(Source: hopefullyraw)
Some people have asked to read the commencement address I delivered this morning to the 2013 graduates of Butler University. So here it is.
My own commencement speaker, who shall remain nameless, began with a lame joke about how these speeches only come in two varieties: Short and bad. This raised my expectations, and then he went onto speak for 26 minutes, so I’m just going to tell you now: 12 minutes flat, 11:45 if you don’t laugh.
Congratulations to all of you here today, and I do mean all of you—parents, families, friends, professors, coaches. Every single person in Hinkle today has given something to make this moment possible for the class of 2013—well, except for me. I really just showed up and put on the robe.
But special congratulations to you graduates. Before we get to the Life Advice You’ll Soon Forget portion of the program, I want to engage in a time-honored tradition of American commencement addresses: Stealing from other commencement addresses, in this case one by the children’s television host Fred Rogers. Think, if you will, of some of the people who helped get you to today, people who’ve loved you and without whose care and generosity you might not have found yourself here, graduating from Butler, or watching someone you love graduate, or seeing your students graduate. Think for one minute of those who have loved you up into this day. I’ll keep the time.
(1 minute of silence)
Those people are so proud of you today.
We will return to those people soon, but first I have to deliver terrible news, which is that you are all going to die. This is another time-honored tradition of American celebration, the Raining on the Parade. I remember when I got married, the priest devoted most of his homily to telling me how challenging and laborious marriage would be, and I kept thinking, “Well, sure, but can’t we talk about that, like, TOMORROW?” But no, it simply cannot wait. You are going to die. Also everything you ever make and think and experience will be washed away by the sands of time, and the Sun will blow up and no one will remember Cleopatra ruling Egypt or Crick and Watson untangling the structure of DNA or Ptolemy fathoming the stars or even that improbably wonderful Gonzaga game.
So that’s unfortunate.
But I would argue that it’s good to be aware of temporariness when you are thinking about what you want to do with your life. The whole idea of this commencement speech is that I’m supposed to offer you some thoughts on how you might live a good life out there in the so-called Real World, which by the way I assure you is no more or less real than the one in which you have so far found yourselves. But I can’t give any advice about how to live a good life unless and until we establish what constitutes a good life. Of course, that’s much of what you’ve been up to for the past four years, and I’m not going to swoop in here at the end with any interesting revelations. I would just note that the default assumption is that the point of human life is to be as successful as possible, to acquire lots of fame or glory or money as defined by quantifiable metrics: number of twitter followers, or facebook friends, or dollars in one’s 401k.
This is the hero’s journey, right? The hero starts out with no money and ends up with a lot of it, or starts out an ugly duckling and becomes a beautiful swan, or starts out an awwkard girl and becomes a vampire mother, or grows up an orphan living under the staircase and then becomes the wizard who saves the world. We are taught that the hero’s journey is the journey from weakness to strength. But I am here today to tell you that those stories are wrong. The real hero’s journey is the journey from strength to weakness.
And here is the good news nested inside the bad: Many of you, most of you, are about to make that journey. You will go from being the best-informed, most engaged students at one of the finest universities around to being the person who brings coffee to people, or a Steak n Shake waiter, as I once was. Whether you’re a basketball player or a pharmacist or a software designer, you’re about to be a rookie. Your parents’ long-asked questions—what exactly does one DO with a degree in anthropology—will become a matter of sudden and profound relevance. Your student loans will come due and you will need a very good answer for why exactly you went to college, which answer you will have a hard time coming by as you sit at your job, provided you are lucky enough to find a job, and suffer the indignity of people calling you by the wrong name or, if you are forced to wear a name tag, people calling you by the right name too often.
That is the true hero’s errand—strength to weakness. And because you went to college, you will be more alive to the experience, better able to contextualize it and maybe even find the joy and wonder hidden amid the dehumanizing drudgery. For example, when I was a data entry professional, I would often call to mind William Faulkner’s brilliant letter of resignation from the United States Postal Service, which went:
As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation. William Faulkner.
Having read that letter in a Faulkner biography in college had nothing to do with my job typing numbers into a database, but it was still profoundly useful to me. Education provides context and comfort and access, no matter the relationship between your field of study and your post-collegiate life.
But still, you are probably going to be a nobody for a while. You are going to make that journey from strength to weakness, and while it won’t be an easy trip, it is a heroic one. For in learning how to be a nobody, you will learn how not to be a jerk. And for the rest of your life, if you are able to remember your hero’s journey from college grad to underling, you will be less of a jerk. You will tip well. You will empathize. You will be a mentor, and a generous one. In short, you will become like the people you imagined in silence a few minutes ago.
