A Different Kind of Graduation

It's the end of the Chinese school year, and what's more fitting than a giant, time-wasting ceremony to top it off?

We had to arrive thirty minutes earlier usual supposedly to get our seats. Well, I grumbled and mumbled and showed up at 8:30 in the rather early morning. We went into the auditorium and plopped down somewhere in the middle. And sat. And sat. Until 9:00, finally things started happening.

First on the agenda was the pathetic excuse for a symphony orchestra. Let's start with the conductor. He listens to some piece of music, which is probably copyrighted by the way, and then writes out the notes. Then he does a little arranging with the final result leaving the second violins with the melody. And finally, when he conducts, he sings along! The rest of the orchestra is composed of whoever is gullible enough to participate, although there was a half decent first chair violinist, but he still needed to work on his shifts. The last first violin was a bit too timid, the second violin's bowing out of sync, and the trumpet made some odd noises usually associated with flatulence. Their performance thankfully ended with the loud death of a bovine.

Following the orchestra was some video of the Chinese school's university somewhere out there. The idiot manning the spotlight decided to let the beam rest on the screen, making it nearly impossible to discern what was happening. Then another idiot controlling the sound system either muted the audio and created some very inharmonious feedback.

Then came the graduates, complete in their shiny metallic ponchos that passed for a graduation robe. Pieces of paper, probably diplomas for what they're worth, and pollen-leaking flowers were handed out to the leaving students.

When the graduates left, a special ed group of students dressed in bathrobes came on stage and began can be best described as when teacher's pets begin experiencing a lack of drama in their lives and must thus dramatize everything. A glazed look comes over their eyes and they move in awkward, lumbering movements. When they speak, they somehow butcher the words and must move their entire heads back and forth. They are also quite gullible. One of them will shout "Look!" and point into some point above our heads and the rest of them will follow. Haha, made you look!

Then we have more awards and a slide show of a bunch of adults with their mug shots. Every so often, some of them will have their picture of Buddha. I assume that this indicates that the individual has gone to a better place where they sit on lotuses and deform their earlobes. An award was passed out for Best Improvement, which can quite easily be won by failing all your tests first semester and then "suddenly improve" in the second semester.

There was also a time when we saw the karate students strut their stuff. They did some very simple kicks and made noises that made me wonder if they didn't practice while squatting on top of a toilet. After the constipation example, some other students showed some fighting moves which involve the enemy grunting and then standing still. I don't want to see choreographed combat! I want to see some blood gladiator style! Finally, there was some board kicking. When the ceremony had ended, I got a chance to examine the boards. They were broken with the grain, and there was evidence of the gluing of boards together. The fracture lines were rather clean, too. Suspicious.

Then the ceremony was ended by much barbaric voodoo dancing among other things, during which the aforementioned special ed people demonstrated their lack of situational awareness. Despite having in their hand the object known as a microphone, the proceeded to shout at the top of their lungs to make themselves heard, and when they were done screaming, laid the still active microphone on the stage. And when the stage happens to contain a bunch of shuffling munchkins about to perform some silly dance, well, lets just say that it wasn't very quiet nor pleasant.

And the end.

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One more thing! Uncle say go to Humor-blogs!