Senior Luncheon

The date for this year’s Senior Class Luncheon will be held on Wednesday, May 29, 2013.

Please save the date for this graduation tradition!

Ann Velenchik addressed the class of 2012 at the Senior Luncheon on May 23.

Thank you. In a minute, I’m going to talk about you, but before I do that, I’m going to talk about me. It is more meaningful than you could know for me to be here with you today. I was supposed to give this address to the class of 2010, and three weeks before commencement, I was diagnosed with leukemia and hospitalized, and as the class of 2010 walked across the commencement stage, I was on a gurney in a hospital elevator heading to an ICU. So to be able to be here with you now closes a circle on a not so fabulous chapter. So thank you. [applause, cheers] Stop, or I’ll cry, and then it’ll all be ruined. [laughter]

So the last time I saw you, I think the first thing I told you was how beautiful you all looked. You look more beautiful now, and I will tell you that pisses me off. The years between 18 and 22 do an entirely different thing to the female appearance than the years between 47 and 51. So please forgive me if I’m not relishing your beauty, although I do need to be telling you one thing, and that is: Menopause is coming for you, too.

The advice I gave you that day was organized around the alphabet. I think I told you to “apply yourself, to seek balance, to continue learning something that you did well, to deepen your understanding, and to explore.”

And so I thought I would go on with the alphabet today. We’ll get to F, G, H, I, and J. If you want more than that, we’ll have to do it at reunion. The way I figure, your 15th reunion and my retirement will be just about the same, so I will meet you here in this tent in 2027, and we will finish out the last five, all right?

My advice to you that day was about getting started on your Wellesley careers, and I guess you could say that my advice to you today is about getting started on the rest of your life. There are lots of things you can aspire or hope to be: rich, thin, powerful, famous, successful, influential, elegant, intelligent, beloved, fulfilled, inspired, beautiful, talented, ethical, spiritual, committed, dedicated, fulfilled. You can want to be a CEO or a law partner, a doctor or a professor, a writer, an engineer, a movie star, a wife, a mother, a daughter, a friend. Whatever of those things you want, I hope you get them. But that’s not really what I want for you. What I want for you is the same thing that I want for myself and for my children.

Now speaking of my children, last time we met, I told you about how my 11-year-old son wouldn’t go inside the J.P. Licks to read the menu, and how ticked off he was because I got an excellent flavor with chunks of brownies, and he did not, because he was too lazy to go inside to read the menu. Well that 11-year-old boy is now a 5 foot 10 inch, 190-pound football defensive lineman who doesn’t need to read the menu, because he just orders one of each.

But in any event, I want for him what I want for you, and that is that you go out in the world and make happiness and contentment and joy in your lives. Now, please note the verb. I didn’t say find happiness. There is not happiness lying on the side of the road. It’s not on a sale rack in Bloomingdale’s, although we all wish it would be. Happiness is not something that gets given to you or made for you. There is no job, no person, no pile of gold, no shoes or handbag that can make you happy. Happiness is something that you need to claim and nurture and defend for yourself.

And the letters of the alphabet I’m going to give you are just some words of advice on how perhaps to make that easier for yourself than it might otherwise be.

Find Your People

And the first letter is F: Find your people. Now, I don’t mean your life partner. I’m not talking about your husband or your wife, because, really, I don’t know…they’re a dime a dozen. I’m talking about friends. I’m talking about the people who will tell you when those pants make your ass look fat. Right? I’m talking about the people who will be there when you need them, who will support you, and who will tell you when you are making a mistake. And for me, and I think for most people who are on the other side of college, one of the most shocking and unpleasant revelations about life beyond college is how much harder it is to connect with people in the outside world than it is here. People who share your interests aren’t eating in a dining hall next to you, because there is no dining hall.

Let me repeat that. There is no dining hall. You will have to acquire and prepare and clean up food, starting on Monday, and for the rest of your life. And I’m telling you that that dormitory chicken is going to sound damn good come September.

But you need to identify your people among the people you meet. Where do I meet people? Well I met some of them here at work. I met some of them on the sidelines of the soccer field. You need to have an identification strategy. How do you identify people who could be your people? My strategy is, I only pick people who have a good sense of humor, and I have a very narrow definition of a good sense of humor. A person has a good sense of humor if she thinks I am funny. So I say something that I think is funny, and if she laughs, I go after her, and if she doesn’t I leave her alone.

