Warholian process of hearing 1,100 names read out, one by one, I quickly regressed to 8 years old: nothing could hold my attention, and so I took to annoying everyone around me with my petty complaints (erm, much as I'm doing now).

For my sins, I have received the most awkward sunburn: as I had a week-long beard at the time, only the top half of my face is bright red. But I ask you: though you're of course going to go agog when your loved one's name is called, you still have to sit through (or at least I did) 10,999 other names, every last one of them ones you don't know. Is there anything even remotely interesting, then, about this ritual? How could anything that is going on hold your interest? And even if one thing does -- like, in my case, hearing countless air horns go off limply; conspiracy? -- will it honestly continue to be fascinating after ten minutes or so?

In brighter news, the otherwise-relaxing weekend had some merit. The new Beastie Boys song "Ch-Check It Out" is a sharp little number (though Adam Yauch sounds like his voice is on its last leg; then again, that's what happens when you scream for 25 years, I suppose); I scored myself Prince's Around the World in a Day and Mission of Burma's OnOffOn; the clips I heard from the new Morrissey ain't bad; and I spent my train-ride home watching Robert Aldrich's Attack! on my laptop. Have I finally turned into the kind of person who does that? More on the movie itself later.

Oh, and I'll finally update my sidebar files. (That is, assuming anyone was paying attention. Or will, for that matter.)