Bart Mills: Advice to grads: Never mind

Graduates of the Class of 2012, parents, friends and honored guests.Let me begin by acknowledging that I have not, in the strictest sense of the term, been asked to speak at today's commencement ceremony. These honors are typically reserved for men and women of achievement, your doctors and lawyers and captains of industry types. I am none of those things.In fairness, there is no hard-and-fast rule that says you have to pick those types for your commencement speaker. When I graduated from college, the guest speaker was — and I am not making this up — a guy whose greatest achievement was playing the dean of the all black fraternity in “Revenge of the Nerds II.” He didn't even have any good Booger anecdotes, just read some of his poems, which, in all honesty, offered a fairly apt illustration of why he was best known for his ability to play broad exasperation in B-comedy sequels.But I digress.The point is, while I have not been formerly asked to speak here today, I have taken the time to craft a good 10 minutes of ‘A' material, full of wit, wisdom and the sort of life lessons you're frankly not going to get from the third most popular proctologist in Mercer County. I have done this every year for the past five years with the hope that, one day, the academic oligarchs will realize what they are missing and actually book me. It hasn't happened yet, but I keep trying. As my dad used to say, “Even a blind hog will get the occasional acorn.”So Lesson One; be persistent. If you really want a gig, just act as though you already have it. Eventually, someone will give in and give you a chance.This is not advice, by the way, that should be applied by those of you who hope to be heart surgeons. You'll need to go to school for that. Just showing up and acting like a heart surgeon because I tell you to, that's just a really, really bad idea. That goes for other types of surgeons, too. Oh, and engineers or whoever it is that's in charge of building bridges so they don't fall down. You shouldn't fake that job either.In retrospect, ignore Lesson One completely. Now that I think about it, it applies to almost no serious vocation. I suppose you can fake being a hair dresser or bartender without anyone dying, but it's still bad form. Messing up a man's Manhattan is right up there with botching his heart bypass in my circles. So let's put Lesson One behind us.Lesson One is actually: Listen to your parents. Yeah, that's it. Like when my dad said the bit about blind hogs getting acorns. That's good stuff. I will admit, it took a few decades of hearing it to piece together what it actually means. Turns out, hogs like acorns but, as you might suspect, being blind complicated the gathering of them a touch. But once in awhile, that blind hog gets lucky and scores an acorn. It could be a lesson in persistence. You have to assume it takes a lot of rutting about for a blind pig to happen on an acorn, especially if it's one of those factory farms where they all live in concrete pads. Or it could just be an homage to the power of luck. Either way, it's pretty good advice.Not that all the advice your parents give you is as good as the blind pig bit. In fact, I know a few of your parents and, as I assume you've figure out by now, they're idiots. The mom who drives the Hummer 40 miles-per-hour through the school drop-off while talking to her sister on the cellphone and balancing a cup of skim-lite mocha whatever she stopped to get on the way, thus making you late for the 43rd day this year, she's an idiot. So is your dad, the guy who showed up at your second-grade T-ball game in Bengals Zubaz and a backwards “Git 'er Done” cap and proceeded to yell at the coach and the other players about their questionable grasp of the role of designated hitters. He's an idiot and a jackass. So don't listen to them.Let's amend the amended Lesson One to acknowledge the fact that some of you are, unfortunately, the offspring of idiots. If that is your circumstance, ignore Lesson One. In fact, between bad parents and bad advice, the chances are too high you're just going to walk the wrong path listening to your parents. Beside, you're not going to actually listen to them anyway, so why bother. Ignore Lesson One, both the original and the latter.So graduates of the Class of 2012, congratulations, have a nice life and figure it out on your own.In the meantime, I'm going to go write a letter of apology to my old commencement speaker. Turns out, “Revenge of the Nerds II” was not his greatest achievement. Getting though this damn speech was.You can comment on this story at www.limaohio.com.