Let me submit to you that this is the actual definition of a good life. You want to be the kind of person who other people—people who may not even born yet—will think about in their own silences years from now at their own commencements. I am going to hazard a guess that relatively few of us closed our eyes and thought of all the work and love that Selena Gomez or Justin Bieber put into making this moment possible for us. We may be taught that the people to admire and emulate are actors and musicians and sports heroes and professionally famous people, but when we look at the people who have helped us, the people who actually change actual lives, relatively few of them are publicly celebrated. We do not think of the money they had, but of their generosity. We do not think of how beautiful or powerful they were, but how willing they were to sacrifice for us—so willing, at times, that we might not have even noticed that they were making sacrifices.
So with that in mind, I’d like to share a few pieces of what I believe to be rock solid advice about proper adulthood or whatever:
First, do not worry too much about your lawn. You will soon find if you haven’t already that almost every adult American devotes tremendous time and money to the maintenance of an invasive plant species called turf grass that we can’t eat. I encourage you to choose better obsessions.
Also, you may have heard that it is better to burn out than it is to fade away. That is ridiculous. It is much better to fade away. Always. Fade. Away.
Keep reading. Specifically, read my books, ideally in hardcover. But also keep reading other books. You have probably figured out by now that education is not really about grades or getting a job; it’s primarily about becoming a more aware and engaged observer of the universe. If that ends with college, you’re rather wasting your one and only known chance at consciousness.
Also a word about the Internet: Old people like myself are terrified by their ignorance of it, which you can and should use to your advantage by saying things at your job like, “You don’t have a tumblr? Oh you should really have a tumblr. I can set you up with that.”
Try not to worry so much about what you are going to do with your life. You are already doing what you are going to do with your life, and judging by your gownedness, you’re doing all right.
On that topic, there are many more jobs out there than you have ever heard of. Your dream job might not yet exist. If you had told College Me that I would become a professional YouTuber, I would’ve been like, “That is not a word, and it never should be.”
And lastly, be vigilant in the struggle toward empathy. A couple years after I graduated from college, I was living in an apartment in Chicago with four friends, one of whom was this Kuwaiti guy named Hassan, and when the U.S. invaded Iraq, Hassan lost touch with his family, who lived on the border, for six weeks. He responded to this stress by watching cable news coverage of the war 24 hours a day. So the only way to hang out with Hassan was to sit on the couch with him, and so one day we were watching the news and the anchor was like, “We’re getting new footage from the city of Baghdad,” and a camera panned across a house that had a huge hole in one wall covered by a piece of plywood. On the plywood was Arabic graffiti scrawled in black spraypaint, and as the news anchor talked about the anger on the Arab street or whatever, Hassan started laughing for the first time in several weeks.
“What’s so funny?” I asked him.
“The graffiti,” he said.
“What’s funny about it?”
“It says, Happy Birthday, Sir, Despite the Circumstances.”
For the rest of your life, you are going to have a choice about how to read graffiti in a language you do not know, and you will have a choice about how to read the actions and intonations of the people you meet. I would encourage you as often as possible to consider the Happy Birthday Sir Despite the Circumstances possibility, the possibility that the lives and experiences of others are as complex and unpredictable as your own, that other people—be they family or strangers, near or far—are not simply one thing or the other—not simply good or evil or wise or ignorant—but that they like you contain multitudes, to borrow a phrase from the great Walt Whitman.
This is difficult to do—it is difficult to remember that people with lives different and distant from your own even celebrate birthdays, let alone with gifts of graffitied plywood. You will always be stuck inside of your body, with your consciousness, seeing through the world through your own eyes, but the gift and challenge of your education is to see others as they see themselves, to grapple with this mean and crazy and beautiful world in all its baffling complexity. We haven’t left you with the easiest path, I know, but I have every confidence in you, and I wish you a very happy graduation, despite the circumstances.
(Source: fishingboatproceeds)
Nostalgia is a powerful emotion, and not one that should be easily dismissed or thought irrelevant. Boy Meets World is a television show which gave profound wisdom through the sometimes heartachingly passionate stories in the life of Cory Matthews. Mr. Feeny was more than a mentor to Cory and his friends; he was a father and a friend. This show will always have a place in my heart.
“Lose one friend, lose all friends, lose yourself.”
the all-knowing.
This is one of the most heart-wrenching photoset I’ve ever seen <3
Teachers teach so much more than math, history, or english.
(Source: nihilus3247)
Bill Cosby (via quote-book)
Speak that truth, Bill, speak that truth.
