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Okay, so maybe they used my full name instead, but it would have been so kickass had they announced me as Goob.

For those of you not paying attention, my college graduation was a week ago. And of course, one of the highlights of graduation is the commencement address. It’s one of the rare times where funny and important people go out of their way to commend you and kiss your ass. Never one to turn down a good ego boosting, I eagerly searched the night before I was to graduate to find out who would be speaking at my graduation.

Some classes get Will Ferrell or Jon Stewart, which I must say is by far my favorite Commencement Address I’ve ever read. Heck, some even get President Bush, although let’s be honest here, it had to be hard for a few hundred well educated people to sit and smile while the President stumbled over basic words. But what about my graduation, you ask? I got the Father of Aerobics.

I kid you not, the speaker for my graduation was The Father of Mother Fucking Aerobics.

He spent the first five minutes talking about how he invented the word aerobics and how the rest of the world had trouble interpreting it into their native tongue. He then moved on to talk about all the books he’s written and all the places he’s spoken at. By this point, the girl beside me and I were whispering to each other how we guessed he was going to tie this all into context. My guess was that he was going to use a route such as talking about the importance of a strong body and then switch over to the importance of having a strong mind as well, which is where we came in.

But the speech just kept going on about him. He began to lecture and almost scream how unhealthy our society is today and how heart attack rates would go down significantly if we would all just get off our asses and exercise a bit. It was around this point that he began to turn red in the face, which led me to mumble something about it looked like he was going to have a heart attack right there on the stage, which would have been oh so poetic.

When he reached the point in his rant where we will be the first generation to die before our parents, I almost began to feel fat. What the fuck, it’s my graduation day and I’m being yelled at over my health. Thanks asshole. About fifteen minutes later, he thanked us for our time, turned around, and sat down.

Without saying one damn word about us. Not even a congratulations or a good luck. I’m now boycotting aerobics.

Twenty minutes later, however, my mind was completely void of any thoughts about our lovely speaker. I was standing in line, name card in hand, ready to walk across the stage. Before we had gotten started, however, our school President had asked for all claps and cheers to be held until the end of the ceremony. The process of calling out names, walking across the stage, and shaking his hand was going to take a while and if we waited for everybody to clap each time, it would have been as long and mind numbingly boring as the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. Of course, the two “barking” fraternities were there to hoot and bark for their brothers who were graduating, but this was to be expected. In case you never had the joy to experience a barking frat on your campus, they’re two frats that have some retarded tradition of barking as loud as humanly possible whenever they hear another bark. So, say a brother is standing in the middle of campus and for the hell of it feels like barking out loud. He’ll cup his hands, bark, and within five seconds he’ll receive barking responses from any brothers who heard him. They too, in turn, will receive barking responses and so for the next minute or so, the entire campus is filled with barking noises. Nothing says finer education than the reproduction of animal noises at noon on a Tuesday for no reason whatsoever.

So there I stood, in line, name card in hand, ready to take the walk. I handed my card to the announcer, began my walk, and literally fell over laughing.

As soon as the “Laude” had finished booming from the speaker, up arose a thunderous cheer from the back of the arena. I shook the President’s hand while laughing, made my way back to my seat, and laughed my ass off. Not to be outdone by any fraternity and damned if they had even been told not to do it, my family, led by my mom, had cheered like a bunch of idiots.

And I loved every second of it.