Commencement

I graduated today with my bachelor's degree in communication, and only minutes after escaping from the sea of black caps and gowns I was back where it all started — in the Scroll office.

It has been one crazy week, complete with me having to print off a title page for my research paper the morning of my graduation, when all of my assignments should have already been turned in. And, to top it off, I had to burn fitness videos onto CDs, clean my entire bedroom and kitchen for white glove checks, clear out my finances and sell back my textbooks. Isn't graduation supposed to be a time of celebration?

Well, now it is. I went out to dinner with my family tonight to celebrate my graduation and my brother's mission call yesterday to the Michigan Lansing mission. Let me just explain something for those of you who do not know my family — our celebrations are never formal affairs. Nor are they usually typical celebrations.

We did not go to a fancy sit-down restaurant and calmly discuss our plans for the future or reminisce about our times together as a family. Oh, no. We went to the Evergreen Buffet, this all-you-can-eat-pseudo-Chinese restaurant in Idaho Falls, so that my brothers could see how many crab legs they could ingest. Only after Randall had determined that they were not going to refill the crab did my dad decide it was time to go.

"Think of all the poor crabs walking around with crutches right now," he quipped.

My dad's puns sometimes make me groan internally, although I laughed harder at that one than I probably would have normally. And when my brother knocked over a chair getting up for another helping of tapioca and my sister complained (loudly) about the boil on her nose (which was really a gigantic zit), I realized something. My family is crazy, but I love them, and I love that we're just not the type to go to sit-down restaurants and do conventional graduation things.

As we drove home in our blue Home Alone van and stopped at a stoplight to rev the engine next to two teens in a beat-up car with cigarette smoke pouring out the windows, I decided a few things:

My brother will make a great missionary, especially if there's sea food involved. My sister, the future Harvard grad, will eventually come to terms with her acne. And one day soon, we will not have to take a roommate's beta fish, complete with murky water the color of granite, home with us to smell up the van with fish mold.

Yes, my friends, the future is bright.