Commencement Speech
On Saturday, May 22nd I gave the commencement speech for the graduating Women's Studies class at California State Univeristy Fullerton. What amazing ladies! Plus two men! The speech was twelve blasts, and the graduates -- guh! -- what an inspiration. It sounds so cheesy to say it, but it really was an honor for me.
I am working on getting some video uploaded, but until then, here's the text of the speechiest speech I've ever given. Thank you to Professor Jodi Davis for inviting me!
This video was put together by NPR and my new crush RadioLab. Following a week spent with my German mother-in-law and my Norweigian father-in-law, when it's always painfully obvious to me how elastic and elusive English can be, this video reminded me of how beautiful that is. And that our highly specific language today evolved from speech where a word could mean a hundred different things, depending on context,
Fascinated with this curious mode of communication, Paterson translated Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata into Morse code and sent it to the Moon via radio waves. Ostensibly “remixed” as it bounced off the contours of the Moon’s surface, the sonata was then retranslated into a new score and played by a grand piano at Modern Art Oxford.
“People have access to more information than ever before, but they’ve completely forgotten how to contextualize any of it.” — Douglas Coupland
Time Magazine just elevated the self-help obsession discussion to the level I think we’ve all been waiting for since watching 