Depending which way you slice it, I’ve got approximately two parents, three brothers, four grandparents, one great-grandparent, 10 aunts and uncles, 12 cousins, one boyfriend and at least 10 friends that I am relatively sure like me at least a little bit.
And I’ve got six tickets for graduation.
This would really be a non-issue if my graduation was about me. I just wouldn’t show up to the thing. Graduation requires me to wake up at some unholy hour, put on makeup and junk, wear a big floppy robe and sit still for 16 billion hours. I’ve already been through my high school graduation, where I at least got to break up the tedious affair by giving some pretentious speech I wrote.
But graduation is like those birthday parties they throw for one-year-old kids. Those things obviously aren’t for the children. It’s about adults watching little pudgy babies smoosh cake in their adorable, misshapen faces. Graduation isn’t about me getting a diploma. It’s about my grandma trying to figure out how to work her digital camera so she can take a picture of me in a cardboard hat.
Which is why this whole six-ticket affair is such a scandalous disaster. I realize “there just aren’t enough seats” seems like a reasonable explanation to some people, but my family doesn’t exactly buy into “reasonable explanations.” They think I am precious and they want to see me walk across a stage in heels and get a diploma. Maybe it’s because they’re proud of me. Maybe it’s because they want to be there to see if I fall down. Either way, this limited seating thing isn’t quite cutting it.
I know it’s too late to get anything fixed for this graduation. It’s fine. I’ll just tell my sweet Great Grandma Glenz, who is recovering nicely from a broken knee, that no, she can’t come to the graduation of her oldest great-grandchild, essentially ripping her little heart from her petite little chest. It’s no big deal. I enjoy upsetting little old ladies.
But to avoid crushing the dreams of other 90-year-old women, I’ve decided to set up an easy system for the administration of Texas A&M as they look to next year’s graduation ceremonies. Obviously, since the seating has been limited for the College of Liberal Arts, the Mays Business School and the Dwight Look College of Engineering, those graduation ceremonies need to be split up into two separate affairs for each college.
As a psychology major with personal knowledge of the college, the liberal arts ceremonies are the easiest to divide up. The ceremonies are about the guests and not the graduates after all, so surveys should be sent out to all parents and guardians of the graduates to gauge exactly how disappointed they are in their children’s life choices.
Trust me, the split will be perfect. A look of pure shame and displeasure follows the words, “I’m majoring in psychology and minoring in religious studies,” almost exactly 50 percent of the time. It’s the same look I see as I look at my reflection in the drive-thru window, waiting for my chicken nugget order at 3 a.m. It’s just a fact of nature.
The beauty in this is that there won’t be nearly as many awkward conversations between graduation guests. I imagine there are probably some plucky and perky parents on graduation day that lean over to invade their neighbor’s personal space, all ready to share their joy and coffee breath, only to receive half-hearted sighs and weary looks of exasperation from their peers. Putting people in that situation is just plain cruel. It should be avoided at all costs.
The families and friends of the engineers, however, are obviously proud of their precious little birds, flapping the wings of their graduation robes to fly off to high-paying, productive occupations, so there’s no reason to divide up the ceremony based on disappointment. That’s why those folks will get surveys gauging their understanding of what their child is actually doing with their lives.
That way, no one will have to feel bad when they don’t actually know what their kid is doing. No one else in the stands does either! It’s got something with pipes or electricity and there might be coils involved, but no one knows for sure. All anyone is certain about is that the student loans will be paid for in two years or less.
The business graduation is a bit tricky to split up, mainly because I don’t think I actually know any business majors. I did date a guy getting his minor in business once though, so I’m going to go ahead and assume he’s a representative sample. His parents were part of a yacht club, and I’m pretty sure that’s normal over there. We’ll just divide ’em up by yacht club membership and call it good.