graduation, etc.

The graduation ceremony is in a couple of hours. It's a strange thing. I wouldn't say that these last four years passed in the blink of an eye, but I also wasn't expecting them to get over so quickly. The present is a strange place to be. More than anything, I'm hoping that the weather isn't as deathly hot and humid as it's been recently, or sitting out in the stadium is going to be quite difficult. My roommate of four years moved out yesterday, which was a teeny bit strange. None of the goodbyes and farewells so far has struck me as particularly poignant, at least not immediately, though I have been sensible of the eeriness of casually saying goodbye to people I knew I wasn't likely ever to see again. There is something about never seeing someone ever again, even you were not particularly close, that it's difficult to make sense of unless you either treat it as something terribly tragic or embrace a healthy sense of nihilism, so that you recognize the fundamental meaninglessness of life, and are able to face any challenge calmly and with equanimity.

I recently made several of my blog layouts responsive to different screen sizes, so you should now be able to read my blog on a mobile device on the layouts that you know and I love.

I recently finished reading Vonnegut's Galápagos. It was a strange book. The narrator's tone dripped with irony throughout, so I suppose it had that going for it. I wasn't quite able to tell whether it was meant to be satire or whether Vonnegut himself was, in some degree, pushing the notion that human intelligence has been a bad thing on balance. Vonnegut himself was well-spoken and intelligent, so I doubt that he truly deprecated intelligence, but at the same time it isn't inconceivable that a person who valued intelligence might feel rather bitter about the things it was used to achieve in the twentieth century. Nuclear weapons seem to be most explicitly criticized. It's actually quite astonishing that we should ever think our present civilization modern and enlightened, when some of the most barbaric acts in human history were committed just in the last century. We have quite a ways to go, really, before we can have any real pretensions to being civilized.