Barbarians In Bloom

Two things, to begin:

1. No, the blog is not finished. I just actually had a life for the past few days and so the time to blog escaped me. I shall carry on – but as my adventures in the US tend to be less exciting than those abroad the posts will likely come fewer and further between.
2. READ “TINKERS” BY PAUL HARDING. He is my old fiction teacher and his first novel just won the Pulitzer Prize.

On to a recap of Harvard graduation!

My parents’ flight landed in Boston a little after 11am last Wednesday. Due to the “marvelous” inventions of airplane wi-fi and Apple’s IPad they still managed to hassle and stress my sister and me all morning. Mostly we received half-finished emails from my mother, who, on what I understand as a whim, drove to the mall and purchased an IPad right before her trip. I should note that my mother is a highly educated and well-respected judge who emailed before most others in her generation, but upon failing to figure out how to load more songs on her IPod a few years ago went out and bought a second one. She now uses both. We also gave her an IPod shuffle before the other two IPods, but she washed that one with her running clothes.

An example of the emails we received Wednesday morning, while I prepared for a 40-minute interview in Portuguese and my sister tried to pack and get ready for graduation: “Can't figure out how to back up to correct a letter without erasing as I go. Think it is an apple.Mac” sent from my IPad.

Ten minutes later: “Think it is a Mac thing. Do you have any suggestions” sent from my IPad.

Another two minutes later: “How do you do it on the Magic keyboard for the Mac?”

Fifteen minutes after that: “How is the Port. int. Hope it is going well. Is S okay I am worried” sent from my IPad. This one, incidentally, was only sent to my sister SB – or “S”.

And, finally, my personal favorite: “You touch and hold, then slide your finger to back up without erasing. Very, very cool. It is intuitive. The device I mean. It knows what you Want. Almost before you do. Like periods and spelling and stuff.”

If I had not seen every episode of “Arrested Development” I would think of my family as the least competent on Earth. As I write this we sit in front of the fire (yes, it gets cold up at the farm, even in the summer), the three of them playing Gin Rummy. The Judge keeps trying to look through the discarded cards (against the rules) and my father continuously forgets that his turn comes after SB’s. The Judge is careful to explain that in card games you always play clockwise, and accompanies her statement with a grandiose circular arm motion. SB asks Daddy, “How did you never learn the clockwise rule?”

Daddy counters, “How did you never learn to not be obnoxious?”

Our parents arrived in Cambridge immediately after we watched SB’s roommate JF get commissioned for the US Navy. We snuck out of the end of the ceremony and met them in Harvard Square, then proceeded to a picnic in Harvard Yard at which individual meals were packed into crimson Harvard Alumni Association lunchboxes. The Judge enthusiastically snatched all four lunchboxes after dumping the food onto a table so that we could save them for beer coolers. I looked for a different family to which I might attach myself for the duration of the weekend.

The afternoon consisted of Class Day – an affair marked by truly awful speeches summarizing life lessons in practiced and boring tones. I seem to remember that one made me laugh. My parents and I skipped out before Christiane Amanpour’s talk, which my sister described as more of a pitch for her new TV show, and dodged SB’s camera-happy friends on our cross-yard sprint to Massachusetts Ave. We hailed a cab (a story in and of itself, so scour the blog for future posts) and checked in to our hotel, where I had the pleasure of sharing a suite with my parents. I scored the sofa bed, which turned out well since it meant I had no need to drag my suitcase up the stairs to the master bed. I was also closer to the exit, in case I needed to leave for my limited sanity’s safety, and the window, in case I needed to make a really quick escape. As we were on the sixteenth floor I kept the window option only in the farthest recesses of my mind.

We met back with SB – a relief for yours truly – and I explained to her my new tactic for dealing with our parents: the ignore factor. Basically I ignore our parents if they start repeating themselves or getting particularly annoying. SB scolded me for not exercising patience and two hours later embraced it. This method seemed promising in theory but in practice has them repeating themselves even more until one of us gets so frustrated that we explode in response. This causes them to smile slightly and walk away. Sometimes I forget that my parents are as wily as I am.

We dined at Grafton Street before an early night so we could awaken at 5am the following morning. Harvard maintains a barbaric tradition of opening the gates to the Yard for graduation-goers at 6:45am, and those same graduation-goers begin lining up at an indiscernibly early hour (indiscernible because I refuse to get up early enough to discover it). The Judge and Daddy and I arrived at 6:45, cut in line, and still only managed seats back as far as Widener Library. For those of you unfamiliar with Harvard Yard, that’s kind of far away. We had a view of a huge plasma screen, but could not see the stage. I should note that Harvard Yard also extends far past Widener and that many people who did not find seats proceeded to stand for the next five hours. As I said, it’s barbaric.

Luckily I brought my MacBook and spent much of the morning making videos with PhotoBooth’s mirror function. During video breaks I read the Steig Larsson book I braved the Coop (you’ll recall the picture-takers of the previous post) to buy. My one-line book review: it’s interesting, but not interesting enough to stand in gargantuan lines behind people taking pictures of their every moves. I would suggest ordering it from Amazon.com.

By the way, Harvard graduation is partially conducted in Latin, so I won’t be giving you a full recap.

We tried to laugh at more rough speeches and at noon followed SB back to her house, Quincy, where we sat for another two hours as they called her name and she walked across the stage to receive her diploma. I would call the entire day an enormous waste of time but for two important points:

1. My brilliant sister graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with a major in Molecular Cellular Biology; and
2. Harvard gave me a special Harvard ice cream with crimson sprinkles and an H in the middle.

My terrifyingly odd family calls for my participation in “family time”. More on the weekend to follow.