Graduation

It's over. I had my graduation ceremony last Tuesday. It wasn't an altogether crummy affair even if it was held in the parking lot. Two of the speeches were good: the one given by a fellow graduee and the one by the teacher that we'd chosen for the occasion. The other three speeches ranged from tedious to borderline clumsy. The rector of the University managed to sound condescending (by implying that we don't feel the need to be grateful to our teachers) and bore us to death.

A thought: maybe 85% of the people who graduated from Medschool that day were women--how come both the speech in representation of the students and the imposition of the muceta were given to men? The sad thing is that these two things were voted for by us, the students. This means most women vote for guys. I know, not very surprising. I'm also pissed at myself because I didn't vote thinking, "what the heck, they're not going to chose someone I like". Yeah, stupid reasoning.

Afterwards, the fun started. The University, in a show of generosity, managed to suply the students and relatives with enough booze and not enough canapes. Luckily, we had reservations and we promptly dumped our parentals and went off to have a Mexican dinner with liberal amounts of sangría and beer.

A couple observations from the party:

1. Serving food around a hoard of dancing semi-drunk graduates must be hell. I could tell from the waiters' faces. They did a damn good job, though, and only three dessert dishes were broken in front of me (multiply by the square footage of the room to calculate the number of dishes that were broken but I didn't see). On these three occasions, the waiter attempted to push out of his way a dancing female. Come on, waiters, you should know better.

Never invade Russia in winter, never get involved in a guerrilla war and never ever push a dancing female out of the way. She will almost certainly swerve in an unpredictable direction.

2. I finally learned what all those cheesy Spanish Movida 80's songs are for--they're for dancing the conga! (Needless to say, serving food around conga-dancing people is tantamount to dishicide)

3. It doesn't take much to persuade five drunk young men in a room full of girls to take off their clothes to the soundtrack of "Full Monty". It might be a tad more difficult to get them to stop before the truth (or lack of it) is exposed.

4. In a desperate gambit, an organizer of a party might get the idea to tell everyone to climb up on their chairs and dance. This accomplishes three things:
1st: since people are standing in their seats (literally), it makes picking up dishes a lot easier
2nd: it serves as a natural selection of sorts of those who really shouldn't have any more sangria.
3rd: it wrecks havock on the plastered ceiling.

5. One cannot want to leave a party before 6am. If you do choose to leave around 1am like I did, at least have a decent excuse (headache in my case, the music was way too loud).