The Graduation Speech I Never Got to Give.

My idea of wisdom. If you own a cap or a gown of any kind, please put them on.

I know it’s not June. (At least I’m pretty sure it’s not June.) Nevertheless, somehow I got distracted this morning watching pithy speeches full of carefully worded wisdom delivered by people of accomplishment to various cap and gown clad audiences. And whenever I do that, I have the same reaction: I am pulled into a vortex of anxiety about what I would have said had I ever been asked to deliver such a speech. Exactly WHAT did I learn from 6 years of college that I would think it necessary to share with new graduates, (besides how to quickly sign up for the extra 2 years of graduate school when I couldn’t find a job?) 

Like most students, I was not exactly a saavy person when I entered college. As I have mentioned before, the 18-25 year old students typically found in a college have frontal lobes that have not yet attached to their brains. I still wake up in the middle of the night shuddering as I remember how quickly I jumped into a car full of strangers who stopped me on the street when I was a freshman and asked me if I wanted to attend ‘a new kind of religious meeting’. Sure I did! Absolutely! Make room for me! Fortunately it turned out to be a harmless evening of chanting. But the fact that I didn’t mind heading to an undisclosed location in a car packed full of people I had never seen before without bothering to tell a single soul is a good example of the kind of hairpin I was back then. I not only happily jumped into the middle of a great deal of stupid stuff, I have the video to prove it!

BEHOLD!: Below is film of me, being my 20 year old version of hilarious. There I am, in the UC Berkeley art building, smoking and drinking a beer by some extremely flammable acetylene tanks that were meant exclusively for welding. Ha ha. Get it? The joke was that there were signs up everywhere saying that this behavior was strictly forbidden because it could cause a huge explosion. Oh, the fun I was having before I got slowed down by that pesky frontal lobe. (Side note: The Bob Dylan song on the sound track was often in my head back then because I was getting an art degree and it contained the words ‘ARTIST’ and ‘SHE’. “She’s got everything she needs, she’s an artist, she don’t look back.” No offense to the lyrical skills of Mr. Dylan but in retrospect, it might have been a better idea if she and I both looked back a lot more.)

Now back to my premise: what I would NOW say to a class of graduating seniors (besides telling everyone to wait until their frontal lobes are finished before making important decisions. It’s no accident that organizations like ISIS, AL QAEDA, and the NFL are made up entirely of people from this demographic.) (If only the members of the GOP had such an iron-clad excuse.)

Because there are so many facets to the smart/stupid paradigm, I would like to offer this set of correctives to the catalog of bad ideas I accumulated during my college years.

BAD IDEA #1: The virtue of honest spontaneity

Maybe it’s a post teenage reaction to the years of gaining leverage with your parents by out-shouting them before they can respond, but by the time you get to college you are pretty sure that the best thing you can do is always let your raw feelings be known the minute you feel them. That makes them real and authentic, right?

Maybe. But as it turns out, one of the biggest lessons life has to teach you is that its possible to say “ Let me think about that and get back to you.”  when negotiating delicate issues with loved ones. Doubly good for texting in the middle of the night.

It is not necessary to apply the ‘total honesty’ template to everything. It took me much longer than it should have to learn that the answer to “How are you?” does not have to be, “Well, I thought I was getting a headache but I took two Advil and a chewable zinc so now I’m better though I kinda feel like I still might be getting a cold.” No. The proper answer is “Fine.” Period.

An addendum to this is that unless it connects to a life threatening situation, there’s not very much your partner needs (or even wants) to know about your sexual history. In most cases: the less said the better.

BAD IDEA #2: NATURAL IS ALWAYS BEST.

At some point during college, some budding visionary will say to you “ I don’t get why we have to wear deodorant. What could be more natural than body odor? In fact, why do we even have to wear clothes?  We should be allowed to take off our clothes whenever we feel like it. “

To this there is only one reply: “ Get back to me after your frontal lobe finishes hooking up. Then we can discuss the idea of the consequences that will result from a life lived stinky and naked.”

Baboon males murder their rivals. Sand tiger shark mothers eat their young. Matricide, infanticide, and homicide are commonly found in nature which means that they too are natural. What I am saying is that ‘natural’ and ‘civilization’ do not always a happy couple make.

BAD IDEA #3: ALWAYS DRINK AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE

Why drink at all unless you’re planning to drink unlimited quantities?  Isn’t the goal of drinking to get really fucked up?

Seared into my memory is the conversation I had with one of my nephews, back when he was in art school and suffering from a hangover, as one does. I said “How much did you drink last night?”  He said “Not that much.” When I asked for specifics, he added  “Like four vodka shots. And eight beers. And a bottle of wine.” To which I replied “Actually, I believe that is the clinical definition of ‘that much.’

When you are in college, people see evenings full of blacking out as ‘a rite of passage.’ But if you still drink like that in your thirties, people will start to leave pamphlets at your house and want to talk to you about meetings.

I still shudder when I remember the drive I made home from a party when I was in grad school, so drunk that not until I stopped to pay a toll on the SF Bay Bridge did I realize I had come all that way with the emergency brake still on. Then there was the time I was sitting at a table in the kitchen of my first apartment, drinking, talking to a guy I liked. As we spoke, my lack of a frontal lobe convinced me that making little sculptures out of rubber cement and setting them on fire was a fun idea. I was lucky that all I managed to damage was the ceiling of the kitchen. Its almost like people in that age group think the key to a life-well-lived is to invent a couple of brand new ways a month to get killed.

BAD IDEA#4: THE MAGICAL PRISM OF ‘POTENTIAL’

 Everyone in college starts off with free points in “potential” just for attending. For these four special years, a brooding student who is sleeping through classes can still seem like a budding genius. Perhaps they are an embryonic Charles Bukowski or Sylvia Plath. Why not? Because anyone can be anything! Who knows what will happen!

