Commencement at Covenant is a big deal. Huge, in fact. The bagpipe and drum core leads the procession of doctors, professors, and graduates into the convention center with MUCH pomp and circumstance. Amazing Grace played on the bagpipes is so beautiful. It's all really a sight to behold. The professors line either side of the aisle and congratulate the students as they walk through. Each year I keep waiting for the profs to raise their arms and form a long tunnel for the graduates to start running through... like at a football game or something. Maybe I'll request that for my graduation...


This past year, our class president had been emailing us nonstop about who our commencement speaker should be for graduation 2010. The votes came pouring in, some serious and some... not so serious. The wide variety of names topping the charts included both President Obama and Oprah, neither of whom we decided to contact.   

Sinclair Ferguson has agreed to come to our graduation and speak next year.

He was my vote :)

Classes are over and Finals week has begun. For the past few days, I've kept looking around thinking, "I won't see so-and-so next year..." I've been surprised at how many of my good friends will be graduating this year, in about a week and a half! The warm weather has brought everyone outside to study, play music, and just goof-off.

A few weekends ago, the faculty gave us a "Student Appreciation Day" with free ice cream and Starbucks coffee all day long. I felt VERY appreciated :) The line of people for ice cream stretched all the way across our chapel lawn.

And what would a warm summer night be without a massive pillow-fight? Just think, in less than two weeks some of these very people will be entering the business world as responsible adults :)   

Here's one of my favorite poems that I happened to stumble across today... enjoy. It's a bit lengthy, but such an accurate picture of the college student.

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

- Billy Collins

You ever get the feeling that life is passing you by? Or in the words of Mark Schultz, "I'm runnin just to catch myself." I remember laughing along with my brothers to this song, but it's so true. Sometimes you're just doing too much.

On the tail end of a crazy week, I got the opportunity to take some of my girls and a few friends bouldering. At first we thought we were going rock climbing... not really knowing the difference in terminology. (And I just blew my chance to let you guys think I do this thing all the time.) So, all of us novices, we showed up to the huge warehouse looking around for ropes and harnesses. Come to find out, bouldering doesn't require harnesses or ropes. You just climb... with nothing.

After my initial freak out, we actually had a lot of fun. It was a relatively short distance to the ceiling, and then you just drop off onto the mattresses below. The warehouse it was located in was a mom-n-pop kind of place... kids and even a puppy running all over the place. 

Last night our girls on staff kindnapped each other and drove down to one of the soccer fields. All bundled up in hats, gloves, and blankets, we laid down in centerfield with our heads together and talked about our favorite memories on staff this year. I could see a lone little star through the thick canopy of fog overhead. It was a late night, but well worth the company :)

So if you're anything like me, you don't really pay attention to all those awards ceremonies on tv. I have better things to do with my Sunday night. However, a film I've been pleasantly surprised with actually did quite well at the Oscar ceremony.

While most younger audiences were rooting for the Dark Night, very few have heard of a film that's been written off as foreign... Slumdog Millionaire. When I called my family to rave about it over the phone, my mom said it wasn't even showing in Owensboro. A movie that won eight Oscars in total, including best picture, best director, best cinematography and best adapted screenplay wasn't even showing?!

Brandon and I watched the film two weekends ago, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. When we sat down in the theater, I could already tell it was going to be good based on the kind of age group watching along with us... elderly couples. While not always true, I feel like a good rule of thumb is to see what kind of people are watching the movie you're checking out... it tells you more than you might think.

Slumdog is rated "R" for a few heavy topics that it addresses. The slum children in the movie are taken advantage of time and again; it's heartbreaking to watch. But the cinematography is very well done and the characters are engaging... I've never been sucked into a movie so quickly. You can check out a more thorough review at http://www.pluggedinonline.com/movies/movies/a0004420.cfm.

I wondered what the Indians' reactions were to such a gritty feeling movie depicting their way of life. Some were perhaps embarrassed at the U.S.' perception of the Indian slums. "India is not Somalia. We are one of the foremost nuclear powers in the world, our satellites are roaming the universe. Our police commissioners' offices don't look like shacks and there are no blind children begging in the streets of Mumbai," one Indian protested.

Well, the film certainly does draw attention to injustice and extreme poverty in the slum areas. I wonder if Americans will only watch the story for entertainment or actually become mobilized and take an interest in what's going on halfway around the world. For many, it will be a rude awakening.