Commencement Courtesy of Wayne Coyne

Seven years ago I graduated from high school with a head full of ideologies and dreams about what my future should hold. I wanted the world with a fence around it, as my grandmother would to say.

My adventures thereafter brought many conflicts of interest as I continually found it difficult to stay focused on one goal. Through three institutions of higher learning, tens of geographical locales, and what seems like hundreds of love affairs of the mind and of the body I found myself stumbling in and out of depression as dream after dream failed to bear fruit. I lived in the past while simultaneously contemplating some fantasy future, always. That is until this past year.

I can’t pinpoint the moment or day or month where everyday life on earth began its slow pull into the gravitational field of sublime living, but I can say that a slow wobble of thought patterns over the past eight months or so has been the catalyst for positive change. Without getting into personal details, here are the bare bones:

“We cannot know what we’ll become, but we can control what we do.”

So when I came across the Classen High School commencement speech by Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, I smiled pretty big. Despite his obvious attention to cue cards, the message is dead on. I only wish he would have been at my ceremony. But then again, I had to learn for myself.

Check it out:

Every Week They Attempt to Distract Us with Something New

“The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life.”
-Oscar Wilde

The ratio of marriages to divorces is 2 to 1.

I would like to see a statistic that shows what number of those divorced people are Christian.

Why should marriage between two gay individuals be barred while divorce is so common, and morally acceptable? Perhaps this is why many Americans are quick to pass legislation banning gay marriage: they’re afraid gay marriages might give them a bad name, they’re afraid those marriages will stay together, with a love that lasts in the face of huge cultural pressures and true hatred. They’re afraid gays might accomplish something that straight Americans can’t: a happily married life.

I’m certainly relieved at the Senate vote, but at 49-48 Nay, I’d say that’s a little too close for sanity, especially considering the potential presidential contender Chuck Hagel was conveniently not in Washington, opting to instead give a speech in his home state. No use losing potential voters this early in the game.

On Monday, Bush chose his distractions carefully.

In places like Ohio in 2004, Bush’s support for an amendment worked better than color-coded terror alerts and Swift-boating veterans to arouse the Republican base. Since then, other hot buttons like the Spanish anthem and flag-burning and Terri Schiavo haven’t elicited much excitement. He’s got to do something to rally the base in the face of rising carnage in Iraq and rising gas prices at home.

So there was the president on Monday in a ceremony to kick off the latest effort, summoning for 150 invited anti-gay guests his outrage over those activist judges out there undermining marriage.

But he really didn’t deliver the red meat the Christian conservatives were looking for. He’d already downgraded the location from the prime venue of the Rose Garden to the decidedly dreary Eisenhower Executive Office Building. And he quickly switched gears to preach that the debate should be conducted with “tolerance, dignity and respect” and point out that the states were free to define other legal arrangements for gay couples.

Bye Now

After hosting the anti-gay groups, Bush could hardly wait to tour the country pushing something he really cares about, his immigration bill, fueling the sense of some conservatives that they’ve been played.

–Margaret Carlson, Bloomberg

Now back to immigration.