Graduation.

A time for celebration. A time for remembrance. A time for nostalgia. There will be parties and dinners, and congratulations all around. But seeing as how you’re now another post-grad girl without a job or savings the thing you’ll probably be the most excited about are the presents. I mean call us superficial but I feel like there has to be a few perks to leaving behind one of the parts of your life. And that means presents.

And while your family and friends all mean well. Sometimes their ideas of a good gift for graduating seniors are just a little bit of the mark. Ladies,  I present to you some of the ugliest graduation gifts ever.

Graduation Day. The most important day of your college career. (At least for your parents.) A day to celebrate. A day to remember. A day  to cherish. A day…that can definitely get pretty boring. Because while our parents and professors may be up for a few hours of ceremony and speeches, I personally feel like I could do without the hours upon hours of speeches that college seniors have to deal with… but speeches we will have to endure. (Want a preview? Check out our graduation speech mashup.)

Or at least, you know, pretend to endure. Because while we can’t get out of listening to those speeches, we can make them a little bit more entertaining. Sure you’ll have to sit there quietly and listen to your president speak, listen to the valedictorian speak, and listen to the commencement speaker give his or her big speech. But that doesn’t mean your mind is not allowed to wander right? I mean it’s only natural. So let it wander on over to one of these games.

1. Count the “Likes, Okays, Ums, and Yeas”

Speeches getting boring? That’s okay. Focus on the speech impediments instead. Every speaker has them. Whether it be a tendency to say like far too often, um in between every other word, or phrase every statement like it’s a question, every speaker has one. In high school, I had a math teacher who said “um kay” after every single sentence. I spent many a math class keeping track of just how many times she could say that particular phrase in a 40 minute period. Want a hint? It was well over ninety.

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So there’s a lot of things that come to my mind when I think about graduation. There’s the week of senior festivities that takes place before, and the long, relaxing summer that takes place after. There’s caps and gowns and diplomas and awards and speeches. Lots of speeches.

From the president of your college to your valedictorian there will be a lot of people giving your advice on graduation day, but none more important than the allusive commencement speaker. For some schools, this is just another really long, really boring speech. But for a special few  the commencement speech, and the commencement speaker, is actually pretty great. I know if I went to one of these schools I’d actually be listening to my commencement speaker, not falling asleep in my chair.

Uh, not that I plan on doing that anyway…

Graduation season is upon us which only means one thing…seniors across the country are spending all their time job hunting bragging about their celebrity commencement speakers. But at the end of the day it doesn’t matter whether you have Obama or  an unknown author who published a bestseller before you were even born. Why? Because all the BS graduation speeches sound exactly the same.  There are only so many ways to say you have a bright future ahead of you. Don’t believe us? Check out the ultimate graduation speech mashup. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll feel like you just heard a famous commencement speaker without the pain and torture of having to watch 5000 students cross the stage one at a time.

I did it! I graduated. Although the moment of hearing my name, walking across the stage, receiving my diploma, and turning my tassel went by incredibly fast, the road to Commencement has been an unforgettable eye-opening four-year journey.

It’s been made up of classes I’ve loved (like Arab-American literature) and those I’ve hated (Computers 100, I’m talking to you and your Microsoft Word projects). There were those endless papers analyzing literary theorists, ethical dilemmas, Shakespeare’s couplets, and acts of radical feminism. I worked on and cried over hundreds of math problems and graphs, all while reading books that would forever change me and the ways I think about the world around me. I wrote and edited poem after poem for numerous workshop classes, while expanding my poetry vocabulary from e.e. cummings and Emily Dickinson’s collections to the voices of Lorine Niedecker and Naomi Shihab Nye. All these academic experiences led me to learn things I would have never known if I strayed off on a different path.

Outside of school, I interned – a lot. There were the internships I learned a lot at, and the ones that failed to utilize their internship programs to the full extent. There were the people in the business world I met that I admire and respected, and then there were the ones that made me promise myself “I will never end up like that.” I traveled, whether it was from the Upper East Side to SoHo in New York City or from London to Paris for a weekend. Honestly, I even spent most of my time in college traveling to and from other colleges around me (this was part of my college’s campus culture – especially at such a small all women’s college), which convinced me that a two hour car ride is nothing but a quick ride down the road. Read More »

I’ve been asked to speak at my son’s nursery school graduation, and I am perplexed as to what to say to four-year-olds about to embark on life’s most treacherous journey: entering Kindergarten! There must be some bit of wisdom I can impart on these kids that will have a more lasting impression than the first time they saw Spongebob Squarepants in his underwear.

With this daunting task before me, I’ve decided to look to the people who are perhaps the most insightful when it comes to living life to the fullest: Hollywood A-listers. Here’s what college graduates have to look forward to with this year’s celebrity commencement addresses. Read More »

Forget what those commencement speakers say, this is the real deal.

Oprah apologizes to James Frey!?

This is a sad way to lure in customers.

Adam Lambert hits eBay.

Oh no, Jennifer Hudson. No, no, no!

The 4 worst hangover remedies.

I, too, will probably be this drunk at commencement.

I’ve lost track of the days and I no longer can distinguish between night and day. We drink round the clock now anyways so there doesn’t seem to be a reason for me to try to figure any of this out. But there are still a few things that I must get done before doomsday (known to my parents as commencement ceremonies).

TRY ON MY CAP AND GOWN
I thought it would be hilarious and trendsetting if I got a 4’11 gown for my 5’7 self. There’s a strong chance I will regret that decision when I’m the only one crossing the stage with bare legs. There’s a stronger chance that my family will be embarrassed. And there’s the strongest chance that cutting the top in a v-neck (they’re very in right now) will look more Salvation Army than American Apparel.

THROW EVERYTHING OUT
I have problems throwing things out. Especially if I got it for free. Because of this issue of mine (un-webmd-able…I’ve looked) I have quite the collection of heinously ugly Syracuse water bottles, fairy wings, and soy sauce packets. I never even once dreamed of dressing up like a fairy, but because I found the wings laying on a street on a rainy Halloween circa 2007 I kept them. I don’t know what I planned to do with them over the past three years, but I kept telling myself you never know when you might need them. Turns out I never did.

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I remember my college graduation like it was yesterday. After a group of my friends threw an open bar graduation party for family and friends the night before, I woke up graduation morning hungover, naked and confused about  my whereabouts. I rolled over to find myself lying next to the first college friend I made at orientation.

“Fitting,” I thought to myself. Then I grabbed my clothes (all but one shoe…which I told myself I could live without) and ran out the door. If I didn’t get home soon, I would be late for graduation.

I hailed a cab on the corner of the street and hopped in. On the short ride back to my house, I passed families all dressed up for the great moment that was their son/daughter/grandchild/cousin/brother/sister’s graduation. I looked down at the clothes I wore the night before and the unidentified scars that can only come from a night of heavy drinking on someone else’s tab.

“Fitting,” I thought to myself again. Read More »

As graduation time for many college seniors is looming in the distance, it’s important to remember the wise words of those that have gone before us. The most entertaining and witty of those was a 1997 column in the Chicago Tribune that was published as the author’s own version of a commencement address. It skips all of the b.s. of typical speeches and details why we should simply enjoy our lives right now! The column became famous and I always read it when I need a little boost. Just a little taste…

“Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.

Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You’ll miss them when they’re gone.

Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll have children, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s…

Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.”

Read the full column here