Graduation: Nobody Cares

It's true. Since when was a degree about earning the right to wear a mortar board?

The reason people pay stupid amounts for those ridiculous graduation photographs – which aren't even any good – is because no family could ever or will ever comprehend the individual experience of any student. If they can, the student wasn't doing it properly.

What's strange to me is that nobody seems to understand this is perfectly rational. You weren't there; you can't know what happened. Sticking a stilted "photograph" on a mantelpiece does not help you understand who the child you raised is now, nor does it suggest that you're proud of your genetic material. It just makes you look like an idiot for having such an extravagantly expensive memento that doesn't portray in the slightest the phenomenon it supposedly represents. You might as well kill a frog, stuff it and hang it on the ceiling with a small cutout of your pride-and-joy's face in its mouth. It'd be every bit as appropriate.

I wonder whether I'll become less cynical in the 18-months until my graduation. If not, I won't attend. I might let my parents show up, but I'm sure I can thinking of better things to do with a sunny day in July, or January, for that matter.

I love how little bothered the girl in the foreground is.