Graduation week: Thursday
The basic setup for graduation week was for me to drive down Wednesday night and stay in Livonia (half an hour from Ann Arbor), because the Holiday Inn in Ann Arbor was charging $400 a night last week, and the other hotels were worse.
The schedule was packed: two events each on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, plus dinners with the families of Eli 21.9s girlfriend and roommate squeezed in as well.
Oh, and I totally forgot to mention that he finished 3rd in the inaugural Collegiate National GeoGuessr Championships on the previous Saturday. I can't even keep up.
It'd been so long since I dressed up for anything in "business casual" that was I wasn't even sure my pants would fit, but they did. And I had nicely ironed shirts, as I mentioned last week. I thought I was prepared.
What I didn't know was we were going to walk everywhere, and everything was 20-30 minutes away, because there are zero useful parking spaces in Ann Arbor during graduation week. The first day, I wore dress shoes and wound up walking for over two hours in them, which wrecked my feet. After that, and seeing how everyone else was dressed, I snuck by with "nice" running shoes.
What struck me about the Honors Commencement was how incredibly accomplished all the students were, to a degree I never expected from anyone that young. The kids I graduated with in the last century were absolutely nothing like these kids.
This was where Eli was going to be one of the speakers, which meant he sat on stage. He would have much preferred to sit with his friends.
He was the second speaker, and as soon as he started, you could have heard a pin drop. It was a great moment. Here's the video of his speech (it's about two and a half minutes long): Eli's speech.
His girlfriend was in also in Honors, so I got to see her after the ceremony and they took some great , happy pictures together (not sharing to protect her privacy, but they're a wonderful couple).
That night, we went to another ceremony, and I'm not even sure what it was called, but he won the Marshall Sahlins award, which goes to the student with the best honors thesis in the Sociology Department.
I was even more amazed during this presentation, because they talked about the thesis subjects of the students, and they were astonishingly inventive and difficult. An example: a thesis on the Munich Massacre of 1972 (during the Olympic Games), which was a hugely formative moment in my life. This student went back and examined thousands of pages of newspaper articles from both Germany and Israel (in their native language) to add a new perspective. Oh, and she's Eli's friend, too, so she's sending him a copy to send to me.
As I write this, I realized I'm still on fumes after last weekend, and I'm getting the facts, but I'm doing very poorly with describing how I felt, and all the funny things Eli and I said to each other. There were many.
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