I just finished reading In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, the true story of a group of Nantucket whalers who had their ship sunk by a sperm whale and ended up adrift in open boats for three months. Of course, if the moron whalers hadn’t been afraid of homosexual cannibals running amok in Tahiti, they could’ve been on land in a week (history has shown that the Tahitian natives never practiced cannibalism, although it was true that some of them had exceptional taste in drapes).
    I tried to keep the plight of these sorry sailors in mind as I set out on my own journey of endless tedium last weekend. The men of the Essex may have eventually starved to death and devoured one another, but, unlike me, they never had to sit through a college graduation.
    My brother, Graham, was to become a newly minted graduate of Ithaca College. Ithaca is roughly six hours away, meaning  I could look forward to spending more than a quarter of a workweek traveling to and from an event that promised to be about as interesting as applying vegetable oil to the bronze ducks in the Public Garden and watching little kids fall off onto the cobblestones. Sorry, bad example.
    Over the course of the drive to Ithaca, severe road dementia set in. Luckily, I had a passenger, Liz, to curtail my normal road dementia behavior, which includes playing games like “Let’s test the speed limiter,” and “Let’s see how far we can drive using only the brake and the cruise-control ‘resume’ button.” Thus, while my driving remained sedate (precious cargo!), my stir-craziness found other outlets, such as freestyle rapping: “I’m gonna drive this truck to Elmira/My favorite mistress of the night is Elvira/I’ll fire ya/Then I’ll hire ya/Make you so confused you’ll blow a fuse like Mike Tyson/I’ve been known to take a walk in the woods like Bill Bryson/There’s lice in/My hair...” It’s a good thing I have a car, because I don’t think I’d be a very likable hitchhiker.
    Our hotel was located in the charmingly named town of Horseheads, a good 30 miles beyond Ithaca. Apparently, what with graduation, all the local hotels named after equine anatomy were booked solid.
    However, “Where do you think you are, the Horseheads Holiday Inn?” is a phrase I derisively asked myself many times the next day, when a hair dryer, comforter or hot bath would have been welcome indeed. I’d forgotten to bring a jacket, and upstate New York rewarded my lack of respect with late-May weather as cold as any day in Boston last winter. It snowed. James Earl Jones was the commencement speaker, and in one part of his speech, he bellowed, “The reason that we are all here today is... (trying futilely to turn the page with his frozen hands)... my hands are very cold.” I don’t remember any other nuggets of wisdom, but I think that other colleges considering his services should stipulate in his contract that he has to say “Simba,” “Luke, I am your father,” and “Welcome to 411” at least once.
    Besides going inside a warm building after the commencement ceremony, the other high point of my weekend was learning of my mother’s graduation gift for Graham’s girlfriend, Michelle. Mom thought she’d created a thoughtful gift by framing a cute picture of the two of them that she picked out of a roll of his film. There was only one problem. The guy in the picture wasn’t Graham. In fact, the guy wasn’t even a guy. It was a female soccer-goalie friend of Michelle’s, who, while a bit butch, was on closer inspection a far bit removed from looking like my none-too-feminine brother. (My Mom also once mistook one of Graham’s football teammates for her son, which is notable given that the other player was black.)
    Ironically, I spent more than 14 hours in the car for the privilege of freezing through an hour of various people talking about embarking on wonderful journeys. I at least thought that I might be done with graduations for a while, since I only have one sibling. But Graham’s now talking about going to grad school, so I’m adopting my grandfather’s strict no-commencement policy. He’s so anti-graduation that he skipped his own doctorate ceremony. Until Graham gets a master’s degree from the University of Hawaii, or Natalie Portman demands that I attend her graduation at Harvard because it’s my duty as her boyfriend, I’m afraid the only place I’ll be looking at tassels in the near future is at Centerfolds. *