Graduation Week: Friday
A little housekeeping from yesterday first. This is the video of Eli 21.9 receiving the Marshall Sahlins award, and sorry that the first 30 seconds are basically video of his elbow:
Marshall Sahlins Award.
Friday the weather was absolutely trash, as it is seven months a year hear. I'd solved the shoe problem (even though my feet felt like they used to feel after running a marathon), but since we couldn't really drive anywhere, we basically walked through rain all day long with temperatures in the low 50s.
We saw Eli's girlfriend present her thesis, which was wonderful. She's such a kind person, and she's ridiculously smart, too. Part of her presentation involved a standardized survey (a well-established one) to measure changes in hope, and it made me realize something I'd never understood before.
Hope is not an event, it's a process.
This dovetails neatly with Eli's thesis and how abandoned people in Liberia felt after the U.N. (and the U.S.) stayed around for a while, made promises, and then left before any of them came to fruition. They abandoned the process, and so of course the Liberian people felt cheated.
If you want to help someone, it can't just be an event. That might pay off in the short-term, but in the long-term, they'll be right back where they started. I've tried to help people in my life, but I never thought of it in these terms, and it's never been as helpful as I'd hoped. Maybe now I know why.
Later in the afternoon there was Political Science Honors, where they again talked about the thesis topics, this time for Political Science in particular, and again I was just astonished at how ambitious and creative the students were.
Walking back (now in just a light rain), we were laughing at how his life had changed in the last few months. All the things he'd been working for had somehow borne fruit. He said he liked being recognized for his work, but that it was incredibly embarrassing to have it done in public. He's definitely his father's son, in that regard.
I'm going to break the protocol of the last twenty years and show a few pictures of us together (I know, I've posted a few, but not many over the years).
This was after Honors graduation:
Walking back to his apartment on Friday, we passed this, and it was beautiful:
We had dinner with eight people Friday night, which was great but tough for me, because my battery runs down pretty quickly in those situations. I made it through, though, then drove back half an hour in heavy rain.
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