It isn't that I'm not incredibly pleased that Whitney now has an MA in Children's Literature or anything, but graduation ceremonies (or indeed Commencements) in America seem to be engineered to be rather torturously dull experiences. As I've mentioned before, we had to be there at 8:45 in the morning, which may sound reasonable to people with normal sleeping hours but tends to make less sense for computer scientists in general. Fortunately, during the week the time I got up had slipped towards about five in the morning because of going to bed earlier and earlier after the physical exertion of moving out of the office, so it was beginning to approach the middle of the day for me.

Because of the large number of graduating students, the ceremony was held not in a university building but the Bayside Expo And Conference Centre Center, which has four separate halls of varying degrees of giganticism. For the first part, we were all shepherded in to the largest hall and sat around for a while waiting for something to happen while the Boston Brass Ensemble Star Wars-ed it up in the background.

Eventually, after a slight pause in the music, the band launched into Pomp and Bloody Circumstance (which is all right on its own but suffers from roughly one hundred years of overplay, especially as it brought back dreadful memories of sitting through three hours of it at Drew's graduation) and the students began to file in dressed in their black robes and hoods that were far less girly than my own. After some introductions, we all sang "America the Beautiful" and then Bianca Jagger stood up to give what I thought would be a short "Commencement Address" - though instead she chose to talk about how dreadful America actually was.

On the programme we were promised this, but sadly we got more of this instead. She started off pleasantly enough, but seemed to end every single part of her speech with "something that I hope you will take with you when you leave today" and then ensuring that we didn't by going on to speak about the next ten years of her depressing life. After 45 minutes it was beginning to become clear that she was never going to stop, and booing started to be audible from the back of the audience (some of whom were beginning to leave) as she continued to speak about global warming and prison camps. I'm sure she had a good message about all of them, but I think she would have benefitted from being about half an hour more concise - by that point everyone had tuned it out and just wanted her to finish. Eventually she did sit down, and was given a standing ovation (mostly for stopping).

After we watched the undergraduates file up and along the stage (though I actually went to walk around the building for a while at this point), they eventually left and the postgraduate ceremony began. We were given a speech about the Wizard of Oz and its underlying performativity displayed by the characters reflecting the author's heteronormativity by one of Whitney's very American classmates, and were very pleased that more than half the postgraduates in the giant list in the booklet hadn't bothered to turn up. Near the end it was Whitney's turn, and it was a great feeling to see her walk across the stage (not only because it meant we'd soon escape, but because I'd missed the last one and she'd got to go to mine).

After that we spent what was left of the day with Whitney's family, having a meal at a small Italian place that not everyone was very pleased with and then (with me already suffering from severe mental exhaustion) went to see Iron Man again. That makes it one of two films I think I've seen more than once at the cinema - the other one sadly being Die Another Day. Then we went home and fell over.

I really thought I would feel better after sleeping, but this morning I was just as cloudy and disoriented as I was during the evening yesterday. And I've caught Whitney's cold. So I'm spending the day asleep, while she's gone off to join her family to the Greater Boston area, under instructions to "just tell them I've died or something". I need one stress-free day.