By Linh Chuong, APIASF/GMS Scholar
Originally posted on The Treatment: Writing Medicine and IllnessAs significant as she is to me personally, I recognize her experience is connected to a larger stream of herstory: the Vietnamese refugee experience. Vietnamese America emerged from the ashes of the Vietnam War. When South Vietnam was lost, people fled by sea, by air, by whatever means possible. Families were torn apart in the process, but it was said that “to stay meant to die.”[iv] From 1975 to 2010, the American Community Survey estimates that there were 771,834 Vietnamese refugees that settled in the United States alone.
My family was lucky. My father was a lieutenant in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). After the war, the Viet Cong subjected him to torture for three and a half years in a hard labor camp (trại cải tạo). My father left fifty pounds in that camp, but he managed to walk away with his life. The story of my family’s life after trại cải tạo could stretch for volumes, but simply put, because of this camp experience, the United States government admitted us under a subset of the Orderly Departure Program known as the Humanitarian Operation. When we landed in Los Angeles, we came together, as a family.
However, it isn’t enough to just look at my family and community as “Vietnamese refugees.” To do so is to deny the complexity of human experience, the realities of longer histories of transplantation and forced migration which leave indigenous people generationally and structurally violated. My family lived in Vietnam for two hundred years, but my ancestors are displaced Chinese ethnic minorities, indigenous to the mountains of southern China: Yao and Ngai. There are also Hmong people who fought the Secret War in Laos against the communist Pathet Lao and its North Vietnamese allies. When the North Vietnamese won, Hmong were brutally persecuted for it. There are approximately 260,073 Hmong refugee-immigrants in the United States as of the 2010 American Community Survey. Degar, Cham, Khmer Krom, Chinese and other ethnic minorities in Vietnam were targeted by the North Vietnamese government. While the first wave of Vietnamese immigrants were better educated, wealthier, and politically connected to the United States, the second wave had a more difficult time assimilating. It is important to understand a few things: that the Vietnamese American community is diverse, that they are connected to a Southeast Asian history, and that some of us are suffering from circumstances that are connected to a much longer history of oppression. Health access, educational attainment, and a variety of other measures of circumstance are at similarly dismal rates for Vietnamese as they are for Latinos.
By Linh Chuong, APIASF/GMS Scholar
This piece was originally posted on The Treatment: Writing Medicine and Illness. It will be published in three parts on re/present.The television is blaring; my sisters and I are doing school work and harassing each other; my father alternates between reading his daily Vietnamese newspapers and nodding off on the couch; my mother insists she needs to go to the Asian market for something, even though we have a fridge packed with food that my father and I conspire to throw away piecemeal when she is unaware. In the warm California sun, there are jars of pickled lemons sitting outside next to an assortment of vegetation—Thai basil, aloe vera, a guava tree, grape vines, and leafy, green mint running rampant; deep purple irises slowly bud next to lavender and white roses along the black metal gate, curving green elephant ear stalks bend over the earth, shaded underneath the fruit trees bursting in hues of green and orange and yellow: persimmons, clementines, and Meyer lemons.
That is how I always remember our home. We have all dispersed in the four years since I left Los Angeles for college in Conway, Arkansas. Even when I make the annual 1,600 mile pilgrimage home, I can’t return to that place in time.
These days I mostly see my sister as the green dot on Facebook chat. Michelle online? Green dot. I am in a computer lab at school, procrastinating on the seemingly endless stream of papers, annotated bibliographies, reading summaries, and discussion questions, or listlessly browsing the internet in search of news and entertainment: Tumblr, BBC, Facebook, Salon, Hyphen, fashion and food blogs, goat photos, anything not-school. Five hundred miles away, I imagine Michelle at the impeccable, glistening white nail salon and spa where she works, sitting at her station with her nail polish, acetone, files, emery boards, lotions, cotton swabs, and other tools of the trade. She is checking Facebook on her phone as she waits for a customer, for her turn alongside the other Vietnamese women nail technicians.
Linh is an amazing friend and role model. Thankful to know this incredible woman.
I photographed the little guy on the left because he was carrying a violin. During the post photo interview, his little brother kept chiming in with his own answers. It was clear that he wanted to be part of the process. After a few questions, the older one called to his brother: “Come be in my picture, Riley.”
Modification of the last infographic. Congressladies + men = still a ways to go.
Source: Office of the Clerk
This is the most beautiful infographic I’ve ever seen. Paging I Love Charts!
copy that, Jess.
That first step of faith is the toughest though.
How funny it is when things like this pop up and you are quickly reminded of the beautiful opportunities that are sitting in front of you. Forgetting where you come from because you’re so focused on where you are going can be a dangerous thing.
Oh and then theres this comment from my cousin…HAHA