After you’ve identified these people, you have to woo them. My best piece of advice to you is never say, “We should get together.” Only say, “We should get together next Tuesday.”  Because “we should get together” goes off into the ether. And “we should get next Tuesday” demands a response, a response like, “ OK,” or, “Tuesday is not good for me.” So you need to find your people. Woo your people, woo! And that means if you see a woman with excellent shoes, you should say, those are excellent shoes. All right? Why? Partly because her husband didn’t tell her that—promise, cross my heart, hope to die. And partly because that’s how you’re going to connect. So you need to go out there and try to connect. F, find your people.

Good Enough

G: OK, everybody grown up, cover your ears. Good enough is good enough. You hear me? I know you think that out there in the world are millions of fabulous women doing everything perfectly. Not so much. Not so much. This morning, I told my son that really, you could wear your lacrosse game shorts while they were still wet, because they got into the washer, but not out of the washer. And so we drove from Brookline to the Roxbury Latin School with my son holding gym shorts out the window, because I told him the wind would dry them. Remember I told you, he’s a 15-year-old boy. I told my students in Writing 125 this spring that there were really only two kinds of papers in the world, ’cause when push comes to shove, there are two kinds of papers. You know what they are? Done and not done. So you will serve yourself well if you learn to identify those things into which you want to put the effort to excel, and those things that are not important enough to you to do so. Because anyone who tells you that she does everything to the best of her ability all day every day is a big, fat liar, and not one of your people. OK? My strategy is to always own a lot of underwear. Like, a lot. I don’t like to do laundry. Everybody in my family has 35 pair of underwear. I commend that to you.

So, find your people. Recognize that good enough is good enough.

Honor Your Obligations

H: Honor your obligations. Remember how there were two kinds of papers? There are two kinds of people in the world:  people you can count on to do what they said they’d do, and those other people. You need to be the first kind of people. If you said you’d do it, do it. Why will that make you happy? 'Cause the most unhappy you can be is when you feel guilty. All right? So do what you said you’d do.

Corollary: Don’t feel like you have to say you’ll do it just because someone asks you. And don’t feel like you have to explain why you can’t. So let’s say a sentence all together. Are you ready? I’ll say it first, and then you’ll say it with me. The sentence is, “No, I’m sorry, I can’t do that.” Ready? [whole audience] “No, I’m sorry, I can’t do that.”

That’s it. Do not make up lies about your mother-in-law, because that will always come back and bite you in the ass. “No, I’m sorry, I can’t do that.”

Instigate

I is for instigate. Now I don’t mean initiate. I don’t mean start. I mean instigate, in the sense of provoke, rebel, push back. I know that in your minds, you’re Wellesley women, and I know a lot about you, because I’ve been teaching here since many years before some of you were born. You like to complain. In fact you raised complaining to an art form. I think it’s a major here. But complaining, to be perfectly honest with you, complaining rots your soul. If you don’t like it, fix it. And if that means that you have to be a pain in the ass—right, which I am; I’m looking at President Bottomly, she is not shaking her head no. If you have to be a pain in the ass, be one. But instigate what you think needs to happen, because no one else is going to do that for you.

Juggle

Finally, my last letter is, of course—just want to make sure you’re listening: J. J is for juggle. Why do you have to juggle? Because you’re women. My favorite cartoon in the New Yorker, and I’m a passionate New Yorker reader, is a picture of a chicken juggling eggs. And the caption reads, “I don’t know how she does it, juggling work and family like that.”

Now, I love the pun, that the egg is both the chicken's work and family, and I know that many of you have been juggling the whole time you’ve been at Wellesley. But can I tell you that you’ve been juggling bean bags. And 15 years from now, you’ll be juggling flaming swords.

Now, how do you juggle flaming swords? Well the first thing is, you don’t look too closely. The second thing is, you make sure one of them has your name on it. Make your own happy. If all of the swords you are juggling are about someone or something else, you are guaranteed to go down in flames. Do those other four things that I told you about. Find your people, so that they can stand there and hand you new ones. Recognize that good enough is good enough. And if you drop one, put out the fire, sweep up the remains, and move on.

On Friday, you’re going to put on your heels or your flats, and I will be sitting at the side of the stage where you go up the stairs, keeping track of who’s wearing what, as I have for 23 years. I would encourage, based on that experience, flats, because it’s grass, and your heels sink in, and then that pretty little sway you get from walking in the heels turns into something totally else. All right?

As you walk across that stage, you’re leaving us behind. But I want you to know, on behalf of all 300-and-some-odd members of the Wellesley faculty, that we hope you’ll take us with you, that you will think of us along the way, and that you will know that we are thinking of you and hoping that you are taking all that you have learned here and using it for the most important thing you can use it for, which is to make your own way in the world with happiness and contentment and joy. We love you, and we are proud of you, and we wish you all the best.