Sadly, as you get older, the magic starts rapidly leaking out of that winsome notion. It turns out in real life, you only get points for what you actually DO. As this begins to occur to you, the anxiety can be overwhelming. To put it more harshly, a moody 45 year old with a beautiful soul who is still ‘wasting their God given talent’ doing nothing all day is usually a depressed person who is…um… doing nothing all day. There are exceptions. But as a general rule, when you are no longer in school and you meet someone who is full of excuses about why they never accomplished what they intended to do, the best explanation can often be found online by reading through checklists of symptoms for personality disorders.

BAD IDEA #5: SEX? JUST SAY YES.

College sex is where your screwy ideas about spontaneity, substance abuse and passion for its own sake unite to create a perfect storm. You may never again give a more poorly chosen group of people a roll in the hay than you end up doing in college. Some of them will literally turn out to be people you would avoid sitting next to on public transportation. Others you will pretend not to recognize when you run into them years later.

Sexually speaking, there’s a lot of faking going on in college. But because college students wrongly believe that being in college means they have achieved some sophisticated level of worldly refinement, they also assume that when a sexual misfire occurs, it is probably because there is something terribly wrong with them.

The truth, (especially if you are a young female) is that the guys who interest you barely know where anything is on a woman. (This is not to imply that they necessarily know much more after they graduate.) To any neophytes reading this, a valuable word of advice: If you suspect you don’t know what you are doing, you are fooling no one. So for God’s sake, don’t do it harder.

BAD IDEA #6: FINDING THE MEANING OF EXISTENCE

You will never in any other period of your life have so many convoluted conversations about the meaning of existence with naive people who have just taken some kind of drug but otherwise have given the meaning of existence almost no thought.

The good news is that unless you become a philosopher, an astro-physicist or someone who likes to sign up for New Age retreats, as time goes on you will stop thinking this is a problem you alone need to roll up your sleeves and solve.

BAD IDEA #7: FRIGHTENINGLY RANDOM LIVING SITUATIONS

 Living in a dorm is like agreeing to co-habit with everyone who shares your lane on the freeway. For that reason I am happy to report that unless you wind up in prison or decide to sign up for a Carnival Cruise, you may never have to live with as random a group of incompatible people ever again.

 BAD IDEA #8: THE TEDIUM OF WRITING COHERENTLY

Your college papers may be the last coherent writing you ever have to do where you will be judged and critiqued on your ability to substantiate an argument or assimilate a piece of material.  Blogging, song lyrics, poetry, political speeches, legal briefs, government policy and literary masterpieces are just a few of the areas of post graduate writing that will not require you to make any sense.

More good news: As far as I know, there is still no law that says you have to voluntarily become a writer. Unless you turn out to be a blockhead like me (who likes to spend a lot of time rearranging words for no apparent reason), from here on out your problems are going to be handled by A.I.

BAD IDEA #9: THE TREACHERY OF BEING COOL

During your college years, a frightening premium is placed on having a lot of insider minutiae about transitory things. You must commit to memory the details of a seemingly limitless list of bands, sports stars, cutting edge Improv groups, comedians, cast members of SNL, comic book artists and animators, poet/philosophers, indie-film directors and video game designers. Not to mention the massive number of You Tube content creators/influencers that your generation thinks are game changers. You will then need to attend a lot of events in support of all of these things wearing the right kind of clothes and consuming the right kind of substances. Whew. I feel for you.

On the bright side, it turns out that because this is so much work, as you get older you will become self-centered enough to grant yourself the luxury of tuning out most of pop culture. For a while, many adults simply continue to keep hanging on to the list of stuff they thought was hip when they learned it in college. After they finally realize that these references make them sound old and dated, there is one more card they can play. It is called ‘just change the subject’.

BAD IDEA #10: EXPECTING A LOT RIGHT AWAY

As I keep mentioning, most people don’t have very good sense in their early twenties. The world knows this so it doesn’t take people in their twenties too seriously yet. As I mention ad nauseam, an idea as basic to clear thinking as ‘consider the consequences’ doesn’t become a permanent brain plug-in until your frontal lobe finishes hooking up in your late twenties. It’s no accident that organizations like ISIS, AL QAEDA, and the NFL are made up entirely of people from this demographic. (Sadly there is no easy excuse for members of the GOP.)

BAD IDEA #11: WHITE KNUCKLE STUDYING

In your real after-school life, studying will probably be related to pro-forma things like the DMV. You may never again have to study as hard for something you don’t specifically need to know. You will also find that many of the important people and/or employers that you meet will never ask to see your college transcripts.

They WILL, however, expect you to actually know stuff. This is why the biggest waste of your time in school is finding ways to cheat on tests. Use your time to develop an affinity for learning. Because school is a fantastic place to develop the secondary and tertiary passions that will help you heal the wounds you ARE going to get when you are kicked hard in the primary passion center. Guaranteed, that is going to happen. You will definitely get knocked down in your area of expertise. But you will also be expected to pick yourself up again and that is when you will crave other things, off topic, that interest you. By caring about cooking or botany or literature or woodworking, you will be better able to maintain your sense of purpose as a functional member of humanity…even though deep inside you may still be worried that is not the case.

So on balance, while your college years may not be the best four years of your life, if you make a point of training yourself to be excited by the idea of learning new stuff, they can be a path to joy as you enter your more sedentary (but generally happier) years. If you make it to your years of greater maturity and you play your cards right, you can look forward to not only less vomiting but fewer crab-infested sex partners. (Your mileage may vary.)

Now get out there, you graduates, and fulfill your God-given mandate of taking jobs away from more qualified people!