Welcome, everyone, to our 2024 graduation ceremonies. On behalf of the board of trustees, our faculty, our entire staff and, of course, our outside counsel, we are delighted to have you here with us today. Well, we realize that only a few of you are actually here, in our auditorium, for this celebratory event. Many of you are still on the Quad, waiting for us to deliver your humanitarian aid, while others are hiding in your dorms, afraid to walk past the 100% peaceful freedom fighters on the Quad to get to the auditorium. And, of course, so many of our birthing persons and non-birthing persons were unable to clear our security barriers in time for today’s ceremonies, so you probably aren’t hearing or seeing me at all. If you are hearing me, though, I wish you a Happy Birthing Persons’ Day. Of course, our auditorium is not empty in any way. We are genuinely delighted to welcome, in person, eight students, one professor, three hundred security guards and an emotional support alligator. You represent the best of the class of 2024, at least the part of the class that took their final exams and will actually graduate this year. Looking out at your smiling, uh, grimacing, um, masked…faces, I cannot help but recognize how historic your class is for our university. Of course, you all began your freshperson years at home, during the height of Covid, longing for the days when you could visit our campus IRL and stay at the dorms that we forced you to rent whether you were here or not. You made up for lost time, though, when you returned to campus and learned the history and philosophies of people who wrote the most substantial and eternal lessons of the past 50 years. And you did more than learn; you acted. You transformed every idea we presented to you into meaningful performance art, reinterpreting the protests of the 1960s for a new and less enlightened audience. Many people have criticized our university for our handling of your protests, but they are on the wrong side of history. Our brave students gave up the comforts of dorm life to brave the elements on the Quad, subsisting on Door Dash and San Pellegrino for weeks on end. You have written a new Profile in Courage, even if none of you has a clue about that literary reference. Like Gandhi and Mandela and bin Laden and all the great freedom fighters of the past, you have made your stand and you are prepared to accept the consequences of your actions. Yes, many of you leave here without a diploma and many of you will be pretty much unemployable as those videos make the rounds, but that’s a small price to pay for saving all the gay and trans folk who long to live openly in a Free Palestine. You have set the standard for divestment by burning your cell phones and any other devices that contain any technology developed in Israel. You are the true leaders of the future and we would salute you if saluting wasn’t such a militaristic, colonial macro-aggression. We know your family units are ever so proud to see such an incredible return on their investment in your education and we know you will reciprocate for our contributions to your lives by becoming members of our alumni association. Frankly, we’ve lost most of our longtime donors over the past three months, although we have no idea why, so we’d appreciate your expertise with GoFundMe campaigns. On the positive side, we won’t need much money from you, since our incoming class this fall will include only seven persons. All of them will be from marginalized groups and, coincidentally, there will be no Jews to trigger them. This is a bittersweet moment for me, as this ceremony will be my last official act as president of the university. As you might have heard I have “resigned“ in order to—what did they say in the press release?—pursue other interests. Even as I depart, though, I know our new president will be just as supportive of students’ rights as I was. In fact, I am pleased to announce that we will be creating a new curriculum major focused on virtuous protest. What could possibly go wrong? Next week, we savor the laughs at an old friend's funeral. Be sure to subscribe so you can get in on the fun.
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Somebody's about to take it all away, but we don't know who they are, and millions of women are getting pasta next week. It's all coming true, and you heard it here first... Only MILFs need apply. Mothers’ Day is coming up and I checked out the ads to see what’s trending this year. So, based on the promotions I’m seeing, you’re in luck if you’re a mom who is 32 or younger, ridiculously hot, and have a four-year-old blond child who can afford to buy you a diamond pendant. For the rest of the moms, it’s macaroni art at best. Finished already? I really don’t understand all the fuss about the Kentucky Derby. All those people prepping for months, showing up in fancy clothes, competing for the best cuisine, and then the main event is over in two minutes. Reminds me of my honeymoon. Stop that…who? I know a bunch of successful guys who have this fear that is almost never front and center, but often buzzing in the background: Somehow, somebody is going to take it away. It’s almost never a specific somebody, but there is a sense of unease about success, that it is unearned or arbitrary and that it can disappear much more quickly than it arrived. I suspect I know even more people who are not as successful and have the same insecurity. That’s why it resonates when they’re told there are evil forces plotting to take away everything they have. If my successful friends can host that fear, how much more so for people who are less financially/socially/culturally secure? Smarter than Alfred. When you really think about it, Einstein’s most famous formula is actually pretty stupid, or at least as basic as it gets. We can measure mass and we can measure the speed of light, so E is just whatever MCC is. That’s no smarter than my special formula: Happiness = Beer times pizza. Are they commute-worthy? Speaking of formulas, we need a new calculation for declining an invitation when the time spent in transit is greater than the time spent at the actual event. I’m thinking one-to-one: two hours of transit for a two-hour movie or play or baseball game or summer