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.
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.