Just something I was thinking about today, and I’m curious if I’m an outlier, or if I’m on the same page as everybody else.
It’s a big time of the year for graduations and weddings and it got me thinking about all the ceremonies. They are often long and drawn out and VERY expensive for whoever’s paying the bill, and I can’t stand them.
Just the idea of sitting for hours while somebody I don’t know talks and talks and talks until we finally get to the “I do” or the passing of the diplomas/awards that we came to see.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the celebration. I’m more than happy to come out and congratulate you on your achievement and make some good memories with friends and family, but why can’t we just skip to that part instead of sitting through a series of lectures?
I even skipped my own college graduation because I didn’t see any point in making me and my family sit through the ceremony. They know I graduated, and I don’t need some big expensive to-do and a spotlight to validate that.
But, we keep doing them, and keep making them bigger and more elaborate than before, so it makes me wonder if people actually appreciate these ceremonies or if it’s just something we do because that’s how it’s been done.
Graduations don’t have much value for me. I didn’t want to go to my own, but my mom said I had to. She was paying the bills, so that’s what I did.
I didn’t want to go to my kids’ high school graduations, but my wife says I had to so I did.
Two of my three kids graduated college after an odd number of semesters, so by the time they could have gone to their college graduation, they had moved on and had no interest.
One kid went to art school, and that graduation was one I went to and enjoyed. In addition to the tedious, forgettable speeches, they also had a bunch of music and dancing.
Edit to add:
Weddings are different. The ceremonies are tedious and boring, but I consider them important. I think it’s just because of how I feel about my marriage and how I felt about my wedding. My wedding was an important milestone in my life that I wanted to share with my friends and family. My wife and I had been dating for 7 years, so it wasn’t exactly unexpected.
Funerals are not really expected to be fun. Like graduations, they’re not for the subject of the ceremony as much as they are for the attendees. My father died in May, and we were all surprised that he had decided he wanted a funeral. When his parents died, they had opted to be cremated without any funeral, and I had always assumed he would do the same.
I’m kind of glad he went the full route with a viewing because I saw him after he died in the hospital, and that wasn’t really what I wanted my last memory of him to be. I’ve always thought people were full of shit when they said the deceased looked good in the casket, because everyone I’ve ever seen looked absolutely horrible. However they did such an amazing job on my father that multiple people were surprised because it looked like he could be breathing.
It’s one thing to not want to go to yours but I think it’s pretty shitty to not want to celebrate your children unless they explicitly told you they didn’t want to go/anyone else to go.
Their high school graduations sucked. They have the graduation on the football field. No shade so everyone is baking in the sun. So many kid’s in each class that they are announcing the names one right after the other in rapid fire, people are still screaming for their kid so you don’t hear your kid’s name being called, and you’re so far away you can’t even see them.
I have no problem celebrating my kids, but that wasn’t a celebration of the kids, but that wasn’t what that graduation ceremony was. It was the school meeting an obligation in as cold and meaningless a manner as possible.
When my daughter graduated in the middle of COVID, they split the graduation up into three groups on three different days, and despite having the crowd being 1/3rd the size, they managed to have it be just as useless.
That’s funny because the other complaints were that it takes too long.
I didn’t say theirs didn’t take too long. There were a lot of kids. I think it ran around an hour and 30 minutes when they split it into thirds.
Not wanting to celebrate your kids IS shitty, but that’s a bit of a heavy handed assessment of the comment.
I didn’t want to sit through all those crappy band concerts and baseball games but I did it with excitement and I congratulated my children after every single one.
You can still be supportive of your kids while not really enjoying the activity.