festival; four hours for a wedding, bar mitzvah or any dinner with a really good cocktail hour. We’ll call it the commuter quotient and every host must accept it as a completely legitimate reason for rejection. Pre-forgiving the bad debt. Two of the biggest tsunamis on my social feeds last month were from people arguing about taxpayer subsidies for a new stadium for the Chicago Bears and student loan forgiveness. Shockingly, and by “shocking,” I mean “right on cue,” many people in favor of throwing taxpayer dollars at billionaire club owners are violently opposed to writing off debts for graduates who will never know the luxury of two-ply tissue. Taxpayers have been screwed over and over by sports teams and large corporations that promise huge financial returns that never materialize from “taxpayer investments,” but it’s a lesson we’ll learn at about the same time Charlie Brown stops flailing at the football. Intentionally idle. Quite often, the hardest thing to do is nothing, to wait it out, to refrain from getting in the middle and adding new complications. Some problems have no solution, some situations simply require time for resolution, and sometimes, just maybe, all our help just makes things worse. Also, “forbearance” sounds much more selfless than “laziness.” Pointed critique. I came back from a trip recently and I noticed that a quarter of my photos included people pointing at something. Mostly, it was the guides on our visit and I wanted the pictures to be a bit more dramatic, so I waited until they were gesturing before I took the shot. Someday, an archaeologist is going to look at my pictures and think we walked around all day pointing at things. It’s a lot like the selfies that will convince them we were always looking up and smiling, even though we appear to have had only one arm. You really think somebody likes me! Secretly, I love it when they tell us to silence our cell phones at the start of the movie. It feels so good to be included among those who might actually receive a phone call one of these days. We'll be visiting college graduation next week and you won't want to miss it, so be sure to click here to subscribe. IRS agents are howling with orgasmic glee as they anxiously await your tax filing tomorrow and you’ve waited until the last minute in hopes that someone would give you the secret deets to save, save, save on what you owe. Are you crazy? Last year ended, well, last year, and you can’t do anything now to fix all the ways you screwed up in 2023. You know that by now, though, because you’ve been studying all the lame-stream media guides and every one of them mocks you for all the things you were supposed to do, but didn’t, when it could actually make a difference:
While you're waiting for all those updates, why not take a minute to click here to subscribe? Not only do oldsters write in a secret code called cursive, we’re also coming up with hip new lingo and a cure for short-term memory loss. Making it less of a drag getting old this week…
While you're waiting to join the class-action list of plaintiffs, take a moment to click here to subscribe for more brilliant ideas for revenge. I’m doing a good job of keeping up on the news these days, but I’m not completely sure that any of it makes sense. For instance…
It turns out I owe Betty an apology. A few weeks ago, I railed about her and how she was treated so much better than I am and I admitted to my absolute jealousy over the special opportunities people were strewing at her feet. Since then, I’ve taken a look at my spam folder and it turns out I’m the lucky one, not her, and everybody, including Betty, should be jealous of me, me, me. As I was scrolling through my junk mail, it occurred to me that it’s much more compelling than the stuff I end up reading in my real messages. (Sorry, friends, but you’re really boring.) Even better, I can get much better deals than Betty and I don’t even need to take any classes at those schools that want her as a student. I am so special… Nothing indicates an investment that’s geared specifically for my parameters than: Good day. I found your email address in the Google database. Is your email address still valid? I have a good business proposal for you. Of course, there’s the traditional alert that I’m in for a big bequest: Hello, a donation of € 1,700,000.00 has been made for you. And then there are people who don’t know the difference between a benefactor and a beneficiary, although I suspect I would end up as more of the former than the latter if I clicked on the link: You have been selected as benefactor of $1,000,000.00 million dollars from our personal donation in the year 2023. A trillion dollars? That’s even more than Elon Musk lost on Twitter. I’ve got to temper my excitement, though, because I might not be the real beneficiary. Not only are they confusing me with Betty all the time, some of them now think I’m Ed, who is an even better credit risk than Betty or I will ever be: Hi Ed, If you'd like to get fast flexible funding for your business then a business cash advance could be the perfect solution. Get From $5,000 to $1 Million in as little as 24 hours. $1 Million? I could be in Tahiti before they find out I’m not Ed. Or Betty. Or that I don’t live in New York. That’s a good thing, really, since New Yorkers appear to be all wrinkly and saggy and vastly overweight, according to all of these messages:
Not only am I not Betty, or Ed, or a New Yawker, I’m not a Brit, either, but you wouldn’t know it from these greetings from friends:
I’ve also discovered that power tools are considered the most appealing gifts:
So, all this scrolling has me thinking. With all these special deals just for me, it isn’t possible that all of them are fake. There must be at least a few offers that are legit in here and I’m missing out by ignoring them. Maybe I should just click on a few an |
Who writes this stuff?Dadwrites oozes from the warped mind of Michael Rosenbaum, an award-winning author who spends most of his time these days as a start-up business mentor, book coach, photographer and, mostly, a grandfather. All views are his alone, largely due to the fact that he can’t find anyone who agrees with him. Archives
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